Helge Jörgens

The diffusion of new environmental policy instruments

Abstract. 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.

The international sources of policy convergence: explaining the spread of environmental policy innovations

Abstract How do international processes, actors and institutions contribute to domestic policy change and cross-national policy convergence? Scholars in the fields of international relations and comparative politics have identified a wide array of convergence mechanisms operating at the international or transnational level. In order to categorize this wide array of possible causes of policy convergence, we propose a typology of three broad classes of mechanisms: (1) the co-operative harmonization of domestic practices by means of international legal agreements or supranational law; (2) the coercive imposition of political practices by means of economic, political or even military threat, intervention or conditionality; and (3) the interdependent but uncoordinated diffusion of practices by means of cross-national imitation, emulation or learning. We illustrate and substantiate this claim through the empirical analysis of the international spread of three different kinds of policy innovation: national environmental policy plans and sustainable development strategies, environmental ministries and agencies, and feed-in tariffs and quotas for the promotion of renewable electricity.

Governance by Diffusion - Implementing Global Norms Through Cross-National Imitation and Learning

Implementing international norms is a core aspect of global governance. It raises the question of whether, and through which mechanisms, developments at the international level can influence domestic policymaking. While students of global governance have placed much emphasis on processes of bargaining within international regimes and hegemonic coercion by Individual states or international organizations to explain how international agendas reach the domestic level, this paper argues that diffusion constitutes a third and distinct mode of global governance which has not received due attention so far. The paper first outlines the concept of policy diffusion and distinguishes it from other mechanisms of global governance. It draws on theories on the domestic effects of international norms and institutions developed within the field of international relations as well as theories of policy diffusion and policy transfer developed within comparative public policy. Based on an empirical analysis of the international spread of national environmental policy plans and sustainable development strategies, the paper then demonstrates how cross-national imitation and learning matters as a mechanism of implementing the global norm of sustainable development and how these processes of policy diffusion interact with other, more institutionalized, forms of international governance such as unilateral imposition and multilateral harmonization. The paper concludes with general perspectives on the theoretical as well as practical consequences of conceptualizing policy diffusion as a crucial component of global governance and on its potential as a mechanism for implementing sustainable development.

National environmental policy planning in OECD countries: Preliminary lessons from cross‐national comparisons

While the first part of the article focuses on the possible advantages of strategic and integrative planning in environmental policy, the second part looks at existing national planning approaches in OECD countries, underlining important differences and similarities, and attempting a preliminary evaluation of three national environmental policy plans. On this empirical basis the article represents an attempt to systematise existing approaches and to draft model stages in environmental planning.

The Diffusion of Environmental Policy Innovations: A Contribution to the Globalisation of Environmental Policy

The subject of this paper is the importance of the diffusion of environmental innovations between countries for the global development of environmental policy. Empirical observation has shown that national environmental initiatives are often rapidly adopted by other countries; thus, these initiatives spread internationally. The conditions for and restrictions on the international diffusion of environmental innovations are examined on the basis of five case studies: environmental agencies and ministries, ecolabels, national environmental plans, CO2/energy taxes, and soil protection legislation. The key determinants of policy diffusion include (1) national factors (capacities for action in environmental policy, the demand for problem solutions), (2) the dynamics of the international system (the significance of front-runner countries for global policy diffusion, international organisations, transnational networks), and (3) aspects of the specific policy innovation (characteristics of policy innovation, availability of appropriate policy models, etc.).

Transfer, Diffusion und Konvergenz: Konzepte und Kausalmechanismen

Die Begriffe Politikkonvergenz, Politikdiffusion und Politiktransfer werden in der Literatur nicht immer klar voneinander abgegrenzt. Die daraus resultierende begriffliche — und moglicherweise auch analytische —Unklarheit erschwert bislang die Synthese der unter den verschiedenen Begriffen erarbeiteten konzeptionellen Ansatze und empirischen Ergebnisse und damit die Herausbildung eines ubergreifenden Forschungsprogramms (Holzinger/Knill 2005; Tews 2005; Holzinger/Jorgens/Knill im Erscheinen). Ziel dieses einleitenden Beitrags ist es daher, die verwandten Konzepte Diffusion, Transfer und Konvergenz zusammenzufuhren und fur einander fruchtbar zu machen.

