Suchergebnisse

Seit den 1960er-Jahren hat sich die Umweltpolitik zu einem zentralen Themenbereich nationalstaatlicher Politik entwickelt. Nahezu alle industrialisierten Länder haben seit Beginn der 1970er-Jahre nationale Umweltministerien und andere Behörden eingerichtet und eine Vielzahl von Umweltgesetzen verabschiedet.1 In Deutschland wurde der Grundstein für die heutige Umweltpolitik mit dem ersten Umweltprogramm der Bundesregierung im Jahr 1971 sowie der Gründung des Umweltbundesamtes 1974 gelegt.2 Anfänglich galt die Umweltpolitik als Teilbereich der Innenpolitik. Durch die verstärkte Wahrnehmung grenzüberschreitender Umweltbelastungen seit Anfang der 1980er-Jahre (Stichwort ,Waldsterben') wurde die Umweltpolitik zunehmend zu einem festen Bestandteil der Außenpolitik.

In a context of multiple crises, the European Union's climate and energy policies have become highly politicized and contested. Based on a comparative study of renewable energy policies in ten EU member states, and adopting a circular view of policy change and Europeanization to account for overlapping sovereignty claims between the national and the European level, this article unravels the authority debates over successive rounds of negotiation, adoption, and implementation along three EU directives. Following an exploratory process-tracing method, we investigate how policymaking authority originally delegated to the EU becomes contested by the member states and how these authority conflicts are managed. We find that the Europeanization of renewable energy policy is accompanied by an issue-specific renegotiation of authority between the EU and its member states which, in times of crises, can trigger instances of de-Europeanization and even a partial weakening of European integration in this policy domain. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

This fourth paper in the German European Policy Series studies the typical interests which shape Germany's environmental foreign policy in Europe: victim, polluter and third-party interests as well as the state's interest in a stronger role in international politics and its interest in shaping policy within the European Union. It demonstrates that Germany's interests are diverse and characterised by interactions between the national and European policy levels , and how the country plays a particularly active role in European and international environmental policy when different types of foreign policy interests are combined. The paper concludes that Germany will likely extend its international activities in this area, both within the European Union and beyond in global negotiations, in the medium to long term.

Twitter hat sich für viele Disziplinen zu einem wichtigen Untersuchungsgegenstand und einer interessanten Datenquelle entwickelt. Jedoch wird die Kommunikationsplattform von Forscher*innen der transnationalen und Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) bislang wenig untersucht. Unter den verschiedenen sozialen Medien wird Twitter am intensivsten von politischen Akteur*innen genutzt. Dies liegt vor allem an der Zugänglichkeit, Öffentlichkeit und Schnelllebigkeit der Plattform. Twitter schafft so einen digitalen öffentlichen Diskursraum, in dem verschiedene Akteur*innen länderübergreifend und ohne Zeitverzögerung direkt miteinander interagieren können. In diesem Beitrag möchten wir aufzeigen, wie Twitter von Akteur*innen im Bereich der internationalen Politik genutzt werden kann, mit besonderem Fokus auf internationalen Verhandlungen. Abschließend erörtern wir die Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen, die sich für Forscher*innen der IB bei der Nutzung von Twitter-Daten ergeben können. ; Twitter has become an important object of study and an interesting source of data for many disciplines. However, the communication platform has been little studied by researchers of transnational and international relations (IR). Among the various social media, Twitter is used most intensively by political actors. This is mainly due to the accessibility, publicity and fast-moving nature of the platform. Twitter thus creates a digital public discourse space in which different actors can interact directly with each other across countries and without delay. In this paper, we will show how Twitter can be used by actors in the field of international politics, with a special focus on international negotiations. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges that IBR researchers may face when using Twitter data. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

With the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), inclusive education has become the main alternative to special schools for the schooling of children with disabilities. In order to promote the global implementation of inclusive education, a variety of stakeholders form networks to transmit and exchange information and knowledge concerning political strategies. However, little is known about the actors and actor groups involved in these networks. In the present paper, we draw on general network theory and policy network theory to examine the Twitter communication network that has formed around the topic of inclusive education. Using exploratory and inferential social network analysis, we show that disabled persons' organizations and international organizations, such as the United Nations, hold a particularly central position in the network. This position enables them to potentially exert influence on the content and flow of information within the network. Aside from that, business actors are active participants in the network. Moreover, the Twitter network shows some structural patterns that can also be found in policy networks. Our findings help to map the global sphere of inclusive education promotion and can contribute to a broader understanding of global processes in inclusive education policy. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

International organizations and their secretariats, called international public administrations (IPAs), have been found to hold considerable authority in world politics. This study conceptualizes and measures IPA authority in the digital sphere. It proposes the concept of digital authority to measure the authority of actors in online social networks (OSN), such as Twitter. Applying exponential random graph models (ERGMs) based on Twitter data during climate change negotiations the article compares the authority of IPAs to that of other actors. The findings show that IPAs are attributed as much authority as state actors in global climate communication networks on Twitter. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

International organizations are important participants in the realm of world politics. An area in which this has become highly visible is the field of United Nations peace operations. Since the end of the Cold War, UN peace operations have increased in number, geographical focus, as well as in their overall complexity.

New Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) are becoming increasingly attractive. From a global perspective, there has been a rapid diffusion of these market-based, voluntary or informational instruments. This article examines the spread of four different NEPIs - eco-labels, energy or carbon taxes, national environmental policy plans or strategies for sustainable development, and free-access-of-information (FAI) provisions. The adoption of NEPIs by national policy makers is not simply a reaction to newly emerging environmental problems or to real or perceived deficits of traditional command and control regulation, rather the use of NEPIs can also be ascribed to the inner dynamics of international processes of policy transfer or policy diffusion. These processes make it increasingly difficult for national policy makers to ignore new approaches in environmental policy that have already been put into practice in 'forerunner' countries. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)

Our article aims to better understand the role of the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the increasingly complex global climate governance structure. We employ an innovative approach to addressing this issue by systematically examining the climate secretariat's relations with the main groups of actors involved in this policy domain, in particular with nonparty actors. In a first step, we use social network analysis (SNA) to examine the secretariat's relations with nonparty and state stakeholders and to identify its position in the UNFCCC policy network. An understanding of where the climate secretariat stands in the global climate governance network and which actors it interacts with most allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about the ways in which it connects with other stakeholders to influence global climate policy outputs. In a second step, we conduct thirty-three semistructured interviews to corroborate the results of the SNA. Our findings lend support to the argument that the climate secretariat may gradually be moving from a rather neutral and instrumental stance to playing a proactive and influential role in international climate governance. It aims to increase its political influence by establishing strategic links to actors other than the formal negotiation parties. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society's relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasises the heterogeneity of SSH policy evidence ...