Climate Policy in the Czech Republic: A Nascent or Derivative Subsystem?

When tackling complex challenges such as climate change, inter-organizational collaboration is considered as one of the necessary conditions for efficient policy responses. Advocacy Coalition Framework assumes that policy processes shaping such responses are contested by the diversity of actors interacting at the level of a policy subsystem – a subset of a political system defined by a particular jurisdiction and issue area. The bulk of the research on inter-organizational collaboration focused on mature subsystems existing for extended periods of time, which are mostly characterized by well-established coalition structures. Although climate change belongs to major national policy issues for a couple of decades in Western Europe, climate policy subsystems in European post-communist countries are emerging only recently – and thus can be classified as nascent. This research is a case study of the Czech Republic, a heavily coal-dependent economy, which adopted its Climate Policy in 2017. The literature on nascent subsystems suggests that collaboration in nascent subsystems is driven by pre-existing contacts rather than by perceived influence or belief homophily (cf. Ingold et al., 2017). Hence, the research examines a hypothesis that collaboration patterns within the nascent climate change subsystem follow collaboration patterns from the “parent” mature coal policy subsystem. To this end, the Exponential Random Graph modeling is applied to organizational survey data.