TY - JOUR A1 - Leipprand, Anna A1 - Flachsland, Christian A1 - Pahle, Michael T1 - Advocates or cartographers? Scientific advisors and the narratives of German energy transition JF - Energy Policy N2 - Political debate on energy in Germany has been shaped by two historically opposed discourses, one pushing for a transition to renewables, the other holding on to the status quo. Scientific policy advice (SPA) has been involved in their evolution from the beginning. This paper draws on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and on discourse and narrative theory to study the role of SPA in recent German energy policy. We explore 1) whether scientific advisors have been members of advocacy coalitions, and 2) how their contributions may have interacted with the evolution of the discourses and major narratives. We perform a qualitative text analysis of 50 SPA reports published between 2000 and 2015. We find that the majority of studies clearly take sides in the debate, and that in most cases the reports’ positions are fully transparent. Despite the polarization, SPA provides differentiated information on key aspects of the discourses, and alternative design options for policy instruments. We conclude that SPA contributions have improved the conditions for political consensus and compromise. Collectively, SPA studies provide a basis for mapping different policy pathways and their consequences. In the future, SPA should address additional critical issues such as coal phase-out and international leadership. KW - Energy transition KW - Scientific policy advice KW - Discourse KW - Narratives KW - Advocacy coalitions KW - Germany Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.12.021 SN - 0301-4215 VL - 102 SP - 222 EP - 236 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leipprand, Anna A1 - Flachsland, Christian T1 - Regime destabilization in energy transitions: The German debate on the future of coal JF - Energy Research & Social Science N2 - Greenhouse gas emissions are stagnating in Germany despite increasing deployment of renewable energy. This makes the government’s Energiewende appear inconsistent and has triggered a discussion on phasing-out coal. The focus has thus turned from niche technology development to the destabilization of the existing high-carbon regime. In this paper we investigate stakeholders’ framings and their perceptions of different policy options to advance the understanding of regime destabilization processes and theory-building in the context of the multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions. We find that actors still form coalitions with traditional allies and cling to established lines of reasoning, although there are indications for a beginning disintegration of the status quo-defending coalition. In their framings, core actors emphasize risks and threats. This confirms that regime destabilization is particularly conflictual and shows that for actors pushing regime change it is more difficult to offer a positive story. Linking policies for phasing-out incumbent technologies to accompanying measures for managing structural change in affected regions may facilitate compromise. The results moreover point to a tension between national and supra-national action as a core issue in destabilization debates. Our insights are relevant for countries in similar transition phases and may inform future comparative research. KW - Energy transitions; Multi-level perspective; Framing; Coal Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.02.004 SN - 2214-6296 VL - 40 SP - 190 EP - 204 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leipprand, Anna A1 - Flachsland, Christian A1 - Pahle, Michael T1 - Starting low, reaching high? Sequencing in EU climate and energy policies JF - Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions N2 - In order to achieve the UNFCCC Paris Agreement goals, climate policies worldwide require considerable ratcheting-up. Policy sequencing provides a framework for analysing policy process dynamics that facilitate ratcheting-up. We apply a sequencing perspective to two key EU climate and energy policies, the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), to comparatively test the empirical relevance of sequencing for single policies – in addition to sequencing across policies, which has been the focus of sequencing theory so far – and to uncover specific mechanisms. Our results confirm that sequencing, based on triggering positive and controlling negative feedback, is relevant both within and across policies. Policy choices that may facilitate ratcheting-up include tools to control costs, the possibility to centralise and harmonise in a multi-level governance context, options for compensation of reluctant actors, and the encouragement of learning processes. KW - Policy sequencing KW - Policy feedback KW - Energy policy KW - Climate policy KW - Emissions trading Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2020.08.006 VL - 37 SP - 140 EP - 155 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Müller-Hansen, Finn A1 - Callaghan, Max W. A1 - Lee, Yuan Ting A1 - Leipprand, Anna A1 - Flachsland, Christian A1 - Minx, Jan C. T1 - Who cares about coal? Analyzing 70 years of German parliamentary debates on coal with dynamic topic modeling JF - Energy Research & Social Science N2 - Despite Germany’s Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time – to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods. KW - Coal transition KW - Energy policy KW - Parliamentary debates KW - Topic modeling KW - Computational text analysis Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101869 VL - 72 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leipprand, Anna A1 - Flachsland, Christian A1 - Pahle, Michael T1 - Energy transition on the rise : discourses on energy future in the German parliament JF - Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research N2 - In this paper we describe energy policy discourses and their story-lines in German parliamentary debates, and trace their evolution over the past decades. Through content analysis and coding with MAXQDA, changes in the discourses and in the use of story-lines by different political parties are analyzed. Our study shows that while the concept of a transition towards a nuclear-free, renewables-based energy system became hegemonic within three decades, the discourse itself underwent major changes. Energy Transition was de-radicalized and became part of a discourse of Ecological Modernization, thus aligning with mainstream economic logic. There are still considerable differences in the story-lines narrated by parliamentarians about pathways to Energy Transition and its effects. Discursive struggles into the meaning and the means of the transition project continue, suggesting that discourse structuration is far from complete. KW - discourse analysis KW - story-lines KW - energy transition KW - renewable energy KW - energy policy KW - Germany Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2016.1215241 IS - 3 SP - 283 EP - 305 PB - 30 ER -