Socially far-sighted climate policy

The amendment to the Building Energy Act (GEG) shows how mistakes in the social design and communication of climate policy can lead to uncertainty and conflict among the population.

The analysis of the project “Group Appeals – The Political Communication of Eco-Social Policies in Germany” identifies three key lessons:

• Socially unbalanced subsidy logic: The design of the subsidy primarily favors households with higher incomes. Lower-income owners continue to be heavily burdened by their own contributions. This creates a Matthew effect (“To those who have, more will be given”), which reinforces social inequalities and reduces acceptance.
• Insufficiently differentiated communication: Different social situations—for example, between owners and tenants or between urban and rural areas—were not sufficiently taken into account by politicians and the media. The specific burdens on individual groups remained underexposed, and concerns were not addressed effectively.
• Instrumentalization of social arguments: Critical parties used social arguments primarily to delegitimize the law without presenting viable alternatives. At the same time, the governing parties’ responses to social design and their communication were insufficiently prepared.

The policy brief derives from this the concept of a forward-looking climate social policy. This refers to a policy that:

• considers the ecological and social dimensions of climate protection throughout the entire policy process and
• takes conflicts over social design into account in a forward-looking manner in policy design and the communication of measures.

This reduces socially motivated areas of attack, makes political instrumentalization more difficult, and secures social majorities in the long term.