Politics matter - Understanding policy making and policy change

As policies need to be implemented on the national (and sub-national) level, the political decision making process within countries will be crucial for the success of the Paris Agreement. This section provides an overview on political theories for the policy making process and policy change.

21 Assessment as of Dec 15, 2015 by Climate Action Tracker (2015). Meanwhile, in July 2016, 162 INDCs were submitted representing 189 countries (World Resource Institute 2016a).

Political decision making

Simplifying the essence of the very complex process, policy making can be described as a policy cycle with different stages, often referred to as ‘Stages Heuristic’, comprising Agenda Setting, Policy Formulation and Legitimation, Implementation and Evaluation (Sabatier 2007). This is again followed by a decision whether the policy should be maintained, modified or abandoned. In each stage a large variety of different actors influence the policy process within a country; Interest groups from industry or NGOs, legal institutions, governmental agencies at different levels, researcher, journalists, each potentially pursuing different interests and policy preferences. Though the process is in reality much more complex and less clear cut, with interactions of different policies and different stages at different levels of policy making, the Policy Cycle illustrates that many steps have to be taken on the national level to achieve a successful implementation of a policy, even after the problem has been identified to be urgent and important. For a global problem like climate change, the interaction of local level, national level and international level policy making further complicates the process. Gaining a better understanding of the policy making process may help to identify and prevent potential impediments or conflicts.

Several political theories and frameworks have attempted to understand and describe the determining factors and causal drivers of policy making (see e.g. Ostrom 2011; Sabatier 2007). Whether a topic manages to mobilize sufficient political resources to be pushed to the policy formulation and implementation stage depends on a variety of factors from voting cycles, to media coverage and information policy as well as the general structure and power of institutions and actors (Sabatier 2007).

Understanding policy change

Effectively mitigating dangerous climate change, however, would not only require incremental adjustments to the business-as-usual situation but rather a strong shift away from the status quo policy making in most countries, especially if pledges were intensified sufficiently to aim for the ‘well below 2°C’ target. This would necessitate fundamental policy changes touching upon many different policy areas. A number of different theoretical frameworks deal with describing how policy change can occur, especially which factors foster and which hamper policy change under given circumstances. In the following a selection of relevant frameworks are briefly presented. A more in-depth description can be found in e.g. Sabatier (2007).

The “Advocacy Coalitions Framework” (ACF) developed by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith identifies policy subsystems consisting of actors from different public and private organizations sharing the active concern about a specific policy issue (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 2007). In these subsystems, actors form coalitions based on shared core beliefs - e.g. about the causes of the problem, ideas for solutions and fundamental socio-cultural values - coordinating activities in order to advocate their ideas. Policy change then happens through the coordinated activities by these ‘advocacy coalitions’ competing for attention and influence. Policy brokers trying to mediate the conflicts arising from different advocacy coalitions propose compromises, resulting in governmental programs and policy outputs. While the core beliefs uniting a coalition are relatively resistant to change, external events such as changes in

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economic conditions, changes in the governing coalition or changes in other subsystems may induce coalitions to revise their beliefs and/or alter their strategy leading to policy change. Moreover, policy oriented learning by cognitive processing of experience over time or new information may lead to the revision of policy objectives and trigger minor policy change, i.e. confined to secondary aspects.

However, major policy changes, i.e. changes in policy core aspects, mostly require perturbations external to the subsystem such as changes in socio-economic conditions or personal changes in the system-wide governing coalition according to the ACF theory (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 2007). As the ACF does not provide many insights on the conditions under which these external events finally lead to policy change, the ACF can be seen as rather describing the policy process than explaining policy change (John 2015).

The “Punctuated Equilibrium Theory” developed by Baumgartner & Jones focuses on large scale policy shifts (True, Jones, and Baumgartner 2007). According to the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory policy making is characterized by stability over long periods with only incremental changes to existing policies, as governing institutions have a tendency to maintain the status quo with conservative courts, resistance to new ideas and influential policy groups countering radical changes. However, occasionally, the system is interrupted by major alterations in form of external shocks (such as accidents, crises or elections) bringing about a short period of disruptive, drastic policy change. The Punctuated Equilibrium Theory assumes that policy makers are subject to bounded rationality being limited in time and resources and thus large scale change which would necessitate dedicating a certain amount of attention to a topic is hampered unless external events raise this attention. However, similar to the AFC, it remains unclear in this theory how and when these punctuations can occur and change can be triggered (Cerna 2013).

