Suchergebnisse

Decarbonization requires the winding down of – economically – fully viable, if not highly prosperous, lines of economic activity. Different from past episodes of industrial restructuring revolving around the managed decline of sunset industries, accelerating climate change requires reallocation away from economic activities where the metaphorical sun is still shining. Firms, owners, workers, regions, and polities structurally rely on these sources of prosperity and have interwoven their past and future lives with them. We argue that this problem has created a space for state actors to experiment with vertical industrial policies to manage the reallocation of resources from polluting to non-polluting activities. We illustrate this dynamic by investigating the least-likely case of the European Union, a polity heavily tilted towards market governance. European climate policymakers, we argue, have incrementally moved away from the primacy of regulatory, market-making tools and have introduced a plethora of vertical instruments to shift resources away from climate-harming fields. This experimentation with vertical policies unfolds against the backdrop of a thirty-year institutional legacy of single market-oriented policy in the energy field.

AbstractFor decades, the EU's trade policy has been centred around open(ing) markets. Why, then, has the EU recently embraced open strategic autonomy as the conceptual cornerstone of its renewed trade policy? In this article, we argue that this move away from neoliberalism has to be understood against the background of a changing global environment. The geopoliticization of trade in particular has changed the Commission's view about how to best serve European interests (and values) but also provided an opening for neo‐mercantilist and socially oriented actors to challenge Europe's embedded neoliberal compromise. Using document analysis, interviews and discourse network analysis, we show how the Commission used open strategic autonomy as a coalition magnet to mobilize support for its new doctrine of qualified openness. Our paper contributes to understanding the ideational and coalitional politics behind the recent evolution of EU trade policy as well as broader debates around European autonomy and sovereignty.

First published online: 21 October 2019 ; Over the past decade, the external policy of the European Commission has become increasingly entangled by the notion of policy coherence. Previously 'siloed' policy areas such as trade, agriculture, and development are increasingly approached as challenges only effectively resolved by addressing their positive and negative interlinkages. While the EC is critical of fundamental incoherencies between different policy areas, it simultaneously calls to harness synergies between them. To explain this ambiguous approach, we combine insights from speech act theory and cultural political economy. We aim for methodological triangulation by employing social network analysis, an explanatory narrative, and expert interviews. We argue that the Commission's approach towards coherence can be understood as a process that reshapes the actor landscape around the discourse on coherence. By gradually pushing out the most outspoken actors, the Commission discursively resolves the inherent contradictions of reconciling free trade and development of the Global South.

"Ohne Strom können wir leben, nicht aber ohne Land" – mit diesem Slogan protestierten 2006 die Anwohner/-innen des Gebiets rund um den Tipaimuk-Staudamm in Manipur (Indien) gegen das geplante Großprojekt und den damit verbundenen Verlust ihres Siedlungsraums. Im Kern fasst die Plakataufschrift der Demonstranten den Konflikt zwischen Modernisierung und Landrechten zusammen, der in Indien zu vielfältigen, häufig auch gewalttätigen Auseinandersetzungen führt. Besonders betroffen hiervon sind immer wieder die indigenen Bewohner/-innen Indiens, die Adivasi. Selbst offiziellen Zahlen zufolge wurden seit der indischen Unabhängigkeit allein bis 2011 schon 60 Millionen Menschen in Indien Opfer von Zwangsumsiedlung und Vertreibung, davon 40 Prozent Adivasi. Mit etwa 330 Millionen Hektar verfügt der indische Subkontinent nur über etwa 3,2 Prozent der globalen Landfläche, wird aber von mehr als 16 Prozent der Weltbevölkerung bewohnt. Landnutzungsrechte sind somit politisch, wirtschaftlich und gesellschaftlich ein hochbrisantes Thema.