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Has the Swedish Climate Policy Framework – including the new Swedish Climate Act – adopted in June 2017, been conducive to advancing climate mitigation, and if so, to what extent and in which aspects? Although Sweden is often described as a frontrunner in climate work, several evaluations prior to the adoption of the Climate Policy Framework and the Climate Act concluded that Swedish climate policy has suffered from both implementation and monitoring deficits, as well as from the fact that climate goals and strategies were non-legally binding. Taken together, such deficits make the stable, long-term prioritizing of climate mitigation over other sector policies increasingly difficult, thus limiting the possibilities to reach future targets. This article focuses on three dimensions of climate policy integration – assessing policy processes, outputs and outcomes – with the aim to analyse political developments and policy outcomes in Sweden after the implementation of the Climate Policy Framework and the Climate Act. The results of a comprehensive set of interviews with policy experts and high-level decision-makers show that the framework is believed to have had important effects, mainly in terms of changing both policy language, cross-sector coordination, and increasing the prioritization of the climate issue. Thus the study (1) contributes to a better theoretical and empirical understanding of Climate Change Acts as instruments for climate policy integration; (2) paves the way for future comparative studies; and (3) presents important practical lessons for policy makers on the effects of legal mechanisms to achieve climate mitigation. Key policy insights Climate Acts provide a legal framework for governmental climate activities. A comprehensive framework including three dimensions of climate policy integration – assessing process, output and outcome, should be used to evaluate Climate Act effects. The Swedish Climate Policy Framework and Climate Act has induced a weak type of climate policy integration, showing effects on climate policy debate, coordination, policy measure implementation and policy support. The framework sends strong signals of political will to address climate change, but the non-inclusion of targets and instruments in the Swedish Climate Act is causing debate and insecurity regarding what policy instruments will be implemented [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framework legislation on climate change is coming of age. Ever more nation states and sub-state entities are passing Climate Change Acts (CCAs) – framework legislation that lays down general principles and obligations for climate change policymaking – and a number of early adopters are updating or replacing their initial legislation. This provides an opportune moment to bring together and move forward the scholarship on CCAs, examining where they have come from (their origins), how they work in practice (their dynamics), and what impacts they are having on the world and how it is organized (their consequences). The contributions to this Special Issue analyse the CCAs of Sweden, Mexico, New Zealand, Australian subnational governments, the UK, Denmark, Scotland and Austria as well as an unsuccessful attempt to introduce a Belgian CCA. Collectively, they add a wealth of new perspectives to the growing scholarship, identifying policy insights that can inspire further scholarship and future policy endeavours that can learn from these cases. The Special Issue contributions demonstrate that a number of contextual factors and elements of parliamentary process are important for successful passing of CCAs and/or high levels of ambition in the legislation itself. They highlight both the dangers and potential of policy fragmentation as dynamics of CCAs and the potential role for advisory bodies to shape these dynamics. Finally, consequences are identified in changes in political culture, parliamentary debate and the emergence of specific policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air travel has received increasing attention in the climate debate in recent years. Current climate policy in this sector remains weak in comparison to, for example, the road transport sector. In this study, we analyze public support for seven different national policy measures that have been chosen to reflect the main thinking raised in the debate. Using original data from Sweden (N = 4500), we found that less coercive measures, as well as regulatory measures targeting the aviation industry rather than individuals directly, are more readily supported by the public than market-based policies aiming to push individuals away from air travel. The analyses of the different policy measures reveal many similarities between them. Climate concern, a personal norm to act in a more climate-friendly way, a political orientation to the left and high levels of institutional trust all display strong associations with support for all the different policy types. Perceptions of fairness, in particular, and effectiveness were strongly associated with overall policy support. Interestingly, however, the extent to which a policy measure was expected to affect one's own personal freedom was found to have a very weak correlation with policy support. Key policy insights Public support was higher for 'pull' policies (climate labelling and subsidies for high-speed and night trains), as well as for regulatory measures targeting the aviation industry (biofuel blending mandate), than for policies that aim to push individuals away from air travel (e.g. air passenger tax). The weakest public support was found for frequent flyer taxation and personal carbon allowances. One reason, however, may be that these are novel policy options where the respondents had little prior information. In line with previous research, climate concern, ideology and trust in institutions correlate with attitudes to aviation polices, but the multivariate model showed that perceptions of whether a policy is fair and effective were by far the most important variables. Hence, fairness and effectiveness appear to be crucial aspects for the design of new policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many countries have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the choice of national climate policy measures demonstrates widespread variation. Although system of government, path-dependency and economic entanglements can explain a certain amount of variation in policy choice, research also points specifically towards the highly politicized nature of climate policy instruments and their sensitivity to public support as explanatory factors for cross-national differences. Previous studies hypothesize that various country-specific contextual factors determine both general preferences for environmental protection and the public's preferences for different types of policy instruments. One suggestion is that countries' prevailing political cultures have significant consequences for such public support. Another supposition is that, since countries differ in their economic dependency on climate detrimental industry such as fossil fuel production, this should be a significant factor determining both public attitudes and subsequent political decisions. This paper applies unique, original data from four countries with significant variation in (i) political-cultural contexts (Sweden and Norway vs New Zealand and Australia and (ii) economic dependency (Norway and Australia vs Sweden and New Zealand) to analyze how, and to what extent, these two contextual variables interact with, and moderate, the effect of individual-level factors on support for climate policy measures in the four countries. Furthermore, the paper explores variations in support for different types of CO2 taxes (directed towards individual consumers, industry, and fossil-fuel producers) in the four countries. Key policy insights Across contexts, public policy support is lower for taxes directed towards private consumption than for taxes directed towards industry, and the strongest for CO2 taxes on fossil fuel producing industry. Political culture and economic context influence the effect of individual-level factors on policy support. In a context of high economic dependency on the fossil-fuel industry, people are less likely to support the introduction of CO2 taxes. The effect of left-right ideology on policy support is sensitive to political-cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at better understanding how, and to what extent, perceptions of a policy instrument's distributional effects impact on policy support, focusing on the case of CO2 taxes on petrol in Sweden. Through a large-scale (N = 5000) randomized survey experiment with a 2 x 3 factorial design, the extent to which perceptions of fairness determine attitudes to a suggested increase of the Swedish CO2 tax is explored. Furthermore, the study considers whether these effects change with the level of the suggested tax increase, as well as whether negative sentiments can be alleviated by combining it with a compensatory measure in the shape of a simultaneous income tax cut financed by the revenues from the tax increase. The results show that a higher tax increase is both viewed as more unfair and enjoys weaker support. Furthermore, compensatory measures can be a powerful policy design tool to increase perceptions of the policy as fair, but the effect of compensation on policy support is conditioned by the individual's left- right ideological position. Whereas people self-identifying to the right react favourably to compensatory measures, people self-identifying to the left become less supportive of a tax increase when combined with a simultaneous cut in income taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]