Description
Governments around the world have developed national strategies for pursuing systemic reductions in carbon emissions. While some important research has explored the institutional, political economic, and normative factors that shape the matrix of initiatives that governments adopt, relatively little attention has been paid to what influences how governments organise internally to implement them – and with what consequences. The Danish government’s green transition objectives have been met with widespread acclaim internationally and within comparative indexes. Using public sector spending and employment data and interviews with 20 key informants, this paper explores how the Danish green transition bureaucracy has developed since the enactment of the 2020 Climate Act. It shows that bureaucratic state capacity for governing the green transition can be characterised by its unevenness across policy areas. It demonstrates this unevenness through a within-case comparison of three policy implementation areas that differ on the basis of implementation risks and economic interest convergence: CCS, PtX, and agricultural reform. It finds that the structural objectives of economic actors within the state produces unevenness of state capacity in green transition governance. The paper suggests that understanding the green transition implementation requires an account of how bureaucracies are shaped by their wider political economic context.
