Climate change and government policy: Fresh insights from complexity theory

Abstract

Governments worldwide are increasingly concerned about ensuring a balance between economic and environmental well being. Global economies, particularly developing ones, emphasize the importance of achieving escofriendly growth to maintain the levels of the ecological footprint while achieving higher economic growth. The ecological footprint is a comprehensive indicator of environmental degradation. It is used to assess the state of the environment because it reflects the impact of all human activities on nature. This study contributes to the literature by offering a novel analytical approach for solving complex interactions of ecological footprint antecedents, advancing the theoretical reasoning behind how government policy combines to explain the ecological footprint from some G7 countries (France, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and Germany) from 1996 to 2020. To establish a composite score of environmental footprint, we used complexity theory as well as fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and necessary condition analysis (NCA). Our analysis revealed that low expenditures on environmental protection and waste management, low taxes on transport, and high energy use are sufficient conditions to be included in the causal configurations for a high ecological footprint. Additionally, the sufficient solution, which has the highest coverage score that produces a low ecological footprint relies on high expenditure on environmental protection and high taxes on transportation. In this framework, Japan, Italy, and France have more effective government policies in terms of reducing the ecological footprint.