Constructing Policy (In)coherence in Germany's Energy Transition and Impacts on (In)equality

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🔬研究者:This paper provides a framework for studying policy coherence as a political and justice issue, moving beyond technocratic approaches.

🏢実務担当者:Practitioners can learn how coherence arguments are used to legitimize or contest projects, and how to anticipate distributional impacts.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers should consider how coherence is instrumentalized by different actors and ensure just transition measures for affected communities.

ABSTRACT Policy coherence is widely regarded as essential for achieving sustainable development, climate targets, and reducing inequality, as reflected in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Recent scholarship has moved beyond technocratic approaches, drawing on comparative politics, particularly the “3 I's” of ideas, interests, and institutions, to highlight the inherently political nature of coherence. Yet even these studies often treat coherence as binary, easily observable, and intrinsically beneficial. Building on a coherence literature focused on discourses and frames, this paper challenges these assumptions by examining how policy (in)coherence is constructed and contested. Focusing on policy implementation in North Rhine‐Westphalia, Germany's coal heartland, we analyse two cases before and during the 2022 energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine: the commissioning of the Datteln IV hard coal plant in 2020, and the clearance of the village of Lützerath for mining in 2023. Drawing on 28 semi‐structured interviews with German energy, climate, and environmental experts, alongside policy and media analysis, we find that (in)coherence is greatly constructed and contested under shifting political and economic pressures, instrumentalised and legitimisatised by different actors to advance their interests, and profoundly shaped by temporal dynamics. Given recent findings that challenge the 2030 Agenda's assumption that policy coherence reduces inequalities, we also explore how (in)coherence is perceived to shape multidimensional inequality in the Energiewende more broadly. Here, we find that (in)coherence is most prominently perceived to cause delays in climate mitigation, disproportionately affecting youth, low‐income households, migrants, and activists. In this context, (in)coherence is not merely technical, political nor constructed, but fundamentally a matter of justice, shifting the analytical focus from whether policies and their implementation are coherent to how, and for whom, coherence matters.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.70083first seen 2026-06-07 04:45:33