Reconsidering Green Deals as national transition policy frameworks after the Paris Agreement

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Long-term national policies jointly advancing decarbonization and socioeconomic development have become prominent features of the post-Paris Agreement governance landscape. Existing research has focused disproportionately on initiatives labeled as “Green Deals” while potentially overlooking a broader shift in sustainability transition governance. This study argues that “Green Deals” are better understood as instances of a broader class of low-carbon development policies (LCDPs). It develops a Weberian ideal type for identifying and comparing them, based on three governance attributes treated as analytically consequential by the scholarship on earlier sustainability transition governance policy approaches: transformational objectives, steering instruments, and international anchoring. The two extant Green Deals - the European Green Deal and the Korean Green New Deal - supply the empirical material from which these attributes are accentuated into their fully developed form. A semi-systematic literature review applies this ideal type to a globally diverse sample of 33 national and EU-level policies across diverse regions and politico-economic systems. The review establishes international anchoring as a comparative dimension of domestic transition policies, comprising five institutional forms that are climate-oriented, mixed, or non-climate in purpose. Each policy is ranked on all three attributes according to how closely it approximates the ideal type, yielding an overall classification of the reviewed cases. The study contributes a framework to identify and compare post-Paris sustainability transition policies beyond the “Green Deal” label, theorizes international anchoring as a governance feature rather than background context, and provides a basis for comparing diverse cases on an equal analytical basis.