From Kyoto to the Town Hall

Making International and National Climate Policy Work at the Local Level

Lennart J. Lundqvist, Anders Biel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844074235
• eBook ISBN: 9781136565182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, EU regulation and country-specific national climate policies offer some hope of addressing climate change. But all too often implementation of these high level objectives is derailed at the sub-national, local and - perhaps most important - individual level, by a variety of structural, policy and perceived barriers that result in a failure of effective action.

Drawing on original research from Sweden, a world leader in effective environmental solutions, this volume examines the difficulties of aligning climate
policy from international to national and sub-national levels. The authors address the full range of barriers and complexities, including governance structures, the relationship between 'experts' and the public, political feasibility, tax measures, perceptions of 'fairness' and self-interest, and the importance of environmental values. Also covered are the roles and perceptions of organizations and professions, the place of carbon-free technologies (such as wind power), the relationship between national and EU regulations, and the monumental challenge of governing the climate in a bordered and divided world.

This volume is a vital source of information for all those seeking to create effective, coordinated responses to the challenge of climate change.

1

From Kyoto to the Town Hall:
Transforming National Strategies
into Local and Individual Action

Lennart J. Lundqvist and Anders Biel

CLIMATE CHANGE: A CHALLENGE TO
MULTILEVEL DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

Climate is a collective good affected by both natural and human influences. Even if the importance of human influences relative to natural cycles of change is a matter for debate, scientific evidence is gradually making it clear that human-induced climate change impacts have now begun to show in natural ecosystems. Political debate increasingly deals with how to change individual human behaviour and socio-economic processes and activities in order to avoid climate change reaching magnitudes beyond the resilience of ecological systems and the stability of societal systems. At the same time, the durability of historical, present and projected emissions of greenhouse gases into the biosphere makes it clear that ‘climate stability’ is not a realistic objective for climate policy. A more realistic view of climate politics is one of multilevel action aimed at keeping the impact of human activities on climate variations within limits of ecological, social and economic resilience.

We regard the recent science-based consensual reports that climate change is, to a large extent, caused by human activities that emit greenhouse gases as tenable. Such activities range from air traffic, with a global reach over industrial belts and urban conglomerations, to local small-scale energy use for heating homes and mowing lawns. This means that effective climate strategies inevitably also require action all the way from global to local levels. Since the majority of these activities originate at the local level and involve individual action, however, climate strategies must literally begin ‘at home’ to ‘hit home’. Measures directed towards individuals to change habits and lifestyles, and pressures on local governments to take action, must gain legitimacy in order to become effective.

The auspices for effective and legitimate multilevel governance to combat climate change are at the core of this book on Sweden's national climate strategy. But how good are they? To begin with, it would seem as if the activities just mentioned – and their consequences – can be analysed along a continuum ranging from concentrated to dispersed. When both origin and consequences are local, this would seem to favour a local handling of the problem and its solutions. Consequences that reach across and beyond local jurisdictions call for decisions and policies at higher administrative levels (see Naustdalslid, 1994).

Simple as this analytical distinction is, however, it becomes less tenable as a principle for policy recommendations when confronted with the realities of climate change. The very commonness of the atmosphere implies that even geographically limited activities causing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions may eventually have much wider and long-term consequences. Indeed, climate change challenges the traditional allocation of political and administrative authority. Traditional jurisdictions are organized around ‘territories and communities’. They have a limited number of hierarchical levels with broad and ‘bundled’ competences, expected to last for a long time. The character of the climate issue rather points to a need for reorganization:

• around climate change as a ‘problem’;

• across traditional levels;

• with task-specific missions and competences; and

• with flexibility to allow for change with increasing knowledge of causes and cures.

Viewing climate governance as such a dynamic system of ‘spheres of authority’ across different scales may better capture the forces that make – and, perhaps, break – climate change policy than do existing hierarchical models (Hooghe and Marks, 2003).

To begin with, international commitments and national actions create dynamics in multilevel governance. Nation states commit themselves to internationally agreed policies and measures. This means that they agree to supranational control and possible sanctions if they do not fulfil their commitment under the Kyoto Protocol or the European Union (EU) Climate Policy, and that they thus relinquish some of their political authority upward. But once democratic nation states are committed to implement globally decided climate strategy objectives and measures, strategies of ‘domestication’ are called for. National governments must find ways of making lower governmental levels, as well as private firms and individuals within their territories, take appropriate action to heed the nation's commitments. In so doing, democratic governments will have to observe legitimate claims for local and individual self-government (see Plattner, 2002).

