Meeting Kyoto Commitments: European Union Influence on Norway and Germany

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to understand and explain how the EU has influenced the climate change policymaking processes in Norway and Germany, despite strong prior national preferences. We ask how the EU has affected the choice and design of climate policy instruments. Has the EU been a decisive factor in shaping policy responses, or has domestic politics mattered more? To address these questions empirically, we focus on the policy formulation of a particularly relevant and recently debated climate policy issue, namely, emissions trading. We focus on the objectives that national governments have sought to meet, examine the values and principles underlying those objectives, identify the means through which each country has attempted to achieve their desired goals, and go on to investigate how this process may have been influenced by the EU. We analyze the policymaking process for an emissions trading scheme in the EU, and discuss the processes through which emissions trading has been introduced as a policy instrument alternative in Norway and Germany. We examine the extent to which the EU appears to have influenced policy instrument choice in the two countries and suggest reasons for this.