Phase II

Chapter 5 is about processes of making mitigation policy choices, largely in Annex 1 countries, from the immediate post-Kyoto period up to 2008. Although there had been some debate about difficulties in reducing emissions in the pre-Kyoto period, it was during this following phase that more clarity emerged about the choices and contestations policymakers faced in practice and the institutions that shaped them. These ranged from deciding where mitigation decisions should be taken, in existing or new departments or ministries; what the overall approach should be and what types of policy should be preferred; to how reducing emissions relates to objectives in other policy areas and what to do about perceived trade-offs. The politics of making collective mitigation choices, and how those choices were influenced, started to become more tangible, whilst climate mitigation was subject to a range of politicisations in a deliberative sense.