Energy Security and Climate Policy in Germany: Relational Analysis of an Ecology of Games

This paper addresses climate policy in Germany in the context of the extraordinary German decision to phase out nuclear power and its implications for energy security. After the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, the German government decided to shut down eight old nuclear reactors in the short term and phase out the rest of the reactors within the next seven years. At the same time, however, the German government wanted to continue pursuing its existing climate policy goals. However, the new energy policy constraints led to the need to 1/ relying on (cheap russian) natural gas as a bridging technology to reduce future energy demand, 2/ massively promoting renewable energies and their development, 3/ the improvement of energy efficiency and the reduction of climate-damaging emissions were massively promoted with the funding of R&D. In this context, the paper aims at explaining the German climate and energy policy decisions after Fukushima and in the following years with the Ecology of Games approach, which assumes an entanglement of multiple political games that follow different logics and create corresponding dilemmas for the political actors involved. The specific mechanisms explaining conflict and cooperation in the network of actors involved are analyzed using advanced methods applied on network data collected in the years between 2012 and 2013 within the first wave of COMPON studies.