Helge Jörgens

ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa | ISCTE · Department of Political Science and Public Policy

While there is little doubt that international public administrations (IPAs) exert autonomous influence on international policy outputs, scholars struggle with the problem of how to measure this influence. Established methods for assessing political influence are of limited use when focusing on international bureaucracies. The main reason is that I...

New Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) are becoming increasingly attractive. From a global perspective, there has been a rapid diffusion of these market-based, voluntary or informational instruments. This article examines the spread of four different NEPIs – eco-labels, energy or carbon taxes, national environmental policy plans or strategies...

Over recent decades national environmental policies have become increasingly alike. This book analyses the driving forces of this process of policy convergence, providing an in-depth empirical analysis of the international forces at work. It does so by investigating how four countries - France, Hungary, Mexico and the Netherlands - have shaped thei...

The chapter investigates how different types of state transformations play out in one major field, environmental policy-making. While the public goods character of transboundary environmental problems might lead us to expect weaker levels of privatization and stronger levels of internationalization, many environment-related state activities began t...

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society’s relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policyma...

International bureaucracies, also called International Public Administrations (IPAs), have been identified as potentially influential actors within the global climate change regime complex. To assess how these organizations exert influence, scholars have predominantly relied on case studies, interviews and descriptive (network) statistics. This art...

Interconnected bureaucracies. Comparing online and offline networks during global climate negotiations Measuring the influence of international public administrations has traditionally been conducted with ‘offline’ data, using interviews, surveys or official documents. However, an emerging strand of the literature argues that influence can also be...

The past few years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars and policy-makers in the interplay of international bureaucracies with civil society organizations, other non-profit entities, and the private sector. This article extends the state of research by investigating whether and how secretariats try to strengthen their reputation within...

Portugal is in the middle of a major transformation of its energy supply, which has been shaped by internal resource constraints, growing environmental concerns, and the dynamics of European integration. Portugal’s past choices – the investment in hydropower and the refusal of nuclear energy – and the lack of an endowment of resources have constrai...

Measuring the influence of international public administrations has traditionally been conducted with ‘offline’ data, using interviews, surveys or official documents. However, an emerging strand of the literature argues that influence can also be observed ‘online’, with data based on online social networks, such as Twitter. Our contribution aims at...

With the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), inclusive education has become the main alternative to special schools for the schooling of children with disabilities. In order to promote the global implementation of inclusive education, a variety of stakeholders form networks to transmit and exchange information and knowledg...

Die vollständig überarbeitete Neuauflage des Handbuchs zur deutschen Europapolitik gibt einen tiefen Einblick in die Verflechtung Deutschlands mit der EU und arbeitet den Einfluss heraus, den Deutschland auf europäische Integrations- und Entscheidungsprozesse hat. Renommierte AutorInnen analysieren Grundlagen und Konzepte deutscher Europapolitik un...

Twitter hat sich für viele Disziplinen zu einem wichtigen Untersuchungsgegenstand und einer interessanten Datenquelle entwickelt. Jedoch wird die Kommunikationsplattform von Forscher*innen der transnationalen und Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) bislang wenig untersucht. Unter den verschiedenen sozialen Medien wird Twitter am intensivsten von polit...

International organizations and their secretariats, called international public administrations (IPAs), have been found to hold considerable authority in world politics. This study conceptualizes and measures IPA authority in the digital sphere. It proposes the concept of digital authority to measure the authority of actors in online social network...

Our article aims to better understand the role of the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the increasingly complex global climate governance structure. We employ an innovative approach to addressing this issue by systematically examining the climate secretariat's relations with the main groups of act...

International public administrations (IPA s) play a significant role for the success of multilateral negotiations. As the bureaucratic bodies of international organizations, they are deeply involved in international negotiations, but receive little credit for their outcomes. By studying the administrative styles of the Secretariat of the UN Framewo...

In a context of multiple crises, the European Union’s climate and energy policies have become highly politicized and contested. Based on a comparative study of renewable energy policies in ten EU member states, and adopting a circular view of policy change and Europeanization to account for overlapping sovereignty claims between the national and th...

Education is considered an essential tool for achieving sustainability-related goals. In this regard, education for sustainable development (ESD) and climate change education (CCE) have become prominent concepts. The central characteristics of both concepts influence the non-hierarchical network governance structure that has formed around them: (1)...

Despite the relevance of education-specific negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the increasingly influential role of the UNFCCC secretariat therein, research in this area is still scarce. In this article, we contribute to closing this research gap by exploring how the UNFCCC secretariat becomes...

While there is little doubt that social networks are essential for processes of implementing social innovations in community education such as Climate Change Education (CCE) or Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), scholars have neglected to analyze these processes in the multilevel governance system using Social Network Analysis. In this ar...

