Modelling Environmental Capacities of Nation States: Path dependencies and policy domains

The capacities of countries to cope with the challenges of global environmental change vary considerably. Some countries are earlier and their environmental policies are more ambitious than others. Based on earlier comparative case studies and conceptual models, we have developed a statistical model to describe and analyse environmental capacity of a country, as constituted by the strength, competence and configuration of the governmental and non-governmental proponents of environmental protection and the specific cognitive-informational, political-institutional and economic-technological framework conditions. We expect capacities of countries to vary in different issue areas. A country might perform relatively well in climate policies, but is less ambitious in e.g. chemical policies or other issue areas. While a country might have built up expertise, competences, networks of actors etc. in a certain domain, it is lacking such conditions in another. This can be captured as path dependencies of environmental policies. To explore the relevance of such path dependencies, we compare indicators of the policy performance of countries in two issue areas, i.e. climate change policies and natur