Premium
Policy coherence by subterfuge? Arenas and compromise‐building in the European Union's energy efficiency policy
Author(s) -
Deters Henning
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
environmental policy and governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.987
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1756-9338
pISSN - 1756-932X
DOI - 10.1002/eet.1822
Subject(s) - compromise , status quo , coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) , deadlock , european union , political science , law and economics , economics , computer science , law , economic policy , distributed computing , physics , quantum mechanics
This paper looks at how policy‐makers use various alternative decision arenas to avoid internal policy incoherence. Inconsistency between goals and measures in a policy indirectly results from conflicting interests pulling in different directions within a heterarchical institutional setting. To avoid deadlock, negotiators rely on consensus‐building techniques such as watering down, issue redefinition, and the setting of targets without actions. These techniques facilitate moving away from the status quo, but they come at the expense of coherence. This paper shows that alternative decision arenas may bypass conflict, and thereby make the use of consensus‐building techniques unnecessary, resulting in more coherence. Examples from the emerging field of energy efficiency policy substantiate this claim.