Missing conceptual links in the international environmental policy debate: power, time and transfer

ABSTRACT

Over the past 20 years, scholars have examined the role policy transfer has had on the development of environmental policies across the globe. The literature in this area has discussed everything from the movement of cap-and-trade policies to the movement of rain barrels. As the name ‘policy transfer’ implies, studies tend to focus on the successful movement of a policy or program. Part of the reason for this focus is that studies tend to neglect the role power and time play in the transfer process. To begin addressing this, the concepts of power most commonly associated with the three faces of power debate and ideas of political time, policy time and ‘chronological’ time (i.e. timing, tempo, time) can help explain a range of environmental transfers (or non-transfers) better than the existing literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy transfer
• power
• time
• timing
• tempo
• storm water management

Acknowledgments

For helpful advice, I thank the reviewers, the journal editors and the guest editors of this Symposium, Alexander Bürgin and Kai Oppermann.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Gilley (2012) frames the environmental policy approach as Democratic (US) vs Authoritarian (China) Environmentalism. Despite the difference between the two systems, they encounter similar problems once policies move to the local level. For similar analysis, see Shin (2018) or a further discussion of power see also French and Raven (1959).

2. For a more general review of clean air and water policies in China, see Seligsohn et al. (2018).

3. For a similar discussion focused on how policy instruments become established, pushed and change as they move over time and place, see Voß and Simons (2014).

4. China launched its own pilot version in Shanghai (see Liu et al. 2015).

5. The Chinese government also acted in response to economic opportunities and internal pressures to address air quality in major cities.

6. An aspect of power that I do not elaborate here is the hegemonic role of neo-classic economic ideas, i.e. the decision to use market mechanisms, such as carbon trading and tax incentives, instead of potential non-market mechanisms.

7. This links to the dominant paradigms structuring the policymaking and surrounding discourses at the time (or time horizons) transfer occurs (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003, Bulmer 2009).