פרסומים – מכון ירושלים למחקרי מדיניות

Summary

Publication Year: 2015

Authors:

SPREE

SPREE: Servicing Policy for Resource Efficient Economy is a three-year project from 2012-2015 under the European Union’s Environment Program (FP7). The objective of the project is to design policy packages to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns characterized by the transition from the purchase of consumer products to services in three sectors: water, transportation and food agriculture. The main product of the project is “Policy Packages for Transition to Service Consumption” which will help achieve a complete separation between economic growth and environmental damage while taking into consideration social considerations.

Policy Packaging – Aim and Methodology

A Policy Package is a combination of policy instruments designed to address one or more policy objectives. Through a combination of policy instruments, a Policy Package should result in meeting goals that otherwise cannot be met with a single policy instrument. Policy Packages utilize positive synergy effects between policy instruments while avoiding contradictory effects and reducing negative unintended effects. They are also designed to increase public acceptance of policies.

The inventory of policy instruments was created in order to achieve the policy goal of decoupling. The decoupling indicator for the Mobility sector was defined as the ratio between emissions/fossil fuel use from passenger cars per unit and the revenue from Car-Sharing growth (or vkm driven if Bike-Sharing is the focus). The decoupling levels were measured against the decoupling level of the conventional model of car ownership in order to assess the effects of shifting to servicing.

Recommendations

The process described here is recommended to follow as a systematic way to think about the different ways to design policy that is at the same time effective and implementable. Policy Packaging aims to try and ensure that the political policy formulation process is streamlined, to the extent possible, and is progressing while considering several stages and associated ‘tests’ or evaluations. By empirically testing the Policy Packaging methodology, use was made for the first time of an Agent-Based Model (ABM), developed and specifically tailored for each servicing case. The ABM thus allowed for a simulation of the outcome of implementing different policy instruments.

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