Tag Archives: Estonia

Franziska Ehnert, Climate Policy in Denmark, Germany, Estonia and Poland, Ideas, Discourses and Institutions (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2019)

Book review (editorial review), , , , , , , ,

The book of Franziska Ehnert, entitled Climate Policy in Denmark, Germany, Estonia and Poland, Ideas, Discourses and Institutions approaches climate change in terms of interaction of institutional, policy and discourse aspects that form the path from reality to political priority, policy and solution. This topic is part of current political debates that began in the 1980s, despite climate scepticism or climate change denial, and despite the resistance to the transformation of lifestyles and infrastructures. Environmental movements succeeded in bringing science and policy together, to sustain a climate change critique of the status quo and to promote ecologist alternative values and solutions via environmental policy.

Climate policy analyses are paramount to assess the manner in which the “ministerial administrations” implement or change a policy to answer environmental issues, redefine problems and maintain the adequacy and efficiency of climate change policy.

Considering that previous studies have shown the tension between the expert public officials and the politicians, the research conducted by Franziska Ehnert argues that “policy change will be better understood by studying the actors formulating these policies, namely ministerial administrations. It captures, not merely party politics and interest group politics, but the departmental politics of policy change. The book therefore focuses on the coordinative discourses within governmental institutions (…) among the actors participating in the construction of a policy, which stand in contrast to the communicative discourses through which politicians communicate and justify their policies vis-à-vis the public”. (p. 5)

Thus, the investigation follows the factors and aspects involved in the continuation or change of a policy; how is policy shaped, how coordinative discourses, policy frames, institutional contexts and particular identities relate and evolve; and how can one assess the reframing of values, the redefinition of interests or the reinterpretation of the guiding ideas.

Methodologically the study combines ontological, epistemological and methodological characteristics of the positivist and interpretative research paradigms in a comparative research with qualitative and quantitative dimensions based on the singularities and not on the similarities of the cases. Literature reviews, document analyses and expert interviews are also combined. Moreover, state and non-state actors are taken into consideration via expert interviews. Interpretation plays an important role as well following the data-generation stage: meaning-focused methods are used to analyse empirical data (p. 15). The investigation has as its own particularity the fact that the researchers acknowledge the characteristics of the cases only in the process of data generation, which increases objectivity. The countries compared are similar enough as regards institutional democracy, rule of law and market economy, and, as EU members, they share similar political commitments to EU climate and energy policy. Having under investigation older and younger democracies, varied indicators such as historical backgrounds, territory, economic, political, military and financial power or population size, differences in policy styles and discourses are to be expected.

The analytic framework introduced in the second chapter investigates the causes and means for the continuation of policies, provided that ideas and narratives shape and do not merely reflect the field of action. Political power has an important dimension in the power of ideas. The agents have an activity expressing the “following of the rules” and the “reproduction of the institution”, but also one that indicates the meta-level of discourse, for they think about and outside their institutions too. In terms of “ideal types”, the entrepreneurial-style bureaucrats are more likely to perform as “policy brokers”, while servant-style bureaucrats are more likely to “refrain from mediation and brokerage” and be, more likely, policy followers. (pp. 21-31)

In contrast, the following chapters approach the empirical data and associated analyses and interpretations concerning the making of climate policy in two Western European countries (Denmark and Germany) and in two Central Eastern European countries (Estonia and Poland). The researcher finds that Denmark is performing an important role in climate policy (“a small, green state”) due to a consensus-seeking policy style, a coordination apparatus among cabinet committees, and extensive specialization of the ministerial administration on climate policy. (p. 36)

These aspects, next to the policy ideals, objectives and instruments that are investigated, indicate a multitude of actors sustaining and opposing climate policy, but at the same time a resulting strong societal support for climate policy arising from this polyphonic conversation. However, Denmark is not and does not aim to be a “green Leviathan”, but a green democracy and market economy, with a policy orientation towards consensus, openness and inclusiveness. (p. 61)

The coordinative and consensus-seeking discourses are the most important in this respect. In the case of Germany, the size of the country induces different consequences to the similar reality of the multitude of actors involved in the climate policy “conversation”. Political acceptance might be the result of the “early participation of stakeholders in policy deliberation” in improving policy implementation. In this respect, even if lobbying may be seen as a risk factor, it could be also a democratic-openness enhancement factor. (p. 94) The main climate policy discourse in Germany has become that of increased “participation and transparency in policy deliberation processes”, calling more attention to institutional policy aiming at a more consensus-seeking attitude.

The “small state” discourse is central to Estonian identity, influencing both politics and policies. The EU was the agenda setter in Estonian climate policy and in Estonian energy efficiency policy. Fighting the communist heritage of authoritarian rule, a paradoxical weakness of the culture of coordination, the institutional fragmentation, the limited resources, the poor interministerial  consultations, the weak citizen participation and the low professionalization of the environmental NGOs, the situation was improved slightly by the planning for the European Structural Funds (2014-2020), by the design and continuation of the National Development Plan of the Energy Sector until 2030, and by the academic expertise, making the discourse of the technocrats and departmental politics officials prevalent, to the detriment of other actors. (pp. 120-123)

Central to Polish identity is the idea of catching up with Western development and requirements. On the one hand, the “relationships between state and society were fluid and fragmented” and, on the other, we have the communist heritage of authoritarian rule “undermining parliamentary independence” and weakening the institutionalized character of the “informal practices of interministerial and public consultations” (p. 151) Environmental NGOs are professionalized in Poland, but they remain marginalized. Their discourse attempted to sustain a core idea of ecological modernization, which has gained more adepts with the support of the Ministry of Economy, academic experts and environmental NGOs (keeping the white certificate system in the EEA).

