The politics of policy re-designing: The case of German renewable energy policy, 2000 - 2020

In light of the climate crisis, policy intervention is needed to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuel-based and toward renewable energy technologies. For legislators, designing and implementing such interventions is a considerable challenge, particularly since policy needs constant re-design to be effective. One important factor driving the need for such re-design is technological change: increased deployment and/or changing costs of target technologies, such as wind or biomass, can affect the type of policy support needed for these technologies. The legislative politics of re-designing policies remains, however, understudied. On the one hand, policy design literature has only recently started to examine the politics of re-designing, proposing the concept of design coalitions. On the other hand, legislative politics literature seldom addresses the specific politics involved with innovation and technology policy. In this paper, we address this gap by investigating the following research question: What are the legislative politics of policy re-designing of technology policy? How does policy-induced technological change affect these politics? To answer these questions, we conduct an empirical analysis of parliamentary debates in Germany from 1999-2018. We focus on the re-design of a key policy instrument in the German energy sector, the Feed-in-Tariff (FiT), targeting renewable energy technologies. Using Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), we trace whether and how political parties change their positions in parliamentary debates regarding FiT design features and whether position change is linked to technological change. To do so, we manually coded protocols of parliamentary debates on 12 instances of policy re-design. Building on an established taxonomy of policy design elements by Cashore and Howlett (2007), we dis-aggregated party positions into six distinct categories of policy design, ranging from higher-level goals and means to lower-level calibrations and settings of the FiT. Preliminary findings show that the political debates on re-designing the FiT shift from higher to lower-level design elements. We also observe technology differences in the salience and degree of conflict around specific design elements. Our paper contributes to the policy design and legislative politics literatures by exploring the evolving politics behind policy re-designing, and by highlighting the need to dis-aggregate these politics systematically into different policy design dimensions, and relating them to the policy outcome of technological change.