Project description

In the face of rising costs for energy, resources and the environment, a growing amount of overlaps emerge between environmental politics on the one hand and policies concerning the industry, innovations, regions and economic structures. These developments have numerous consequences. On the one hand, environmental policies have to further their orientation towards market structures and innovation. On the other, this development also impliesfor other political areas, a need to fully acknowledge and consider ecological challenges . Regarding established political structures, this results in a two fold challenge. Instruments need to be developed, which are able to initiate a comprehensive change in economic structures . No individual measure can set the necessary impulses for the development and diffusion of ecological technologies for the future on its own. Instead, a broad mixture of actions, taken by various actors is needed. The second challenge addresses the institutional level. Greening industrial politics demands a high degree of policy integration between areas traditionally separated and whose relations are sometimes highly conflicted.
Both challenges arise not only to Germany, but are also perceived in other countries. For example the USA, Japan, Denmark, Ireland, Great Britain and the Netherlands have made interesting experiences in the last few years, concerning measures and mechanism of cooperation to support long term environmental innovations. This project aimed to draw lessons from these experiences, to develop precise opportunities of taking action in the institutional and instrumental design of green industrial politics.
Experiences with existing (more classical) instruments of industrial policies were assessed, and possible strategies of applying these to environmental policies were analysed.