The volume advances a very interesting methodology approaching the climate policies in the EU and it emphasizes an important and original evolving perspective in assessing climate policy. Both environment issues and political “landscapes” are changing, inducing more debate over competing ideas and ideals, values, facts and interests. As a consequence, discursiveness becomes more important in the lives of the institutions, states and societies. At the same time, interpretive analysis emphasizes potential improvement on scientific arguments and agendas as a result of the improvement of the deliberation processes on climate change.

Hilmar Þór Hilmarsson, The Economic Crisis and its Aftermath in the Nordic and Baltic Countries: Do As We Say and Not As We Do (London: Routledge, 2019)

Book review, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is a timely book written by a macroeconomic expert with a broad theoretical and institutional knowledge of the region under consideration. The pivot question to be answered in this book concerns how small northern European countries came through the economic crisis, and what prospects they may experience should a new crisis hit them. From the very beginning, it becomes clear that a ‘small economy’ is not necessarily a well-defined analytical concept. In economic terms the so-called Continental Nordic countries are large compared to the three Baltic States and Iceland, approximately in the proportion 10:1, although in size of population the disproportion (except for Iceland) is somewhat smaller.

The author quite quickly reduces his analysis to focus on how the ‘small’ small economies managed the crisis. He is undertaking a rather broad-ranging scrutiny of the economic development of the Baltic States compared to Iceland and, to a much lesser extent, the bigger Nordic economies as well as transitory economies in central Europe (Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic). He wants to figure out why the Baltic States had the worst macroeconomic record of all these countries with regard to getting through the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008/09. These three countries had the steepest fall in GDP, the highest rise in unemployment, the highest rate of inequality and, without any comparison, experienced a large emigration rate (close to 10 percent of population) of mainly young people.

Chapter by chapter the author goes through the likely economic explanations of this poor performance. One overall conclusion is the lack of economic and political autonomy and the very Anglo-Saxon inspired welfare regimes of all three Baltic states, which is a striking difference when comparison to the economic development in Iceland is analyzed.

The relatively weak automatic budget-stabilizers made GDP and employment plunge dramatically, causing a kind of exodus of mainly young (educated) people to leave these countries. Furthermore, the political elite felt themselves very committed to make the countries become a full member of the euro-zone as soon as possible. This political ambition made a fixed exchange rate policy an indisputable request from the EU. Hereby, a re-start of an economic up-swing by a strategic devaluation of the currency was blocked, even though the IMF recommended, at least in the Latvian case, such a policy.

The author is also pointing at the dominant position of foreign, especially Swedish, banks. In practice, the Baltics had no financial autonomy. The private sector had to borrow at subsidiaries of foreign banks. Credit policy was decided in Stockholm rather than in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. All three countries ran heavy balance-of-payments deficits in the boom leading up to 2008 – foreign loans were seemingly without limit. When the credit turn-around suddenly came, governments had to ‘do as we say’ (part of the book’s subtitle), meaning that the foreign banks had a large word to say in economic policy (i.e. fixed exchange rate and austerity) and requested a (partial) bail-out of some insolvent banks – causing public debt to rise. The parallel to Southern Europe (see Jespersen 2016) is striking, whilst the contrast to Iceland is revealing: dramatic devaluation, limited and socially balanced austerity, and no bailing out of private banks.

The content of this thought-provoking book, I think, can be summarized by a quote (found in the book, p. 14) by Joseph Stiglitz: “This book is about economics and economic ideologies and their interactions with politics: it is a case study of how, even the best intentions, when new institutions and policies are created on the basis of oversimplified views of how economies function, the results can be not only disappointing, but even disastrous” (Stiglitz, 2016, p.7, emphasis added).

The over-arching hypothesis is vindicated: that the Baltic States came through the economic crisis more poorly than neighboring states due to an inadequate economic policy dictated by their political elite and foreign stakeholders (i.e. the EU and the Swedish banks). But, and this is an important “but” which the author stresses several times, their specific history and the present somewhat tense security situation along the Russian border (in relation to a significant Russian-speaking minority in Estonia and Latvia) called for a tight political integration to Western Europe (economics) and the US (defense).

Having emphasized this extraordinary political challenge and the limited sovereignty of the governments, the author is still rather critical when it comes to social policy. It is, according to him, mainly a national prerogative to decide on how the burden of public expenditures and the economic crisis is shared among people. The Baltics are the most unequal societies in the Northern region, and here the governments could take lessons from the more mature Nordic welfare states, where the burden is much more equally shared. The Anglo-Saxon welfare model only works (if at all) in countries with a high degree of fiscal and monetary autonomy, like the US (and perhaps also the UK). It is in this light that the somewhat subtle subtitle of the book, “Do as we say and not as we do”, can be understood. The author is hereby making an accusation against the external advisers (especially representatives from Sweden and Finland) that they recommended/required a fixed exchange rate and austerity policies of the Baltic governments; but when they were in a similar situation, in the early 1990s, these two countries devaluated the currency strongly and kept their welfare system intact. The word of ‘hypocrisy’ is written between the lines, whereas Iceland stands out as a strong counter-example.

The book is to be recommended to anyone who takes a serious interest into the economics of the Baltic States and wants to go beyond prejudice and conventional wisdom.

 

References

Jespersen, J. (2016). The Euro – Why it failed, London: Pivot-Book, Palgrave/Macmillan.

Stiglitz, J.E. (2016). The Euro – How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.