Hegemonic Green Projects and Network Structures Among German Climate Policy Experts

Leon Wansleben

States’ green policies and their coordination with societal actors build on “hegemonic projects,” which are more or less dominant, more or less contested conceptions of viable, desirable transition pathways, which involve particular technological, infrastructural, and distributional choices. Hegemonic projects can rest, for instance, on optimistic ideas of the compatibility of environmental with economic interests. For Germany, we investigate the development of hegemonic projects together with the evolving network structures that enable their emergence. Network structures and positions among climate policy experts reveal patterns of influence, cooperation, and rivalry, thereby allowing us to study specific “imagined futures” of decarbonization in their structural contexts. For this study, we rely on a unique data set of all advisory contracts held by various types of consultancy organizations (research, commercial, and civil society) with federal ministries for different periods since 2009. We study whether or not these organizations coalesce around green transition hegemonies and which types of organizations are dominant in the German climate policy discourse.