In his talk Prof. Andrew Jordan will seek to explore the concept of (climate) policy innovation, including the conditions under which it might occur (or fail to occur), speculate on its empirical prevalence and suggest what it would take to fully evaluate its effects/future potential.

When set against the latest scientific predictions of future climate impacts the current pace of policy change – at all levels of governance - does seem to be painfully inadequate. As the consensus strengthens that staying within 2 degrees will be difficult if not impossible, policy makers will come under even greater pressure to identify stronger mitigation policies, and ways to combine mitigation and adaptation policies. There have been policy innovations in the past – emissions trading in the EU and the USA; binding targets in the UK Climate Change Act; the Clean Development Mechanism. At a more local level, many other innovations have been noted. Policy innovation refers to the process through which significantly different policies appear and become embedded in policy systems. It has been a long standing theme in political analysis, but existing research is characterized by a scarcity of comparable empirical data and theory-oriented explanatory analysis. Contributions have largely been limited to specific aspects of innovation (namely policy diffusion) and/or isolated case studies, and hence only offer partial explanations. The topic is however ripe for new international inter-disciplinary analysis.

The talk will be held in English.

The Berlin Sustainability Talk is a monthly brown bag seminar at the Environmental Policy Research Centre (ffu). It presents a forum for discussion and exchange about ongoing research projects and recent trends in environmental policy research with scholars of other institutes, business representatives, politics, and public administrations as well as the interested public.