The Politics of Climate Instruments: Investigating Policymakers’ Belief Systems in EU Climate Policymaking

Common policy process theories underrepresent the politics of policy formulation, and ignore instruments as normatively charged meaning structures. We applied the belief systems approach of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to analyse the European Union’s (EU) multi-level climate policy-making in the realm of the EU’s Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), to uncover EU and German policymakers’ beliefs. Our results demonstrate that climate policy is politicized through instruments, despite goal-unanimity. In five ‘worlds of thought’, we explicate ‘appropriate’ solutions (instrument belief) as part of implicit ideational frames, constituted by a problem-representation (policy-core beliefs), and visions of a climate-mitigated world (deep-core beliefs). The main cleavage moves around the statemarket relationship, between carbon pricing purists and more helps more policymakers. Many former purists accept a policy mix after ‘instrument-based learning’. Discursively marginalized degrowth-supporters back the ETS pragmatically, while other false-flag policymakers support it rhetorically, but undermine it for industry protection.