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Games are increasingly proposed as an innovative way to convey scientific insights on the climate-economic system to students, non-experts, and the wider public. Yet, it is not clear if games can meet such expectations. We present quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of a simulation game for communicating and teaching international climate politics. We use a sample of over 200 students from Germany playing the simulation game KEEP COOL. We combine pre- and postgame surveys on climate politics with data on individual in-game decisions. Our key findings are that gaming increases the sense of personal responsibility, the confidence in politics for climate change mitigation, and makes more optimistic about international cooperation in climate politics. Furthermore, players that do cooperate less in the game become more optimistic about international cooperation but less confident about politics. These results are relevant for the design of future games, showing that effective climate games do not require climate-friendly in-game behavior as a winning condition. We conclude that simulation games can facilitate experiential learning about the difficulties of international climate politics and thereby complement both conventional communication and teaching methods. more...

The implementation of theoretically designed low carbon energy transitions provided by scientific policy advice proves to be challenging in practice. For the case of Germany prominent rhetoric frontlines separate proponents of centralized and decentralized solutions for decarbonizing its electricity infrastructure. This paper investigates whether the claim that incumbent actors favor centralized and challengers decentralized solutions finds supporting evidence on a small sample of practitioners from different fields of the German electricity system. It further aims to identify qualitative infrastructure scenarios for its long-term future based on the practitioners’ mental models of system effects. We find empirical evidence for the postulated claim; yet there are no clear-cut camps. Disagreements across elicited mental models of practitioners from the same fields render the identification of internally consistent scenarios impossible for the full sample. The largest possible subsamples lead to three related visions of a substantially transformed electricity system dominated by decentral, small and medium-scale solutions coexisting with some centralized, large-scale infrastructures. The strong heterogeneity in preferences and mental models we uncover leads us to conclude that transparent and participatory public discourse on underlying worldviews, norms and values is paramount for accelerating institutional reform paving the way for energy transitions in Germany and globally. more...

When multiple power plants are curtailed at the same time and in the same region, electricity system costs rise. If transmission lines are congested, these costs might be amplified and spatially more concentrated, because there are less spatial spill-overs. We study how such costs and their distribution depend on the market design (nodal pricing or uniform pricing). We extend the literature on curtailment by considering space and market design, and the literature on market design by considering curtailment. We expose a DC load-flow model for Germany to severe correlated curtailment scenarios. We find that additional costs are moderate. For the simulated week, curtailment of 9.3% non-renewable capacity reduces welfare by 2.7% (uniform pricing). With nodal pricing, welfare loss can be reduced by 1.5%. Distributional differences are multiple times larger. For nodal pricing, producer surplus rises more, and costs are spatially more concentrated at the curtailed power plants. Consumer surplus becomes lower. The difference is unlikely to justify changes of the current market design. If also wind or photovoltaic feed-in is unavailable, economic impacts can decrease or increase, but remain in the same order of magnitude. The spatial electricity system structure matters more than the volume of curtailment. more...

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552 Archetypes are increasingly used as a methodological approach to understand recurrent patterns in variables and processes that shape the sustainability of social-ecological systems. The rapid growth and diversification of archetype analyses has generated variations, inconsistencies, and confusion about the meanings, potential, and limitations of archetypes. Based on a systematic review, a survey, and a workshop series, we provide a consolidated perspective on the core features and diverse meanings of archetype analysis in sustainability research, the motivations behind it, and its policy relevance. We identify three core features of archetype analysis: Recurrent patterns, multiple models, and intermediate abstraction. Two gradients help to apprehend the variety of meanings of archetype analysis that sustainability researchers have developed: (1) understanding archetypes as building blocks or as case typologies and (2) using archetypes for pattern recognition, diagnosis, or scenario development. We demonstrate how archetype analysis has been used to synthesize results from case studies, bridge the gap between global narratives and local realities, foster methodological interplay, and transfer knowledge about sustainability strategies across cases. We also critically examine the potential and limitations of archetype analysis in supporting evidence-based policy making through context-sensitive generalizations with case-level empirical validity. Finally, we identify future priorities, with a view to leveraging the full potential of archetype analysis for supporting sustainable development. more...

Policy advocates frequently call for unilateral action to promote international climate protection. It is still conventional wisdom that unilateral action does not pay off for individual countries due to free-riding incentives for other countries. Does this conclusion change if damage can be reduced by adaptation measures? This article considers adaptation as an explicit decision variable and frames unilateral action as Stackelberg game with two countries. The sequence of play is determined endogenously. We show that the Stackelberg leader reduces adaptation expenditures and emissions if the follower’s damage function has a specific convexity property where adaptation leads to strategic complements. Then, no country has an incentive to deviate from the sequence of play. Unilateral action in adaptation or in emissions leads to a strict Pareto improvement compared to the non-co-operative Nash solution. There are lower total emissions and less adaptation. more...

