Climate policy convergence in Europe: an assessment based on National Communications to the UNFCCC

Abstract

With the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the Kyoto Protocol (1997), an impressive international regime on climate change has emerged, involving over 190 countries. It includes legally binding quantitative targets on the emission of greenhouse gases for thirty-eight countries as well as for the European Union. In addition, the regime offers guidelines and incentives for countries to develop climate policy. The development of national climate policy strategies is legally binding, but countries are free to select their own policies and measures. Yet, since national climate policy is discussed in and promoted by international institutions, convergence of policies and measures can be expected. We present an empirical analysis of policy output and policy outcome convergence, based on the National Communications of twenty-three European countries. Our results suggest that in most European countries the explorative phase of climate policy has evolved into the selection and further elaboration of a set of core measures (especially in the energy and transportation sectors), implying some output policy convergence so far.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• Kyoto Protocol
• policy convergence
• policy outcome
• policy output
• UNFCCC

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Christoph Knill, two anonymous reviewers and the participants in the Hamburg workshop on Policy Convergence in Europe (24–25 April 2004) for their very useful comments and suggestions for improving the paper.

Notes

1 ‘Additional measures’ are considered for implementation when the initial ‘with measures’ did not meet the mitigation targets.

2 Several other countries also suggested that new energy taxes should not be introduced unilaterally but be considered at the international level.