Reluctant to Change: Czech Climate Policy Walking the Superior Jurisdiction Pathway

Rapid decarbonization requires major policy change. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) proposes four policy change pathways for such change to occur: external event, internal event, policy-oriented learning, and negotiated agreement. Nevertheless, we argue that the baseline assumption for Europeanized policies such as environmental and climate policy should be change by a hierarchically superior jurisdiction. We study Czech climate policy which has been profoundly shaped by the European Union’s legislation. The Czech Republic is a post-communist EU member state with a coal-dependent economy, strong fossil fuel incumbents, and a significant climate skepticism and Euroscepticism among political elites. The adoption of legislation to support decarbonization thus faces staunch opposition. This research aims to unravel the extent to which superior jurisdiction explains the adoption of climate legislation in the Czech Republic, and whether it is interdependent with other policy change pathways. We trace the policy change pathways by investigating the explanatory reports of Czech climate legislation adopted since 1993 and related parliamentary debates. The statements referring to the perceived causes of policy adoption are taken as proxy indicators of policy change antecedents (Fullerton et al. 2022). The research utilizes two-mode network analysis to map interdependencies among the policy change antecedents and the adopted policy instruments to examine the extent to which superior jurisdiction has shaped the policy, while controlling for the other pathways of policy change.