Cancelled Success and Failure in Environmental and Climate Policy

The world is facing a number of urgent environmental and climate crises. National, regional and local governments as well as the European Union and international organisations have addressed environmental and climate problems with varying success and sometimes failed. For instance, loss of bio-diversity is alarming, plastic in the oceans has reached a critical level and longstanding problems with chemicals and nutrients pollution of groundwater and surface water remain unresolved many places. On the positive side, some countries have been relatively successful in promoting renewable energy and organic farming. While there are technically feasible and economically efficient policy solutions available for addressing many environmental and climate issues, the reality is that when such solutions meet the world of politics other concerns often come into play in shaping policy measures. The course will introduce concepts and theories that enable us to understand the political aspects that must be factored in when designing environmental and climate policies. It is important to consider that public policy is politics!

In public policy research, there has been a longstanding focus on understanding policy failures, often ignoring that policy successes are indeed frequent. However, over the last decade there has been increased interest in understanding policy success. It is particularly the ground-breaking work on the three-dimensional conceptualisation of policy success that has invigorated research on policy outcomes. The distinction between the programmatic, process and political dimensions of policy enables a more nuanced understanding of policy success and failure, and not least why policy can be a success and failure at the same time. For instance, adoption of ambitious objectives for reducing greenhouse gases is often praised as major political and process successes, but it remains to be seen whether governments have the courage to adopt the measures needed to deliver in terms of reaching the goals (the programmatic dimension).

This course is cutting-edge in its approach to environmental and climate policy research as it applies the three-dimensional policy concept to discuss success and failure. Much environmental policy literature is limited to focusing on the programmatic dimension, evaluating whether a policy/measure will reach (or has reached) the objective. This often misses the point that environmental policy-making is not a technocratic exercise; rather it is a process in which inclusion and exclusion of interests can be crucial for whether policy works. Further, it is a process in which a range of political concerns influence policy design.

In the course, we will go beyond the concepts of policy success and failure and identify and discuss the circumstances and factors explaining success and failure in environmental and climate policy. These can relate to agenda setting processes (including hidden agendas), institutional context, policy design and instrument targeting (including placebo policy), policy integration (including greenwashing), disproportionality of the policy measures relative to the perceived problem and policy capacity.

The course is designed for students with various backgrounds in the sciences and social sciences and with an interest in learning about environmental and climate policy processes and willingness to be introduced to the fascinating world of politics and policy-making.