European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 23

European Policy Analysis

Switzerland’s climate policy on the
national level has been almost exclusively
focusing on climate mitigation for
decades,
Switzerland
elaborated
funding scheme solutions that would
incentivize the private sector to promote
international adaptation measures with
their international partners in the EIG
group.
The
policies
and
related
negotiations we investigate in this
article took place at two different points
in time: the design of the policy on the
national level occurred around the year
2005, when Switzerland first revised
the CO2 act and introduced the tax in
combination with the tradable permits
and the climate penny. The international
policy formulation during the COP in
Copenhagen and Cancun happened in
2009 and 2010. Seen from a temporal
perspective, the national position
could have impacted the position of the
Swiss delegation also in international
negotiations. As this was not the case, the
question arises whether the divergence
in position is a consequence of divergent
negotiation topics at the two levels, or
of different negotiation cultures within
the Swiss political elite on the national
and the international levels. Below, we
develop those thoughts and outline
some theoretical arguments which
could account for the difference between
Switzerland’s national and international
position in climate change policy.

and countries (Jones and Jenkins-Smith
2009; Gilardi 2010; Kay 2011). However,
those influences are not limited to the
products of policymaking, but also hold
for political bargaining and decisionmaking processes. Although several
theories and frameworks focus on actors
and their role in order to explain such
mutual influence mechanisms among
different processes (Hooghe and Marks
2003; Marks, Hooghe, and Blank 1996;
Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993),
there are two diverging views on how
much actors might coordinate actions
across levels. For instance, in multilevel
governance and the “ecology of games”,
actors are involved in different “games”
or “arenas” at the same time (Dutton,
Schneider, and Vedel 2012; Lubell, Henry,
and McCoy 2010). Those “games” can
be characterized by very heterogeneous
institutions and rules, which is why the
same actors tend to behave differently and
defend divergent interests (Moravcsik
1993; Lubell et al. 2012).

Putnam (1988) also argues that
actors involved in foreign policymaking
produce different policy outputs in
the absence of domestic pressures and
vice-versa; but this is not true in twolevel games where both spheres are
entangled. In such “overlapping or nested
subsystems ” actors are functionally
interdependent, which might result in
coordination and feedback from one
system to the other (Jones and JenkinsSmith 2009; Zafonte and Sabatier 1998).
Finally, also Lisowski (2002) applies the
Theory
two-level games metaphor for US climate
egarding policy outputs, there politics and its repudiation of the Kyoto
is convincing evidence of policy Protocol and convincingly demonstrates
learning, diffusion, and spill-over how President George Bush Jr. legitimizes
effects across policy levels, domains, his international approach with domestic
evidences.

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