Climate Action Through Policy Expansion and/or Dismantling: A Workshop

The DeepDCarb team organized a workshop on climate policy expansion and/or dismantling in Mannheim in October 2022. It aimed at advancing the state of the art on these topics and showcase it in a series of papers which will eventually be published in a special issue of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis.

The comparative study of climate policy has advanced a lot in recent years but has mostly concentrated on the adoption of new targets, policies and policy instruments to curb emissions. Often it is politically more feasible to adopt new targets, policies and instruments than to weaken or entirely dismantle policies that are already in place (e.g., fossil fuel subsidies).

Post Paris, there is a need for more comparative studies to understand better the drivers of and barriers to policy adoption and dismantling, across the full array of political systems (i.e., more or less democratic, including those of a more authoritarian nature), where possible understanding the net effect on emissions.

Papers presented at the workshop addressed these topics, for instance by looking at how major emitting countries have progressed towards NDCs and mitigation pledges, the role of populism in the adoption of national climate policy and political opposition to coal power phase down.
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The workshop was a great success and we look forward to publishing the special issue in 2024.