Department Environmental Social Sciences

In a complex and multilevel regime, countries’ national and international strategies to address climate change may considerably differ. Adopting an actor-centered approach, the aim of this article is to outline and understand the potential difference between a nation’s domestic climate policy and its position in the international climate regime. We adopt social network analysis focusing on actors’ identification, their relational profiles, interests, and resources. Through survey data and content analysis, we focus on those actors’ positions within Swiss national and foreign climate policy. Results show that it is crucial to identify actors that participate in both the national and foreign policymaking. But participation on two levels seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Actors should play a central role in both processes, and defend similar policy interests on the two levels, in order for them to be able to coordinate actions and produce coherent outputs in overlapping subsystems.

Climate change mitigation policy is driven by scientific knowledge and involves actors from the international, national and local decision-making levels. This multi-level and cross-sectoral context requires collaborative management when designing mitigation solutions over time and space. But collaboration in general policymaking settings, and particularly in the complex domain of climate mitigation, is not an easy task. This paper addresses the question of what drives collaboration among collective actors involved in climate mitigation policy. We wish to investigate whether common beliefs or power structures influence collaboration among actors. We adopt a longitudinal approach to grasp differences between the early and more advanced stages of mitigation policy design. We use survey data to investigate actors’ collaboration, beliefs and power, and apply a Stochastic Actor-oriented Model for network dynamics to three subsequent networks in Swiss climate policy between 1995 and 2012. Results show that common beliefs among actors, as well as formal power structures, have a higher impact on collaboration relations than perceived power structures. Furthermore, those effects hold true for decision-making about initial mitigation strategies, but less so for the implementation of those measures.

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) pays special attention to "so-called" policy brokers when explaining policy change. However, this prominent policy approach neither clearly defines who the policy brokers are nor identifies under which institutional rules they have an influence on policy processes and outputs. This article thus formulates two theoretical hypotheses that complement the ACF and then proceeds to undertake the first empirical testing of these hypotheses within the Swiss climate policy (1990-2008). The empirical results show that, in the case under investigation, the strategic interest-based behavior of two policy brokers (i.e., one public administration and one political party), as well as two institutionalized veto points (i.e., optional referendum and parliamentary committee), are crucial factors explaining policy brokers' influence on policy process and change.