Implementation and governance: Current and future research on climate change policies

Central policymakers, governments, climate researchers, and research funders emphasize the necessity to develop, design, and implement climate change policies. This article investigates how this is dealt with in current social science research by analyzing relevant articles published in international academic journals. The search covers both interdisciplinary and more discipline-specific journals, focusing on publications within international relations, political science, public administration, and sociology. The results show that although climate change is a major contemporary research topic, there seems to be a lack of research focusing on existing government actions, multilevel governance, and implementation. The existing research is largely empirical and case-oriented. Crosscountry comparisons are rare, and relatively few studies explicitly focus on theory development. A major proportion of the research is published in interdisciplinary journals, where vital insights from political science and public administration research might be lacking. This paper, through an analysis of extant research, will add to the body of literature on climate change policy from a public policy implementation perspective.