Conference Agenda

Governance is a bottleneck in the quest for the transformation to sustainability; hence, many scholars claim that (democratic) political institutions need to change in the context of the Anthropocene and long-term challenges. One aspect is whether and how governments adapt political decision-making to consider profound global and long-term challenges like the climate and sustainability crises. Against this background, I focus on the role of specialized political bodies for sustainability, which I call “sustainability institutions”.

In the proposed paper, I introduce a cross-sectional data set offering an overview of roughly 200 diverse sustainability institutions that countries across the world had implemented by 2020 at the national level in order to promote sustainability in the executive and legislative spheres. The data set comprises sustainability institutions in the sense of public, cross-sectoral and permanent bodies, aiming to promote sustainability in terms of socio-ecological well-being with an orientation towards the future and embedded into global frameworks.

The data set covers variables on basic information about national sustainability institutions including their name, country, and world region, the year of their implementation etc. Further, it includes variables on both their structural dimension such as their links to the executive and the legislative bodies, and their substantial dimension in terms of their covered sustainability areas, future-orientation and reference to UN sustainability agendas.

The data set serves various purposes: First, the data set is an original contribution to the research and policy fields of sustainable development because it combines data on different types of sustainability institutions that were so far scattered over different databases or those with limited regional foci. Second, the data set facilitates comparisons regarding countries’ institutionalisation of sustainability according to key features. Third, the dataset serves as a basis for further research on the empirical phenomenon of sustainability institutions, e.g., as point of departure for in-depth case studies, or as a building block for large-n analyses like potential relationships with other variables such as progress on sustainable development, levels of democracy, or the like.

In the paper, I introduce the data set in terms of methodology and present findings from a descriptive comparative analysis regarding the main features and peculiarities of national sustainability institutions around the globe. The paper mainly contributes to the ESG research streams of Architecture and Agency as well as Democracy and Power.

Australia has long been termed a ‘climate laggard’ in international climate negotiations and policy making. Nevertheless, Australia has one of the best records for reporting within the climate regime. It has long been assumed that with better reporting will come better state behaviour. Thus, it could be expected that given Australia’s extremely strong track record of reporting under the transparency requirements of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and subsequent climate agreements, that there would be a convergence with strong climate policy. This, however, has not borne out. Therefore, this research asks, what, if any, are the impacts of reporting and review on Australian climate policy.

This paper first provides an historical account of climate policy in Australia and it major turning points and actors. This is followed by a tracing of Australian climate reporting and review. This is achieved through document analysis and interviews to better understand who prepares the reports, how they are prepared and used, and how reviews of Australian reports are received and responded to. This tracing provides a detailed picture of Australian climate reporting and review processes, which to date, have not been documented. This also allows for an analysis of the convergence, or lack thereof, between climate policy making and reporting and review.

This research contributes to a wider body of transparency work which is attempting to understand the substantive effects of transparency requirements and whether such requirements truly result in positive change or simply act to distract from it.

The Paris Agreement established a new international framework to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in which countries agreed to maintain the global average temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. As each member state of the Agreement defines its own nationally determined contributions (NDCs), a key condition for achieving the Paris goal is domestic climate actions of large emitters. Hence, national climate policy (i.e., sectoral or overarching policies aimed at lasting emission reductions), plays a central role in governing climate change under the Paris Agreement and is now a focus of the literature on climate governance. As the world’s largest emitter of GHGs, China plays an essential role in meeting global climate goals, and it requires a variety of public policy interventions to steer its direction. However, to date, the characteristics of China’s national climate policy mixes remains underexamined, and this knowledge gap prevents researchers from objectively and systematically assessing the progress and ambition of China’s efforts toward its climate commitment. In this study, we investigate China’s climate policy mixes through a two-level, bottom-up approach that examines the “Macro-level (policy mix balance)” and the “Meso-level (policy intensity)” characteristics. Particularly, policy mix balance is measured by evaluating the dispersion of policy instruments across different instrument types by applying the International Energy Agency’s categorisation of policy instruments along nine different types. On the other hand, policy intensity, i.e., the strength of policies toward specific goals, is measured by a revised version of [citation removed to annonymize abstract]’s (2015) Index of Policy Activity (IPA), which is an aggregation of six indicators: objective, scope, integration, budget, implementation and monitoring. More specifically, we compile a novel dataset of 342 national climate policies published from 2016 to 2022 by the Chinese central government, assess each policy with this two-level analytical framework, and then aggregate systematically at the policy mix level. Our contribution unfolds into two parts: first, we unpack the policy mixes that China has adopted and identify their key design features and temporal dynamics, e.g., the instrument balance and intensity among different sectors and the preference for adopting some specific type of instrument. Second, based on the aggregate results, we further examine the strength and weaknesses of China’s national government’s efforts to implement climate policies to influence long-term policy change and fulfill its NDCs.

