Search

The impact of Europeanisation on domestic policies is often associated with the alignment of European policies and discourses with national ones. The Habitats Directive mandating wolf protection entailed heated debates across the EU, suggesting diverging values and interests at various levels of policy-making. I present an analysis of wolf policy and politics in Germany, where wolves have returned after a long period of extinction. Tracing the dynamics of institutions involved in wolf management in 2000–2021, I identify key groups involved, their activities and positions as well as the impact of European rules and discourses. Unlike in some other Central in Eastern European countries, German wolf policy was strongly influenced by Europeanisation that helped to sustain the institutional path of wolf conservation, despite criticism from dominant land-use actors who politicised the issue to relax conservation rules. I suggest adding safeguarding of latent policies to the catalogue of outcomes of Europeanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the party political learning of the German Greens, a powerful agent of environmental policy in European politics, we identify the strategic and programmatic lessons learned from their failure in the 2013 general elections and explain the party politics that facilitated these lessons. We advance research on learning from failures by understanding failures not as objective facts but as constructed in political discourse. Tracing the main discursive elements of failure constructions, we argue that such constructions empower agents of learning and direct what actors learn from failures. Party elites might engage in strategic constructions of failures to promote their agenda and position in the party. Empirically tracing how the party political discourse of the German Greens constructed the 2013 elections as a failure, we demonstrate how this discursive construction intertwines with party politics and helped shift the intra-party balance of power and political direction of the Greens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confers an obligation on developed states to lead in mitigation. This obligation challenges traditional conceptions of the modern state by calling forth a more outward looking state that is able to serve both the national and international communities in the service of global climate protection. Yet, the more skeptical theories of the ecological state suggest that climate leaders will only emerge if they can connect their climate strategy to the traditional state imperatives of economic growth or national security. How the governments of Germany and Norway, both relative climate leaders with ongoing fossil-fuel dependencies, have legitimated their climate policies and diplomacy is examined through a comparative discourse analysis. While both governments rely heavily on discourses of Green growth, they also construct national identities and international role conceptions that serve purposes beyond themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A successful carbon capture and storage (CCS) policy and programme is widely considered essential to curbing carbon dioxide emissions. What explains the strikingly different policy outcomes in two key European Union political heavyweights and coal economies, the UK and Germany? The UK has decided to contract two specific CCS projects, with explicit timelines for realisation; Germany has made no such decisions. From scrutiny of official documents and in-depth high-level interviews, it was found that the UK has more favourable structural capacity, including offshore storage capacity (which evokes less conflict) and significant oil-industry expertise, and thus an easier task. Moreover, this structural capacity has interacted with a solid political commitment to bring CCS forward in the UK, including specific, multistage funding and a high-level drive to develop CCS, especially after 2009. In Germany, by contrast, CCS has encountered increasing local and central opposition since 2009, with the Energiewende and renewables being accorded priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Greens achieved a record result in the federal elections of 2009. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, it is argued that this excellent result was not an isolated phenomenon but is in line with a long-term growth of Green electoral support that has a strong generational basis. A ‘feminisation’ and ‘greying’ of Green voters is also apparent. Despite the party's effort to emphasise economic and social issues in its campaigning, the chief factors explaining Green voting remain environmental concern and opposition to nuclear energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-1970s well into the 1980s, the Federal Alliance of Citizens' Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU) was one of Germany's most visible and influential environmental organisations, an unusual achievement for a network of local organisations. Lacking strong competitors, it was able to become a central movement organisation for Germany's rapidly growing anti-nuclear power and environmental movements. However, after institutionalisation of environmental concerns robbed the movement of some of its impetus, competing social movement organisations appeared, and government subsidies ended, familiar problems of grass-roots networks, which had plagued the BBU from the beginning, intensified. The resulting downward spiral cost the BBU most of its members and its prominence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the new environmental policy instruments in Germany as of March 2003. Pros and cons of tradable permits debated by environmental economists in the country; Institutional structures of the German environmental policy; Description of the environmental regulatory style.

The article considers some broader social considerations concerning environmental politics and practice with a view to encouraging reflection about the current position of the environmental movement. The author describes some experience of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) world since the early 1970s and a measure of more recent involvement in the world of statutory agencies. Some social and political phenomena which contributed to the progress of environmental ideas and initiatives, like the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, are presented.

Environmental policy programmes are finding a new focus in the Netherlands: increasingly programmes are developed that deal with the environmental effects of the production, consumption, and waste activities around a product rather than with the effects of separate production processes. This development, which is also occurring in other European countries, coincides with the process of inter-nationalisation that is currently changing the face of Europe. As this latter process is to a great extent focused on economic activities, it is important to analyse the mutual influence of both developments. This analysis, which gives insight into the positive, as well as problematic aspects, is based on the example of the formulation of the EC-Directive concerning the control of chemicals, and its implementation in the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green parties achieved a major breakthrough in the 1989 European elections. Who voted green in these elections? This first comprehensive comparative analysis of the green voter in Europe reveals, that, as expected, green voting is more common among the young, well-educated, and middle class, and green voters also tend to be left-wing, post-materialist and concerned about the environment and arms limitation. But these stereotypical attributes of greenness closely apply to the German and Dutch Greens only: green voters in other countries comply far less, if at all, with this socio-demographic profile. The one pervasive predictor is environmental concern, which is dominant in Britain, France, Belgium and Ireland. It is rather less important in Germany and the Netherlands where post-materialism and a left-wing orientation are more prevalent instead. The basis of green voting is thus rather less narrow than previously thought. The sharper delineation of support for the German Greens has contributed to a relatively stable green vote in the past, but the potential for attracting other sectors of the electorate are clearly very limited. Green parties in most other countries appear to be able to attract votes from a wider spectrum of the population but the commitment of these voters is likely to be far more volatile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]