What Makes a Climate Leader? The Politics of Climate Policy in California and Germany

As California hosts the Global Climate Action Summit this month, ambitions to tackle climate change fly high—the US federal government’s opposition notwithstanding. The wave of aspiration is welcome, but it is far from clear whether climate goals will in fact be implemented as effective policy. We may like to think that it all depends on voters. Yet the history of climate politics has shown that all too often powerful business lobbies capture climate policy, even if voters are in favor of action. This suggests an important truth: How governments manage vested interests shapes if climate ambitions turn into climate actions. Take the story of California and Germany, which led the world with ambitious emission reduction goals for 2020. While California reached its target ahead of time, Merkel’s administration has admitted that Germany will miss its goal by a wide margin. A key reason for California’s success lies in how little the climate policy process opened the door to lobbyists, compared to Germany.  In particular, the division of labor between the bureaucracy and the legislature mattered. Drawing on these two cases, the talk will explore how policy process shapes opportunities for regulatory capture and draw lessons for implementing climate policy. 

Please join us for the first Environmental Policy and Planning lunch of the fall 2018 term with guest speaker Jonas Meckling (UC Berkeley).