Eine Forschungsagenda für ein erwachsen gewordenes Politikfeld

Seit sich der Umweltschutz Ende der 1960er Jahre als eigenständiges Politikfeld etabliert hat, sind mehr als 40 Jahre vergangen. Die Umweltpolitik ist also längst kein neuer Politik-bereich mehr. Dennoch hat sich in der Politikwissenschaft ein Bild vom Umweltschutz als relativ jungem Politikfeld festgesetzt, das sich nur sehr langsam verändert und das – bewusst oder unbewusst – auch heute noch die politikwissenschaftliche Forschungsperspektive prägt. Ausgangspunkt dieses Beitrags ist die Beobachtung, dass es die Umweltpolitologie bis heute versäumt hat, das Erwachsenwerden ihres Untersuchungsgegenstands systematisch zu re-flektieren. Was passiert wenn ein Politikfeld in die Jahre kommt? Wie verändert sich das Aufgabenspektrum staatlicher, gesellschaftlicher und privater Akteure? Wie ihre Strategien und Handlungsressourcen? Wie beeinflussen vergangene Entscheidungen die Chancen künftigen Politikwandels? Sind die umweltpolitischen Erfolgsbedingungen von Gestern auch in Zukunft noch von Bedeutung? Diesen Fragen hat die Umweltpolitikanalyse bislang zu wenig Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet. In ihnen liegt der Schlüssel für ihre künftige thematische Ausrichtung. Vor diesem Hintergrund reflektiert der vorliegende Beitrag den Wandel der Umweltpolitik von einem neuen zu einem etablierten Politikfeld und identifiziert blinde Flecken der Umweltpolitikanalyse. In Form von 25 Thesen werden potentielle Forschungsperspektiven aufgezeigt, mit denen die Umweltpolitikanalyse einen Beitrag zum besseren Verständnis umweltpolitischer Dynamiken leisten und letztlich auch praktische Politikempfehlungen entwickeln kann

Contested energy transition? Europeanization and authority turns in EU renewable energy policy

In a context of multiple crises, the European Union’s climate and energy policies have become highly politicized and contested. Based on a comparative study of renewable energy policies in ten EU member states, and adopting a circular view of policy change and Europeanization to account for overlapping sovereignty claims between the national and the European level, this article unravels the authority debates over successive rounds of negotiation, adoption, and implementation along three EU directives. Following an exploratory process-tracing method, we investigate how policymaking authority originally delegated to the EU becomes contested by the member states and how these authority conflicts are managed. We find that the Europeanization of renewable energy policy is accompanied by an issue-specific renegotiation of authority between the EU and its member states which, in times of crises, can trigger instances of de-Europeanization and even a partial weakening of European integration in this policy domain.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The Cases of Education for Sustainable Development and Climate Change Education

While there is little doubt that social networks are essential for processes of implementing social innovations in community education such as Climate Change Education (CCE) or Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), scholars have neglected to analyze these processes in the multilevel governance system using Social Network Analysis. In this article, we contribute to closing this research gap by exploring the implementation of CCE and ESD in education at the regional and global levels. We compare the way CCE is negotiated and implemented within and through the global conferences of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with the way the UN Decade of ESD is put into practice through networks in five different German municipalities. We argue that the role of social networks is particularly strong in policy areas like CCE and ESD, which are best characterized as multi-level and multi-actor governance. Based on data derived from standardized surveys and from Twitter we analyze the complex interactions of public and private actors at different levels of governance in the two selected policy areas. We find, amongst others, that the implementation of CCE and ESD in community education depends in part on actors that had not been assumed to be influential at the outset. Furthermore, our analyses suggest the different levels of governance are not well integrated throughout the phases of the policy innovation cycle

A numerical method for computing radially symmetric solutions of a dissipative nonlinear modified Klein-Gordon equation

In this paper we develop a finite-difference scheme to approximate radially symmetric solutions of the initial-value problem with smooth initial conditions in an open sphere around the origin, where the internal and external damping coefficients are constant, and the nonlinear term follows a power law. We prove that our scheme is consistent of second order when the nonlinearity is identically equal to zero, and provide a necessary condition for it to be stable order n. Part of our study will be devoted to compare the physical effects of the damping coefficients

The diffusion of new environmental policy instruments

New Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) are increasingly discussed and adopted across countries. From a global perspective a rapid diffusion of these market based, voluntary or informational instruments can be observed. In our article – which is mainly explor-ative in nature – we argue that the adoption of NEPIs by national policy makers should not merely be interpreted as a reaction to newly emerging environmental problems or to real or per-ceived deficits of traditional (command and control) regulation in coping with those problems. To an important degree the use of NEPIs can be ascribed to the inner dynamics of international processes of policy transfer or policy diffusion, which make it increasingly difficult for national policy-makers to ignore new approaches in environmental policy that have already been put into practice in forerunner countries. In a first step, the article outlines the concept of policy diffusion. In a second step, we will de-scribe the trans-national spread of four different NEPIs (Eco-labels, Energy/Carbon Taxes, Na-tional Environmental Policy Plans/Strategies for Sustainable Development and Free- Access-of-Information (FAI) provisions) by showing the respective pattern of spread in empirically based curves. In a third step, the article analyses the underlying mechanisms of policy diffusion. We will argue that in addition to the national demand for adequate environmental policy instruments the spread of policy innovations is influenced by the presence or absence of international plat-forms or promoting agencies, which have placed the advancement of certain NEPIs on their agenda; and by the specific characteristics of the policy innovation itself. Finally, we will draw some preliminary conclusions about the motivations of policy makers to adopt or to reject new environmental policy instruments. We argue that the utilization of a softer and more flexible approach cannot exclusively be explained by the decision makers’ considera-tions of improving the efficiency of environmental policy making. Additionally, considerations of generating legitimacy affect the policy makers’ decisions