To green or not to green? Economic Recovery packages in times of Covid-19

This paper explores the interplay of institutions, ideas, and power during windows of opportunity for change. The lockdowns due to CoVid-19 has slowed economic growth or even caused recessions in some countries. In response, many economies are planning economic recovery packages. The decisions made in the next few months will likely shape economic trajectories for years to come. Against the background of UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement, many are calling for “green recovery packages” that stimulate green growth and the decarbonization of energy systems. Based on the expectation that economic recovery packages will heed these calls to different degrees, this paper asks: To green or not to green – What determines the struggle over green economic recovery? This paper aims to draw generalisable lessons about the interplay of institutions, ideas, and power, a topic at the heart of political science debates. Methodologically, this research conducts a comparative case study. The simultaneous, CoVid-19 induced economic slowdown and responding recovery packages offer an exceptional opportunity to study why windows of opportunity play out differently in different cases. This research proposes case studies of big economies passing stimulus packages, such as the US, the EU, China, Germany, and Japan. In the literature on crisis-induced institutional and policy change, the traditional question of how institutions mediate crisis has been complemented with an intense debate about the respective explanatory weight of ideas and power (Capoccia 2016). This paper proposes to study the role of ideas by assessing how influential green growth and sustainable development paradigms turn out to be in comparison to more traditional notions of fossil fuel-based economic growth. Power dynamics are observable when policy entrepreneurs push for change, veto players seek to block it and the public mobilises around the issue. The influence of ideas and power is naturally mediated by different institutional settings, i.e. political systems. This paper draws on process tracing and framing analysis to shine light on the following set of questions: Which similarities are identifiable across political systems? Which power dynamics are decisive? How much do pre-existing ideas about green growth and sustainable development impact decision-making? By covering different political systems, while keeping many context parameters stable – the type of crisis, simultaneous economic downturn, related global market structure and conflicts –identifies common factors across cases to further theory development about crisis-induced institutional and policy change. References Capoccia, Giovanni. 2016. “Critical Junctures.” In The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism, edited by Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia G. Falleti, and Adam Sheingate, 89–106. Oxford: Oxford University Press.