Conference Agenda

Realizing durable and ambitious climate policy remains deeply challenging across the world. Despite continued policy activity and some moments of policy success, overall progress toward decarbonization remains vastly insufficient. While struggles over policy adoption are crucial, the post-adoption phase is equally important and equally contested. For example, policy may be questioned, eroded, or even repealed. Nonetheless, critical assessment of existing policies remains crucial to ensure that they do not stall climate action through entrenching counterproductive path dependencies.

In recent years, scholars have examined patterns of variation in climate policy action/inaction and diverse experiences of contestation in response to introduced policy. Institutional arrangements, political elites, and mass publics play crucial roles in both policy generation and in conditioning responses to introduced policies. It is now timely to step back and critically examine this confluence between institutions, elites, and mass publics within pre- and post-adoption politics of domestic climate policy. The panel tackles this challenge from multiple angles, including investigating responsiveness of political elites to citizens’ demands, mismatch between public preferences and policy design, and mass public responses to climate policies, among others. Overall, the panel contributes to understanding agency and power in the politics of climate policymaking, which is crucial to advancing sustainable transformations in governance and society.

Working towards sustainability transformations requires a better understanding of the insti­tutions that sustain the status quo, and the forces that may help to shift these institutions. A particularly sticky type of institutions that often stand in the way of sustainability but have received surprisingly little attention in this context are fiscal policies. Some of these policies combine income redistribution from the bottom to the top and incentives for environ­mentally damaging behaviour. They are therefore at odds with emerging ideas about the Sus­tainable Welfare State as well as two cross-cutting SDGs – Reduced Inequalities and Climate Ac­tion.

We approach the phenomenon of unsustainable institutions by studying citizen preferences in the context of a fiscal measure in Germany. More precisely, we investigate popular attitudes regarding the Commuting Travel Allowance. This transport-related tax deduction scheme has been called the 'holy cow of German tax law' due to its stickiness and long history, which dates back to the German Empire. The policy is an example of a fiscal measure that entails income redistribution to the top and incentives for environmentally harmful behavior, leading to 4 million tons of CO₂ emissions every year. It frequently appears high on the po­litical agenda, not least in the context of the ongoing energy crisis. As the measure bluntly contradicts any conception of sustainability, it provides a suitable entry point to study the complex relationships between institutions, popular attitudes, and sustainability.

Previous research indicates that citizens in democracies, and in Germany in particular, prefer both a more equal income distribution and stronger environmental protection. Why, then, does the commuting policy still exist? And do citizens perceive it as fair? Based on a vignette experiment with n = 4,500 German residents (fielded in 2022), we investigate these questions and gauge preferences for comprehensive institutional change. Our analysis indicates that the current policy, which benefits affluent drivers, does not match conceptions of fairness held by the public. Moreover, due to its complex­ity, citizens are not aware of the policy’s detrimental effects. Our experimental design allows to identify alternative policy design options that are in line with what citizens perceive as fair. Notably, these entail redistribution from the top to the bottom and incentives for environmentally benign ways of commuting instead of driving. Broadly, our work sketches how new research at the intersection of citizens and elites in environmental policy may help to identify leverage points for transfor­mational change.

Since the early 2000s, sustainable development and Green Growth have represented central themes in South Korea’s national energy plans. Despite these aspirations, the government’s renewable energy support policies have been characterized by inconsistent changes contributing to the country having one of the lowest shares of clean electricity generation among all OECD member states. This paper seeks to shed light on the political impediments toward decarbonizing the South Korean electricity sector by studying the repeal of the country’s first clean energy support policy.

