Jale Tosun

Heidelberg University · Institute of Political Science

European water policies aim to promote tap water consumption among citizens. Our survey of 5815 German respondents investigates factors influencing tap water consumption in key out-of-home settings: workplace, recreational sports, hospitality and travel. Results show tap water is consumed most frequently in sports settings and least in hospitality,...

The attribution of responsibility is an important aspect of democratic government and governance. This study is interested in explaining variation in the responsibility that the public attributes to farmers for tackling climate change and environmental degradation. It analyzes data for respondents based in the 27 member states of the European Union...

The corpus of national climate policies continues to grow, but to what effect? Using data on 2,782 policy instruments in 43 OECD countries and major emerging economies over the period 2000–2019 we show that national climate policy portfolios that specialise on certain instrument types and sectors are associated with faster reductions in fossil CO2...

We build on research on polycentric climate governance and the strategic behavior of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to assess the factors that determine the partnership choices of climate NGOs. More precisely, we are interested in how these factors relate to the type of governance actors and the governance scale at which their partners operat...

Elected politicians and civil servants are key in developing climate policy. The articles in this special issue investigate factors that induce politico-administrative actors to adopt climate policies and dismantle anti-climate policies to advance decarbonisation. Politico-administrative actors have predominantly expanded climate policy and raised...

Politicians' engagement with climate change is the focus of an emerging literature, but this research has not been subjected to systematic analysis. To address this important gap, we perform a systematic review of 141 articles on politicians and climate change published between 1985 and 2021. We find a growing research area; almost half of the arti...

How does autocratization affect the environmental performance of states? While research on this question is still limited, a rich body of research has investigated a related research question, namely how regime types relate to environmental performance, focusing on the differences between different types of democracies and autocracies. In this chap...

Studies on the relationship between religious attitudes and attitudes towards climate change and other environmental issues have tended to focus on the United States. While there is good reason to expect such a relationship to exist, our understanding of it is limited first and foremost by the limited number of country-comparative studies. This stu...

Language plays a decisive role in politics. At various stages of the policy process, language influences what topics are placed on the political agenda, which political solutions prevail, and whether adopted policy measures are perceived as legitimate and lead to intended behavioral changes. Given that language has an impact on the policy process,...

Young people Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) have become a target population of policymaking in Europe. After one decade of political attention and corresponding policy action, we consider it a good time to take stock of the literature that has dealt with young people who are classified as NEET and the policies adopted in response...

This thematic issue discusses the design, implementation, and impact of youth-oriented active labour market policies in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its peripheries. The need to address territorialised, youth-oriented active labour market policies is pressing for several reasons. For one, the whole socioeconomic paradigm is undergoing fund...

This chapter investigates the climate justice principles and the mandate and scope of multilateral institutions in pursuit of sustainable and climate-resilient development. Specifically, the climate change operational framework and strategies of key multilateral development banks are analysed from the perspective of climate justice, along with impl...

Youth unemployment has been an issue in European countries for many years. However, the attention paid to it by policymakers has varied over time, and there are high cross-country variations in both the size of the phenomenon, representations of it, and policy interventions. This study adds an intra-country component to the country-comparative dime...

The European Union (EU) began developing climate policy in the 1990s. Since then, it has built up a broad portfolio of mitigation policy measures and governance tools, including legally binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and policy measures addressing emissions trading, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and more. In 2019,...

The European Climate Pact provides opportunities for individuals, communities and organisations to declare their commitment to climate action. This study analyses the publicly available web profiles of the European Climate Pact Ambassadors (PAs) as of January 2023. First, it explores the extent to which people who volunteer as PAs demonstrate commi...

Transnational public–private governance initiatives (TGIs) have become key elements in global governance, especially in the governance of sustainability. Pertinent research has concentrated on why TGIs have emerged as well as on their impacts on political outcomes and questions related to their legitimacy. This instructive literature has predominan...

Environmental policies that fail to be implemented also fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as fulfil other goals related to environmental protection. Consequently, a vast body of research has emerged that assesses how environmental policies are implemented, that is, how they are put into practice. In this chapter, the authors give an o...

A growing number of farmers’ cooperatives cultivate crops without chemical pesticides, but also without organic certification. How does this intermediate form of agriculture between conventional and organic production function? What are the outcomes of this production form on cropland biodiversity? How does this model contribute to the transition t...

