Federal coordination of complex policy issues in the energy transition: hydrogen governance in Germany

With its National Hydrogen Strategy, the German federal government defined an initial framework for the integration of hydrogen into the energy system. At the subnational level, most states have also adopted own hydrogen strategies and are pursuing regional hydrogen policies within the national framework. This article examines how the interdependent but partly differing regional strategies are coordinated in the German multilevel system. We find different coordination processes among state governments but also between subnational and national level and discuss their pattern in the context of the coordination literature ranging from unilateral decision-making to integrated strategy building