Subsystem Compartmentalisation in a Cross-National Comparative Perspective: Applying the ACF to Climate Change Committees’ Networks in Germany, Japan and USA

According to the ACF, bounded rationality and cognitive biases lead to formation of policy within policy subsystems, which are defined by particular substantive issue with a given geographic scope. While there is documented overlap and nestedness between subsystems, in general the ACF hypothesizes that the tendency in policy processes will be the further compartmentalization of policy processes within subsystems, rather than the integration of policy responses through the creation of connections between subsystems. These processes are at odds with the increasingly complex, multidimensional nature of pressing and “wicked” societal problems, such as global climate change. A central focus of the ACF is the use (and misuse) of scientific information in the policy process. One important mechanism for the integration of science and policy, and a mechanism for integration between subsystems, are scientific committees tasked with assessing the state of salient problems and recommending policy solutions to these problems. Through the systematic study of these committees and connections between them, we can understand how broad, cross-domain policy issues are treated: through compartmentalization within subsystems, or through an integrative approach that transcends one narrow policy domain. In this paper we apply a cross-national perspective on policy subsystems to test the degree to which a particular issue (global climate change) is treated in a compartmentalized way (through fragmented subsystems) or in an integrative way (through overlapping subsystems) and further test the hypothesis that integration is correlated with more effective governmental action on climate change. While the ACF has been broadly applied in the United States and Western Europe, the framework is rarely applied in other contexts and even more rarely applied with a cross-national comparative perspective. Thus we contribute to an emerging research program of comparative research in the ACF, and we begin to understand the degree to which subsystem compartmentalization is strictly a US phenomenon, or if it is a general finding across multiple national contexts.