Exploring the hidden influence of international treaty secretariats: using social network analysis to analyse the Twitter debate on the ‘Lima Work Programme on Gender’

ABSTRACT While there is little doubt that international public administrations (IPAs) exert autonomous influence on international policy outputs, scholars struggle with the problem of how to measure this influence. Established methods for assessing political influence are of limited use when focusing on international bureaucracies. The main reason is that IPAs do not explicitly state their policy preferences. Instead, they tend to present themselves as neutral administrators, aiming to facilitate intergovernmental agreement. They normally act ‘behind the scenes’. We propose social network analysis (SNA) as an alternative method for assessing the hidden influence of international treaty secretariats. SNA infers influence from an actor’s relative position in issue-specific communication networks. We illustrate the application and usefulness of this method in a case study on the role of the United Nations climate secretariat in a policy-oriented Twitter debate on incorporating gender issues into the global climate policy regime.

Globale Ausbreitungsmuster umweltpolitischer Innovationen

Nationale Umweltpolitikinnovationen breiten sich zunehmend international aus. Ergebnis dieses seit den sechziger Jahren andauernden globalen Ausbreitungsprozesses ist eine weit reichende Transformation der nationalen ebenso wie der internationalen Umweltpolitik. Zentrale Merkmale dieser Entwicklung sind der kontinuierliche Auf- und Ausbau staatlicher und zivilgesellschaftlicher umweltpolitischer Handlungskapazitaten und eine tendenzielle Konvergenz umweltpolitischer Masnahmen und Regelungsmuster. Der vorliegende Beitrag fragt nach den Ursachen und Mechanismen dieses eindrucksvollen Politikwandels. Warum und wie breiten sich umweltpolitische Innovationen international aus? Welche kausalen Prozesse liegen dem globalen Wandel nationaler Umweltpolitiken zugrunde? Welchen Mustern folgt die internationale Ausbreitung von Politikinnovationen?

State of the art : conceptualising environmental policy convergence

The study of policy convergence has received considerable attention both in comparative politics and in the field of international studies. Interestingly, both disciplines have approached the subject from opposite starting points and with differing methodologies. Whereas in the field of international studies theoretically derived expectations of an increasing similarity of states and political systems driven by economic or ideational forces constituted a dominant thread in the early convergence literature (for a comprehensive overview see Drezner 2001), comparative studies initially focused more on the explanation of empirically observed differences between national political systems and programmes (Lundqvist 1974, 1980/. Only recently have the two research strands effectively merged into an integrated study of policy convergence that increasingly challenges the traditional boundaries between comparative politics and international relations. In this chapter we first introduce the concept of policy convergence and explain how it relates to similar concepts like policy transfer, policy diffusion or isomorphism. In a second step we review the existing empirical research on environmental policy convergence both in comparative politics and in international relations. Based on this overview, and drawing more broadly on the general convergence literature, we systematise the major causes of policy convergence that have been identified in these studies. We distinguish between causal mechanisms which translate pressures at the international level into domestic policy change and, possibly, into convergence of domestic policies, First publ. in: Environmental policy convergence in Europe. The impact of international institutions and trade / Katharina Holzinger, Christoph Knill and Bas Arts (eds.

Orchestrating (Bio-)Diversity: The Secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity as an Attention-Seeking Bureaucracy

Conceptualizing international public administrations (IPAs) as attention-seeking bureaucracies which aim to actively feed their policy-relevant information into multilateral decision-making process, the chapter proposes two pathways through which international treaty secretariats may seek to influence international negotiations: (a) secretariats may attempt to supply policy-relevant information to negotiators from the inside via their close cooperation with the chairs of multilateral negotiations; (b) they may attempt to build support for their preferred policy outputs by engaging with and communicatively connecting actors within the broader transnational policy network in order to exert pressure on negotiators from the outside. Taking the secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) as an example, these potential pathways of secretariat influence are illustrated and explored empirically. The findings contribute to a growing body of literature that studies the role of national and IPAs as agenda-setters, policy entrepreneurs, or policy brokers at the interface of public policy analysis and PA.