Solving climate change mitigation in relation to power production systems to achieve Paris Commitments of maintaining waring well below 2 degrees Celsius is daunting. Involving people in strategizing and imagining a decarbonized future shows promise. This article reports on two day Citizen Juries held in four communities from 2021-2022 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Historically a fossil fuel, oil and gas region, Saskatchewan is an appropriate case study for transitioning to clean and renewable power production.

Two day deliberate focus group discussions in the communities were preceded and followed by surveys to measure preferences for power production sources, priorities in relation to strategy, and social learning. Qualitative analysis of discussions and strategies and recommendations for climate mitigation were anlayzed for case study comparisons and differences.

The four communities exhibited place based attachments and priorities dependent on both surrounding industry and power production sources. Coal, oil and gas communities continued to support fossil fuel generation together with carbon capture and sequestration to a greater extent than other communities. While there is high support for renewables, a wind power generation community made interesting comments and expressed concerns over expansion of this source of power production, but did evidence social learning. This community ranked natural gas pre citizen jury as the preferred source of power production, but revised this after learning about its Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs). The four communities expressed divergent perceptions surrounding Small Modular Reactors (SMRs); all communities favour renewables (wind, solar, hydro-electricity).

While cost of power production sources and impact on Gross Domestic Product was a significant concern at the beginning of the citizen jury, it decreased substantially by the end of the citizen jury. Participants stated, “cost shouldn’t hinder the goal’ of addressing climate change. Full life cycle costs of all power production sources need to be considered. Jurors made concrete recommendations for government surrounding leadership, education and citizen participation.

The structure of policy arrangements for the governance of climate change mitigation is defined as complex. Existing literature suggests that adopting a system perspective on such structures allows to unfold the complexity and it does so by employing the concept of policy mixes. This argument originates from the observation that governments have adopted an ever-increasing number of policy instruments which co-exist and evolve together over time as policy mixes for the mitigation of the climate crisis. Yet, to date, we have limited knowledge on if (and how) policies within the same policy mix interact with each other in addressing the climate crisis.

This paper focuses on this knowledge gap by employing a network lens to the study of policy interactions within mixes for climate change mitigation. It researches the case of the electricity sector in the United Kingdom (UK) and its national level policy mix from 1956 (year of adoption of the Clean Air Act, considered a milestone in the UK environmental legislation) to 2022. This paper initially delineates this historical mix and populates it with policies, which is innovative for two reasons. First, I take a historical perspective, while most studies on policy mixes consider one point in time or a shorter time span. Second, drawing on archival research, I include both explicitly labelled climate policies and policies impacting the process of climate change mitigation in the electricity sector without the climate policy label, e.g., financial acts.

Next, I build a network where nodes are policies included in the mix and edges are the bilateral interactions between policies. This paper considers “shared target” as a mode through which policies interact with each other. It refers to the bilateral interactions between policies sharing ends and/or aims, as stated in policy texts. Halting the generation of fossil fueled electricity and uptaking ready-to-deploy renewable energy technologies are urgent steps to pursue to mitigate the climate crisis. Thus, fuels and technologies are the targets under analysis for this paper. Once fuel and/or technology targets are identified for each policy, potential target-interactions are detected and classified as either synergistic or conflictive for climate mitigation. The analysis maps policies in a network and ultimately shows if policies have historically interacted with each other in synergy or in conflict for mitigation of the climate crisis. In conclusion, this study analyses policy interactions to better understand the architecture of policy arrangements addressing the climate crisis.