Despite the relevance of education-specific negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the influential role of the secretariat therein, research in this area is still scarce. We contribute to closing this research gap by exploring how the UNFCCC secretariat becomes involved in and has latent influence...

This book is a guide for understanding the EU renewable energy policy as one of the most ambitious attempts world-wide to facilitate a transition towards more sustainable energy systems. It contains key case studies for understanding how member states have shaped the EU renewable energy policy, how the EU has affected the policies of its member sta...

In the second half of the 2010s, the transformation of the energy systems of the European Union (EU) and its member states towards a greater incorporation of renewable energy sources (RES) has come to a crossroads. While the 1990s and most of the 2000s witnessed a rapid increase in policies and programmes aimed to promote the production and consump...

Chapter 1 presents the analytical framework used throughout the book to study how renewable energy policies in the EU member states emerged and have changed throughout the past three decades. In order to study renewable energy policymaking in the EU and its member states and to untangle the complex policy process that surround it, we draw on the Eu...

Conceptualizing international public administrations (IPAs) as attention-seeking bureaucracies which aim to actively feed their policy-relevant information into multilateral decision-making process, the chapter proposes two pathways through which international treaty secretariats may seek to influence international negotiations: (a) secretariats ma...

The energy transition or Energiewende is a main topic in German politics. Not only is it a core project of the Merkel coalition government, but it is also a matter that, in general terms, generates a cross-party consensus (Jänicke 2011: 131). The Energiewende has been supported across time by different government coalitions, involving all the main...

Over recent decades national environmental policies have become increasingly alike. This book analyses the driving forces of this process of policy convergence, providing an in-depth empirical analysis of the international forces at work. It does so by investigating how four countries - France, Hungary, Mexico and the Netherlands - have shaped thei...

Are environmental policies in European countries growing more and more similar? In this era of globalisation it seems likely, but if so, at what level do national environmental policies converge? Are countries generally reaching out to the most stringent and most effective models available, or does increased international competition rather force t...

In this concluding chapter we summarise the main findings of the six empirical chapters in the light of the research questions formulated in Chapter 1. The role of the different mechanisms of environmental policy convergence will be analysed both individually and with regard to the various ways in which they interact. This also extends to the subme...

This chapter analyses the attempts of the Bush Administration in the United States (2001-2009) to dismantle the New Source Review (NSR), a programme to control air pollution from large and stationary sources. After a short introduction to US environmental politics, it first identifies potential drivers affecting decision makers' perceptions of dism...

Has globalization led to a convergence in policy-making across nations and, if so, what are the causal mechanisms? This book analyses the extent to which the environmental policies of nation states have converged over the last thirty years and whether this convergence has led to a strengthening or weakening of environmental standards (a race to the...

The authors examine the convergence of national environmental policies. They investigate the international spread of 22 environmental policy innovations across 43 countries and of 8 environmental policy innovations worldwide. On this empirical basis, recurring patterns in the global spread of environmental policy innovations are identified and link...

The political science literature lacks a clear distinction of the terms policy-convergence, policy-diffusion and policy-transfer. As a result, there is a considerable amount of terminological and analytical imprecision, impeding a thorough synthesis of the various conceptual and approaches related to these terms and the development of a coherent re...

Policy diffusion is a process during which innovative policy ideas are communicated internationally and implemented voluntarily and unilaterally by an increasing number of countries. As a rule, processes of policy diffusion lead to a convergence of national policies. From a governance perspective, it can therefore be argued that policy diffusion co...

Politikdiffusion ist ein Prozess, in dessen Verlauf Informationen fiber innovative Politiken im internationalen System kommuniziert werden und diese Politiken von einer zunehmenden Zahl von Lindern freiwillig und unilateral, d.h. ohne externen Zwang oder kollektiven Beschluss, iibernommen werden. In der Regel führen Diffusionsprozesse zu einer Angl...

Environmental Policymaking has been confronted with a fundamental change of the structure and nature of the key environmental problems it has to deal with. Many of today’s most pressing environmental problems can be characterized as ‘persistent’, meaning that over a longer period of time political attempts to solve them have failed or have not show...

How do international processes, actors and institutions contribute to domestic policy change and cross-national policy convergence? Scholars in the fields of international relations and comparative politics have identified a wide array of convergence mechanisms operating at the international or transnational level. In order to categorize this wide...

The article gives an empirical overview of the international spread of 22 environmental policy innovations. The policy innovations examined in the article include administrative institutions (e.g. environmental ministries, scientific advisory bodies), laws (e.g. soil protection laws, packaging waste laws), instruments of environmental policy integr...

Studies in comparative political science and international relations found that nations increasingly tend to adopt similar environmental policy innovations and thereby contribute to the innovations' international proliferation. In their sum, these individual policy adoptions add up to a remarkable degree of cross-national environmental policy conve...

