by Kai Schulze
Diffusion has emerged as an important concept for studying how public policies spread across jurisdictions. Scholars have identified several mechanisms that drive policy diffusion, including learning, competition, emulation, and coercion. At the same time, policy diffusion is also a popular governance approach, particularly for higher levels of government that want to promote certain policies at lower levels, but do not want to or cannot mandate policy action. However, the governance potential of policy diffusion is poorly captured by the prevailing mechanism-centered concept, which is difficult to measure and typically emphasizes direct coercion or “hard” interventions, such as preemptive legislation or conditional funding. It therefore risks overlooking important less coercive or “soft” interventions that higher levels of government can use to promote policy development at lower levels.
This neglect of soft interventions limits the analytical value of the diffusion concept, especially in multilevel environments with varying levels of authority and in policy areas where direct coercion is unavailable or undesirable, including in climate policy. For example, in many countries, higher levels of government lack the constitutional authority to mandate local climate action, or local authorities lack the capacity to comply with such mandates, so they resort to various interventions that are scattered throughout the literature but have not yet been compared more systematically.
To address these issues, I present a new channel-centered framework that distinguishes between six soft policy diffusion channels that can be broadly placed on a continuum of coerciveness or state intervention: autonomous, collaborative, exemplary, persuasive, organized, and funded diffusion (see Table 1). Autonomous diffusion refers to voluntary and noninstitutionalized exchanges between jurisdictions at the same level of government, collaborative diffusion to the bottom-up creation of formal networks, exemplary diffusion to policy development by higher-level governments to set an example, persuasive diffusion to the provision of informational resources, organized diffusion to networks created by higher-level governments, and funded diffusion to financial incentives and the provision of additional resources.
I probe the framework by studying local climate change adaptation policy using original survey data collected from the administrations of 190 municipalities located in the central German state of Hessen. The regression results indicate that the local institutionalization of adaptation in Hessen such as the development of adaptation plans and new staff dealing with adaptation is associated with several interventions by higher levels of government, including the provision of a policy model, a municipal climate network, and grant programs. However, the density of concrete adaptation measures–such as the creation of open-air corridors, education programs, drainage and retention areas, and surface unsealing–is associated with noninstitutionalized exchanges between municipalities. These results demonstrate the usefulness of the framework for distinguishing and comparing different diffusion channels and thus for understanding policy diffusion as a governance approach. In particular, the results suggest that different types of interventions may be needed to support adaptation policy development at the local level. This is important information for the efficient allocation of scarce (local) resources and for policymakers seeking to capitalize on policy diffusion.
You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at
Schulze, Kai. 2024. “ The Soft Channels of Policy Diffusion: Insights From Local Climate Change Adaptation Policy.” Policy Studies Journal 52(4): 881–906. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12555.
About the Author
Kai Schulze is an Adjunct Professor with the Institute of Political Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany leading the Junior Research Group on Integrated Systems Analysis. His research focuses on comparative public policy and politics, particularly in the fields of energy, climate, and environment. His work has appeared in journals such as Climate Policy, European Journal of Political Research, Global Environmental Politics, Regional Environmental Change, Regulation & Governance, Review of Policy Research, WIREs Climate Change.
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