Technology and Climate Policy - A Coordination Challenge

Abstract

The issue of climate change raises new requirements for the way our societies work, and in particular how energy is provided. The reductions necessary to reach the internationally agreed target to limit the rise in temperature to 2° C are enormous and require technological and social innovations at several levels. In order to cope with this challenge the incremental improvement of existing technologies will be necessary but probably not sufficient. Therefore radical innovations are required, since the improvement of existing technologies alone will probably not be sufficient to meet the greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reductions considered to be cope with the effects of climate change (UNFCCC 2009; IPPC 2007; Stern 2006). Even though climate policy is regarded as being crucial in most European countries, the coordination of technology and climate policy proves difficult. Sometimes the interaction of climate and technology policy even leads to unintended and undesirable results. In the case of Denmark for instance it has been stated, that the Kyoto process has led to a decrease in technological innovation in the energy sector (Lund 2006). Furthermore recent attempts to policy integration, e.g. the UK Low Carbon transition plan (HM Government 2009) provide interesting examples of how governments try to coordinate different policy fields. The transition plan for instance explicitly aims at the field of technology policy in the domains of offshore wind, marine energy and electric vehicles. This paper will look closer into the challenges and experiences of the coordination between climate and technology policy applying a case study approach focusing on the experiences in the two countries mentioned previously: Denmark and the UK. The aim is to draw lessons learned from coordination efforts of the past and to identify best practices from the case studies. From a theoretical point the study is informed by the literature on the dimensions of policy learning (Nilsson 2005; Jachtenfuchs and Huber 1993) and the findings of innovation and transition studies (Geels et al. 2008; Sanden and Azar 2005).