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552 This article introduces the special issue on climate adaptation and institutions. Economic accounts of climate adaptation have stressed its collective action nature and the limitations of standard economic approaches to the matter. Governance accounts, on their part, have shown that adaptation does not always happen when it is expected. Against this background, institutional economics has the potential to shed light on those societal processes and collective mechanisms leading to and shaping adaptation (or the absence of it). The selection of articles contributing to this special issue shows that climate adaptation can indeed be explored successfully through institutional economics, and that doing so fits well within the institutional economics agenda. Some recommendations for future research are provided at the end. more...

Can we explain barriers to adaptation of collective action to changes in the natural environment? One reason for adaptation is the impacts of climate change. Ample case study evidence shows that such adaptation is rarely a smooth process. However, generalisable patterns of how and why barriers arise remain scarce. The study adopts a collective action perspective and the archetypes approach in a meta-analysis of 26 selected publications to explain how barriers arise in specific conditions. Focusing on adaptation of water governance in river basins, the study finds 21 reappearing patterns. Less well-established patterns relate to water property rights, hydrological standards, adaptation externalities, non-climatological uncertainty and vertical coordination. Results further show how barriers impede collective action in specific ways. The paper precisely introduces the archetypes approach, and shows that reported problems in adapting collective action under climate change arise from attributes of actors and pre-existing institutions rather than biophysical characteristics. more...

The transformation of critical infrastructure such as energy systems toward sustainability imposes a multitude of challenges that are social-technical in nature and require interdisciplinary collaboration. Resilience has received growing attention as a concept to bridge different scientific disciplines in research on energy systems, given their social, ecological, and technical elements. However, a resilience framework that is suitable for merging notions of resilience as a measurable property with notions of resilience as a social construction or an observatory scheme is still a desideratum. Against this backdrop, we present a cross-epistemic resilience (CER) framework for interdisciplinary research on energy and other social-ecological-technical systems. In particular, we introduce the distinction between positivist first-order and constructivist second-order observations and identify four modes of inquiry in resilience research. Our CER framework contributes to interdisciplinary resilience research by pointing out how assumedly incompatible perspectives are able to inform and constructively irritate each other and, hence, enhance the overall understanding of energy systems. The framework has been tested in a radically interdisciplinary research project. We draw on electricity systems as our prime example to illustrate the application of our arguments and concepts. more...

In Deutschland ist – wie in vielen Mitgliedstaaten der EU – Anpassung an den Klimawandel als eigenes Politikfeld mit einer nationalen Strategie, einem Masnahmenplan sowie fur die Umsetzung zustandigen Akteuren etabliert. Insbesondere bei physischen, raumwirksamen Masnahmen kommt dabei der kommunalen und regionalen Ebene eine masgebliche Rolle zu. Auf EU-Ebene kann die Umsetzung insbesondere durch einen geeigneten Forder- und Rechtsrahmen unterstutzt werden. Im Mittelpunkt des Kapitels stehen Klimaanpassungsstrategien auf den unterschiedlichen politischen Ebenen – von der EU bis zur Kommune –, Ansatze erfolgreicher Umsetzung und entsprechende Hemmnisse. more...

Conventional approaches to natural resource management are increasingly challenged by environmental problems that are embedded in highly complex systems with profound uncertainties. These so-called social-ecological systems (SESs) are characterized by strong links between the social and the ecological system and multiple interactions across spatial and temporal scales. New approaches are needed to manage those tightly coupled systems; however, basic understanding of their nonlinear behavior is still missing. Modeling is a traditional tool in natural resource management to study complex, dynamic systems. There is a long tradition of SES modeling, but the approach is now being more widely recognized in other fields, such as ecological and economic modeling, where issues such as nonlinear ecological dynamics and complex human decision making are receiving more attention. SES modeling is maturing as a discipline in its own right, incorporating ideas from other interdisciplinary fields such as resilience or complex systems research. In this paper, we provide an overview of the emergence and state of the art of this cross-cutting field. Our analysis reveals the substantial potential of SES models to address issues that are of utmost importance for managing complex human-environment relationships, such as: (i) the implications of ecological and social structure for resource management, (ii) uncertainty in natural and social systems and ways to address it, (iii) the role of coevolutionary processes in the dynamics of SESs, and (iv) the implications of microscale human decision making for sustainable resource management and conservation. The complexity of SESs and the lack of a common analytical framework, however, also pose significant challenges for this emerging field. There are clear research needs with respect to: (i) approaches that go beyond rather simple specifications of human decision making, (ii) development of coping strategies to deal with (irreducible) uncertainties, (iii) more explicit modeling of feedbacks between the social and ecological systems, and (iv) a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing and modeling SESs. We provide ideas for tackling some of these challenges and indicate potential key focal areas for SES modeling in the future. more...