Decarbonizing Housing in Times of Crisis: The Politics and Consequences of Bureaucratic Overload in German Cities.

Subnational governments in modern political economies are increasingly overburdened by policy accumulation and underinvestment in administrative capacities. At the same time, crises have grown more frequent, necessitating novel policy interventions—exemplified by the climate crisis and widespread governmental commitments to net-zero targets. This paper contributes to the literature on policy accumulation by examining how local governments in Germany implement policy instruments aimed at decarbonizing housing—a polity closely tied to life chances and widely perceived as being in a quasi-permanent state of crisis. While existing research demonstrates that this conjuncture challenges implementation authorities to fulfill their functions and develop coping strategies, less is known about variations in how accumulated policy stocks are administered and the associated political consequences. Drawing on three comparative case studies, this paper shows that variations in the structural properties of implementation polities—the distribution of authority, responsibilities, and capacities across levels of government and the private sector, alongside coordination dynamics—produce distinct implementation challenges, which lead subnational governments to strategically engage with national policy instruments and align their implementation with their local policies and interests in specific ways. These politics of accumulation undermine the effectiveness of climate policy. Each case study spans two cities within one subnational jurisdiction (Land) and represents a paradigmatic case of the structural properties of implementation polities (centralized, decentralized, and those featuring a strong private-sector role). By adopting an institutional, rather than a functional, conceptualization of policy instruments, this paper demonstrates how the accumulation literature can account for the political consequences of accumulation, which fueled by rising territorial inequalities and increasing party polarization, challenge the problem-solving capacities and legitimacy of modern states. The draft paper is based on ongoing research and is the first step in a broader research agenda aimed at comparing the administration and politics of accumulation internationally.