The “Multiple Streams Framework” by Kingdon (1995) examines policy choice in the presence of ambiguity, i.e. situations of ambivalence where circumstances can be perceived and interpreted differently, viewing the collective output as a result of the push and pull of several factors (Zahariadis 2007). Kingdon’s approach describes policy choice based on the ‘garbage can model’ (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972) where due to time and resource constraints preferences and knowledge of individual actors remain vague and decisions are taken subject to bounded rationality and opaqueness rather than rational arguments or optimization considerations. Kingdon identifies three streams that coexist in a system: problems, policies and politics. The problems stream contains conditions that have been identified as problems by policy makers. It relates to the question why the policy makers pays attention to specific issues while disregarding others. This may be due to routine monitoring reports or caused by dramatic events like crises, natural disasters or accidents. Not all conditions raising policy makers’

attention are valued as problems by policy makers and not all actual problems receive political attention. Moreover, attention can shift away easily towards other issues as problems are competing for attracting interest. The policies stream contains different ideas for solutions that may have been proposed e.g. by researchers or ministry staff. Many of these ideas may be applicable to different problems and may have been combined or modified to new proposals while other proposals never receive serious consideration by policy makers. The politics stream reflects the national mood, lobbying campaigns and legislative or administrative turn over. Changes in public opinion or support as well as

opposition from important interest groups can influence policy makers in their views. Turnover in important positions can strongly impact attention for and attitudes towards certain issues. Kingdon highlights that these three streams act more or less independently from each other. However, new attention to problems from the problems stream or specific events in the politics stream may open a

“policy window” or “window of opportunity” that provides the opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to couple the streams and advocate for their preferred problem to be addressed or for their preferred policy to be adopted. These policy windows are usually of short duration and policy advocates - willing to invest time and effort - need to be persistent and skilled at coupling the streams by finding suitable problems to their preferred policy or suitable solutions to their problem and gaining support by others.

These policy windows allow policy change to occur if either the triggering problem is matched to a feasible idea developed in the policy stream or a policy idea pushed forward by e.g. the newly elected government is matched to address a problem. If all three streams are coupled conditions for change are most favorable. Although Kingdon has proposed this framework primarily to explain agenda setting, Zahariadis extended it to explain policy formulation as well (Zahariadis 2007). The multiple streams framework is of particular interest for situations when policy making is characterized by high complexity, ambiguity and limited capacities for political attention.

Implications for climate policy

Each of the different frameworks may exhibit different strengths and weaknesses in explaining observed policy change in different country contexts and in providing insights on how policy change can be fostered. For decision making in complex democracies, which are characterized by open debates and transparency, the Advocacy Coalition Framework is a valuable tool to analyze the interactions of groups and actors involved in the process. In more authoritarian and less transparent regimes, often characterized by a smaller variety of actors and groups, potential coalitions and underlying motivations are less visible and the inclusion of non-political stakeholders in the decision making process might be rather limited. Decision making and policy making might be more determined by individual perspectives of the political elite acting as policy entrepreneurs pushing for specific problems to be addressed and specific solutions to be favored. Moreover, identifying advocating or opposing internal coalitions is more challenging if the variety of political parties is limited and transparency of decision making processes is low. For the case study on Vietnam (Chapter 3) we therefore decided that the Multiple Stream Framework seems most appropriate in reflecting the Vietnamese political context.

As a common feature all discussed policy change frameworks acknowledge that policy makers are subject to bounded rationality due informational and time constraints and limited resources. This implies that policies may often be chosen not because they are the most suitable or optimal (e.g. least-cost or most effective solution) to a specific problem from economic perspective, but because they benefited from the right mix of enabling conditions and had talented advocates to push for it. It also implies that policy makers may not be well aware of potential co-benefits or adverse side effects on other policy areas as they tend to focus on their area of expertise. Research can help to identify climate policy barriers, potential co-benefits and adverse side effects and inform policy making. This thesis attempts to shed light on the intricacy of climate policy making, bringing together economic aspects and political aspects of the different dimensions of climate policy. Moreover it aims to contribute to

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improving the understanding of challenges with respect to putting climate policy into practice, as well as identifying opportunities for fostering national incentives for action.