This section analyses the climate change strategies of Gelsenkirchen and Newcastle in the context of typical policy styles that are associated with Germany and the UK. Based on the fieldwork investigations, it examines two sub-dimensions of policy style: the extent to which the council relies on hierarchy rather than engagement; and,
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its preference for state of the art (SOTA) solutions instead of relying on the best practicable means (BPM) to address a problem. The chapter maps Gelsenkirchen and Newcastle against these sub-dimensions to illustrate the empirical findings and then analyses the reasons why each city follows a particular approach.
As will become apparent, there is some evidence to show that the two municipalities have followed policy styles that are ‘typical’ of their respective countries. For example, Gelsenkirchen Council has been more likely to adopt a hierarchical approach to other societal actors, whereas its counterpart in Newcastle sought to engage with them more in policy-making processes. Similarly, Gelsenkirchen has invested in state of the art solutions for climate protection (partly due to a belief that this would also help to support economic development in the city), whereas
Newcastle has placed greater emphasis on cost-effectiveness and the best practicable means for achieving policy objectives.
However, the fieldwork also found that both cities are shifting towards the ideal ‘English’ policy style along both sub-dimensions. Both authorities have recognised that public bodies need to work more closely with non-state actors to achieve climate objectives, because they do not have the internal capacity to deliver them
independently. Therefore, they are seeking to engage more with other organisations instead of relying on more hierarchical techniques. In addition, Gelsenkirchen’s financial situation has reduced its ability to fund exemplar SOTA initiatives and it is therefore moving towards BPM approaches for dealing with a problem. For its part, Newcastle is also operating in an increasingly pragmatic way by focusing more on adaptation, and thereby directing scarce resources at climate initiatives where the municipality is able to have the greatest impact. As the chapter will demonstrate, this illustrates how the council prefers to adopt the best practicable means rather than invest in state of the art solutions.
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4.3.1 Gelsenkirchen
4.3.1.1 Hierarchy versus engagement
The fieldwork revealed that officers at Gelsenkirchen expected the municipality to take a strong leadership role in the city’s climate protection strategy. In particular, the hierarchical process that the authority followed to develop its Klimaschutzkonzept
illustrated the extent to which it relied on a traditional ‘German’ policy style along this dimension. This document was drafted by an advisory body of municipal officers and politicians, together with some managers from the local energy supplier ELE – other businesses and voluntary groups in the city were not involved in these
discussions (interviews 14 and 21). Some staff have since engaged with other local stakeholders to try and persuade them to play their part in achieving the planned reductions in carbon emissions, for example by reducing their reliance on road transport. However, it is notable that this only happened after the strategy was adopted formally by the council. Furthermore, prior to the development of the
Klimaschutzkonzept,the municipality had adopted a hierarchical approach when it sought to develop and promote the city as a centre for solar energy in the 1990s. In both cases, municipal decision-makers felt that the authority had a responsibility to provide local leadership in response to climate change and industrial decline (interview 25).
Interestingly, some interviewees suggested that other German cities would take a more consensual approach to climate protection policy than Gelsenkirchen. Indeed, these views chime with a recent empirical study that compared climate policy in Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart (Heinelt and Lamping, 2015). Gelsenkirchen Council’s approach reflected the political realities in a city that has struggled
economically for many years, and where most residents have more pressing concerns. Nonetheless, this contrast with other, more affluent, municipalities only serves to underline the fact that its strategy was very hierarchical:
Politically, it can be useful to speak about the issue of climate protection. But, as opposed to Freiburg or Tübingen, a large part of the people of Gelsenkirchen have completely different concerns (interview 25).