Nationale Umweltpolitikinnovationen breiten sich zunehmend international aus. Ergebnis dieses seit den sechziger Jahren andauernden globalen Ausbreitungsprozesses ist eine weit reichende Transformation der nationalen ebenso wie der internationalen Umweltpolitik. Zentrale Merkmale dieser Entwicklung sind der kontinuierliche Auf- und Ausbau staatlich...

The United States and European countries are experimenting with a new generation of policy approaches for combating environmental degradation. Industrial Transformation evaluates the effectiveness of twelve innovative voluntary, collaborative, and information-based programs, focusing particularly on the effectiveness of these programs in bringing a...

Ausgangspunkt des Forschungsvorhabens war die empirische Beobachtung, dass nationale umweltpolitische Initiativen von anderen Ländern zum Teil mit hoher Geschwindigkeit übernommen werden. Globale Diffusionsprozesse sind in der Technik ebenso wie in der Sozial- oder Gesundheitspolitik frühzeitig beobachtet worden. In der Umweltpolitik kommt ihnen ho...

During the 1990s, a new regulatory pattern in domestic environmental policy making emerged. This pattern is largely a result of policy diffusion. In the absence of formal obligations, regulatory instruments that have been communicated internationally and were already being practiced elsewhere were voluntarily emulated and adopted by policy makers....

During the 1990s, a new regulatory pattern in domestic environmental policy making emerged. This pattern is largely a result of policy diffusion. In the absence of formal obligations, regulatory instruments that have been communicated internationally and were already being practiced elsewhere were voluntarily emulated and adopted by policy makers....

The study which was commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) focuses on practices for improving institutions and decision-making for sustainable development in Germany. It highlights current trends as well as selected promising developments that could help achieve sustainable development. It focuses primaril...

Die Umweltpolitik der 90er Jahre ist zunehmend vom Leitbild der Nachhaltigen Entwicklung gekennzeichnet. Damit einher geht ein weitreichender Wandel des umweltpolitischen Steuerungsansatzes. Im Zentrum dieses neuen umweltpolitischen Ansatzes steht eine strategische Umwelt- bzw. Nachhaltigkeitsplanung, wie sie in der Agenda 21 skizziert und in einer...

Uncertainty is a distinct feature of environmental policy and environmental issues. This article explores the potential of strategic and comprehensive environmental planning for dealing with these uncertainties. First, four types of uncertainty and their specific impacts on environmental policy are distinguished. Strategic environmental planning co...

Thema dieses Beitrags ist die Diffusion umweltpolitischer Innovationen zwischen Nationalstaaten in ihrer Bedeutung für die globale Entwicklung von Umweltpolitik. Dabei geht es um die empirische Beobachtung, daß nationale Umweltinitiativen vielfach mit hoher Geschwindigkeit in anderen Ländern übernommen werden und sich auf diese Weise international...

Strategische Umwelt- oder Nachhaltigkeitsplanung ist keine kurzfristige Modeerscheinung. Sie ist einer der wichtigsten Versuche, das Leitbild der nachhaltigen Entwicklung auf nationaler Ebene umzusetzen (Meadowcroft in diesem Band). Nicht nur die „üblichen Verdächtigen“wie etwa die Niederlande, Dänemark oder Schweden haben seit Ende der achtziger J...

While the first part of the article focuses on the possible advantages of strategic and integrative planning in environmental policy, the second part looks at existing national planning approaches in OECD countries, underlining important differences and similarities, and attempting a preliminary evaluation of three national environmental policy pla...

The Green Plan was formally announced by the Canadian government on December 11, 1990. It was intended to be a five-year, $3-billion comprehensive environmental action plan to guide federal environmental policy. A key objective of the Plan’s designers was to change the machinery of government concerning environment and sustainability issues. The Gr...

Den Ausgangspunkt für die Erstellung eines Nationalen Umweltplanes (NUP) für Österreich bildete ein seit 1990 durchgeführter Den Ausgangspunkt für die Erstellung eines Nationalen Umweltplanes (NUP) für Österreich bildete ein seit 1990 durchgeführter hausinterner Reflexionsprozeß über die Planungserfordernisse sowie Umsetzungskapazitäten und -effizi...

The Netherlands has the dubious honour of being the first and only country where a government has fallen on an environmental issue. That issue was the proposal in 1989 to adopt the first National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP).

Der systematisch vergleichenden Analyse dieses Kapitels liegen die Umweltpläne bzw. Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien der Niederlande. Großbritanniens, Kanadas, Österreichs und der Schweiz zugrunde. Unter den ausgewählten Ländern finden sich drei Bundesstaaten (Kanada, Schweiz, Österreich), die insoweit eine höhere Vergleichbarkeit im Verhältnis zur Bundes...