Leadership and lesson-drawing in the European Union’s multilevel climate governance system

ABSTRACT

The important role that climate leaders and leadership play at different levels of the European Union (EU) multilevel governance system is exemplified. Initially, climate leader states set the pace with ambitious policy measures that were adopted largely on an ad hoc basis. Since the mid-1980s, the EU has developed a multilevel climate governance system that has facilitated leadership and lesson-drawing at all governance levels including the local level. The EU has become a global climate policy leader by example although it had been set up as a ‘leaderless Europe’. The resulting ‘leadership without leader’ paradox cannot be sufficiently explained merely by reference to top-level EU climate policies. Local-level climate innovations and lesson-drawing have increasingly been encouraged by the EU’s multilevel climate governance system which has become more polycentric. The recognition of economic co-benefits of climate policy measures has helped to further the EU’s climate leadership role.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• cities
• villages
• multilevel climate governance
• lesson-drawing
• leaderless leadership paradox

Acknowledgments

Martin Jänicke delivered an early version to the Innovation in Global Climate Governance (INOGOV) funded workshop on ‘Pioneers and Leaders in Polycentric Climate Governance (PiLePoC)’ in Hull, 15–16 September 2016. Both authors are grateful to the referees and the journal editors, Chris Rootes and Anthony Zito, for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Leadership by example has a long tradition in European history. For example, French absolutism’s power structure, economic system, architecture and even its preferred products have been imitated by other European countries.

2. Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) and Wurzel et al. (2017) have argued that leaders actively seek to attract followers while this is not normally the case for pioneers. Here, we focus primarily on leaders.

3. Klemmer et al. (1999) first used the term ‘multi-impulse-hypothesis’ for environmental innovations that are not caused by one specific policy instrument but by the interactions of different societal factors.