Mitigating climate change in a federal country committed to the Kyoto Protocol: how Swiss federalism further complicated an already complex challenge

Abstract

When policy scholars assess the effects of federalism on climate change mitigation, they often look at countries that rejected binding commitments (in particular, the USA) and find that federalism enabled sub-national entities to partly fill national regulatory voids. In accordance with a similar case study on Austria, we find the exact opposite for Switzerland, a country that committed itself to an 8 % cut in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. To reveal the detrimental effects of federalism, we focus our case study on the integration of climate change concerns into building policies, a policy field fully in the hands of Swiss sub-national authorities known as cantons. Apart from a few pioneer cantons, we found mainly federal departments concerned with integrating climate change mitigation into cantonal building policies and cantonal as well as federal actors struggling with the numerous pitfalls of Swiss federalism in their own ways. On the one hand, various federal departments tried repeatedly to facilitate a nationwide greening of cantonal building policies, and their interventions often resulted in lowest common denominator solutions that were difficult to improve once in place. On the other hand, Swiss federalism gave a few pioneer cantons the freedom to green their building policies early on, but their policies hardly diffused to other cantons. Resembling our main finding of the Austrian case study, we conclude that the 15 % emission decline in the Swiss building sector during 2008-2012 compared to 1990 levels happened despite, not because of Swiss federalism. This warrants caution against high hopes in assuming that decentralised or polycentric governance can fully compensate for failed national (or international) climate policies.

Climate change mitigation in Austria and Switzerland: The pitfalls of federalism in greening decentralized building policies

“…The programme aims to promote building refurbishment and the modernization of heating systems through subsidies provided by federal and cantonal authorities in equal shares and negotiated in so‐called “convention programmes”. While the effects of the merged Buildings Programme on refurbishment rates and carbon emissions are unclear (federal interviewee), it is well documented that the full potential of the programme was not exploited by the cantons until 2013 (for details see Casado‐Asensio and Steurer, ).…”

“…The case studies are based on a qualitative analysis of the relevant written material (i.e., scholarly literature, studies and assessments, policy documents) and semi‐structured face‐to‐face interviews with experts and federal as well as sub‐national policymakers (14 for Austria and 15 for Switzerland). All interviews were conducted in German and interview quotes were translated by the authors (for further details on methods see Steurer and Clar ; Casado‐Asensio and Steurer, ).…”

“…Large parts of the two original case study papers have been used here without quoting or referencing them because this is the only way a comparison like this can be published meaningfully. For further details on methods and findings on the Austrian case, see Steurer and Clar (); for Switzerland see Casado‐Asensio and Steurer ().…”

“…For more details on the Austrian case, see Steurer and Clar (), for Switzerland see Casado‐Asensio and Steurer ().…”

“…For more details on the Austrian case, seeSteurer and Clar (2015), for Switzerland seeCasado-Asensio and Steurer (2016b).5 Until December 2017, the full names of the three ministries were Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management; Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy; Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology. 6 See also http://www.endk.ch/de/EnDK/Ziel-und-Zweck (accessed February 2, 2016).7 For more details on the Austrian case, seeSteurer and Clar (2015), for Switzerland see Casado-Asensio and Steurer (2016b).…”