Designing Instrument Packages for the Low-Carbon Transition: An Evaluation Framework with an Application to Austria

Limiting global warming to no more than 2°C requires global large-scale deployment of low-carbon and negative emissions technologies. This requires the development of new eco-innovations and the diffusion of new and existing ones. Existing portfolios of environmental and technology policy instruments, however, may not be up to this task. In this paper, we develop an evaluative framework for the assessment of existing and new policy instruments for the successful development and deployment of eco-innovations. Our evaluative framework considers focus, scope, strictness, coherence and timing as key criteria for the evaluation of policy instruments for the transition to a low-carbon economy. We apply our framework to the residential and commercial (buildings) sector in an ambitious country, Austria.