From symbolism to substance: what the renewal of the Danish climate change act tells us about the driving forces behind policy change

ABSTRACT

In 2020, Denmark passed a substantive Climate Change Act (CCA), replacing largely symbolic legislation from 2014. Using the multiple streams framework, this contribution compares the emergence of both CCAs across the problem, policy and politics streams. Whilst new governments proposed both CCAs following elections, the levels of politicisation of climate could not have differed more. While the 2014 Act was relatively low-key, in 2020 policy change was accompanied by a citizens’ initiative campaign and subsequent political party competition on climate policies during the 2019 parliamentary elections. In a key difference, the 2020 CCA remained a political issue even after the policy change process had moved from agenda setting to decision making, whereas political momentum ebbed earlier in 2014. We conclude that the high level of politicisation of climate issues in 2019–2020 contributed greatly to a substantive CCA, but that further improvements are necessary to meet increasingly demanding mitigation targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate Change Acts
• framework legislation
• Denmark
• citizens’ initiative
• climate policy
• politicisation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Anthony Zito for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Sarah Nash would also like to thank Kenn Mouritzen for his patient Danish language teaching: tusind tak Kenn!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Socialist People’s Party left the Government in early 2014 and a coalition Government of the Social Democrats and the Social Liberal Party continued until the 2015 elections.

2. This excludes the political parties representing Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Climate Research Programme [KR16AC0K13333].