Suchergebnisse

Die Gründung und rasche Mitgliederentwicklung der euro(pa)skeptischen Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) im Jahr 2013 steht im Einklang mit Erfolgen rechtspopulistischer Parteien in anderen EU Mitgliedsländern. Seit der Ablehnung des Verfassungsvertrages bei Volksabstimmungen in Frankreich und der Niederlande gilt der "permissive Konsens" bezüglich Kernfragen der Europäischen Einigung auch im Kreise der EG-Gründungsmitglieder als bedroht. Gegner einer fortschreitenden Vertiefung der Europäischen Integration, nicht zuletzt die britischen Tories unter Premier David Cameron, rechnen sich vermehrt Aussichten auf eine erfolgreiche Neuausrichtung der europäischen Politik aus. Diese europäischen und die weiteren zivilgesellschaftlichen Hintergründe der konservativ-neoliberal ausgerichteten Partei in Deutschland sind maßgebliche Faktoren für die Erklärung des schnellen Aufstiegs und die Einordnung der Alternative für Deutschland ins deutsche und europäische Parteienspektrum. Das Papier untersucht in diesem Zusammenhang zum einen die Herausbildung der europäischen politischen Partei Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR) auf der Basis der Prager Erklärung, die AECR Parteistiftung New Directions und deren europäisches Partner-Netzwerk genauer. Zum anderen werden die neoliberal-europakritischen Hintergründe der AfD anhand einer Reihe von zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen, Think Tanks, Vorläuferparteien und Initiativen dargestellt.

Germany is known as a leader in energy transition, but the country keeps falling short of meeting stated objectives. While attention has been high on climate change related policy leadership, the competing domestic alliances in the field of energy transition have received scant attention. In Germany, the strong momentum of the conversion to renewable energy has been stalled in the second half of the 2010s. Enabled by an increasing weight of neoliberal economic concerns, traditional energy coalitions have managed to reshape the path of energy transition. In this article three competing discourse coalitions are introduced to examine their constituencies and projects in the field of energy and politics. It focuses on radical ecological forces around the Öko-Institut, environmental modernization capacities linked to Green Budget Germany and fossil interest groups intersecting with neoliberal academic and partisan think tanks. As such, the article opens a view on multiple contestations over Germany's Energiewende.

In deliberation-minded and civil society-oriented scholarship, think tanks are relevant because of their constructive role in policy-related knowledge generation. They are held to establish and enable expertise from diverse stakeholders and multiple angles, and to successfully feed the policy process. The environmental policy field, in general, and climate change mitigation especially, allows additionally for the observation of a less benign and wider range of roles and functions for think tanks across multiple conflict constellations. Conflict theoretical and power-sensitive approaches implicate the need to relate think tanks – in agnostic ways – to the political struggles of competing discourse coalitions that frequently rely on problem-solving research, as well as destructive strategies of 'knowledge shaping' and 'strategic ignorance'. The current vitriol in climate change mitigation debates cannot simply be attributed to the abuse of science and fake news. Evidence points to a far-ranging transformation of the 'global knowledge power structure' in which policy think tanks have come to play an increasingly important and ambiguous role.

In recent times, no subject matter has provoked stronger practical science wars than the question of climate change, its human causes, and its policy implications. This chapter addresses this conflict constellation, as an extreme case, to highlight its particular relevance to policy-related think tanks and think tank networks. These are the core subject of this chapter, along with the rise of transnational expert, consulting, and lobby/advocacy agencies that appear increasingly to rely on a growing number (or "a new breed") of partisan and contract think tanks employed strategically to achieve political ends. Since the political character of knowledge has to be considered a normal rather than an extraordinary feature of policy-related knowledge, the expertise-interest nexus and the expertise-lobbying feature are relevant way beyond the arguably extreme case of climate change. Yet think tank studies so far have not been sufficiently directed to meet the challenges posed by this new type of transnational political technocracy. Think tank network studies are introduced here as a promising way to improve understanding of the knowledge-interest nexus in transnational knowledge regimes. ; This chapter was first published in Critical Policy Studies (2014, volume 8, issue 1, pp 101–115, doi:10.1080/19460171.2014.883859). The author thanks the publisher for granting permission of publication.