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Freiburg is more ‘bottom-up’… and here with us it’s more ‘top-down’ (interview 19)
Furthermore, neither public officials nor other stakeholders in Gelsenkirchen questioned the municipality’s leadership role and authority within the city. This highlights the fact that the authority has the capacity to exert very strong influence over other local actors. Indeed, as section 4.2.1.2 explained, German councils can operate more independently of other actors in the locality compared to municipalities like Newcastle. One interviewee, who had extensive knowledge of local government in both Germany and the UK, agreed that the status of the municipality in governance arrangements differs significantly between the two countries. Crucially, this plays a key role in shaping relationships with other horizontal actors, because it means German councils can employ more traditional hierarchical approaches to policy- making:
Municipalities in Germany have a very, very much stronger position than in Great Britain and therefore do not have to do so much with civil society. They don’t have to work with other actors – at least at the moment (interview 27).
This analysis fits with the argument made in chapter 3 about the historical evolution of local government in England and Germany and how this has shaped its perceived role in both countries. The legacy of German municipalities as more overt political
actors than their English counterparts has continued to the present day, and this helps to explain the different governance approaches taken by Gelsenkirchen and
Newcastle.
However, the traditional German reliance on state hierarchy is beginning to change, partly in response to the increasing importance of wicked policy issues. For its part, Gelsenkirchen Council has taken a more active role in involving additional actors in its approach to climate protection, largely because decision-makers have
acknowledged that they need to persuade residents and businesses to change their behaviour in order to reduce carbon emissions (interviews 14 and 15). Indeed, the municipality recognised the importance of public engagement in the mid-1990s, when it tried to mobilise support for the city’s regeneration plans (interview 19). By
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promoting the development of solar housing estates, the authority sought to include citizens in its plans for taking the city forward (Jung et al., 2010). Indeed, once the housing estates were completed, their residents created a local citizens’ association to represent the area and work with the council on supporting similar developments elsewhere (Jeromin and Karutz, 2010).
Nonetheless, several interviewees felt that the municipality should have taken an even more collaborative approach to developing this solar strategy. These officers
recognised that the demographic make-up of Gelsenkirchen meant most residents do not consider the environment to be a priority, and therefore argued that the
municipality should have done more to promote its vision to nurture civic pride and local identity:
I think that is one of the things that we have learnt in the last twenty years or so – that you always need allies… There are some people who would say, ‘Oh, yes, solar city! At least we’re leading on that!’ But it is a difficult task to communicate this issue to people who are outside leadership circles (interview 19).
As the above quote suggests, officers were aware of the need to persuade local residents to support the council’s objectives. In line with this, the municipality’s
Klimaschutzkonzept recognises the importance of other governance actors in the implementation of its climate change strategy. Indeed, it notes how the municipality is only responsible for 2% of the city’s CO2 emissions, and therefore private households and businesses need to make a significant contribution to the overall target of
reducing GHG emissions by a quarter between 2010 and 2020. Yet, although the council relies heavily on these other actors to achieve its climate objectives, it cannot use many hierarchical tools to force them to operate in a more sustainable manner. Therefore, by adopting an ‘enabling’ mode of governance rather than relying on ‘governing by authority’ (Bulkeley and Kern, 2006), officers in the municipality have increasingly sought to persuade local actors to engage with the Klimaschutzkonzept, rather than introduce binding regulations.
For example, the council has provided advisory ‘helpline’ services to local businesses and residents to help them reduce carbon emissions since 1987 (interview 15). In
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recent years it has begun to take a more active approach to initiating behaviour
change, including marketing campaigns to inform households and businesses that they would benefit from feed-in tariffs if they installed PV panels (interviews 19 and 24). In 2012 and 2014 it organised climate conferences and invited key actors from across the city to share ideas on carbon reduction (interview 20). Furthermore, the
Klimaschutzkonzept lists numerous other examples of how the municipality is hoping to persuade stakeholders within Gelsenkirchen to change their behaviour. They include: encouraging cycling through a rent-a-bike initiative; a more co-ordinated campaign to encourage people to use public transport and car-sharing schemes; real- time updates to bus, train and tram timetables; and a tool on the municipal website that allows householders and businesses to calculate the financial viability of installing solar panels on their properties (Stadt Gelsenkirchen, 2011). These all illustrate a growing reliance on horizontal governance tools, as the municipality recognises that it needs to work with other societal actors in order to achieve its climate objectives. Indeed, interviewees stressed that they viewed the
Klimaschutzkonzept as a living document: if external actors were to suggest other initiatives that would contribute towards climate protection, then the council would seek to incorporate them into the strategy (interview 20).
