Collaboration to mitigate climate change – Does the institutional context matter? A comparative study of Finland, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States

Abstract

Policy actors often try to influence decisions and outputs by joining forces and coordinating their action. Understanding patterns of coordination is important for the field of environmental policy and governance, as environmental policies typically target a wide range of stakeholders from different sectors. The public policy literature has advanced and tested several hypotheses concerning the factors that promote or hinder collaboration at the national or subnational level. However, an important caveat of the literature is that only a handful of studies compare these factors across different institutional contexts. In this paper, we draw on the existing literature to formulate hypotheses concerning the role of beliefs, actor types, and resources in shaping collaboration patterns. We test these hypotheses using data on the climate change policy networks in four countries with very different institutional contexts: Finland, Switzerland, South Korea, and the US. The crucial institutional axes along which the cases differ from each other are (a) federal (Switzerland, US) vs. unitary (Finland, Korea), (b) corporatist (Finland, Switzerland) vs. pluralist (US, Korea), and (c) majoritarian (USA, South Korea) vs. consensual (Finland, Switzerland). Estimating Exponential Random Graph Models for each country, we find no systematic variation across the different polity contexts, which is good news for important public policy theories such as the Advocacy Coalition Framework, policy networks, ecological modernisation theory, or resource dependence theory. However, we do find significant variation between different national policy contexts. Firstly, actors collaborate with others sharing beliefs or the same type of actor in particular during conflictive phases in the policy process, but not when major decisions are already made. In particular, the Swiss case illustrates that when important directions of a policy process are already laid out, actors of different beliefs or actor types start to collaborate across conflict lines. In a similar vein, public authorities are also more important targets in phases were important decisions are still to be made. However, one finding that holds for all countries across all polity and policy contexts is that resourceful and influential actors are popular collaboration targets.