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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Explaining Success And Failure In Climate Policies: Developing Theory Through German Case Studies, Roger Karapin
Explaining Success And Failure In Climate Policies: Developing Theory Through German Case Studies, Roger Karapin
Publications and Research
Theories of environmental outcomes have been developed mostly through large-N cross-national studies, which have a structuralist bias and do not include the mechanisms through which inferred causes operate. Structured, focused case studies can help overcome those limits by incorporating political processes and identifying causal mechanisms. Here, comparisons of climate policy outcomes within Germany are used to test and develop theory, by explaining the differences among nine cases with the help of process tracing. The findings suggest that environmental-outcome theories should be modified to include: external events and advocacy-coalition formation as key processes; multiple causal paths through which green parties improve …
Climate Policy Outcomes In Germany: Environmental Performance And Environmental Damage In Eleven Policy Areas, Roger Karapin
Climate Policy Outcomes In Germany: Environmental Performance And Environmental Damage In Eleven Policy Areas, Roger Karapin
Publications and Research
Germany has reduced its emissions of greenhouse gases more than almost any other industrialized democracy and is exceeding its ambitious Kyoto commitment of a 21% reduction since 1990. Hence, it is commonly portrayed as a climate-policy success story, but the situation is much more complex. Generalizing Germany's per-capita emissions to all countries or its emissions reductions to all industrialized democracies would still very likely produce more than a two-degree rise in global temperature. Moreover, analyzing the German country-case into eleven subcases shows that it is a mixture of relative successes and failures.
This illustrates several major problems with the literature …