This chapter examines the process related to policymaking as well as potential determinants of policy choices. It begins with a discussion of conceptual models of policymaking, namely the institutional, rational, incremental, group, elite, and process models. It then considers the policy cycle, which models the policy process as a series of politic...

The European Climate Pact is one constitutive element of the European Green Deal, which has the ambition of making the European Union (EU) climate neutral by 2050. It is a particularly intriguing measure since it is designed as a format for volunteering, known as European Climate Pact Ambassadors, whom the EU Commission expects to inform members of...

The European Union (EU) has committed itself to becoming climate-neutral by 2050. To attain this goal, the EU adopted the European Green Deal, which lays out an ambitious research agenda that resonates with what the EU committed to achieve within the framework of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The European Green Deal strives to...

Is there a rural–urban divide in citizens’ views on European Union agricultural policy? We argue that the place of residence influences a person’s attitude toward agricultural policy issues. More precisely, we postulate that rural populations are less likely to view environmental and climate action, and sustainable food production as key objectives...

To what extent do traditional environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) tackle climate change issues? What explains the variation among ENGOs regarding their attention to climate change issues? To answer these questions, we use an original dataset comprising 293 ENGOs that are affiliated with the International Union for Conservation of Na...

Crises signal eventful deviations from the normal state of affairs and prompt societies to reflect (on themselves). The Covid-19 crisis provided a stark illustration of this. In view of the apparent omnipresence of crises, the question arises as to how states have dealt with and can deal with crises in the 21st century. This special volume explores...

German federalism has represented both an obstacle and an opportunity for the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. Initially, the state governments competed against each other over the “right” way to handle the situation. The different strategies adopted by the states informed the federal government’s policy decisions, which resulted in the first...

This editorial introduces the journal Climate Action to its audience and defines its aims and scope. It first calls for the need to understand climate action as the choices and behavior of international organizations, governments, civil society, businesses, and individuals. Next, it discusses both the facilitators and impacts of climate action. The...

This study analyzes the enactment of public participation in rulemaking within the European Union and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries. It relies on an original dataset of administrative procedural acts and administrative laws concerning the making of delegated legislation. As 12 out of 39 countries enacted a proce...

We assess whether different presidents have different "styles" of involving intermediary organizations such as trade unions or business associations in the policy process. Given that temporal variation in the relationship between presidents and intermediaries can be observed, to what extent can the intermediaries included in the policy process be e...

This study offers insights into the institutional arrangements established to coordinate policies aiming at the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Drawing on the literature on policy design, we highlight institutional arrangements as elements of policy design spaces and contend that they fall into four categories that either stress the...

The European Green Deal puts forth an ambitious agenda for a transition towards sustainable development. To this end, it embraces participatory governance and has even created a new tool for it: climate pact ambassadors (CPAs). CPAs either act on their own behalf or represent organisations that have made a publicly accessible pledge. They are expec...

Action is needed from all the major emitting economies if we are to achieve global net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Climate action takes place at various levels of the political system. In this study, we concentrate on cooperation between the major economies on clean energy technologies in the frame of the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM; initiated...

Rural areas are very complex zones of analysis, with many interacting components influencing development patterns and socio-economic conditions. In turn, these lead to desirable or non-desirable solutions. Given that many rural areas are struggling to attract youth, the development of attractive and stimulating environments, as well as a vast numbe...

Environmental concerns of young female farmers: a short literature review by ilkay Unay-Gailhard, Štefan Bojnec, and Tereza Pilarova

A core component of the European Union’s (EU) commitment to combatting climate change is the international promotion of issues related to sustainable development. Historically, it has done this by means of different instruments, such as international cooperation or development aid, but recently, it has opted increasingly for trade agreements betwee...

The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted the Anti-food Waste Law of the People’s Republic of China in April 2021 to guarantee grain security, conserve resources, and protect the environment. We pursue three research questions: Why has China implemented a law with sanctions to reduce food waste, and why now? Why does the law...

In this study we investigate the impact of individual, parental and social factors on young adults' job-finding intentions across countries and overall. We test our hypotheses by conducting binary logistic regressions on the basis of an original dataset that comprises responses from more than 5200 young adults and their parents from 11 European cou...

