Mitigating climate change in a federal country committed to the Kyoto Protocol

How Swiss federalism further complicated an already complex challenge

Bibliographic Data

ID10354896
AuthorsJuan Casado-Asensio, Juan Casado‐Asensio (BOKU University), Reinhard Steurer (0000-0002-5000-7046, BOKU University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume49
Issue3
Pages257-279
Publication date2016-02-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolicy Sciences (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0032-2687 • E-ISSN: 1573-0891
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s11077-016-9247-z
OpenAlexW2277715096
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited48

When policy scholars assess the effects of federalism on climate change mitigation, they often look at countries that rejected binding commitments (in particular, the USA) and find that federalism enabled sub-national entities to partly fill national regulatory voids. In accordance with a similar case study on Austria, we find the exact opposite for Switzerland, a country that committed itself to an 8 % cut in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. To reveal the detrimental effects of federalism, we focus our case study on the integration of climate change concerns into building policies, a policy field fully in the hands of Swiss sub-national authorities known as cantons. Apart from a few pioneer cantons, we found mainly federal departments concerned with integrating climate change mitigation into cantonal building policies and cantonal as well as federal actors struggling with the numerous pitfalls of Swiss federalism in their own ways. On the one hand, various federal departments tried repeatedly to facilitate a nationwide greening of cantonal building policies, and their interventions often resulted in lowest common denominator solutions that were difficult to improve once in place. On the other hand, Swiss federalism gave a few pioneer cantons the freedom to green their building policies early on, but their policies hardly diffused to other cantons. Resembling our main finding of the Austrian case study, we conclude that the 15 % emission decline in the Swiss building sector during 2008–2012 compared to 1990 levels happened despite, not because of Swiss federalism. This warrants caution against high hopes in assuming that decentralised or polycentric governance can fully compensate for failed national (or international) climate policies

Climate change · Cooperative federalism · Dual federalism · Economics · Federalism · Kyoto Protocol · New Federalism · Political science · Politics · Law · Policy Transfer and Learning · Political Systems and Governance · Public Administration · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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