As the section 4.2.1.2 mentioned, Gelsenkirchen Council has also sought to persuade housing landlords to retrofit their properties in order to increase energy efficiency. The authority faces a particular challenge in this area, because only 16% of homes in the city are occupied by their owners – a significant proportion belong to hedge funds or companies listed on the stock exchange (interview 14). In addition, population decline has resulted in a surplus of housing, which has reduced market rents and meant that landlords are reluctant to invest in property improvements that may not deliver a financial return. As a result, the council faces a significant challenge in persuading these landlords – many of whom are legally required to act in the interests of their shareholders rather than the city of Gelsenkirchen – to insulate their buildings more effectively and/or install more efficient heating systems.
As of summer 2013, however, most of the major landlords were engaging with the council and seeking to improve the energy efficiency of their housing stock. Officers at the municipality attributed this to the council’s status and its authority as the
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democratic voice of local residents, pointing out that private companies often look to the state for leadership and are willing to follow (interview 14). Indeed, council staff were not particularly surprised that these landlords agreed to participate in governance processes, in spite of the fact that the city was not in a position to coerce or incentivise them in any way. This illustrates the high regard in which municipalities are held in Germany: Gelsenkirchen is not even able to cast a ‘shadow of hierarchy’ (Héritier and Lehmkuhl, 2011) over large private companies, yet it could still use its democratic resources and status as the localauthority (in every sense of the term) to persuade them to invest in building retrofits.
In addition, the council is able to exert its hierarchical authority more formally in some areas – albeit to a lesser extent than in the past. Most notably, the outsourcing of municipal utilities has led to it needing to collaborate with the other ELE partners in order to achieve climate change objectives (see section 4.2.1.2). Notably,
Gelsenkirchen Council worked with the other two municipalities that have a share in the energy provider (Bottrop and Gladbeck) to include a clause in the most recent energy contract that requires ELE to generate up to 20GwH of Gelsenkirchen’s annual electricity provision from renewable sources by 2020 (interview 20). Although the risks associated with re-municipalising energy provision may be very high (interview 24), it can still be raised as an option during contract negotiations and thereby serve as an example of the state casting its ‘shadow of hierarchy’ over market actors to achieve policy objectives. In contrast, the UK energy sector has been almost wholly privatised and the prospect of local (or even national) government asserting significant control over gas and electricity provision is extremely unlikely. Therefore, although
Gelsenkirchen’s capacity for hierarchical climate governance may have been reduced in recent decades, it remains in a much stronger position to instruct other actors than Newcastle.
As this subsection has demonstrated, Gelsenkirchen is moving slowly away from an ideal ‘German’ approach of state hierarchy and towards greater flexibility and stakeholder engagement. This is largely because the municipality has recognised that it needs to persuade other actors to change their behaviour in order to reduce the city’s carbon emissions. In other words, the council has acknowledged that it lacks the capacity to achieve its policy objectives alone and has therefore sought to work more
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interdependently with other organisations in order to deliver its climate protection strategy. In Bulkeley and Betsill’s (2005) terms, it has had to adopt a mode of
governing by ‘enabling’ rather than ‘authority’ to try and co-ordinate the behaviour of actors across the city, although the municipality can resort to the ‘shadow of
hierarchy’ to exercise some control over local energy provision. These developments also show how the authority responded to events by developing a pragmatic coping strategy (Salomon and Mokhtarian, 1997) that involves changing traditional processes and styles to deliver more effective policy. At the same time, however, it is crucial to note that Gelsenkirchen Council still exerts more hierarchical authority over other horizontal actors than its counterpart in Newcastle (see figure 4.6 on page 157).