Do work values affect attitudes and intentions regarding career development? Differentiating between work centrality, intrinsic and extrinsic work values, and using original survey data from German respondents, this study shows that these work values differ in their effect on career development. The empirical analysis examines three outcome dimensi...

National policy ambition plays a central role in climate change governance under the Paris Agreement and is now a focus of rapidly emerging literature. In this contribution, we argue that policy ambition can be captured by the level of national policy activity, which in accordance with the existing literature should be referred to as "policy densit...

Can relatively short-term political leadership affect long-term national policy styles, and if so, how? We examine these questions in order to explain the temporal dynamics in national policy styles observed in several recent studies whose findings have challenged the traditional view that policy styles lend continuity and stability to policy-makin...

Scholarship about both politics and policy tends to represent tools of direct democracy as veto points that are used to prevent policy change. In this study, we move beyond this unidimensional view and explain the conditions under which instruments of direct democracy can be conducive to policy change. We investigate both the direct and indirect ef...

The concept of national policy styles differs between states in respect of whether their governments react to policy changes in an anticipatory or reactive fashion and whether they seek to achieve consensus with societal actors or impose decisions on them. To date, this conceptualization has been applied to a limited number of states and produced o...

Adopting public policies to deliver the ambitious long-term goals of the Paris Agreement will require significant societal commitment. That commitment will eventually emerge from the interaction between policies, publics and politicians. This article has two main aims. First, it reviews the existing literatures on these three to identify salient re...

This article departs from the assumption that the challenge of putting the Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F) into action stems from the broader challenge of attaining cross‐sectoral policy integration. Policy integration has been part of the EU's policy approach for a long time and has predominantly been achieved in the form of environmental policy integ...

We examine stakeholder participation in the online debate on genetically modified organisms in China and assess how the debate has changed over time. Therefore, we compare messages posted between 2013 and 2020 on the Chinese microblog website Weibo by using discourse network analysis. Our findings reveal strong opposition to genetically modified cr...

Many of the current scenario studies on future water extremes do not seem to adequately address their emerging wickedness. Instead, they often focus on one of the extremes: floods or droughts or pollution, but not on the complexity of interlinkages between extremes. Also, very few studies seem to integrate the natural and the social science perspec...

This chapter, authored by Jale Tosun, Julia Weiss, Alexa Meyer-Hamme and Marcel Katzlinger undertakes the important task of evaluating – from the German perspective – if the German dual model can be successfully transported to Spain and Italy where youth unemployment has traditionally been, and continues to be acute. Focusing on the involvement of...

This study concentrates on the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) as one of several high-level global forums on climate change governance. The CEM can be conceptualised as a ‘polycentric’ organisation in which its members collaborate on a wide range of issues concerning the clean energy transition. Can we identify a set of domestic-level variables that...

Die Landwirtschaftspolitik ist für die CDU von besonderer Bedeutung. In der Vergangenheit hat sie sich als Fürsprecherin der Landwirtinnen und -wirte gesehen. Die Grünen hingegen haben sich traditionell für die Integration von Natur- und Artenschutz in die Landwirtschaftspolitik und eine „Agrarwende“ ausgesprochen. Wie haben beide Parteien im Rahme...

Global forums on climate action consist of groups of countries that take climate action outside of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This analysis investigates in which global forums post-Communist countries participate and their motivation for it. The article draws from theories of policy diffusion to explain why post-Comm...

In 2018, a citizens' initiative (CI) launched in the German State of Bavaria put forth the 'policy idea' of preserving and enhancing biodiversity and formulated a concrete policy proposal for implementing it. This policy idea diffused across Germany and resulted in the launch of similar CIs in the States of Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Lower Sax...

This study investigates the connection between the reasons why some young people end their education without attaining a university degree and the effect of this decision on the probability of becoming a NEET in a set of European countries. Young people face the highest degree of disadvantage in the Mediterranean and East European countries, wherea...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments to impose major restrictions on individual freedom in order to stop the spread of the virus. With the successful development of a vaccine, these restrictions are likely to become obsolete-on the condition that people get vaccinated. However, parts of the population have reservations against vaccination....

This study investigates the participation of China and Russia in the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM). In which policy initiatives have these two countries participated? In which initiatives have they taken the lead? Building on the club theory and international relations literature, we approach the research questions by offering an in-depth analysis...

