Expanding the Study of Policy Interplay in Sustainability Transitions: National Security, the Zero-Carbon Energy Challenge and Horizontal Policy Coherence

When opening the annual General Assembly of the United Nations in 2016, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated that, while the Sustainable Development Goals offer a manifesto for a better future, gains are threatened by conflict and failures of governance (UN 2016). Sustainability transitions research, however, has paid little attention to geopolitics, military conflicts and security threats, as factors influencing transitions. This paper pays attention to two significant challenges intertwined with energy transitions: mitigation of climate change and national security. Geopolitics may play both explicit and hidden roles in energy policy decisions, even in countries that have adopted more market-based approaches (cf. Kuzemko et al., 2016). This paper takes public policy in focus, and how it accelerates or slows down transitions (cf. EEA, 2019). The specific interest here is on the integration and coherence between policy strategies for low-carbon energy policy and national security, representing two different policy sub-systems. Policy strategies present explicit and formalised policy goals and instrument mixes that have been officially recognised by the political parties in power. Their analysis reveals synergies, conflicts and lack of links between policy sub-systems. (We address the hidden side of policymaking in a subsequent stage of this research). The conceptual aim of the paper is to deepen policy mix analysis pertaining to transitions (e.g. Rogge and Reichardt, 2016; Kern et al., 2019) by drawing insights from policy integration and coherence literature (Candel and Biesbroek, 2017; Nilsson et al., 2012), which has not yet been comprehensively integrated with the literature on policy mixes in transitions. After creating an analytical framework for the analysis of policy interplay, the paper focuses on horizontal coordination between national security and energy policies, addressing two of the building blocks in the Rogge and Reichardt framework (2016): policy strategies and policy characteristics. Policy process aspects in the case countries will be studied in a subsequent stage of the research. The paper then analyses policy interplay in four small European countries - Estonia, Finland, Norway and Scotland – examining their energy and security strategies during 2006-2019, and the interplay between the two policy sub-systems. The reason for country selection is to complement studies on energy security and geopolitics that has been typically focused on larger countries, such as Poland or Germany, with a small country perspective in Europe. Key security/defence and energy/climate strategies are identified for each country, the strategy materials are divided into three time periods (2006-2010, 2011-2015, 2016-2020), and framing analysis is carried out for each period in each country. The findings and discussion will focus on illustrating the similarities and differences between policy coherence and integration between the case countries, the dynamics of policy change, and the implications of the results on advancing sustainable energy transitions. It will also identify future research needs pertaining to policy interplay, security considerations and sustainability transitions.