A story often told in development circles concerns a health programme in Africa. Experts spent years teaching men about nutrition, hygiene and childhood disease. The information was sound. The meetings were well attended. Yet little changed.
Then someone asked a disarmingly simple question: who actually chose the food, prepared the meals, cleaned the home and cared for sick children? It was largely women. Once the programme began working with the people who controlled those daily decisions, health outcomes improved markedly.
The programme had not lacked science, money or good intentions. It had been speaking to the wrong people.
Climate policies may be making the same mistake.
For three decades, the world has negotiated treaties, announced targets, enacted laws and asked companies to publish sustainability reports. The institutional architecture has become elaborate. The atmospheric result has not. UNEP estimates that existing policies still place the world on a path towards roughly 2.8°C of warming. Even full implementation of current national pledges would leave it heading towards 2.3–2.5°C.
This is not one failure but four. Our targets are insufficient. Policies do not deliver even those targets. Adaptation remains severely underfunded. And citizens are commonly treated as spectators rather than participants.
The first three failures are familiar. The fourth is less adequately understood.
Governments can procure renewable electricity, regulate methane and redesign cities. Companies can decarbonise production and finance. But neither governments nor companies ultimately inhabit buildings, set thermostats, select vehicles, waste food, maintain neighbourhoods or respond to emergency warnings. Every climate policy eventually arrives at a household, workplace or community. Too often, it arrives there as a slogan.
This does not mean transferring responsibility from major emitters to ordinary people. Individuals cannot decarbonise systems they do not control. The task is to make the cleaner decision available, affordable and normal. The potential is considerable.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that demand-side measures — including better infrastructure, technology and service provision as well as behavioural change — could reduce emissions in end-use sectors by 40–70 per cent by 2050. Public willingness is not absent either. A major UNDP survey found that four out of five people want stronger government climate action.
The obstacle is the distance between willingness and agency.
That distance is especially consequential in the Arab region. It is warming at roughly twice the global average, while 15 of the world’s 20 most water-scarce countries are located there. Yet climate governance remains highly centralised. National strategies proliferate, while municipalities and communities — the institutions and people closest to heat, flooding, water use and waste — often lack money, information or authority.
The GCC adds a particular paradox. Its states possess capital, administrative capacity and some of the world’s best solar resources. Renewable-energy and hydrogen projects are advancing. Yet cheap energy, desalinated water, private-car dependence, extensive cooling and low-density urban development continue to shape daily consumption. We are building the hardware of transition without fully developing its social operating system.
Oman has made important commitments: a 2050 net-zero objective, a stronger national contribution and strategies covering energy transition, adaptation and spatial development. The central question is no longer whether Oman has a climate vision. It is whether that vision governs ordinary decisions.
That requires more than another campaign. Oman should translate national goals into sectoral carbon budgets and annual delivery milestones. Every major public investment should be screened for climate risk. Ministries and state-owned enterprises should report outcomes, not activities: emissions avoided, buildings retrofitted, water saved and communities protected — not workshops held or policies published.
Citizens must then be given practical means to participate. Smart metres should show households how their energy and water use compares. Efficient cooling, insulation, rooftop solar and cleaner vehicles should be supported through targeted rebates and green finance. Subsidy reform, where necessary, should protect vulnerable households transparently. Governorates should receive resources for locally designed resilience projects. Women, young people, expatriate residents and frontline workers should help design the measures they are expected to implement.
The financial system has a parallel role. Disclosure and taxonomies matter, but climate finance must ultimately reach homes, small businesses, infrastructure and communities. Otherwise, sustainable finance risks becoming another sophisticated conversation conducted above the people expected to deliver the transition.
An individual is not merely a consumer. He or she is also a citizen, employee, investor, neighbour and first responder. Climate policy that recognises only the consumer misses most of the person.
The world has not been talking to entirely the wrong institutions. Governments and corporations remain indispensable. But we have spoken to them as though declarations at the top automatically become transformation below.
They do not. Every climate target should therefore end with a practical question: who must act differently tomorrow, and have we given that person the means, incentive and authority to do so? Until the answer is yes, climate policy will continue speaking to the wrong people.
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