Among environmental issues climate change has become very central in driving the development of the ‘ecological state’. Studying climate change policy, particularly mitigation policy, this paper aims at ‘bringing the state back in’ by concentrating on the state apparatus itself. It explores how climate change policy transforms the state apparatus and why and how this transformation is caused. Climate change challenges the existing state structures as it requires a multi-sector response from environmental, energy, agricultural, forestry, research and transport policy and thus a holistic view and understanding of the linkages between these sectors. The paper analyses polity change with regard to the national ministries because by drafting policy proposals they are involved in the early, formative phase of policy formulation and very influential. While climate policy emerged in the mid and late 20th century in Western Europe, it only gradually spread to Central Eastern Europe, commencing rather in the 21st century. Comparing nation-states from both Western and Central Eastern Europe, the paper applies a dissimilar systems design.
The polity and accordingly polity change are strongly rooted in the context of the nation-state. Therefore, the paper chooses a national perspective which highlights domestic features as causes of polity change. Simultaneously, climate policy is strongly internationalized and Europeanized so that nation-states act in a context of multilevel governance-structures. This allows countries to engage in institutional borrowing and draw on institutional templates from other political levels, other countries or their own past. Since structures, agency and ideas interact in these processes of administrative change, the paper combines neo-institutionalism, especially historical and discursive neo-institutionalism, with policy learning and transfer research. This integrative approach is used to study the polity responses of ministries and the imprints they leave on the state apparatus, possibly turning it into an ‘ecological state’.
