Documents Bruch, Nils 2 results

"The European Green Deal aims at decarbonizing the European Union's economies by 2050. This implies stepping up policy actions to support both renewable energy and energy efficiency, two domains in which the body of EU law has recently changed. These changes raise the question of stakeholder support for more ambitious policies. To assess such support, we first apply the concept of salience to identify the most important issues for four core European stakeholder groups and follow up with an in-depth investigation. We use a mixed method design, testing external issue salience through a qualitative read-out of 182 stakeholder position papers and 198,128 Twitter messages, and then testing internal salience and readiness to support through analysis of an opinion survey of 20 key European stakeholders. We find stakeholders closely align in demanding binding energy efficiency and renewable energy policies. Strong focus can be expected on energy efficiency targets and measures, less so on the further development of the framework for renewable energies. These findings confirm earlier studies on salience in different policy fields."

"Adapting to some level of climate change has become unavoidable. However, there is surprisingly limited systematic knowledge about whether and how adaptation policies have diffused and could diffuse in the future. Most existing adaptation studies do not explicitly examine policy diffusion, which is a form of interdependent policy-making among jurisdictions at the same or across different levels of governance. To address this gap, we offer a new interpretation and assessment of the extensive adaptation policy literature through a policy diffusion perspective; we pay specific attention to diffusion drivers and barriers, motivations, mechanisms, outputs, and outcomes. We assess the extent to which four motivations and related mechanisms of policy diffusion—interests (linked with learning and competition), rights and duties (tied to coercion), ideology, and recognition (both connected with emulation)—are conceptually and empirically associated with adaptation. We also engage with adaptation policy characteristics, contextual conditions (e.g., problem severity) and different channels of adaptation policy diffusion (e.g., transnational networks). We demonstrate that adaptation policy diffusion can be associated with different mechanisms, yet many of them remain remarkably understudied. So are the effects of adaptation policy diffusion in terms of changes in vulnerability and resilience. We thus identify manifold avenues for future research, and provide insights for practitioners who may hope to leverage diffusion mechanisms to enhance their adaptation efforts."