When Governance Lags: What Other Technologies Reveal About SRM

Solar radiation modification (SRM) is receiving increasing levels of attention amid growing concern about climate change and rising pressure to explore new responses. Development and deployment of SRM options may decrease certain risks associated with global warming. At the same time, the technology raises political, environmental, and ethical questions at a planetary scale. Stratospheric aerosol injection, the variety of SRM that has received the most scrutiny, could be implemented relatively quickly and at comparatively low direct cost. Some analysts argue that a single country or small coalition could plausibly move ahead without international agreement. Taken together, these characteristics raise difficult questions about authority, legitimacy, and restraint at a moment when, around the world, institutional capacity and public trust cannot be taken for granted.

SRM is such a head-spinning idea that it is often in media and academic characterizations treated as singular, even unprecedented. To describe SRM as unprecedented captures something real: SRM is unlike other climate response options in terms of how it might be developed and utilized, and in terms of what it would take to craft meaningful governance. Yet focusing only on what makes SRM unique risks obscuring the lessons that can be learned through identifying what SRM holds in common with other large-scale technological and social endeavors. If investigation into and potentially development of SRM is to be managed, it is important to identify and learn relevant lessons from other arenas of high-stakes technological development.

A desire to learn lessons about good and effective technological governance is one of the starting points for SRM Governance Horizons. The SRM Governance Horizons project is concerned, big-picture, with illuminating societal readiness to consider SRM. The question is not whether governance will matter, but whether institutions and communities are ready for pressures already shaping SRM today. Readiness means preserving meaningful collective choice before technological or political momentum narrows the available options. Governance is more likely to be ready when authority is legitimate, monitoring systems make unilateral or unwise action visible, and engagement happens early enough to shape direction rather than respond to crisis.

To explore what readiness requires in practice, we can look across other high-stakes technologies where governance faces or faced similar conditions of uncertainty and contention.

Looking across other technologies matters because the governance challenges surrounding SRM are not entirely new, even if their configuration is. The combination of speed, global scope, and uncertain impacts places strain on institutions and raises familiar questions about authority over shared environmental systems, constraints on unilateral action, and forms of oversight capable of maintaining legitimacy under uncertainty. These tensions have appeared before, across different technologies and political contexts.

SRM fits into another recognizable pattern: across multiple fields, high-stakes technologies have advanced faster than governance systems were prepared to manage. This has happened especially when promises of large-scale benefit collide with political realities and uneven public trust. 

Recent history offers examples of technologies that have forced us to confront questions of risk and public authority under conditions of uncertainty, particularly in moments when technical capability advanced faster than any institution could guide or constrain its use. In many cases, public engagement lagged behind technical progress, and legitimacy weakened once political realities and scrutiny set in. Governance frameworks followed, but often only after trust had already been strained and mistakes had already been made in efforts to scale. SRM now shows signs of following this pattern, as private investment accelerates, political attention rises, and policy responses emerge unevenly, often before shared expectations or structured decision-making pathways are in place. 

These dynamics are unfolding in a charged and brittle broader context often described as a polycrisis, where geopolitical instability, climate disruption, technological acceleration, and economic pressures interact in ways that amplify one another. Institutions designed for more stable conditions are now navigating overlapping shocks, making governance challenges more complex and less predictable. In this environment, approaches that rely solely on slow consensus-building or stable authority structures may struggle to keep pace with accelerating change.

Our first instinct when searching for lessons is often to look either backward to analogue technologies or forward to emerging ones. In practice, readiness requires expanding beyond that constrained frame. Historical analogues reveal recurring governance patterns, while rapidly evolving technologies developing alongside SRM are reshaping the same institutional and informational landscape. Understanding readiness therefore requires widening the lens to examine both earlier precedents and parallel emerging fields. 

This series will examine three different sets of lessons for SRM having to do with institutional disruption, integration into the landscape of climate change response options, and security and restraint. In the pieces that follow this introduction, we examine a series of particular technological instances to explore how governance evolved under pressure and what lessons might apply, cautiously, to SRM. While there are number of different technologies that have or once displayed features from which lessons relevant to SRM might be drawn, we have settled, as a starting point, on the following three technological examples:

• Gene editing illustrates institutional disruption, where rapidly advancing technical capability concentrated expertise and shifted decision-making power faster than governance structures could adapt.
• Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) provides an example of the challenges associated with the rise of a novel climate response option, demonstrating how innovation and scale outpaced governance building.
• Artificial intelligence highlights the potential and challenges associated with the seeking of security and exercising of restraint. Artificial intelligence, also standing as its own category, offers insight into how governance struggles when multiple disruptive technologies evolve simultaneously. 

There is understandable tension about how much weight any single analogy should carry, and these comparisons are not meant to suggest that SRM will follow the same path as earlier technologies. No analogy is perfect, and context matters. The aim is to use historical and contemporary experience as orientation rather than prediction, identifying recurring governance dynamics without assuming that past solutions can simply be transferred. Governance does not always succeed, and in many cases it arrives too late. The value of looking across these examples lies in understanding where effort matters most if governance is to shape outcomes rather than react to them.

Our explorations at this point are partial and tentative. That’s by design. The effort at this stage is geared towards drawing out some useful insights and lines of inquiry, based on our own reading of the histories of development and governance across a variety of technological forms. The think-pieces that follow are meant to be first-stage markers and provocations. We invite responses, including evaluations of what is helpful in what we’re producing and what has been missed. Down the road, we will bring together people with deep knowledge of how governance around various technologies has proceeded, to draw out readiness-oriented lessons for a world that needs a better handle on SRM.