Multilevel reinforcing dynamics: Global climate governance and European renewable energy policy
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Katharina Rietig |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12674 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Multilevel reinforcing dynamics: Global
climate governance and European
renewable energy policy
Katharina Rietig
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology,
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon
Tyne, UK
Correspondence
Katharina Rietig, School of Geography,
Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University,
Henry Daysh Building, Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU, UK.
Email: katharine.rietig@ncl.ac.uk
Abstract
This article breaks new ground by revisiting the Multiple
Streams Framework as central public policy theory and modify-
ing it to take into account multilevel reinforcing dynamics. This
is important as it allows policy change to be explained more
accurately given the empirical interdependencies between
policy-making on the national, regional (e.g., European) and
international levels, which so far have not been sufficiently
taken into account by traditional public policy theories. It
process-traces how EU-level policies motivated by energy
security considerations and global climate leadership ambitions
influenced international-level agenda-setting. Global climate
change commitments in turn influenced European renewable
energy and climate policy. Such multilevel reinforcing dynamics
were central for the 2009 European Renewable Energy Direc-
tive, the 2030 Climate and Energy Framework and the 2050
European Green Deal proposal to emerge and subsequently
facilitated the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which
in turn motivated developed and developing countries to legis-
late and implement climate and renewable energy policies.
1|INTRODUCTION
Starting with the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and the US withdrawal from its leadership role in the early
2000s, the European Union (EU) took on a leadership position in pioneering climate change policies (Wurzel and Connelly
Received: 22 July 2017 Revised: 26 January 2020 Accepted: 8 April 2020
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12674
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2020 The Author. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin. 2021;99:55–71. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 55
2011) and pushing for ambitious international-level climate agreements (Schreurs and Tiberghien 2007). The EU adopted
a‘lediator’strategy of leading by example but also moderating increasing climate mitigation ambitions among central
international partners following the disappointment of the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit (Elgström and
Skovgaard 2014) and EU internal disagreements about the future ambition of climate policy (Skovgaard 2014;
Bürgin 2015, 2018). This resulted in a more lenient approach of the European Commission towards member states' imple-
mentation of environmental policies (Knill et al. 2018). The EU considers renewable energy as central to address climate
change and achieve co-benefits for energy security and economic growth. The 2020 EU Climate and Energy Package set
a 2020 target for a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (from 1990), a 20 per cent share of renew-
able energy and improving energy efficiency by 20 per cent. The 2030 EU Climate and Energy Package aims for a 40 per
cent GHG reduction and 27 per cent of renewable energy (EC 2011), while policy ambition increased with the 2019/20
European Green Deal (EC 2019a). The new European Commission under Ursula Von der Leyen proposed targets for car-
bon neutrality by 2050—thus stepping up commitments compared to the 2011 Roadmap 80–95percenttarget.How
can public policy theories explain these multilevel reinforcing dynamics between the EU and UN levels?
This article breaks new ground by making the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF; Kingdon 1995) as a central public
policy theory fit for the empirical complexities of the twenty-first century. It offers an analytical advance that for the first
time allows illuminating and tracing interdependencies across multiple levels of governance from the local, national, regional
(e.g., EU) to the international level as policy-making on one level inspires and necessitates decisions on other gov ernance
levels. These dynamics reinforce each other over time, resulting in aggregated more ambitious policy outcomes despite tem-
porary setbacks on some governance levels. This is an important advance as the public policy literature, especially with
regard to the MSF, made little progress on formally integrating global policy change at theinternational level (e.g., explored
by Alimi 2015; Mamudu et al. 2015; Stone and Ladi 2015) and interdependencies with other governance levels.
The MSF, despite criticism of its applicability and precision, for example, remains one of the most popular theo-
retical frameworks with more than 300 applications and modifications since 2000 (Cairney and Jones 2016; Jones
et al. 2016) and over 2,400 articles on Google Scholar. The MSF is still predominantly applied within a single policy-
level context, especially the national level. There are a few notable exceptions on or linking with the local and
regional/EU levels (e.g., see Exworthy and Powell 2004; Alimi 2015) that draw on the well-understood multilevel
governance concept (Hooghe and Marks 2003) on links between the local, national and EU levels. Formally integrat-
ing interdependencies with the international level is highly significant as it matters for policy transfer across coun-
tries and understanding longer-term policy trends despite temporary set-backs on a single policy level, thus
necessitating an advance in public policy theories (Lovell 2016).
This article makes two highly significant contributions to the public policy literature. First, it modifies the MSF as
central public policy theory to take into account multilevel reinforcing dynamics (MRD), including from the interna-
tional governance level. Second, it demonstrates why this extension to the MSF on multilevel reinforcing dynamics is
useful to explain policy change at the example of links between international climate governance and European cli-
mate/renewable energy policy. The policy outcomes of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the 2019 European Green
Deal proposal can only be partly understood without taking into account interactions between the regional EU level
and the international level. This article addresses these gaps in our understanding.
The public policy literature further refined the MSF in its theoretical aspects (e.g., Herweg et al. 2015), systemat-
ically applied a theoretically refined MSF to empirical cases (e.g., Zohlnhöfer 2016), or applied some of its main com-
ponents such as the streams, policy entrepreneurs or policy windows loosely to empirical case studies (Jones
et al. 2016). Yet systematic applications of a theoretically refined MSF to empirical cases remain rare
(e.g., Zohlnhöfer et al. 2015). The MSF is frequently used in comparison with the Advocacy Coalition Framework
(e.g., Compston and Madsen 2001) and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (e.g., Carter and Jacobs 2014). The European
studies literature has highlighted how policy decisions on the national level, for example, are increasingly influenced
by decisions taken by jurisdictions at the sub-national/local, regional and international levels (Hooghe and
Marks 2003). Despite its popularity in explaining policy change and its applicability to various governance settings,
56 RIETIG
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