Climate Change Integration in the Multilevel Governance of Italy and Austria: Shaping Subnational Policies in the Transport, Energy, and Spatial Planning Sectors

Federica Cittadino, Louisa Parks, Peter Bußjäger and Francesca Rosignoli eds.

Eurac, University of Trento, University of Innsbruck & University of Rovira i Virgili

Tell us a little bit about the book.

Our book, Climate Change Integration in the Multilevel Governance of Italy and Austria, discusses a crucial issue for subnational governments: how to integrate climate change considerations across policy areas to contribute to our global responses to the challenges it presents? Which factors contribute to successful integration? With a specific focus on transport, energy and water, and spatial planning policies in selected cases located at the border of the Alpine region between Italy and Austria, the volume shows that issues of institutional and constitutional design with respect to coordination (vertical and horizontal), public participation and information, leadership, and dedicated funding play fundamental and interlinked roles in climate change policy integration. Results emerging from interviews and document analyses in the study areas give a contextualized interpretation of these factors. The book also proposes a method that can be applied in other subnational cases.

What inspired you to take up this project?

Climate change is a global problem, yet its effects are felt in very local ways. In Europe, for example, Alpine areas experience the impacts of climate change in a specific way that is shared across the borders of Alpine states. Though the major decisions about climate change mitigation and adaptation unfold in global arenas and at the national level, subnational and local actors are crucial to their implementation. To better understand this, we decided to focus on how climate change targets agreed globally and in the European Union are integrated across policy areas at the subnational level – we have great literature on this, but this is (we think) the first comparison across policy areas, across different subnational authorities, and across different countries in an Alpine area.

Whose work was influential on you throughout the project?

Established literature on polycentric governance, Environmental Policy Integration (EPI) and federal studies (Ostrom 2009; Adelle and Russell 2013; Steurer and Clar 2018; Galarraga, Gonzalez‐Eguino, and Markandya 2011; Keskitalo 2010; Wamsler and Pauleit 2016; Peel, Godden, and Keenan 2012; and others) were fundamental for conceiving this book project in the first place. Public outcry around the fact that state actions are so far insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement targets to limit global temperature increase by 2°C, and possibly by 1.5°C were additionally a powerful push for our work. This increased our awareness that, as scholars, we need to contribute to new ways to imagine more effective climate governance.

What challenges did you face in writing the book?

A key challenge was that the editors, authors, and interviewees all had different areas of expertise (environmental law, environmental participation, transport policies, federalism, and others). Our project touched not only on various areas of public and private law and political science, but also on ecological and economic aspects. In this respect, a critical methodological challenge was to initiate legal scholars to social science methods and sociologists to legal doctrine, concepts, and principles. However, the resulting socio-legal approach was successful. The fact that the legal systems of Austria and Italy differ greatly, especially with regard to their federal structure and competences at the regional level, was also an important factor to take into account in the research design and in the evaluation of the collected data.

Another influential practical challenge was coordinating and executing the book project during the pandemic. We did not have the chance to meet in person until December 2022, when the book was already published. Many doubts required numerous online seminars that could have been avoided or resolved with less time and effort with a few on-site events. 

What do you hope to see as the book’s contribution to academic discourse and constitutional or public law more broadly?

We believe that we are primarily strengthening knowledge about the implementation of measures to combat climate change at the subnational level. This discussion has to do with the specificities concerning how federal or decentralized countries may contribute to solving the most pressing challenges of our time. We also believe that at the subnational (and of course also at the municipal) level, it is easier to get people excited about the concerns of climate protection through participation. Because our book points to the importance of participation in both informing and implementing climate change policies, thereby pushing for its integration across policy areas, we hope that we may contribute to raise attention among legal scholars to these aspects. Finally, we aim to contribute to academic debates on the centrality of EPI for the effectiveness of public policies aiming at environmental protection.

What’s next?

We will have a presentation of our book at the University of Innsbruck on May 26, 2023. We hope that this will once again arouse interest, especially in Austria, but of course also across German-speaking countries. Different members of the project and the editorial team are taking their research around climate change issues forward, in different directions: on social movements and participation on climate change issues via the Horizon Act-EU project, on aspects of the European Green Deal via the GreenDeal-NET research network, on climate litigation, on the role of non-state actors in the climate governance, and others. Furthermore, we plan to take stock of the policy recommendations elaborated as an additional product of the research to concretely influence the work of the subnational administrations studied in our book. How this will be done is still to be decided alongside the subnational administrations concerned.

Climate Change Integration in the Multilevel Governance of Italy and Austria is available from Brill, including in open access form.