4.3.1.2 State of the art solutions versus best practicable means
This subsection examines the extent to which Gelsenkirchen adopts state of the art (SOTA) solutions or prefers to rely on the best practicable means (BPM) in its climate change strategy. It highlights how the city has shown preference for the former in the past, but that this commitment has weakened in recent years, primarily due to
financial pressures. Nowadays, the council considers wider economic and financial benefits to be a more important (and demonstrably deliverable) part of any policy initiative on climate change, which has changed the way in which officers make the case for investing in strategic projects. In this way, the subsection highlights once again how capacity constraints have shaped policy styles, because the municipality has had to be more pragmatic in trying to achieve its climate change objectives with limited resources.
Gelsenkirchen’s most notable examples of SOTA solutions date from the 1990s, when the municipality sought to re-brand itself as a location for solar power. Council
officers sought to promote the idea of Gelsenkirchen as the Stadt der tausend Sonnen
(‘city of a thousand suns’), in direct contrast to its previous image of Stadt der tausend Zechen (‘city of a thousand pits’, (Jung et al., 2010)). This was exemplified by the installation of what was then the world’s largest solar power station of its type (210 kW) on Gelsenkirchen’s new science park in 1996 (interview 19, see also figure 4.4). Notably, the science park pre-dated the German federal government’s decision to introduce feed-in-tariffs for renewable power generation. At the time of installation,
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therefore, it appeared that the PV panels would not produce enough energy to pay for themselves, and indeed officers in the municipality did not expect them to make a profit. This led to some criticism of the council’s decision:
The renewable energy law came a few years’ later and quite a few people ridiculed us at the time… especially in the established energy industry (interview 19).
Instead, the municipality believed that an ambitious approach, which sought to put renewable energy at the heart of the city’s regeneration strategy and nurture these ‘industries of the future’ (interview 19), could help to prevent Gelsenkirchen’s economic decline. As a result, it invested in the PV panels as a symbolic way of showing how the city was embracing the emerging low-carbon sector by investing in state of the art technologies rather than the best practicable means.
Figure 4.4: The PV panels on Gelsenkirchen’s science park (Wissenschaftspark,
photograph taken in July 2013)
Alongside the PV panels on the science park, the council also supported local businesses that manufactured products in the renewable energy supply chain, including solar cells. Building on the Stadt der tausend Sonnen idea, its ultimate objective was to transform the Gelsenkirchen area into a ‘Solar Valley’, which would draw on the Ruhrgebiet’s legacy of energy production but place it in a modern, renewable context (interview 19). Indeed, the municipality initiated several more high-profile projects to demonstrate its commitment to this strategy, most notably around the development of solar housing estates. These included the Ruhrgebiet’s first such project in the Bismarck area of the city, which was constructed between 1999 and 2001 (see figure 4.5). Although the council’s ambitious and interventionist
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approach was adopted initially for overwhelmingly economic reasons as part of Gelsenkirchen’s re-branding strategy, it chimed subsequently with the authority’s policies on sustainability and climate protection (interview 19).
Figure 4.5: Homes in the Solarsiedlung in the Bismarck suburb of Gelsenkirchen (photograph taken in July 2013)
Unfortunately for the city, however, Gelsenkirchen’s nascent solar manufacturing industry did not take off to the extent that was initially hoped. Although Shell opened a solar cell factory in the city in the late 1990s, as a global company it relied much more on its existing multinational supply chains than on local businesses (interview 19). Eventually, due largely to the lower labour costs of Chinese competitors, the last solar module manufacturer left the city in the summer of 2012. As a result the
municipality reappraised its strategy, but nonetheless still sought to exploit the idea of Gelsenkirchen as a forward-looking ‘city of a thousand suns’:
We have to reinvent and reinterpret that [brand image]. And I think the best
interpretation would be that we can’t be an industrial cluster at the moment – in fact,
the whole of Germany or the whole of Europe can’t be an industrial cluster. Instead
we could be an applications cluster, in particular with these solar housing estates, and
we now have four of them (interview 19).
In addition, the municipality’s budgetary situation has worsened considerably since the mid-2000s, with the result that all projects now require a robust business case