Since its inception in 1991, the EBRD has had a strong environmental agenda, which it ‘exported’ to post-Communist Europe and Asia. We posit that the post-Soviet states have decreased their carbon emissions more than the average states borrowing from the EBRD as they were more affected by the economic crisis associated with the end of the Soviet Un...

Policymakers increasingly perceive of micropollutants in water (e.g. pharmaceutical residues) as an issue that needs to be addressed. How do environmental groups, in their capacity as knowledge brokers between science and politics, contribute to evidence-based policymaking concerning aquatic micro pollutants? To address this research question, we c...

How are environmental conflicts managed in China and Russia? Both states are territorially large non-democracies affected by environmental degradation due to industrialisation and economic growth, and both are characterised by collectivist culture resulting from pronounced historical legacies and Communism. Our analysis of China indicates the impor...

Introduction Youth unemployment is a major source of concern in Europe. There are two reasons why the levels of youth unemployment continue to be high in certain European Union (EU) member states. First, young people have greater difficulties in finding a job than adults. In many instances, young people's skills and competences are critically asses...

Climate mitigation scenarios envision considerable growth of wind and solar power, but scholars disagree on how this growth compares with historical trends. Here we fit growth models to wind and solar trajectories to identify countries in which growth has already stabilized after the initial acceleration. National growth has followed S-curves to re...

One of the European Union (EU) institutions' responses to the alleged "democratic deficit" in the EU is the introduction of the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI). The ECI provides an agenda-setting tool accessible to different advocacy groups. This study investigates the narrative strategies of ECI organizers to mobilize citizens across the EU. W...

Slow onset events by definition occur gradually and it might be expected that policy-makers as a result pay less attention to them than to immediate risks or ‘shock’ crises. If this is true and what can be done about it are important issues for climate change policy-making, given the gradual nature of many climate related issues. Public bureaucraci...

The European Commission’s Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy, under the European Green Deal, acknowledges that innovative techniques, including biotechnology, may play a role in increasing sustainability. At the same time, organic farming will be promoted, and at least 25% of the EU’s agricultural land shall be under organic farming by 2030. How can both...

Citation: Simões, F.; Rocca, A.; Rocha, R.; Mateus, C.; Marta, E.; Tosun, J. Time to Get Emotional: Determinants of University Students' Intention to Return to Rural Areas. Sustainability 2021, 13, 5135. https:// Abstract: The social sustainability of rural areas is affected by the phenomenon of "brain drain" due to younger generations' outward mig...

Since May 2019, several German cities and municipalities have declared a ‘climate emergency’, an action which makes climate impact assessments mandatory for all projects or policy proposals. How have the processes in the local governments changed in response to the emergency status? How have the processes in the city and municipal councils changed?...

Parliamentary debates are an important instrument for setting the political agenda. We hypothesize that parliamentarians belonging to a Green party deliver more speeches on issues related not only to the environment, but also to agriculture, energy and transport as well as to citizen and minority rights. We conceptualize this mix of policy issues a...

This chapter provides details on our methodological approach, including the types of interviews conducted, our interviewee sampling strategy, the way we conducted the interviews, and the analysis of the interview data. Since we adopt a qualitative approach, the analytical framework consists of general guidelines, which helps to attain our common re...

In this chapter, we outline the theoretical framework that guides the case studies presented in the Chapters 4– 14. The empirical phenomenon, in which all contributions in this volume are collectively interested, is economic self-sufficiency as introduced in Chapter 1.

This chapter provides the introduction to the edited volume. It first offers a conceptualisation of the main outcome variable, economic self-sufficiency, and then provides insights from the CUPESSE survey that forms the departure point of this analysis. Afterwards, the chapter gives an overview of the volume’s structure. Then the final part summari...

In this chapter, we compare the findings reported by the authors of chapters 4 to 14 and offer some general reflections and conclusions. Our overall goal is to provide answers to the research questions posed in chapter 1 and to assess the conceptual model developed in chapter 2. To this end, we proceed as follows. First, we outline the dimensions o...

European countries have faced profound changes in family structures and family forms over the last few decades. This volume provides insights from eleven European countries with varying welfare state arrangements, exploring the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of attitudes, resources and values matter with regard to the economic s...

Studies examining styles have tended to focus on the national level and to contend that policy-making processes need to be studies through the lens of the manner in which the institutional make-up of a government generates the routines and standard operating procedures which constitute its decision-making structure and processes. Given the interest...