Paper Titles & Abstracts

So-called pioneers or leaders play an important role in the political, societal and scientific discourse on environmental policy. By achieving or inducing political and technological breakthroughs and paving the way for followers, they are often considered to be among the most important drivers for the development of ambitious environmental policy. However, the existing literature on environmental pioneers and leaders is based on a limited number of well-researched case studies ad lacks conceptual rigour.Drawing on the existing theoretical and empirical literature, the paper aims to put forward a more coherent conceptualization of environmental pioneers and leaders. More specifically, it will address the following key questions: Who can be a pioneer? It will be argued, amongst other things, that pioneers can be states as well as international/supranational organizations, subnational governments (cities, regions) and private actors (companies, NGOs, individuals). When can an actor be considered a pioneer, or: what defines a pioneer? This section will deal with, amongst other things, the issues addressed by pioneers, their timing and ambition ('first in class' or 'best in class', etc) and their internal vs. external role. Why does an actor behave like a pioneer (characteristics, motivations)? How do pioneers work, or: what are their preferred strategies? This section will refer to the extensive leadership literature. What can the effect of pioneers be? This section will make a distinction between, amongst other things, output and outcome of pioneering behaviour.While the early environmental pioneer literature focused exclusively on states, in recent years a much wider range of actors (e.g. international organisations, the EU, NGOs, businesses and cities) has been identified as exhibiting the potential to act as environmental pioneers and leaders. This paper aims to capture conceptually the 'old' and 'new' actors which may form environmental leader alliances.