Look to Sweden: The Making of a New Renewable Energy Support Scheme in Norway

Two renewable energy support schemes have spread across Europe: green certificate schemes ( GCSs ) and feed‐in tariffs ( FITs ). After a decade‐long policy‐making process, N orwegian decision makers decided in 2011 to adopt a GCS compatible with the already existing one in S weden and thereby establish a joint N orwegian‐Swedish GCS . The article explores this process of policy transfer, and asks to what extent competition and policy learning contributed to N orway's choice of a GCS . It finds that competition was a barrier to a joint N orwegian‐Swedish GCS rather than (as predicted by some scholars) a driver of policy transfer. In terms of policy learning, it finds that N orwegian bureaucrats systematically were searching for information about renewable energy policy instruments in a process characterised by rational learning. However, this information was not taken into account by elected policy makers, whose learning was unsystematic and almost exclusively influenced by S weden – making it a process of bounded learning. Finally, domestic factors that facilitated and constrained the policy transfer process are identified in the article. A reluctant bureaucracy defending the status quo policies constrained the policy transfer process. GCS as a market‐based instrument independent of yearly allocations over the annual national budgets facilitated the process by securing strong support in a broad coalition of stakeholder groups and thereby cross‐partisan support. The latter finding may contribute to the literature by underscoring the importance of domestic political factors.