Brace for Turbulence: EU Member States’ Climate Strategies in the Aviation Sector, 2018-2020

The data is made available with the associated publication. We analysed the EU National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) in order to examine national commitments on aviation. The data show how frequently EU Member States refer to aviation in their NECPs, and we code these references thematically. First, by conducting a content analysis on all 54 draft and final NECPs, we count the keywords associated with aviation. Second, we inductively and iteratively developed themes and sub-themes for each sentence in the final NECPs that contained an aviation reference (n = 494).

The science behind climate change has been established, and now the mitigation of climate change has become a political puzzle. We need to act quickly to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and so this project is designed to find and then share effective policy solutions that can be used across society. Until very recently, attempted solutions for climate change were 'top down': for example, the United Nations organised annual conferences, and those countries responsible for producing the most greenhouse gases dominated these negotiations. However, this approach for dealing with climate change has failed to generate effective change quickly enough, and academics are looking for new governance solutions for this most pressing and significant of issues. Increasingly, scholars argue that we need to be improving policy-making the local level, and empowering a wide range of people take a lead in responding to climate change. In particular, they argue we need 'polycentric governance'. Polycentric governance involves businesses, NGOs and government agencies working independently of each other, while also overlapping and coordinating with one another, as part of complex, multi-level networks. The outcome should be that no individual group or organisation is solely responsible for mitigating climate change, and so every 'node' in the network is encouraged to fulfil its part without fearing being exploited by others.