LIST OF PANELS

Public policy is a main lever for addressing sustainability challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss (Geels et al. 2017; Möhring et al. 2020). Yet, the level of ambition of current policies is not in line with the urgency and scale of these challenges (IPCC 2018). The reason for this gap can primarily be located in the underlying politics of policy change: Because it often imposes costs on incumbent actors, effective policy change is contested by both elite and mass politics with stakes in the status quo (Jordan and Moore 2020; Mildenberger 2020; Schmid et al. 2019; Stokes 2020).

Recent scholarship has turned to these aspects related to the political feasibility of policy change (Jewell and Cherp 2020). A particularly promising and vibrant subset of this literature takes a dynamic perspective and examines whether and how policies can be intentionally designed to enable a positive ratcheting-up process (Levin et al. 2012; Rosenbloom et al. 2019; Sewerin et al. 2020). Such anticipatory policy design may increase the feasibility of ambitious policy in the future, for instance by inducing technological or behavioral change (Fesenfeld et al. 2020; Schmidt and Sewerin 2019) and thus creating and strengthening supportive Green coalitions (Meckling et al. 2015; Pahle et al. 2018). An important theoretical reference point for this emerging literature are concepts from policy feedback theory (Béland and Schlager 2019; Pierson 1993) and policy design literature (Haelg et al. 2020; Capano and Woo 2017). Research in this vein often looks at past political processes to propose lessons for future policy design (Schmid et al. 2019; Yona et al. 2019). It also stretches across different sub-disciplines, such as public policy (Capano and Woo 2017; Cashore and Howlett 2007), the transitions community (Rosenbloom et al. 2019), or governance scholarship (Muiderman et al. 2020).

However, three main questions remain open in this emerging literature: (1) how to identify and empirically assess anticipatory policy design, (2) what are the underlying logics and concrete mechanism behind induced policy changes, (3) whether this research should engage in prescriptive work or focus on analytical approaches. The objective of this panel is to gather scholars from different sub-disciplines working on these questions of politics and policy design in addressing sustainability challenges.

We invite papers that broadly deal with these questions of anticipatory policy design and political feasibility of policy change in the context of sustainability transitions: (1) empirical strategies to assess anticipatory policy design, (2) conceptualization of underlying mechanisms and logics, and (3) the trade-offs between analytical and prescriptive work. Contributions from any sub-discipline are welcome, as are both theoretical/conceptual and empirical contributions. More specifically, we invite

(1)    Theoretical contributions that aim at advancing the conceptual debates and attempt to provide more unifying frameworks that may bridge different approaches in the sub-disciplines. Relevant questions could be: How can policy feedback theory inform scholarly debates on forward-looking policy design? How does anticipatory policy design compare across different target outcomes such as technological and behavioral change, as well as nature-based solutions?

(2)    Empirically driven papers that examine specific, relevant cases of anticipatory policy design, which may also provide lessons for other cases. Relevant questions could be: How do specific policy design elements of a countries’ policy instrument enable ratcheting-up of policy ambition? To what extent are policymakers taking into account information on the problem at hand, such as technology characteristics, when designing anticipatory public policy?

(3)    Methodologically innovative papers that aim at improving our approaches to operationalize and measure anticipatory policy design and its underlying politics. Innovative approaches may include less established political science methods such as experiments or modelling.