What are the underlying challenges that create the climate impasse? This chapter explains why compensation and investments that are supposed to facilitate a clean energy transition face credibility challenges. These challenges arise from various sources, such as today’s government cannot perfectly control what tomorrow’s government does, and uncertainty about whether the government represents the interests of people and communities impacted by policy reforms. Finally, we argue that new industries might be seen as providing few local economic benefits. In light of these challenges, we propose solutions to create credibility and build support for the energy transition.

Though the Islamic waqf is defunct, the Middle East now features modern organizations known also as waqfs. The modern waqf is essentially a philanthropic or charitable corporation. It is self-governing and has a perpetual existence. Along with other autonomous nongovernmental organizations known under different names, the modern waqf provides the institutional basis for a vigorous civil society. Yet across the Middle East civil society remains weak. This is due to two factors, both legacies of the Islamic waqf. First, a century is a short time to develop the civic skills that the Islamic waqf left uncultivated for a millennium. The region is still learning how to build politically effective NGOs. And second, the anemic civic life engendered by the Islamic waqf provided fertile ground for the repressive regimes of modern times. The region’s autocracies try systematically to keep civil society politically weak. From the standpoint of liberalization, a hopeful sign is that the region’s current NGOs, unless captured by the state, are serving as founts of civic education. Promoting a culture of bargaining and compromise, they are teaching how to communicate ideas and form coalitions.

In the Middle East’s secularist regimes, the exclusion of religion from public life sowed discontent, as did the regulation of private religious activity. Defiance of secular mandates became increasingly common. In response, secularist leaders intensified the repression of groups opposed to reforms. But they also made concessions to politically tame groups that wanted to lead openly religious lives. The resurfacing of public religiosity induced adjustments in the public persona of secular elites themselves. Politicians, entertainers, and journalists started pandering to the pious by feigning religiosity. Reversing direction, religious preference falsification now exaggerated not genuine irreligiosity but, rather, genuine piety. Regimes that were once assertively secularist turned into religiously hybrid regimes drawing some legitimacy from Islam. This softening of secularism set the stage for regimes dedicated, in one form or another, to homogenizing society according to a religious blueprint. Under assertively Islamist regimes, longstanding Islamic instruments of repression have transformed religious freedoms, with some groups becoming freer and others less so. Secularists and heterodox believers have been among the losers. The breadth and severity of the ensuing religious repression hides diverse strands of discontent. Public religious discourses and performances disguise rising irreligiosity, deism, and atheism.

Disagreements over a religion’s interpretation can cause a schism – a formal division into variants with their own officials, doctrines, and rituals. Islam’s Sunni–Shii split over succession disputes came early in its history. One might expect either Muslim modernizers or liberal Muslims to have split Islam further. They have done so only informally, in that the global Muslim community is divided between practicing and nominal Muslims. But nowhere in the Middle East is discontent lacking among practicing Muslims over state-approved interpretations. This is evident in the popularity of unregulated fatwa services. Substantial constituencies consider rituals outdated, clerics unprincipled, and gender discrimination unacceptable. But widespread discontent within a religious community need not generate a disunion. If the risk of joining the leavers is grave enough, disaffected members will stick with the status quo. A successful schism requires, at some stage, open collective action on the part of a constituency with a shared religious vision, possibly under leaders able to strategize, represent the membership, and coordinate moves. Also necessary is that supporters of the religious status quo lack the organizational capacity to erect roadblocks. At present, any group trying to develop an alternative to Sunnism or Shiism would face major resistance.

Taking the policy network approach, this chapter investigates three mechanisms – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence – underlying the evolution of inter-government agency relations in China. Operationally, the chapter adopts a social network analysis-based method to quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has not only sustained through the intervention of policy agenda but also self-organized because of policy network’s nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in the evolution of China’s innovation policy network differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. The findings advance our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and have implications for policymaking in emerging economies.

Islamic waqfs did not produce a vigorous civil society. On the contrary, they inhibited mass political participation and collective civic action through several channels. Firstly, a waqf’s beneficiaries had no say over its activities. Second, each waqf was required to provide services on its own, which kept it from participating in political coalitions. Third, the waqf’s beneficiaries played no formal role in appointing its officers. Such organizational features constitute key reasons why, as the West developed political checks and balances, no such tendency emerged in the Middle East. The West liberalized and democratized through epic struggles involving universities, cities, religious orders, and guilds, all organized as corporations. Challenging power structures, such corporations developed ideologies supportive of personal and associational rights. A virtuous circle thus emerged. As civil society strengthened, it took steps to bolster private organizations, which then strengthened civil society further. In the Middle East, by contrast, the waqf created a vicious circle. By keeping civil society weak, it limited freedoms and perpetuated autocracy. The absence of strong nongovernmental organizations made it hard to challenge rulers through organized collective action from outside the state. Tellingly, over more than a millennium, waqfs fostered no political movements or ideologies.

