Exploring institutional legacies across legislative mixes for climate change mitigation: a case study on the United Kingdom

Today’s governance of the climate crisis builds upon decades of institutional decisions addressing climate change across various sectors and actors. The range of policies impacting the mitigation of the climate crisis spans from legally binding emission targets to tax breaks for fossil fuel companies. Overall, the legislative architecture addressing climate change mitigation is highly complex and scholars argue that adopting a system perspective allows to unfold such complexity. The literature employs the concept of policy mixes to analyse the emergence and evolution of policy instruments addressing the climate crisis. Through this conceptual lens, scholars study the multitude of policies addressing the same environmental crisis in the same jurisdiction, as well as the interactions between these policies. Against this backdrop, the composition of a policy mix builds upon previous mixes, as policies are not adopted in isolation. For example, they can layer or amend each other. The extent to which previous policy mixes determine the future ones remains understudied. This is a significant knowledge gap since the urgency and scale of the climate crisis requires institutional change, and these institutions have been made through historic climate policymaking. Our knowledge on how past policies leave a legacy in future climate policy mixes is limited, yet understanding this is necessary to better understand how to address the climate crisis. This paper addresses this literature gap by conducting a case study analysis on climate change mitigation in the electricity sector in the United Kingdom (UK). Following an exploratory research design, this study analyses the extent to which the current legislative mix of the UK is composed by past legislative instruments, starting from the Clean Air Act of 1956 (which scholars consider the first environmental law in the UK). The instruments under analysis are multi-sectoral ones, affecting the process of climate change mitigation. These include explicitly labelled climate legislation, as well as financial and social legislation which affects mitigation but is not categorised as “climate” by legislators. Particular attention is given to the temporal evolution of legislative instruments regulating fossil fuels, e.g., coal, oil, and gas. This ontological and methodological decision intends to shed light on the intricate legislative mix addressing the climate crisis, either to halt greenhouse gas emissions or to maintain a fossil fuel-based society. Beyond legislative decisions, the exploratory nature of this study leads us to consider also past socio-, political- and macro-economic structures that are playing a role in the current composition of the UK climate policy mix. This innovative approach allows us to capture a comprehensive picture of the institutional landscape where the current UK climate legislative mix operates.