ABSTRACT
Introduction Spain provides a good case for assessing the EU’s climate policy’s strengths and weaknesses. EU membership has produced considerable pressures at the national level for adapting climate and other related policies to the ambitious European goals (see Chapter 1). This relationship initially followed a mostly top-down dynamic, where Spain was a more passive taker of European goals and policies (Costa 2011: 182-183), but then turned into a two-way interaction in which reducing the level of ambition of EU policies and targets has been a constant task for Spanish negotiators over the last years. In this regard, Europeanization is key – although not the only variable for understanding the contradictions of climate policy in Spain, which is reflected in the growing social preferences for climate change abatement that have not been fully materialized in the policymaking (Hanemann et al. 2010: 2). The fact that Spain is a decentralized state with powerful sub-national authorities has accentuated the complexities around climate policy. Therefore, Spanish climate policy is characterized by multi-level governance that inevitably needs cooperation and coordination between different levels of government in order to reach its goals. Last but not least, it is important to take into consideration that Spain has faced during the last years a situation of economic crisis that affected the national performance in this field. On top of that, austerity policies led to an outcry of Spanish society for change that has completely shaken up the political landscape. The sum of these factors helps to explain how Spain became one of the EU member states with the poorest results in the 2016 Climate Performance Index (Germanwatch 2016), but at the same time has a society engaged against climate change. This chapter deals with Spanish climate policy in a changing political landscape. It argues that contrasts in Spain’s climate change policy come precisely from this multi-causal background. The EU empowered domestic actors to promote change, but they have come up against structural resistance to it. The case that best exemplifies this is renewable energy, but it is not the only one. Within the framework of multi-level climate governance in Spain, the role of the Autonomous Communities is also crucial for understanding the implementation
of climate policies. To complete the picture, the economic and political turmoil that Spain experienced since 2008 has given rise to green shoots of transformational leadership in Spanish society and new political forces that are increasingly challenging the status quo in climate affairs and beyond.
