From inadvertent to reluctant pioneer? Climate strategies and policy style in France

Abstract

To comply with the Kyoto Protocol, signatory nations have implemented a policy template of reducing greenhouse gas emissions mainly from the electricity generation and heavy industry sectors. This article shows how, in the case of France, a policy style based on ‘environmental meso-corporatism’ has largely exhausted this ‘standard recipe’. To consider how far France has developed fresh solutions, two phases of climate policy-making in the 2000s are analysed. Increased recourse to new environmental policy instruments is identified, but implemented through the institutional routines of ‘environmental meso-corporatism’. The article argues that although this policy style has proved relatively well adapted to regulating the technologies of production, it has little purchase on cultures of consumption within the residential and transport sectors. Faced with new challenges, policymakers have proved better equipped to reform policy content than policy style. But France shows some reluctance to resolve the problem of limited policy reach.