Whole-of-government approach needed to address climate crisis - German govt advisers

Climate policy is a cross-sectoral task that requires a reform of its mode of governance, researchers from the state-supported Ariadne project write in a policy paper directed at the new German government. The researchers call for a whole-of-government approach that goes beyond the creation of the newly presented climate ministry, they write. The federal Chancellery could play a much bigger role in coordinating the specialised ministries and building a new department for climate policy. “Combined with the establishment of standing inter-ministerial working groups as hubs into the ministries, cooperation on important cross-cutting issues could be significantly improved,” said political scientist Michèle Knodt from the Technical University of Darmstadt, one of the authors of the paper. In addition, new policy processes are needed, for example in the form of mandatory impact assessments, and the monitoring of the effectiveness of climate policy measures could be improved. "The governance of climate policy should be designed as an iterative political learning process in order to continuously react to technological, political and social imponderables and to be able to take early corrective action in the event of failures," says Thorsten Müller of the Stiftung Umweltenergierecht, another of the paper’s authors.

Germany’s future government parties, the SPD, the Green Party and the FDP, plan to introduce a ‘super ministry’ for Economy and Climate Protection which will be headed by the Greens. It will be responsible for renewable energies, the power sector, energy networks and the federal climate action law.