Prof Florence Metz: "Navigating the Climate Policy Paradox: Institutional Complexity and the Challenge of Policy Coherence in the EU"

Part of the series of lectures “Politics in Europe”

Date: 08.07.2025
Time: 16:30-18:00
Place: Bld. C1 7, room 0.08

The presentation is held in English

Announcement poster
Event at LSF

 

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Prof Dr Florence Metz

Florence Metz is a political scientist specializing in governance resilience, policy processes, and environmental governance. Since April 2025, she has held the Professorship of Policy Analysis and Political Economy at RPTU University of Kaiserslautern. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor of Governance Resilience at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

Florence Metz was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich's Natural Resource Policy Group and conducted research at the University of Bern's Centre for Development and Environment as well as the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research. She earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern, where she examined political networks and water protection policies in the Rhine River region.

Her research spans multiple international projects funded by the Dutch ZonMW and the Swiss National Science Foundation, with fieldwork conducted across Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Madagascar, Laos, and Myanmar. She received the Professor De Winter Award in 2022. In 2025, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her project Climplexity: CLIMate policy integration – A comPLEXITY trap?

 

Summary

The European Union has made climate action a central policy priority, committing 30% of its 2021–2027 budget—€557 billion—to climate-related spending (European Commission, 2022) and requiring all policy sectors to integrate climate objectives. Yet projections from the Climate Action Tracker (2022) indicate that the EU is unlikely to reach its 2050 net-zero emissions target.

This talk explores the paradox between political ambition and policy effectiveness. I argue that a key explanation lies in a flawed assumption: that as climate policies accumulate, their coherence remains stable. In practice, policies often contradict each other, while their interdependencies are poorly understood.

Building on the Theory of Institutional Complexity Traps, this research shows how expanding policy portfolios can become fragmented and counterproductive when not properly coordinated. Methodologically, I apply network analysis to identify and map the interactions among policy instruments and goals, highlighting areas of synergy and contradiction.

This systems-based approach provides new insights into the structural limits of climate policy integration and suggests why institutional complexity may be a hidden barrier to achieving climate goals. The research is part of the ERC Starting Grant project Climplexity: CLIMate Policy Integration—a ComPLEXITY Trap?

Language: English

Interested parties are cordially invited to attend. Please register in advance at vinciane.pilz(at)uni-saarland.de.