Valuing the wider benefits of net zero: Conceptual foundations of new assessment frameworks in the United Kingdom

Joshua Lait, Timothy J. Foxon, Carly McLachlan, Andrew Sudmant

Highlighting the wider economic, social, and environmental benefits of climate change mitigation can strengthen the investment case for action, support policy coordination, and enhance political feasibility. In the United Kingdom (UK), new assessment frameworks and tools are emerging to better recognise these co-benefits in national net-zero pathways, municipal policy processes, and public procurement. Yet limited attention has been paid to how the conceptual foundations of these tools may reinforce – or challenge – market-led logics in energy policy. The values embedded within assessment frameworks shape policymaking by determining how benefits are prioritised and valued.

Drawing on a review of 28 assessment frameworks and 27 expert interviews, this paper examines how co-benefit appraisal practices are shaping the governance of the UK’s transition to net zero. First, we show that the dominant approach, quantitative economic valuation, tends to support and legitimise a market-based view of this transition. Second, frameworks can treat coordination primarily as a pragmatic policy problem rather than a conceptual issue relating to the need for holistic governance models which are aligned with human and planetary limits. Third, while policymakers combine assessment methods to produce evidence relevant to different audiences, this pragmatic view of political feasibility can obscure the political question of whose values and interests should influence policy design and evaluation.

We argue that applying multiple methods through a well-being economic paradigm reframes co-benefit assessment as a moral and political practice which can identify socially just and ecologically responsible forms of energy system change.