LIST OF PANELS

Mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts requires coordinated responses across different administrative levels, policy fields, and sectors. As in other complex policy fields, coordinating policy efforts is critical to avoid fragmentation, duplication, problem displacement, high transaction costs and policy over- or under-reaction. In many countries, the State plays a critical leadership role in coordinating climate policy efforts and integrating climate change into bureaucratic and institutional structures to ensure timely and effective outcomes. Policy coordination and integration has several dimensions, including horizontal (between different departments, agencies or sectors), vertical (between different administrative levels), and diagonal (between different departments across different levels). However, States have responded differently to the governance challenge climate change poses. Whereas some have chosen a strong “mainstreaming” approach, whereby climate policy is integrated within existing structures and programs, others have created dedicated institutions to coordinate responses across levels and sectors. Recently, several novel, hybrid modes of governance have emerged that cross-cut traditional scales and policy fields, and involve diverse non-state actors.

Despite the role that policy integration processes play in climate action, there are few comprehensive studies that examine systematically how coordination and integration is taking place. Rather than critically engaging with existing theories to better understand why and how coordination and integration works, the climate change scholarship tends to use these concepts as descriptive tools to explain the structure of governing environments in which policy action takes place, vaguely referencing a lack of coordination as a barrier to successful climate policy actions and/or as a normative goal. More rigorous and theory-driven empirical assessment of policy coordination and integration across government levels, policy fields, and sectors is needed.

Mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts requires coordinated responses across different administrative levels, policy fields, and sectors. As in other complex policy fields, coordinating policy efforts is critical to avoid fragmentation, duplication, problem displacement, high transaction costs and policy over- or under-reaction. In many countries, the State plays a critical leadership role in coordinating climate policy efforts and integrating climate change into bureaucratic and institutional structures to ensure timely and effective outcomes. Policy coordination and integration has several dimensions, including horizontal (between different departments, agencies or sectors), vertical (between different administrative levels), and diagonal (between different departments across different levels). However, States have responded differently to the governance challenge climate change poses. Whereas some have chosen a strong “mainstreaming” approach, whereby climate policy is integrated within existing structures and programs, others have created dedicated institutions to coordinate responses across levels and sectors. Recently, several novel, hybrid modes of governance have emerged that cross-cut traditional scales and policy fields, and involve diverse non-state actors.

Despite the role that policy integration processes play in climate action, there are few comprehensive studies that examine systematically how coordination and integration is taking place. Rather than critically engaging with existing theories to better understand why and how coordination and integration works, the climate change scholarship tends to use these concepts as descriptive tools to explain the structure of governing environments in which policy action takes place, vaguely referencing a lack of coordination as a barrier to successful climate policy actions and/or as a normative goal. More rigorous and theory-driven empirical assessment of policy coordination and integration across government levels, policy fields, and sectors is needed.

This session aims to bring together scholars working on climate governance topics at different levels and scales. We are particularly keen on contributions that compare across multiple case studies (medium to large-n studies), and welcome contributions that apply novel methods for data collection and analysis. The papers should ideally cover one or more of the following themes:

• Theoretical: How does context matter for climate policy integration? Are particular aspects of institutional and political environments more important than others in shaping coordination approaches and integration outcomes? What is the influence of different administrative/state systems on how mitigation and adaptation is coordinated? How should we define and recognize ‘successful’ coordination and integration?
• Methodological: How can we empirically study coordination efforts for boundary-spanning policy issues like climate change in a systematic and comprehensive way? What novel research designs can be used for such analyses?
• Empirical: What (recurrent) mechanisms are used for coordination and how successful are they in different contexts? Are there differences between developed and developing countries? What lessons can we draw from comparing across different cases? Are there differences in coordination approaches or integration outcomes between mitigation and adaptation?