Technological Change, Agency and the Politics of Policy Redesigning: The Case of the German Feed-In Tariff, 2000-2018

Policy intervention is needed to foster the transition of the economy to a low-carbon pathway. For policy actors, designing and implementing such interventions is a considerable challenge, particularly since effective policy intervention needs constant monitoring and re-design to be effective and increase its scope. One important factor necessitating such policy learning is technological change: increased effectiveness and/or changing costs of specific technologies can fundamentally change the type of policy support needed for these technologies. This feedback from technological change on the politics of re-designing policies remains, however, understudied. While policy learning in general is a prominent topic in public policy research, this scientific community seldom addresses policy learning through technological change. Similarly, while feedback research has defined concepts of learning through “interpretive feedback”, technological change as a driver of such feedback has only recently been discussed explicitly in the literature. In this paper, we address this gap by investigating the following research question: How does technological change affect the politics of policy re-design? To answer this question, we conduct an empirical analysis of several parliamentary debates from 2000-2018 on the re-design of a key policy instrument in the German energy sector, the Feed-in-Tariff (FiT). Using Discourse Network Analysis, we trace whether and how political parties change their positions regarding FiT design features and whether they do so because of technological change. Building on an established taxonomy of policy design elements, we disaggregate party positions into six distinct categories of policy design. Our paper contributes to the policy learning and policy feedback literatures by exploring the influence of technological change on the politics behind policy re-designing, and by highlighting the need to disaggregate these politics systematically into different policy design dimensions.