Climate change integration in the multilevel governance of Italy and Austria
Climate change represents an urgent global challenge that requires coordinated action at different levels. While objectives and framework rules are decided at the international level, their implementation requires that measures are adopted at different levels of government, including the subnational one. The role that subnational governments play in governing climate change is however little debated. The research project ‘Climate change integration in the multilevel governance of Italy and Austria’, of which I am leader, aims to fill these gaps by concentrating on how climate change is embedded in subnational policy-making in selected case studies, namely the Autonomous Provinces of Bolzano and Trento in Italy and Länder Tyrol and Vorarlberg in Austria. The analysis focuses on three sectors, which are largely impacted by climate change, and where the selected subnational governments exercise broad legislative and administrative competences: transport, energy and water, and spatial planning.
Federica Cittadino
Eurac Research, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy
The project responds to the following research questions: (1) how have the selected subnational governments integrated climate policies in transport, energy and water, and spatial planning policies?; (2) what institutional factors prevent or facilitate this integration at the subnational and local levels, in terms of both policy-making and implementation? The methods adopted to respond to these questions are (1) a comparative approach within and across case studies, and (2) an empirical legal research method, whereby the analysis of legal texts and policy documents was, for the first time in this area, combined with a set of interviews (thirty-nine in total) with policy officers and representatives of civil society organizations in all case studies.
These methods managed to reveal several research findings, of which I will illustrate only three. First, there is a strong correlation between the integration of climate change in the case studies and five hypothesized explanatory factors, which are (1) coordination (the existence of formal or informal mechanisms of vertical or horizontal coordination among policy-makers), (2) leadership (the level of engagement or policy initiative on the part of political leaders or administrative officers in charge of climate related matters), (3) participation (the level of involvement of civil society in decision-making), (4) information (the extent to which the public and officers are informed about climate related initiatives and the quality of information), and (5) funding (the extent to which there is dedicated funding to support climate initiatives). Second, these factors are so closely interrelated that no single one can be deemed sufficient to engender effective climate policy integration. Third, important differences emerge on the relevance of factors both across case studies and depending on the phase of the policy process concerned (policy-making or implementation).
These results will be soon available in the open access double-blind peer-reviewed edited volume titled, ‘Climate Change Integration in the Multilevel Governance of Italy and Austria: Shaping Subnational Policies in the Transport, Energy, and Spatial Planning Sectors’, forthcoming with Brill.
NOTE
For some background literature, see D. BROWN, Cooperative versus competitive federalism: Outcomes and consequences of intergovernmental relations on climate change issues in Canada, in (2012) Zeitschrift für Kanada – Studien 32(2): 9-27; BULKELEY, Cities and climate change (Routledge 2012); A. HUNT and P. WATKISS, Climate change impacts and adaptation in cities: A review of the literature, in (2011) Climatic Change 104: 13-49; S. HUGHES, E.K. CHU and S.G. MASON (eds.), Climate Change in cities innovations in multi-level governance (Springer 2018); C. ADELLE and D. RUSSEL, Climate policy integration: A case of déjà vu?, in (2013) Environmental Policy and Governance 23(1): 1-12; R. STEURER and C. CLAR, The ambiguity of federalism in climate policy-making: How the political system in Austria hinders mitigation and facilitates adaptation, in (2017) Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 20(2): 252-265; T.O. HUEGLIN and A. FENNA, Comparative federalism: A systematic inquiry (University of Toronto Press 2015).