Climatechange policies are cross-sectoral in the sense that they need to be deployed in many policies and across different scales of governance. It entails that several levels of governments and authorities are competent for climate policies. This poses some serious governance challenges, notably in federal structures. Climate federalism literature studies and evaluates how federal structures...
Climate change and environmental degradation rank among the most urgent and complex challenges facing contemporary societies. Addressing them requires ambitious, long-term policies — yet the question of how such consequential decisions should be made remains deeply contested. Should they be left to elected politicians, delegated to independent experts, entrusted to citizens through...
Belgium’s climate transition increasingly relies on subsurface use (geothermal energy, hydrogen and gas storage, CO₂ storage, nuclear-waste disposal), yet governance remains fragmented across federal, Flemish and local levels. Treating the subsurface as a common-pool resource, we apply the Institutional Resource Regimes (IRR) framework to assess institutional capacity and legal alignment in...
