The successful implementation of the Paris Agreement requires substantial energy policy change on the national level. In national energy policy-making, climate change mitigation goals have to be balanced with arguments on other national energy policy goals, namely limiting cost and increasing energy security. Thus far, very little is known about the relative importance of these goals and how they are related to political partisanship. In order to address this gap, we focus on parliamentary discourse around low-carbon energy futures in Germany over the past three decades and analyze the relative importance of, and partisanship around, energy policy goals. We find that the political discourse revolves around four, rather than three, goals as conventionally assumed; improving the competitiveness of the national energy technology industry is not only an additional energy policy goal, it is also highly important in the political discourse. In general, the relative importance of these goals is rather stable over time and partisanship around them is limited. Yet, a sub-analysis of the discourse on renewable energy technologies reveals a high level of partisanship, albeit decreasing over time. Particularly, the energy industry goal’s importance increases while its partisanship vanishes. We discuss how these findings can inform future energy policy research and provide a potential inroad for more ambitious national energy policies.
Key policy insights
In addition to the three classic goals of energy policy (limiting cost, securing access and reducing the environmental burden) we identify a fourth policy goal: strengthening the national energy technology industry
Conformity between the three classical energy and the industrial policy goals is a key driver explaining policy change
For renewable energy technologies, partisanship around this fourth goal is lower than around other goals and decreases over time as innovation allows these technologies to increasingly correspond to policy-makers’ high-level goals
Extant research underestimates the importance of industry policy goals, but overestimates environmental co-benefits of low-carbon energy options
Paradigmatic policy change in Germany did not depend on top-down shifts in high-level policy goals but was driven by lower-level technology-specific goals
How mining companies overcome the problems faced by the fixity of resources and how they might come to exercise influence in societies which appear to be mostly post-industrial are complex questions of political geography. This is not least the case for a region such as the Pilbara—an iron ore site isolated from metropolitan centres—in Australia—a country isolated from many global centres and markets. At the same time, local struggles in this resources site have been profoundly influential in the making of a national neoliberal industrial relations agenda. Building on other scholarship on the Pilbara, but here re-emphasising the local scale and the details of work and regulation, provides a way to assess the place's wider importance. The Pilbara is a site of thoroughly transformed industrial relations, from a union space when export mining began in the 1960s to an employer stronghold today. Policy makers delivered changes to facilitate the remaking of employer power in workplaces in and beyond mining. This resource periphery has therefore been central to the remaking of national policy regimes. 相似文献