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Climate Policies in the BRICS Countries: The Interrelation between GHG Emissions Reduction and Socio-Economic Development
The chapter depicts BRICS countries’ climate policies in three dimensions. Firstly, it summarizes key aims, priorities, and directions of national and foreign GHG emissions reduction policies. Secondly, it features main institutions and instruments underling these policies and presents the mechanisms through which primary interest groups’ preferences are formed, coordinated, and incorporated into decision-making. Thirdly, building on the Climate Action Tracker assessments and on the analysis of emissions-growth decoupling effect, it provides an evaluation of the efficiency of climate policy in each country and the prospects of its development. Such three-dimensional analysis enables us to determine the factors that play a role in forming climate policies and defining their ambitiousness and design in China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and India – countries with divergent characteristics of socioeconomic development. We also conclude that the countries’ readiness to embark on low-carbon development and the degree of coordination of influence groups’ interests on emission reduction measures is largely determined by their ability to devise such climate policy-related institutional design that allows not only for achieving climate targets, but also for attaining some of the crucial aims and objectives of socioeconomic development.