Suchergebnisse

This introduction lays the groundwork for this Special Issue by providing an overview of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP), and by introducing three main analytical themes. The first theme concerns the emergence and continuation of the APP. The contributions show that the emergence of the APP can be attributed to international factors, including the United States' rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, and its search for an alternative arena for global climate governance, and other countries' wish to maintain good relations with the US; as well as domestic factors, such as the presence of bureaucratic actors in favour of the Partnership, alignment with domestic priorities, and the potential for reaping economic benefits through participation. The second theme examines the nature of the Partnership, concluding that it falls on the very soft side of the hard-soft law continuum and that while being branded as a public-private partnership, governments remain in charge. Under the third theme, the influence which the APP exerts on the post-2012 United Nations (UN) climate change negotiations is scrutinised. The contributions show that at the very least, the APP is exerting some cognitive influence on the UN discussions through its promotion of a sectoral approach. The introduction concludes with outlining areas for future research. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.

The emergence of technology-oriented agreements such as the 2005 Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) may have significant implications for the future of global climate governance, as these agreements could be perceived as an alternative for the existing international climate regime. It is, therefore, important to examine what has moved countries to be involved in these agreements alongside the UN climate regime. This article seeks to identify possible factors contributing to Japan's participation in both the UN climate regime and the APP, looking at the position of domestic interest groups, the distribution of climate policy-making at the government level and varying international pressures. It concludes that Japan's participation in both the APP and the UN climate regime flows from a policy-making process that tries to accommodate conflicting viewpoints at the domestic and international levels. To what extent Japan's participation in both fora can be regarded as constructive will depend on the partnership's ability to support the implementation of a future climate regime. © The Author(s) 2009.

The utilization of interlinkages of existing material and the strengthening and promotion of new institutional interlinkages can widen the climate change agenda through new and innovative policy and legal measures. Material linkages are inherent structural connections between policy domains that are largely independent of the rules and procedures of political institutions in the domain. Institutional and organizational linkages are connections between societal institutions as well as linkages between different organizations. Developing small-scale renewable energy program in rural areas address the need to both reduce poverty and mitigate climate change. Promoting specific measures within the climate regime and the protection of such wetlands and protecting fragile ecosystems by zoning procedures and synchronizing the provision of land subsidies and other incentives to allow for multi-functional land use help in the forest conservation with lesser impact of the climate change. The development and promotion of sectoral agreements between major energy-producing companies and between energy-consuming sectors can result to reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in a bottom-up manner. Grand bargaining can be used to make significant trade-offs in the fields of trade and climate. Reducing emissions of air pollutants most likely lead to a general reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well. Mainstreaming climate change impacts and adapting them into the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) is one way to minimize the adverse effects of climate change on health.

The European Union (EU) has sought to lead the world in the adoption of ambitious climate change mitigation targets and policies. In an attempt to characterize and broadly explain the resulting pattern of EU climate governance, scholars have employed the term "multi-level reinforcement." This term does help to account for the paradoxical situation whereby the EU seeks to lead by example but is itself a relatively leaderless system of governance. Drawing on a much fuller empirical account of the evolution of EU climate governance, this article finds that the term captures some but not all aspects of the EU's approach. It identifies four other paradoxical features of the EU's approach and assesses the extent to which they exhibit "multi-level reinforcement." It concludes by looking forward and examining the extent to which all five features are expected to enable and/or constrain the EU's ability to maintain a leading position in climate governance. © 2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Climate policy is a relatively young and dynamic area of public policy making. However, its development has attracted far more attention than the results it delivers in practice, which of course are the concern of policy evaluators. This article attempts to provide the first systematic cataloging of the emerging patterns of policy evaluation undertaken in different parts of the European Union. Theories of policy evaluation suggest that these evaluation practices should acknowledge the inherent complexity of climate policy making, be reflexive by questioning official policy goals, and be participatory. A meta-analysis of 259 climate policy evaluations suggests that current practice engages with some but not all of these issues. This article concludes by analyzing the implications of this finding for those in the academic and practitioner community who are keen to understand the extent to which climate policy evaluation is delivering on its promises. © The Author(s).2011.

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 EU-level 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. © 2009 The Author(s).