Environmental leaders and pioneers: agents of change?

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article distinguishes between states acting as environmental leaders or pioneers. While leaders usually actively seek to attract followers, this is not normally the case for pioneers. Dependent on their internal and external ambitions, states may take on the position of a laggard, pioneer, pusher or symbolic leader. When doing so, states employ various combinations of types and styles of leadership or pioneership. Four types of leadership/pioneership–structural, entrepreneurial, cognitive and exemplary–and two styles of leadership/pioneership–transactional/humdrum and transformational/heroic–are used to assess leaders and pioneers. The novel analytical framework put forward is intended to generate greater conceptual clarity, which is urgently needed for more meaningful theory-guided cumulative empirical research on leaders and pioneers

Ploughing friction on wet and dry sand

The friction for sliding objects over partially water-saturated granular materials is investigated as a function of the water volume fraction. We find that ploughing friction is the main sliding mechanism: The slider leaves a deep trace in the sand after its passage. In line with previous research and everyday experience, we find that the friction force varies nonmonotonically with the water volume fraction. The addition of a small amount of water makes the friction force sharply drop, whereas too much added water causes the friction force to increase again. We present a ploughing model that quantitatively reproduces the nonmonotonic variation of the friction force as a function of water volume fraction without adjustable parameters. In this model, the yield stress of the water-sand mixture controls the depth to which the hemisphere sinks into the sand and the force that is required to plough through the water-sand mixture. We show that the model can also be used for other ploughing friction experiments, such as an ice skate that leaves a ploughing track on ice

The European Council, Council and Member States: jostling for influence

The European Council and the Council each constitute at once supranational EU institutions in which Member States collectively take decisions in the interest of the EU and intergovernmental bargaining arenas for Member States which try to defend their national interests. While the Environment Council has dealt with climate issues since the 1980s, the European Council has focused more regularly on climate policy issues only after they had become politically salient ‘high politics’ issues. Since about 2007, the European Council has become more active in EU and international climate policy, with notable peaks of activity in 2007-2009 and 2014-2015, associated with the 2009 Copenhagen UN climate conference (COP15) and the 2015 Paris UN climate conference respectively as well as in the run up to the 2021 Glasgow UN climate conference. Although the European Council is meant to define only the general political directions and priorities for the EU, in recent years it has issued sometimes fairly detailed instructions to the Council (and the Commission) to act on a particular climate policy issue. The Environment Council focuses on EU climate dossiers while renewable energy and energy efficiency are usually dealt with by the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council. Council meetings constitute only the tip of the iceberg of the Council machinery. They are prepared by Coreper and Council Working Groups which try to achieve as much consensus as possible on dossiers before they are placed on the agenda of Council meetings. The Council’s Working Party on International Environment Issues has been of central importance for the preparation of international climate conferences where the EU is formally represented by the rotating Presidency. Since 2004, a semi-permanent structure with issue leaders and lead negotiators has been in place and has led to an informal division of labour between the Presidency, Commission and Member States. The Council’s internal structures and administrative capacities to deal with EU and international climate issues have changed considerably over the years. This seems to confirm Helen Wallace’s (2003) assessment that the Council is an ‘institutional chameleon’. Over time there have also been significant changes in the relationships between Member States on EU climate issues, with different alliances emerging inside and outside the European Council and Council. Member States have frequently disagreed about the level of ambition for EU climate policies. The widely accepted informal convention that permanent or quasi permanent alliances between groups of Member States should not be formed within the European Council and/or the Council was repeatedly challenged by the Visegrad countries during the 2010s. This challenge, in conjunction with the decline of the relevance of the green trio/sextet, triggered the setting up of the Green Growth Group, both of which have however purposefully remained ad hoc alliances

Introduction: European Union climate leadership

There is no shortage of would-be leaders in EU climate change politics. The EU institutions (e.g. European Council, Council of the EU, Commission and the European Parliament (EP)), member states and societal actors have all, though to varying degrees and at different time periods, tried to offer leadership in EU and international climate change politics. Importantly, public support for EU environmental policy in general, and climate change policy in particular, has been consistently high (e.g. Eurobarometer 2015). The economic recession which followed the 2008 financial crises triggered only a moderate drop in public support for EU action on climate change, although considerable variation exists between member states

Diversity in sub-national EU implementation: the application of the EU Ambient Air Quality directive in 13 municipalities in the Netherlands

The politics and administration of institutional chang