Suchergebnisse

It is widely accepted that the Paris Agreement implies a shift in global climate mitigation policy from a top-down approach focused on global distribution of emission cuts and international cost-effectiveness to a bottom-up approach based on national efforts. Less is known about how this shift at the global level trickles down and manifests in national climate mitigation policy. Norway is in this respect an interesting example, since it has long been portrayed as an important driver of an international top-down approach. In this paper, we demonstrate that Norwegian policy cannot be characterised as a 'pure' top-down regime; policy instruments and measures directed at specific technology investments and deployment to complement cost-effective (international) policy instruments have been an explicit government ambition for a long time. Second, by using the case of biofuels, we analyse how the two approaches have been combined in practice over the past decade. Using the notion of 'hybrid management', we demonstrate that the top-down approach has left a lasting imprint on Norwegian mitigation policy, but also that this approach has increasingly been challenged by bottom-up thinking, leaving Norwegian climate mitigation policy as a contested hybrid of policy approaches. We conclude that inadequate institutional arrangements for productively managing the tensions between the two approaches have hampered progress in Norwegian policy in curbing domestic emissions. We expect that Norwegian climate mitigation will become increasingly hybridised in the coming decades, and suggest that cultivating hybridisation can be a productive approach for policy progress. ; publishedVersion

Climate services have climbed high on the agenda of EU research policy, yet few contributions have reflected on the actual usability of climate services from the perspectives of the intended users, let alone the implications for future EU research and innovation policy. This commentary reflects on four key lessons learnt from engagement in climate services research projects and discusses implications for future EU research policy: i) all end-users have pre-established decision-making processes and tools for their purposes, hence all new information needs to be adapted ii) one size fits none – and tailoring takes time iii) building trust between different actors, processes and confidence in new information is key in the tailoring process – and resource-demanding iv) purveyors and in- termediaries can facilitate tailoring processes but need to finance their activities until end-users demonstrate willingness to pay and/or the climate service is readily implemented. The main argument is that more attention needs to be paid to the demand-side of climate services to help viable climate services make it through the innovation "valley of death" – that is, the twilight zone between technical invention and (commercially) suc- cessful innovation. EU Research and Innovation (R&I) funding streams and policies for establishing truly transdisciplinary learning loops driven by (actual) user needs can function as vehicles through the valley of death ; publishedVersion

This paper investigates non-governmental organisation (NGO) involvement in policy processes related to Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) comparing four countries: Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, and Tanzania. Based on documents and interviews, NGO involvement is mapped using a conceptual framework to categorise and compare different roles and modes of engagement. NGOs have co-operated with government in policy design and implementation, albeit to varying degrees, in all four countries, but expressed relatively little public criticism. Funding seems to have an influence on NGOs' choices regarding whether, what, when, and how to criticise. However, limited public criticism does not necessarily mean that the NGOs are co-opted. They are reflexive regarding their possible operating space, and act strategically and pragmatically to pursue their goals in an entrepreneurial manner. The interests of NGOs and NICFI are to a large extent congruent. Instead of publicly criticising a global initiative that they largely support, and thus put the initiative as a whole at risk, NGOs may use other, more informal, channels to voice points of disagreement. While NGOs do indeed run the risk of being co-opted, their opportunity to resist this fate is probably greater in this instance than is usually the case because NICFI are so reliant on their services.

Policy relevance is the raison d'être for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yet few studies have analysed what the concept entails, not least from the perspective of key target groups for the IPCC. We present a framework which enables analysis of how different actor strategies (heating up and cooling down) contribute to shape relevance-making in specific political situations when IPCC knowledge is interpreted and used. Drawing on empirical evidence from the reception and use of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) across three policy making levels, the paper demonstrates different examples of creating policy relevance. First, the paper analyses the origin of SR15 and the failed attempts to formally acknowledge SR15 in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. Second, it investigates how SR15 has been used to develop and legitimize the EU net-zero target and the European Green Deal. Third, the paper demonstrates how SR15 has been used both for legitimizing and challenging climate policy at the national level, using the example of Norway. In sum, the reception of SR15 demonstrates that while IPCC outputs have resulted in controversy at the international level, they have been highly relevant at regional and national levels. The analysis shows that policy relevance is context-dependent and indirect—created through processes involving many actors, institutions, and types of knowledge. Situating these findings within the larger shift in the international climate regime implied by the Paris Agreement, the paper concludes with a set of empirically grounded recommendations for how the IPCC may approach the goal of policy relevance post-Paris. ; publishedVersion

Policy relevance is the raison d'être for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yet few studies have analysed what the concept entails, not least from the perspective of key target groups for the IPCC. We present a framework which enables analysis of how different actor strategies (heating up and cooling down) contribute to shape relevance-making in specific political situations when IPCC knowledge is interpreted and used. Drawing on empirical evidence from the reception and use of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) across three policy making levels, the paper demonstrates different examples of creating policy relevance. First, the paper analyses the origin of SR15 and the failed attempts to formally acknowledge SR15 in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. Second, it investigates how SR15 has been used to develop and legitimize the EU net-zero target and the European Green Deal. Third, the paper demonstrates how SR15 has been used both for legitimizing and challenging climate policy at the national level, using the example of Norway. In sum, the reception of SR15 demonstrates that while IPCC outputs have resulted in controversy at the international level, they have been highly relevant at regional and national levels. The analysis shows that policy relevance is context-dependent and indirect—created through processes involving many actors, institutions, and types of knowledge. Situating these findings within the larger shift in the international climate regime implied by the Paris Agreement, the paper concludes with a set of empirically grounded recommendations for how the IPCC may approach the goal of policy relevance post-Paris.

For decades Norwegian climate policy has largely ignored the agricultural sector and focused on cost-effective emission reductions abroad. Yet in June 2020, Norway decided to ban the cultivation of peatlands to protect critical carbon sinks, and the issue became 'high politics'. We explain this radical policy change by combining an adapted version of the Multiple Streams framework with the Punctuated Equilibrium model of agenda-setting. We argue that the two models combined can provide a holistic explanatory framework, albeit with two revisions. Firstly, the window of opportunity or punctuation was in our case of a longer duration than both models anticipate. Secondly, we find that multiple complete couplings can take place within the opening of a policy (or more specifically, a decision) window. Both findings can be explained by party competition, thus underlining the need to revise agenda-setting models to better account for party politics. ; publishedVersion

Transport is associated with high amounts of energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted. Most transport means operate using fossil fuels, creating the urgent need for a rapid transformation of the sector. In this research, we examine the transport systems of Norway and Canada, two countries with similar shares of greenhouse gas emissions from transport and powerful oil industries operating within their boundaries. Our socio-technical analysis, based on the Sectoral Innovation Systems approach, attempts to identify the elements enabling Norway to become one of the leaders in the diffusion of electric vehicles, as well as the differences pacing down progress in Canada. By utilising the System Failure framework to compare the two systems, bottlenecks hindering the decarbonisation of the two transport systems are identified. Results indicate that the effectiveness of Norway's policy is exaggerated and has led to recent spillover effects towards green shipping. The activity of oil companies, regional and federal legislative disputes in Canada and the lack of sincere efforts from system actors to address challenges lead to non-drastic greenhouse gas emission reductions, despite significant policy efforts from both countries. Insights into the effectiveness of previously implemented policies and the evolution of the two sectoral systems can help draw lessons towards sustainable transport. ; publishedVersion