German Leadership and the Diffusion of Renewable Energy Policies

Signed by 194 countries, the Paris Agreement is considered a success for international climate politics. Shifting the focus from a top-down approach to a bottom-up system of governance, the Paris Agreement relies on the so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Thus, national policies can be considered crucial in order to reach the common goal of limiting global warming to 1,5°C. Against this background, recent studies have focused on the diffusion of national policy innovations (e.g. Fankhauser et al. 2016). However, the motivations for taking unilateral action by adopting national climate policies are not well understood. One explanation refers to the role of leaders in climate governance that can facilitate activities in other countries. In this paper, we study leadership in the case of Germany by focusing on the example of its energy transition ‘Energiewende’, which is the most prominent plan worldwide to transform energy systems towards a low carbon future. In fact, Germany has strongly expressed its ambitions to promote its model abroad and the characteristics of German leadership in energy transformation have been discussed more recently (Steinbacher and Pahle 2016). However, only very little is known about the effectiveness of Germany efforts to spread its transformation model. Addressing this deficit, this article studies whether or not Germany is able to influence renewable energy policy adoptions in other countries, also outside of the European Union. Analytically, we therefore seek to identify potential mechanisms or routes of influence that may induce other states to follow the German example. A first route is institutional referring to the setup of international and transnational fora and alliances functioning as channels for communicating policies. The second route refers more directly to the role of national bureaucracies as German ministries and agencies have initiated numerous campaigns and dialogues reaching out to foreign audiences and framing the potential of the ‘Energiewende’ in various ways. Finally, aid and assistance play a key role offering financial incentives as Germany has become one of the most important donors of bilateral aid in the field of sustainable energy. Empirically, we test our arguments by examining the global diffusion of feed-in tariffs (FIT) for renewable energy. Germany was the first country to introduce FIT at the national level in 1990 as an instrument to promote renewable energy production. Since then, 75 countries across the globe (REN21 2016: 109) have adopted FIT. FIT guarantee grid access and a specified minimum price per unit for renewable electricity producers and are widely made responsible for the rise of renewable energy production both in Germany and worldwide. By examining German leadership in the case of the diffusion of FIT we thus seek to improve our understanding of the extent to which national leaders can contribute to amore bottom-up system of climate governance in the absence of internationally binding targets.