Navigating the dilemmas of climate policy in Europe: evidence from policy evaluation studies

Abstract

Climate change is widely recognised as a 'wicked' policy problem. Agreeing and implementing governance responses is proving extremely difficult. Policy makers in many jurisdictions now emphasise their ambition to govern using the best available evidence. One obvious source of such evidence is the evaluations of the performance of existing policies. But to what extent do these evaluations provide insights into the difficult dilemmas that governors typically encounter? We address this question by reviewing the content of 262 evaluation studies of European climate policies in the light of six kinds of dilemma found in the governance literature. We are interested in what these studies say about the performance of European climate policies and in their capacity to inform evidence-based policy-making. We find that the evaluations do arrive at common findings: that climate change is framed as a problem of market and/or state failure; that voluntary measures tend to be ineffective; that market-based instruments tend to be regressive; that EUlevel policies have driven climate policies in the latecomer EU Member States; and that lack of monitoring and weak enforcement are major obstacles to effective policy implementation. However, we also conclude that the evidence base these studies represent is surprisingly weak for such a high profile area. There is too little systematic climate policy evaluation work in the EU to support systematic evidence- based policy making. This reduces the scope for sound policy making in the short run and is a constraint to policy learning in the longer term.

‘Test Driving’ a Financing Instrument for Climate Adaptation: Analyzing Institutional Dilemmas using Simulation Gaming

“…What 'short-cuts' and rationales do they use to overcome complex problems? We identify three dilemmas that are addressed in the literature (Adger et al, 2009;Haug et al, 2010;Walker et al, 2011;Mees et al, 2012;Preston et al, 2013): value uncertainty, planning horizon problems, and indirect benefits. Figure 1 illustrates our conceptual framework based on three spheres: (1) climate adaptation as a planning issue; (2) uncertainty and complexity as a decision problem; and (3) the decisions problems are bundled into thematic clusters of the institutional dilemmas.…”

Climate policy innovation: a sociotechnical transitions perspective

“…An example of a reframing-based CPI is the inclusion of annual energy tax increases as climate policy, when these are already instituted for fiscal reasons. As observed by Haug et al (2010), several longstanding measures reported as climate policies were initially designed as responses to other problems. At a strategic level, a level above that of policy instruments, support for many energy technologies has been reframed as climate policy without significant change at the level of policy instruments (Lovell et al 2009, Kivimaa andMickwitz 2011).…”

Coherence, Efficiency, and Independence of the EU Environmental Policy System: Results of Complementary Statistical and Econometric Analyses

“…Finally, many single EU environmental objectives have been criticized. For instance, Spangenberg (2010) and Steurer & Berger (2011) critiqued sustainable development; McLauchlan & João (2012) and Sheate (2012) critiqued the safe environment objective; and Haug et al (2010), Capros et al (2011), and Brouwer et al (2013) critiqued greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction. In contrast, few studies have scrutinized the overall EU environmental policy system in terms of its coherence (i.e., consistency of policies within a framework), efficiency (i.e., ability of policies to meet their objectives), and independence (i.e., logical priority of objectives over policies).…”