Environmental policy evaluation in the EU: between learning, accountability, and political opportunities?

Policy evaluation has grown significantly in the EU environmental sector since the 1990s. In identifying and exploring the putative drivers behind its rise – a desire to learn, a quest for greater accountability, and a wish to manipulate political opportunity structures – new ground is broken by examining how and why the existing literatures on these drivers have largely studied them in isolation. The complementarities and potential tensions between the three drivers are then addressed in order to advance existing research, drawing on emerging empirical examples in climate policy, a very dynamic area of evaluation activity in the EU. The conclusions suggest that future studies should explore the interactions between the three drivers to open up new and exciting research opportunities in order to comprehend contemporary environmental policy and politics in the EU

Towards harder soft governance? Monitoring climate policy in the EU

In the emerging debate on ‘harder soft governance,’ the relationship between hard and soft elements has not been fully explored. This paper addresses this gap by looking at the changing nature of policy monitoring, a quintessentially soft governance mechanism. It focuses on climate change, a dynamic site of policy expansion and experimentation in which the EU has historically been an international frontrunner. This paper finds that a range of ‘harder’ elements have been added to the EU's climate policy monitoring over time, including more explicit legal provisions, greater external publicity, and more concrete links to other policy processes. These changes have emerged from politically sensitive negotiations between many actors, principally the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Environment Agency (who together have generally favoured greater hardening), and Member States (some of whom preferred softer governance) in the context of changing international opportunities and constraints. Moving forward, this paper highlights the need for more research on the efficacy of policy monitoring, especially with respect to the EU's significantly more ambitious long-term decarbonisation targets

How ‘harder soft governance’ might help deliver the EU’s new 55 per cent emissions reduction target

In December, EU leaders agreed to set a new target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to at least 55 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030. Drawing on new research, Michèle Knodt and Jonas Schoenefeld detail the role ‘harder soft governance’ might play in making this target achievable

Softening the surface but hardening the core? Governing renewable energy in the EU

Soft law and governance captured the attention of scholars in the 2000s, andnew policy challenges and the novel introduction of‘harder’elements now drivea (re)turn to these discussions. This article explores the extent to which dynamicsleading towards‘harder soft governance’(HSG) appear in the EU’s renewableenergy governance by comparing the 2020 and 2030 Renewable EnergyDirectives. Document analysis and interviews reveal a surface-level softeningbecause the new 2030 directive contains no binding national targets for theMember States. An entrepreneurial Commission has been seeking to introduce‘harder elements’at the core by focusing on implementation, allowing for poten-tially deeper influence on the national energy mixes though the Energy Union.Two main factors drive these changes: the evolving international context of cli-mate change governance, as well as re-configurations of the actors in the EU.Future research should explore the effectiveness of emerging HSG in detai

Evaluation in polycentric governance systems: climate change policy in the European Union

Perceived failures in top-down climate governance and many emerging bottom-up activities have prompted scholars to pay more attention to the promise and limits of polycentric governance, in which activities are spread across many levels, actors, and scales (E. Ostrom, 2010c; E. Ostrom, 2014b). In adopting the Paris Agreement, policy makers also appear to be moving in the direction of greater polycentricity. But many aspects of polycentric governance remain theoretically and empirically underexplored, especially with a view to policy evaluation, a vital but often neglected governance activity. This thesis addresses these gaps by: (1) considering the potential (theoretical) role of policy evaluation in polycentric governance and (2) empirically exploring the case of the European Union, an active adopter and evaluator of climate policy whose climate governance has been described as polycentric. The thesis argues that polycentric governance theory is based on three foundational ideas, namely that that actors can and do self-organize, that context matters in governance, and that governance centres, while independent, interact in order to fully realize the benefits of polycentric governance. These foundational ideas provide a means to explore climate policy evaluation, and to connect with related debates in the evaluation literatures. Fresh empirical data from a new database of 618 climate policy evaluations (1997-2014) suggest that formal (state) actors produced many more evaluations that informal (societal) ones—pointing to limited self-organization and a key role for public actors in evaluation—but that informal evaluations also emerged in empirically detectable and relevant quantities. By using a new coding scheme to analyse a sub-set of the evaluations this thesis reveals that the limited attention to various contextual factors and the fact that climate policy evaluation tends to happen in and focus on individual governance centres restricts the potential travel of evaluative insights from one governance centre to another. In toto, the empirical characteristics equip climate policy evaluation only partially to facilitate polycentric climate governance in the EU

The European Green Deal: What Prospects for Governing Climate Change With Policy Monitoring?

