Climate change policies and technologies : diffusion and interaction with institutions and governance

Climate change is a global-scale structural change, affecting economies across the world, alongside global fragmentation, digitalisation and demographics. This paper analyses the diffusion of climate policies and technologies and the role of institutions and governance in that process. It discusses theory, models and data available to date, and the empirical evidence for the 20 European Union and all 40 countries covered by the OECD's Environ- mental Policy Stringency index. The results indicate that institutions and governance have significant effects towards a greater speed and spread of diffusion of climate policies and technologies, and that separating the speed and spread effects is essential for assessing the green transition. The paper follows a distinction usually being made between policies and technologies that are about mitigation and those that are about adaptation. Mitigation is about limiting climate change, or at least controlling it, while adaptation is about coping and dealing with the fallout from climate change. The reason for the distinction is that speed and spread of diffusion may differ between mitigation and adaptation efforts, and so may the respective role of institutions and governance. The paper tries to assess how fast and how far those policies and technologies are diffusing, and to what extent this depends on institutions and governance. This is because efficient and high quality institutions and governance have been found to be beneficial in a number of ways, and so might be expected to be beneficial also in the struggle for a stable climate.