The polycentricity of climate policy blockage

Dana R. Fisher () and Philip Leifeld ()
Additional contact information
Dana R. Fisher: University of Maryland
Philip Leifeld: University of Essex, Department of Government

Climatic Change, 2019, vol. 155, issue 4, No 2, 469-487

Abstract: Abstract This paper builds on recent research on polycentric governance and the Ecology of Games to understand climate politics in the USA. Complementing previous work from 2005 to 2009, we map out the ideological networks of political actors engaged in the climate policy network using data from the US Congress as an arena of symbolic interaction. Our analysis identifies polycentric sites of ideological congruence and conflict in the discourse network on climate change. Political actors from different levels and including several actor types formed multiple centers that became bipolarized between the 112th and 114th sessions of the US Congress. This process took place in tandem with the increased participation of subnational actors in the polycentric system. By the 114th session of the Congress—during which the 2016 election took place—subnational policy actors, along with a diversity of other actors, contributed to an extremely polarized discussion of one of the central policies in the Obama Administration’s Climate Action Plan: the Clean Power Plan. This finding is remarkable as the concept of polycentricity tends to be normatively associated with policy innovation, rather than stagnation. Our longitudinal analysis demonstrates, using Discourse Network Analysis, how increased multi-level participation can be associated with policy blockage of progressive climate policies rather than enabling policy innovation.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-019-02481-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:155:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10584-019-02481-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-019-02481-y

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().