The challenges of monitoring national climate policy: learning lessons from the EU

Abstract

One of the most central and novel features of the new climate governance architecture emerging from the 2015 Paris Agreement is the transparency framework committing countries to provide, inter alia, regular progress reports on national pledges to address climate change. Many countries will rely on public policies to turn their pledges into action. This article focuses on the EU’s experience with monitoring national climate policies in order to understand the challenges that are likely to arise as the Paris Agreement is implemented around the world. To do so, the research employs – for the first time – comparative empirical data submitted by states to the EU’s monitoring system. Our findings reveal how the EU’s predominantly technical interpretation of four international reporting quality criteria – an approach borrowed from reporting on GHG fluxes – has constrained knowledge production and stymied debate on the performance of individual climate policies. Key obstacles to more in-depth reporting include not only political concerns over reporting burdens and costs, but also struggles over who determines the nature of climate policy monitoring, the perceived usefulness of reporting information, and the political control that policy knowledge inevitably generates. Given the post-Paris drive to achieve greater transparency, the EU’s experience offers a sobering reminder of the political and technical challenges associated with climate policy monitoring, challenges that are likely to bedevil the Paris Agreement for decades to come

Governing policy evaluation? Towards a new typology

“…Thus a key question is how to govern the evaluation of multiple policies across many scales and sectors of governance, such as exists in the EU. In the EU, governors claim to have deployed well over 1000 separate policies to address climate change (Schoenefeld et al, 2016). The following section unpacks the strengths and weaknesses of two potential forms of organizing evaluation activities, namely hierarchical and polycentric.…”

“…As signatories of the UNFCCC, from 1993 the EU member states implemented greenhouse gas emission and eventually policy reporting requirements through a bottom-up 'Monitoring Mechanism' (Haigh, 1996;Hyvarinen, 1999). Although many EU member states have signed up to the need for more ex-post evaluation in principle, in the area of climate change they were reluctant to centralize climate policy monitoring in the European Commission or the European Environment Agency Schoenefeld et al, 2016), even though greater standardization had been repeatedly recommended by researchers (Mela and Hildén, 2012). So although the Monitoring Mechanism has been revised twice (in 2004 and 2013 respectively) 3 , 'less than 10% of the entries in the 2011 reporting cycle included quantitative data based on ex post evaluations' (Hildén et al, 2014: 898).…”

“…But it remains questionable whether standardizing evaluation adequately captures them all (Somanathan et al, 2014). Furthermore, centrally organized evaluation can be perceived as a way of 'policing' policy performance aimed at control, which could potentially provoke resistance from lower-level actors (see Schoenefeld et al, 2016;Stame, 2008). If such resistance morphs into minimal or even no cooperation, the quality of evaluation may suffer since evaluators may, for example, depend on information from the actors who are being evaluated (Chelimsky, 2006).…”

“…Aldy and Pizer, 2015;Aldy et al, 2016;Feldman and Wilt, 1996;Purdon, 2015;Schoenefeld et al, 2016). A single evaluator may also have greater resources than multiple smaller actors, which may translate into stronger evaluation capacities.…”

“…These remain highly pertinent questions, not least in the context of the transparency provisions in the Paris Agreement on climate change (Schoenefeld et al, 2016;UNFCCC, 2015).…”