Switzerland

The discourse and policies Switzerland adopted during the early 1990s approximates the behavior of what Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) describe as a ‘climate pusher’ which is a state that innovates with regard to its domestic climate policy and lobbies other states to follow its lead. However, at the end of the 1990s Switzerland seemed not capable of translating the propositions made at the international level into national measures anymore. Despite being an early advocate for a world tax on carbon dioxide (CO₂), Switzerland was never able to introduce a domestic CO₂ tax on motor fuels. Moreover, Switzerland has been criticised for its tendency to buy CO₂ certificates instead of introducing domestic reduction measures and for its failure to regulate effectively emissions from the transport sector. In this chapter, we aim to explain these drawbacks in Swiss climate policy by placing the focus on the political process around the tax on CO₂. We rely on social network analysis to demonstrate the difficulty of introducing effective climate policy instruments in the absence of cooperation within actors involved in national politics. Based on these results, we suggest that the structure and type of actor networks engaged in domestic politics might very well explain deviations from climate pushing or pioneering.