Emissions Trading and Institutional Changes in Environmental Policy-Making

If there was a Guinness Book of Records for environmental policy, the instrument of emissions trading would certainly take a whole chapter. In less than ten years, this complex climate policy instrument has been implemented at various political levels. How did international emissions trading under the Kyoto Protocol come into being? What factors contributed to the rapid introduction of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme? Has the introduction of emissions trading brought about a transfer of power, i.e sovereignty, from national to supranational levels? Theoretically underpinned by multi-level governance theory, Tilman Santarius and Marcel Braun address these and other questions by reconstructing the invention of emissions trading in great detail in the paper “Climate Policy in the Multi-Level Governance System“.