Evaluating consistency in environmental policy mixes through policy, stakeholder, and contextual interactions

Abstract

This paper introduces a method to analyse and explore consistency within policy mixes in order to support the policymaking cycle and applies it to energy and climate change policies in the United Kingdom (UK) biofuels policy context. The first part of the paper introduces a multi-level method to evaluate consistency within policy mixes implemented over a period of time. The first level explores consistency across policy design features in policy mixes. The second level evaluates how stakeholders, and their interactions with policy instruments and each other, can impact consistency within a given context. These interactions influence the implementation of policies and can lead to unintended outcomes that fail to meet the overarching goals. In the second part of the paper, we apply our method to the UK biofuels policy mix, to explore a sector that cuts across the policy areas of transportation, energy, land-use, air, and climate change. Our analysis demonstrates how, by overlooking complex interactions in the design and implementation of policies in the biofuels sector, policy mixes have conflicted with the development of a potential low-carbon technology.