Objective
Ambitious climate policies across sectors (e.g. energy, transport, food) are necessary for decarbonisation. To reach the CO2 reduction targets of the Paris Agreement, states agreed to sequentially increase climate policy intensity. Yet, ambitious policies are often politically infeasible. Much research on policy ambition focuses on the energy sector, predominantly investigating the number of policies that are enacted without analysing their intensity. Consequently, we still do not know what factors contribute to this cross-sectoral sequencing. The objective of this project is therefore to better understand the factors that increase the political feasibility of cross-sectoral climate policy.
Contributions and Content
Overall, this project makes substantial theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to advance our understanding why climate policy becomes more ambitious over time. Theoretically, the project contributes by investigating the expectation that policymakers face a breadth versus intensity dilemma: Broad policies imply heterogeneous target groups, which increases the probability of public backlash. This impedes the replacement of policies by more intensive ones. The project further stipulates that this dilemma can be overcome when policies first induce technological innovation spillovers across sectors and lower opportunity costs for more ambitious policies. Pro-environmental public opinion shifts can create positive cross-sectoral feedback that permits sequential updating of cross-sectoral policies. For systematic literature reviewing, the project contributes a new methodological approach for article screening with supervised machine learning. This approach allows for a rich summary of the selected articles and the causal mechanisms while keeping track of the broader tendencies within large strands of literature. To analyse the expectations empirically, I construct a new policy dataset by scraping laws of official country databases and coding these for their intensity. Previous research focuses mostly on the number of policies. Much of the research also relies on qualitative single-case or comparative case studies. This project contributes a quantitative large-scale statistical analysis of policy sequencing and thereby advances a more general understanding of the conditions under which policies are replaced with other more intensive policies.
Work Packages
The project contains of three main work packages. Each shows which barriers delay and which mechanisms accelerate pathways to higher or lower political commitments. The project output provides practically relevant knowledge for climate research, civil society, public agencies and the wider public.
Work Package 1: Pathways to Ambitious Cross-Sectoral Climate Policy: Evidence Synthesis of the Barriers and Solutions
What are the most prominent barriers to the introduction of climate policies; and what solutions to overcome these barriers does the literature present? This work package provides a systematic literature review of the causal mechanisms for barrier relaxation. While barriers have received much attention the mechanisms remain insufficiently researched and largely inaccessible. Quantitative supervised machine learning techniques serve map the general tendencies in the field and to select from a vast amount of potentially relevant scientific articles for an in-depth qualitative analysis.
Work Package 2: Pathways to Intensive Climate Policy
Under which conditions are climate polices replaced by policies with more ambitious sectoral targets and measures? Effective climate mitigation requires behavioural and technological changes, which are difficult to attain with the policies implemented so far. This work package therefore investigates the pathways that lead to intensive political commitment over time, theorising that broad cross-sectoral policies delay the pace at which climate policies are replaced by more intensive ones. A cross-sectoral perspective is indispensable to better understand differential tendencies and spill-overs across sectors.
Work package 3: Policy Sequencing Can Increase Public Support for Ambitious Climate Policy
. In this workpackage, we explore to what extent perceptions of the effectiveness of benefit-inducing prior policies (e.g. renewable energy subsidies) matter to explain support for increasingly ambitious carbon pricing policies. We use data from a conjoint survey experiment fielded before the popular vote on the Swiss CO2 law, to investigate if the perceived effectiveness of prior benefit-inducing policies increases public support for higher carbon prices across sectors.