Millions of “secular Muslims” would become “practicing Muslims” if there existed a variant of Islam compatible with their values, for instance one that would broaden women’s rights and adapt rites to the rhythms of modern life. If no liberal variant has emerged, the reason is not that Islam is monolithic. As with other religions, it admits diverse interpretations. Yet over fourteen centuries, variations in interpretation have produced just one major schism: the Sunni–Shii split of 661. This is puzzling because Christianity, the other monotheism with over a billion adherents, sees schisms frequently. If the collective action necessary for a liberal schism has not materialized, a basic reason lies in obstacles to conducting honest discussions on what Islam represents. Liberal Muslims are intrinsically opposed to settling conflicts through violence, which handicaps them vis-à-vis groups prepared to charge them with physically punishable religious offenses. Easily victimized, they cannot fight back as effectively. Thus, apostasy and blasphemy rules, the two most lethal weapons of Islamic illiberalism, reproduce the fears that allow their preservation. To avoid personal trouble, liberal Muslims, atheists, non-Muslim believers, and assorted other dissenters all avoid repudiating the notion that apostasy and blasphemy are acts that require temporal punishment.

Do people see clean energy investments as delivering local economic benefits? That is, investments producing well-paying jobs that last and use the local workforce? Compared to careers in healthcare, for example, people are more skeptical of the local economic benefits of the clean energy industry. While our surveys show that the national public holds these industries in better regard than coal, for example, this gap declines in areas with more fossil fuel-intensive industries. Our interviews with energy companies confirm these findings. We also discuss the tax revenue challenges communities face when they have long depended on a single revenue source and clean energy does not always support local finances.

The Middle East, defined here as the twenty-two members of the Arab League plus Iran and Turkey, has a poor record on matters of governance. Even within the fifty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, it stands out as weak on rule of law, civil liberties, and government transparency. Another salient characteristic of the Middle East is that its exposure to Islamic law (Sharia) lasted far longer than anywhere else. No Middle Eastern country is governed by Islamic law today; even Iran and Saudi Arabia operate under largely secularized laws. Yet the region’s legal history causes one to expect specific Islamic laws of the past to illuminate its poor political performance today. The legacies transcend contexts explicitly involving religion. Regardless of religious beliefs or attitudes toward religion, every decision maker in the region is constrained by institutions that bear influences of earlier institutions grounded in Islamic law. The contexts that the book’s analysis brings into focus are civic engagement, religious liberty, and economic capability. The illiberal patterns observed in these contexts are sometimes attributed to European colonization alone. In fact, whatever their harms to the region, colonial policies also mitigated institutional inefficiencies rooted in precolonial history.

Islam’s historical institutional complex has delayed a liberal order in the Middle East, not blocked it permanently. The institutions primarily responsible for the region’s historical trajectory are either gone or, under new conditions, they no longer inhibit liberalization. The infrastructure for an effective civil society is in place. Apart from private associations, it includes perpetual enterprises. And no absolute barrier exists to reinterpreting illiberal readings of Islam. By and large, the institutions that sustain the region’s repressive regimes are mutually supporting. For example, religious illiberalism facilitates associational repression, and vice versa. In any one context, the interlinkages among various institutions may work against liberalization, because change depends on appropriate movements in complementary institutions. The half-full part of this glass is that altering a single institution can destabilize others, possibly unleashing a cascade of mutually reinforcing reforms. Yet there is probably no quick fix to the prevailing illiberalism. Many patterns must change for the Middle East to reach advanced standards of liberty. Although specific changes can stimulate one another, each involves adjustments to interpersonal norms, organizational rules, and state laws. Some would upset longstanding status rankings and hierarchies. Learning civic skills requires communal practice. Vested interests are already organized.

This chapter reviews the literature on the political economy of S&T and innovation, including the evolution from the national innovation system to a political economic approach, and proposes a conceptual framework to open the “black box” of the states role in S&T and innovation activities.