Science Blog by Federica Cittadino
The fight against climate change requires global vision and global commitments, hence the major role played by States and international negotiation rounds. However, implementation is currently one of the biggest failures of the UNFCCC framework and one of the aspects that need to be addressed urgently if we want to avoid major climate disasters. While implementation is expected primarily at the national level, my view is that at subnational levels it does happen but it should happen more – that is, at the level of federated entities, regional authorities, Autonomous Provinces, and similar. To investigate this understudied problem, the Eurac Research Institute of Comparative Federalism and the Universities of Trento and Innsbruck have joined forces under the project “Climate change integration in the multilevel governance of Italy and Austria”. This project, of which I am leader, focuses on subnational governments (the Autonomous Provinces of Trento and Bolzano and Länder Tyrol and Vorarlberg) as central players in the integration of climate change considerations in those policy sectors where they exercise legislative powers, namely transport, energy and water, and spatial planning. If you want to know more about the project’s aims and preliminary results, read this blog post!
The project focuses on subnational governments as central players in the integration of climate change considerations in those policy sectors where they exercise legislative powers. The reasons for this focus relate mainly to the fact that subnational governments hold powers in most of the sectors either impacted by climate change or sectors that directly affect national and international mitigation and adaptation goals. The project has been financed under the Research Südtirol/Alto Adige program of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen, to explore how integration is realized in Italy’s Autonomous Provinces of Bolzano/Bozen and Trento and Austria’s Länder Tyrol and Vorarlberg with a particular focus on transport, energy and water, and spatial planning policies.
One of the questions the project aims to respond to is what are the institutional factors that may prevent or facilitate climate change integration at the subnational level, in terms of both policy-making and implementation. In this respect, the project team hypothesized that horizontal and vertical coordination among policy-makers, public participation, information dissemination, political and administrative leadership, and dedicated funding are decisive factors for ensuring the effective integration of climate change in subnational policies.
Since the study of policy documents alone would be inconclusive in addressing these questions, the project team has conducted more than thirty interviews in the abovementioned study areas, with the aim of unraveling possible informal arrangements that would facilitate a more expedient integration of climate change, and thus better implementation at sub-national level. The guiding criterion for the mapping of interviewees was to achieve a balanced representation of both the abovementioned relevant sectors and institutional factors.
While research results will be available with the publication of an edited volume published by Brill next year, Giada Giacomini (Eurac Research), Niccolò Bertuzzi (University of Trento), and Alice Meier (University of Innsbruck) will comment on the results of the recently concluded interview rounds in dedicated blog posts to be published on Eureka! in the next weeks. As expected, coordination and participation were described as crucial aspects by the interviewees, and the interplay between these factors has revealed some important differences in the territories analyzed. I invite you to stay tuned. Long last the role of subnational governments in the global fight against climate change!