The transformation of international commitments into national policy and further into locally implemented measures provides actors with different, sometimes even contradictory, signals concerning appropriate action. Local decision-makers and individual citizens soon find themselves raising questions such as: ‘Why should we act, when our contribution/non-action is hardly discernible?’ or ‘Should we really engage ourselves in actions to combat climate change when non-participants might benefit without contributing time and resources?’ Such questions reveal that climate change brings to the fore the basic tenets of social dilemmas. Viewed as a public good, climate challenges individuals or groups to decide whether to contribute or not to that good. Seen as a common pool resource, climate forces individuals or groups to choose whether to harvest as much as they want from a shared resource or whether to limit their use of the resource. Both types of dilemmas are characterized by free access to the resource and by the fact that cooperative behaviour is voluntary. An example of relevance here is the choice situation facing urban commuters: ‘Should I use my own car or opt for public transportation’ (see Messick and Brewer, 1983; Dawes and Messick, 2000).

MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE AND CLIMATE CHANGE:
A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

The dynamics and tensions climate change brings to multilevel governance thus provide a formidable challenge to social science research. But how should these phenomena be meaningfully interpreted and successfully attacked? We argue that this can be done by disaggregating them into interacting processes and structures at different scales. A meaningful interpretation of the responses and actions at any one level must seek to simultaneously capture the driving and constraining forces at lower and higher levels. Individual responses and local actions should be seen as expressions of the dynamics of individual norms and values and system components at the lower level, as well as of the opportunities and constraints imposed by the system dynamics at the next higher level (see Cash and Moser, 2000).

Using Sweden's strategy for Reduced Climate Impact as a case in point, the research reported in this volume looks at multilevel governance of climate change from this angle. Linked to international climate negotiations and agreements, Sweden's national objective goes beyond the nation's international commitments. Such nationally imposed measures will substantially influence not only local governments and their developmental aspirations, but also market actors’ and individual citizens’ freedom of choice concerning mobility, production, consumption and the like. At the same time, individual citizens and groups, as well as local governments, can strongly affect the implementation of climate strategy measures in democratic nations. Local governments enjoy constitutionally guaranteed space for local self-governance, and individuals can make use of their constitutional rights and liberties. Our central research question is:

How can different parts of a national climate strategy such as the Swedish one be communicated, organized and instrumented to interact in such a way as to make climate strategy implementation legitimate and effective?

This and the following chapter provide the ground for our analysis of climate policy implementation as a problem of multilevel governance. The rest of Chapter 1 outlines our analytical framework. A major premise underlying the framework is that the impact of human activities on climate is rooted in three current and major shortcomings:

1 lack of knowledge about the relationships among human activities, impacts and negative climate consequences;

2 lack of motivation to change activities and behaviour that currently contribute to negative climate impacts, even if there is adequate knowledge broadly diffused across all segments of the population;

3 lack of adequate organizational and legal structures for effective measures against negative impacts and effective management of climate as a collective resource, even if there is both adequate knowledge and motivation to make counteraction legitimate.

The rest of this chapter outlines how these three shortcomings create tensions in multilevel governance, and how policy instruments and organizational patterns provide for dynamics affecting the possibilities of overcoming these shortcomings in order to bring future climate variations within limits of ecological, social and economic resilience.

Chapter 2 provides a more detailed description and argumentation to support our choice of Sweden as a critical case for studying the dynamics of multilevel governance. First of all, Sweden's present climate situation and the projected trends in GHG emissions and changes in climate indicate some quite dramatic scenarios. Second, the national objective to reduce national emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 4 per cent, on average, from 1990 levels by the period of 2008 to 2010 goes beyond the reduction demanded by the EU as Sweden's contribution to the implementation of the EU's climate strategy. In a longer-term perspective, Sweden has adopted Reduced Climate Impact as one of its 16 intergenerational national environmental objectives. This would require a reduction of at least 50 per cent in current levels of Swedish GHG emissions up to the year 2050. National policy thus puts strong pressure on local governments, business and individual citizens to change climate-affecting habits and behaviour. Third, the political and administrative context in which the national climate strategy is implemented provides for both opportunities and obstacles to effective and legitimate transformation of national objectives into local and individual action. The constitutionally guaranteed powers and administrative organization of local governments make them strong and crucial actors in the implementation process. Historic patterns of cooperation with business and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on environmental issues are also highly significant in that process.