The European Green Deal (EGD) puts forward and engages with review mechanisms, such as the European Semester and policy monitoring, to ensure progress towards the long-term climate targets in a turbulent policy environment. Soft-governance mechanisms through policy monitoring have been long in the making, but their design, effects, and politics remain surprisingly under-researched. While some scholars have stressed their importance to climate governance, others have highlighted the difficulties in implementing robust policy monitoring systems, suggesting that they are neither self-implementing nor apolitical. This article advances knowledge on climate policy monitoring in the EU by proposing a new analytical framework to better understand past, present, and potential future policy monitoring efforts, especially in the context of the EGD. Drawing on Lasswell (1965), it unpacks the politics of policy monitoring by analysing who monitors, what, why, when, and with what effect(s). The article discusses each element of the framework with a view to three key climate policy monitoring efforts in the EU which are particularly relevant for the EGD, namely those emerging from the Energy Efficiency Directive, the Renewable Energy Directive, and the Monitoring Mechanism Regulation (now included in the Energy Union Governance Regulation), as well as related processes for illustration. Doing so reveals that the policy monitoring regimes were set up differently in each case, that definitions of the subject of monitoring (i.e., public policies) either differ or remain elusive, and that the corresponding political and policy impact of monitoring varies. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the findings for governing climate change by means of monitoring through the emerging EGD

Parteiendifferenz in der lokalen Klimapolitik? Eine empirische Analyse der hessischen Klima-Kommunen

Machen Parteien für die Klimapolitikgestaltung einen Unterschied? Diese Frage ist nicht nur angesichts des auf nationalen Beiträgen basierenden globalen Klimaregimes relevant, sondern auch, da die Klimapolitik häufig als stärker parteipolitisiert wahrgenommen wird als die Umweltpolitik im Allgemeinen. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht der Frage auf der kommunalen Ebene nach, die bislang in der Forschung zur umweltpolitischen Parteiendifferenzhypothese selten Beachtung findet. Am Beispiel des Bundeslandes Hessen prüfen wir erstens, ob Parteiendifferenzen eine Rolle für den Beitritt der hessischen Städte und Gemeinden zum Klimanetzwerk „Hessen aktiv: Die Klima-Kommunen“ spielen. Zweitens prüfen wir, ob die Erstellung der obligatorischen Aktionspläne unter den Mitgliedern des Netzwerks mit Parteiendifferenzen in Zusammenhang steht. Die Untersuchung beruht auf einer Ereignisdatenanalyse der hessischen Städte und Gemeinden über den Zeitraum von 2009 bis 2020. Die Ergebnisse deuten an, dass von Grünen (Ober‑)Bürgermeister*innen regierte Städte und Gemeinden eher den Klima-Kommunen beitreten. Allerdings finden wir keine Hinweise darauf, dass sich die Erstellung der Aktionspläne, und damit ein konkreteres klimapolitisches Engagement, auf die Parteizugehörigkeit der (Ober-)Bürgermeister*innen zurückführen lässt. Allerdings zeigt sich, dass die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Erstellung eines Aktionsplans mit der Stärke der Grünen in der Gemeindevertretung steigt. Diese heterogenen Ergebnisse lassen erkennen, dass die Parteiendifferenzhypothese auch zur Erklärung von Unterschieden in der kommunalen Klimapolitik beitragen könnte und dass weiterer Forschungsbedarf hierzu auf der lokalen Ebene besteht

Harder soft governance in European climate and energy policy: exploring a new trend in public policy

While various forms of soft governance have been long in the making, there is a growing introduction of new policy elements in order to ‘harden’ soft governance arrangements. These new forms of ‘harder’ soft governance (HSG) vary in the degree of hardness in different settings. This special issue aims to derive lessons for climate and energy policy on HSG by looking across other policy fields and institutions where such ‘hardening’ has emerged, including in climate policy monitoring, the EU Energy Union, the UNFCCC, the OECD, the Open Method of Coordination, the European Semester, and policy surveillance in transnational city networks. Bringing the contributions together, this introduction reviews soft governance approaches, including their hardening. It then develops a framework for diagnosing HSG, including indicators such as obligations, justification, precision, ‘blaming and shaming’ opportunities, the role of third party actors, bundling, enforcement by policy field coupling, and sanctions. The introduction then identifies driving factors of HSG, including the role of the EU Member States, a strong need for coordination, policy entrepreneurs and institutional opportunities. The lessons from this special issue provide a useful yardstick for the future development of climate and energy governance, and the use of HSG in other policy fields

The diffusion of climate change adaptation policy

Adapting to some level of climate change has become unavoidable. However, there is surprisingly limited systematic knowledge about whether and how adaptation policies have diffused and could diffuse in the future. Most existing adaptation studies do not explicitly examine policy diffusion, which is a form of interdependent policy-making among jurisdictions at the same or across different levels of governance. To address this gap, we offer a new interpretation and assessment of the extensive adaptation policy literature through a policy diffusion perspective; we pay specific attention to diffusion drivers and barriers, motivations, mechanisms, outputs, and outcomes. We assess the extent to which four motivations and related mechanisms of policy diffusion—interests (linked with learning and competition), rights and duties (tied to coercion), ideology, and recognition (both connected with emulation)—are conceptually and empirically associated with adaptation. We also engage with adaptation policy characteristics, contextual conditions (e.g., problem severity) and different channels of adapation policy diffusion (e.g., transnational networks). We demonstrate that adaptation policy diffusion can be associated with different mechanisms, yet many of them remain remarkably understudied. So are the effects of adaptation policy diffusion in terms of changes in vulnerability and resilience. We thus identify manifold avenues for future research, and provide insights for practitioners who may hope to leverage diffusion mechanisms to enhance their adaptation efforts