Climate Change Policy Networks in Germany – A Comparison Across 4 Laender

With Germany’s governing parties having agreed upon a new climate protection policy package in September 2019 and a Climate Protection Act being underway, it appears that climate change mitigation has become a broadly accepted political goal. At the same time, approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation remain contested and fragmented. They vary across different regions, including with different priorities, policy instruments, actor constellations and resources. Due to German federalism, the federal states (“Laender”) are the political level at which climate policy decisions have to be implemented. Drawing on regional governance theory and policy network analysis across four very different Laender in Germany, our paper seeks to explain variations in subnational climate governance. The objective of this paper is twofold: First, the paper offers new insights on the climate change mitigation networks across four federal states in Germany which are embedded in Germany’s national multilevel climate governance. We draw on data gathered in four organizational surveys for each case. The federal states were selected with a view to representing a great variety regarding structural factors, including socio-economic trends and climate change related problems. Second, we systematically engage with the differences and similarities across actor constellation and knowledge circulation in the selected cases in order to identify factors determining subnational climate governance. We structure these factors regarding their link to the institutional setting, policy instruments and problem structures in the respective region. As such, this analysis examines differing and dynamically changing subnational climate policy processes in Germany. It serves to explore the critical link between climate change mitigation and regional development as outlined above. In our conclusion, we present our thoughts on how to further study this question focusing on hindering and enabling factors for climate policies identified by local stakeholders in rural districts.