COMMUNICATING SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION
IN ORDER TO AFFECT INDIVIDUAL
CONSCIOUSNESS AND RESPONSE

If lack of knowledge is deemed a primary cause of climate change, information and its communication come into focus. The fate of climate strategies is heavily dependent upon citizens’ acceptance of scientific information about the causes, further trajectories and consequences of climate change. Given the political difficulties of global climate negotiations, the degree of unanimity and certainty among scientists and policy-makers about the state of the climate and adequate countermeasures is crucial to the success of any climate strategy. However, boundaries between science and policy, as well as between relevant and irrelevant, and useful and useless knowledge are partly socially established. Different players act strategically by drawing limitations between knowledge and policy to suit their own interests. What makes some scientific knowledge on climate change more relevant than other knowledge actually depends not so much upon its content as upon the process by which it is developed and validated by the different agents involved (Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). The acceptance of climate strategy measures, and the behavioural changes sought by that strategy, thus depends upon the organization and communication of knowledge among scientists, policy-makers and the general public.

At the receiving end of knowledge communication, personal experience seems more forceful than indirect evidence (see Fazio and Zanna, 1981). Personal behavioural experience enhances attitude clarity, confidence and certainty, as well as knowledge about the attitude object. Indirect evidence may contribute to attitude formation, but attitudes based on indirect experience translate less easily into action. In addition, potentially negative effects from current behaviour do not materialize immediately, but in the distant future. Uncertainty about the longer-term environmental consequences tends to make individuals optimistic and causes them to downgrade the risk that environmental resources are in danger (Gärling et al, 1998).

The climate issue does exhibit such longer-term uncertainties. The timing and methods of communicating information about causes, trends and the relevance of individual behaviour for climate change thus become crucial for policy legitimacy and effectiveness. The national information campaign, launched in 2003, immediately met with credibility problems. The message about the seriousness and consequences of climate change ran counter to the actual weather conditions during the campaign. As a result, the responsible agencies called off the second- and third-year follow-up campaigns. This again points to the importance of the origins and content of climate change information. Are there ways of communicating climate-related information that enhances individual citizens’ trust, not only in the content of the message but also in the institutions and actors engaged in multilevel governance to implement climate policy?

PROMOTING INDIVIDUAL AND LOCAL RESPONSE
THROUGH MARKET-BASED AND
REGULATORY POLICY INSTRUMENTS

Information is, however, mainly complementary to other measures. When lack of motivation is a primary cause of present climate problems, other policy instruments and measures come to the fore. We have already pointed to the character of climate as a collective resource. As such, it puts people in a social dilemma where there is conflict between individual and social motives. When individual motives are upfront, people may argue that ‘My contribution to the climate problem is negligible’, or ‘No one will ever notice that I free ride’, or ‘I have already done all I could be reasonably expected to do.’ Indeed, climate policy implementation here faces individual reactions that seem rational in the context of social dilemmas. Why should the driver leave the car when the effect of such a move on GHG emissions is infinitesimal? And why do so if, and when, almost all others continue to use their cars? To paraphrase Hamlet, such thoughts make ‘enterprises of great pith and motion ... lose the name of action’.

Indeed, this structural context and individual reactions show how difficult it may be to implement climate policy instruments that target groups reg...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 From Kyoto to the Town Hall: Transforming National Strategies into Local and Individual Action
• 2 Coping with Climate Change: Sweden's Climate Strategy as a Case in Point
• 3 Explaining Public Trust in Institutions: The Role of Consensual Expert Ideas
• 4 Is there a Trade-Off Between Cost-Effective Climate Policies and Political Legitimacy?
• 5 Assessing Values in Environmental Policy Formation
• 6 Organizational Culture, Professional Norms and Local Implementation of National Climate Policy
• 7 Policy Effectiveness and the Diffusion of Carbon-Free Energy Technology: The Case of Wind Power
• 8 Sharing Burdens in the European Union for the Protection of the Global Climate: A Swedish Perspective
• 9 Governing the Climate, (B)ordering the World
• 10 Multilevel Governance: A Solution to Climate Change Management?
• Index