More specifically, it undertakes a longitudinal study of adoption, implementation and repeal of South Korea’s Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) policy through three successive policy cycles (2002-2003; 2003-2005; 2005-2011), shedding light on how distributional policy effects influenced post-adoption politics over time. It applies process tracing methodology, leveraging data collected from 45 + interviews with relevant policy stakeholders and from relevant policy documents. The results suggest that the FiT was initially adopted to cater to the interests of large-scale wind developers, who enjoyed privileged access to policymakers and were able to convince them to adopt the FiT law on the premise that the policy would help establish a Korean wind turbine industry. Conversely, solar developers pursuing renewables expansion along alternative lines of reasoning, such as enhanced democratic participation, were initially heavily constrained by the electricity sector regulations during the initial post-adoption years, which prevented them for obtaining access to the subsidies - despite qualifying under the same law. Once larger, commercial developers entered the Korean solar field, the policy cost increased rapidly, leading the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy to eventually rollback the policy as it put an increasing financial burden on the publicly owned electricity distributor, KEPCO.

The preliminary results from the South Korean case emphasize that policy feedback dynamics are highly context-dependent. Relevance is given to the institutional arrangements governing the provision of electricity, as this reflects elements of an implicit social contract between elites and mass publics. More broadly, the study adjusts the policy feedback framework to the non-Western context and sheds light on the extent to which ‘green developmentalism’ constitutes a desirable (or feasible) transition strategy for policymakers in other jurisdictions.

Do political elites respond to voters’ environmental demands? Addressing climate change is inherently a political challenge. While there is growing concern about the environment in public opinion, current policies will make reaching the Paris Agreement goals extremely unlikely at best. This paper studies the gap between mass preferences and policymaking by exploring the strategic behaviour of political elites. We focus on one actor who is most likely interested in responding: Green Parties. We provide a theoretical framework of different types of responsiveness: from talking on social media, to allocating candidates more in line with voters' preferences, to enacting actual policy. We study these different levels of responsiveness by combining geo-located data on Fridays for Future protests with novel datasets on the German Greens candidates' bios, speeches, and the policies they support. We use difference-in-differences and instrumental variable designs to identify this effect. We explore data on candidate selection and its regional variation, and data from other parties to understand how intra-party dynamics and ideology mechanisms influence our findings. This paper provides important insights for research on environmental politics and responsiveness.

Effective and rapid climate change action requires coercive policies (e.g., regulation, taxation/pricing, phase-outs) to accelerate low-carbon transitions. Implementing such policies at the national level is often subject to a fierce political debate and sometimes even large-scale public contestation (e.g., the Yellow Vests movement in France, acrimonious anti-carbon pricing protests in Australia, and court challenges to carbon pricing in Canada). Such responses threaten policy durability by undermining the effectiveness of climate policy instruments and the robustness of wider climate policy agendas. However, when, where, and why contentious public responses occur (or not) remains unclear. This paper aims to systematically examine the variation and prevalence of public responses, both contentious and not, to coercive climate policies.

We develop and apply a typology of public responses to coercive policy spanning public opinion and public mobilization. We analyze a systematic sample of 55 cases of national-level coercive climate change mitigation policies across 23 OECD countries initiated between 2010-2022. Policy domains cover framework policies and energy policies for the sector with the largest CO2 emissions per country. Policy types include taxation/pricing, regulation, and phase-outs, where the latter remain relatively understudied empirically. The medium-N sample enables comparison across a large set of cases, which is rare in climate policy scholarship, where small-N case studies are most common. Cases are interpretively coded using politically-centrist mass media (newspapers) sampled systematically and analyzed over a multi-year period. This approach enables an unbiased categorization and estimate of the prevalence of contentious and non-contentious public responses.

Findings reveal a relatively low prevalence of contentious responses to coercive climate policies. The sporadic picture of contention suggests that coercive policies are not always highly controversial. Contestation that does occur is mainly associated with carbon taxation/pricing. Furthermore, not all identified instances of contention can necessarily be classified as a fully-fledged backlash, despite increasing concern about this among climate scholars and practitioners in recent years. Overall, the paper illuminates agency of mass publics in the post-adoption politics of climate policymaking and suggests a need for comparative analysis of causes of variation in public responses, considering interactions between policy design, institutional architecture, and social context.