The overall goal of the CLIP-IN project was to better understand the integration of climate change mitigation policies both horizontally across sectors and vertically across levels of government in federal European countries, most notably in Austria. The work packages and the work we have accomplished can be summarised as follows:
In WP1 we conducted a desk research that reviewed the scholarly literature on policy integration, with a focus on environmental and/or climate policy integration and respective differences between federal and unitary state settings. It aimed to summarise and advance existing research by answering the following questions: What are the key issues of environmental/climate policy integration in general and what are the particularities in federal states? Is environmental policy integration in federal states more difficult than in unitary states? If so, what are the key challenges of ‘environmental federalism’ and how to address them? The answers to these and other questions resulted in a theoretical/conceptual part of the analytical framework that guided the subsequent research steps.
The desk research in WP2 narrowed the research focus on integrated strategies as key instruments of policy integration. We first reviewed and compared normative guidelines for integrated strategies on sustainable development, climate change adaptation and mitigation. We then analysed the prevalence as well as the performance of these three types of integrated strategies in EU Member States. The findings are documented in a journal manuscript published in the Journal of Public Policy. Since we had abundant material on climate change mitigation strategies (the key theme of the CLIP-IN project), we wrote an extra paper on mitigation strategies. This paper is published in the journal “Climate Policy”.
The case study research conducted in WPs 3 and 4 marks the core of CLIP-IN. The CLIP-IN proposal foresaw that we look in particular at the coordination/integration functions of integrated strategies on sustainable development, climate change mitigation and adaptation. Thus, the research steps detailed in the proposal were as follows. We planned to analyse all three strategies for each of the three countries in single case studies as follows:
- Three within-case analyses for each country,
- One cross-case analysis for each country, i.e. a comparison of strategies within a country (both in WP3), and
- A cross-country comparison, i.e. a comparison of climate policy integration patterns across the three countries in WP4 (see also below).
However, based on the research conducted in WPs 1 and 2, changes in our research design were necessary: Our findings of WP2 indicated that it does not make sense to analyse integrated strategies in-depth because most of them play only marginal roles in policy-making. We therefore refocused the case studies on how climate policy integration progressed in a particular sector, due to integrated strategies or other instruments. We choose to look at climate policy integration in the building sector for two reasons: first, the building sector is one of the most important emitters of greenhouse gas emissions; second, responsibilities for building policies are strongly decentralised in all three federal countries under scrutiny. This enabled us to analyse how federalism shaped climate policy integration – a key concern for the CLIP-IN project.
The case studies conducted in WP3 resulted in several journal manuscripts: two papers on the Austrian case study (one in English published in the Journal “Policy Sciences”, one in German published in the journal “der modern Staat”), one paper on the Swiss case study, and two papers on the German case study (one focussing on the role of mitigation strategies, one focusing on all aspects of climate policy integration in the building sector).
In WP4 we compared the case studies and we produced a project synthesis.
Some of the publications written in the CLIP-IN project can be found under “Deliverables”.