Place-Based Policy in Climate Change: Flexible and Path-Dependent Elements

Abstract

The idea of place-based policy, the collaborative management of issues specific to a geographic area, has been widely used in the context of climate change. The outstanding features of more coherence across countries or the ability to address complex environmental aspects in an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental way made it an attractive tool for governments. Often emphasized is also the flexibility of placed-based approaches (PBAs) in terms of adapting to changes and tailoring policy accordingly. However, every policy within an administration also carries the burden of being path. This bares the question of how much flexibility PBAs need regarding environmental issues and how much consistency would be necessary to succeed. The article explores these questions and develops a framework with four adaption options based on cases in the field of carbon tax and carbon emission policy in British Columbia (Canada), New Zealand, Oregon (USA), and Quebec (Canada).

Keywords:

• place-based policy
• path dependence
• climate change
• multilevel governance

Notes

¹ The Kyoto Protocol (1997) is one of the two main climate change agreements. The other one is the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The Protocol is an international agreement, which commits its Parties by setting internationally binding emission reduction targets.

² Those concerns were expressed in the Senate by passing the Byrd-Hagel resolution (1997), which states that it would not ratify unless the protocol would also “limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Perils within the same compliance period” (S. Res 1998, 105th Congress).

³ The collaboration structure manifests itself in transnational municipal networks (TMNs). Europe’s TMNs have three defining characteristics:

First, member cities are autonomous and free to join or leave; second, because they appear to be non-hierarchical, horizontal, and polycentric, such networks are often characterized as a form of self-governance, although they have a significant government component and membership; third, decisions taken within a network are directly implemented by its members (Kern & Bulkeley, 2009, pp. 309–310). With these elements, TMNs have adapted to the opportunity structure present in the subsidiarity-driven EU multi-level system to have access to key decision-makers as well as resources (Ladrech, 2005). Most networks concentrate on two goals: (1) representing the interest of their members at the European level and (2) facilitating the exchange of experience and transnational learning among their constituents. (Giest & Howlett, 2012, p. 137)

⁴ Political scientists have tried to broaden the economic concept of path-dependence for history-driven analysis. This development led to two different branches of path-dependence and a different underlying ontology. The branches can be summed up under: “Resilient institutional systems” and the “sequencing of events” (Breznitz, 2010). Further, a third development, which uses path-dependence for every explanation where past decisions might explain later events.

⁵ Based on conversion rate of USD 1.00 = NZD 0.71.

⁶ President Bill Clinton, in his State of the Union Address on February 17, 1993, proposed a broad-based energy tax. “The mere proposal of the Btu tax by the President was a victory for advocates of pollution taxes” (Erlandson, 1994, p. 173). However, although advocates were able to persuade the Clinton Administration to propose a broad-based energy tax, they lacked the political capital and resources to pass the tax through Congress (Erlandson, 1994).

⁷ Corporate Knights Magazine is a division of Corporate Knights Inc., a media, research, and financial products company focused on quantifying and animating clean capitalism drivers for decision-makers.