Legislative Dynamics of Mitigation and Adaptation Policies

The Paris agreement (COP 21) was the final step in aligning legislative action across various sectors and levels of government with environmental or climatic changes. Climate change poses a challenge to policymaking given the uncertainty regarding the precise juncture and degree to which individual countries will be affected. Furthermore, the making of climate policy is complicated due to the need to include actors from different policy domains and accommodate their specific interests. Nonetheless, a growing number of countries adopt and integrate framework legislation on climate change as well as climate policies into a wide range of areas, including energy, transport, land use and climate resilience. This is the empirical puzzle we seek to address in this paper. We contend that the cross-sectoral character of climate change provides a political opportunity structure that is conducive to legislative actions. Despite this general feature of climate policies, we recognize the need to model how the institutional setup of countries affects opportunity structures for climate policymaking more systematically. Institutional complexity can result in a situation in which policymakers deem it rational to address multiple facets of climate action as well as multiple sectors by adopting a single comprehensive law. In this study we concentrate on the adoption of national climate change policy by using data provided by the 2015 Global Climate Legislation Study. Our study provides an overview of affected sectors across a multitude of countries. Furthermore, it investigates existing patterns with respect to selecting and sequencing mitigation and adaptation policy instruments. Overall, our study examines the diversity of policies adopted. Focusing on the relationship between the different policy types, we evaluate the influence of institutional arrangements. The preliminary study of the data on 98 countries shows that 78 of those countries adopted at least one climate legislation framework. With respect to ‘standard policies’, the data set contains information on 667 legislative acts — of which 547 refer to mitigation, 14 to adaptation and 106 to both aspects jointly — thereby indicating a clear preference for mitigation efforts. Furthermore, preliminary results also indicate a variance within key sectors that are affected by mitigation or adaptation efforts and show that priorities shift over time across climate policy types. The insights provided by this research can assist in the projection of future integrated climate actions taken across the globe as countries aim to implement the INDCs submitted to the UNFCCC.