Noah Fralich

Wuppertal Institute, Berlin, Germany

This summer I worked for the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy in Berlin, Germany. The Wuppertal Institute is primarily focused on environmental policy research, which they conduct at the request of governments, businesses and other for- and non-profit organizations. They routinely conduct their work with other non-profit organizations such as the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund. Where I worked, however, was slightly different in that the Berlin Office is a satellite office whose purpose is to bring the work of the Wuppertal Institute closer to the German Federal Government and to serve as a lobbying force. The Berlin Office is fairly small relative to the main office in Wuppertal, Germany. The office consists of the director, Hermann E. Ott, and five other co-workers. All of them work on their own various projects ranging from topics related to the Kyoto Protocol to environmental fair trade issues. In late May there had been a week of meetings in Bonn, Germany about the Kyoto Protocol, for which there were both national position papers that had been submitted to the overseeing body as well as post-conference reports about the progress that had been made and the renewed opinions of the various member states who participated. This led into my first project, which I worked on together with one of the other interns working there at the same time.

Our job was to read both of these sets of materials and compile the commonalities into a table for quick reference. There were position briefs that had been submitted by participating parties before and after the conference about the Kyoto Protocol, which I and another intern had been assigned to read. The briefs were dense and, rather than spend time reading them himself, my boss had us bring together their contents into a form that he could easily reference. He wanted the summaries because he was eventually going to use them when meeting with government officials to discuss the conference and advise those officials.

This gave me a good opportunity to see exactly what the language of environmental policy sounded like and also to get a better idea for what topics are of current interest both to the German Government as well as to my boss and the institute. It turns out that the language of politics is extremely dense and it's hard to separate out the issues from the formality, which can be frustrating and also time consuming. Of course this is the point of the internship, I feel; that is to say that it gave me the chance to reevaluate the direction my studies might go and to reassess what my interests really are.

My second and essentially my main project involved research on the contemporary literature pertaining to the correlations between the effectiveness of implementation of environmental policy and levels of democracy. This topic was both extremely theoretical as well as highly practical and, most importantly, very relevant to today's political atmosphere, at least in Europe.

I worked on this project for approximately four weeks, spending time both in the office and at the library, where I reviewed journal articles, scholarly books and online publications. Once I thought I had reached the end of my research (and my internship was coming to an end) I started putting the pieces together into a single paper with summaries of various authors' findings, analyses of theses, and my own personal opinions based on what I had learned. The paper ended up about twenty pages long and spanning some fifteen sources. Though the more I read and learned, the more it became apparent that this project would only be capable of scratching the surface of the issues. By the end of the project, it had become clear that there were a great diversity of opinions regarding the topic. However, to break the debate down into salient general opinions, there were those who advocated more direct and participatory democratic forms as the solution to lagging environmental policy. The other side of the debate held a more technocratic view for the solution, proposing more centralized scientifically informed legislative processes and decreased access by the layperson, or lobbyist. Both sides, in my view, offered positives and negatives to the debate and neither side can clearly claim to have a perfect solution, but rather valuable insights into various facets of the theoretical and practical debate.

This project I found to be an amazing experience on a topic that I didn't even know I was interested in. It is something that I could see myself continuing in my senior project in some fashion or another. As far as the internship goes, I think it was exactly what an internship experience should be. There were parts of it that were eye opening in both positive and negative ways; there were parts that reaffirmed some of my interests in environmental politics, but there were parts that helped me to consider redirecting myself in a slightly different direction. It gave me a great exposure to the office working environment as well as exposing me to a very professional atmosphere in general. If I had to draw a line in the sand, I don't think I could see myself working in exactly that field, rather I'd sooner be more product oriented, such as working for a wind energy development firm. I felt that working on policy wouldn't give me a real sense of accomplishment or that I had truly produced anything fruitful. On the whole though, the internship was everything I could have hoped it would be and I am exceedingly glad that I had the opportunity to experience all that environmental policy research in Germany's capital could give me.

As I look forward to my senior integrative project with my internship in the rearview mirror, I consider my general impressions of the nature of policy work. Rather than go further down that road, my senior project will focus more closely on a specific area of environmental policy that also overlaps into industry, namely the wind power industry. I plan to examine the development of the wind energy industry in Germany with respect to two important milestones in German environmental policy: the passing of the Renewable Energy Sources Act in 2000 and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The project will draw on my exposure to policy work, while at the same time tap into my interests in wind power. It's difficult to say at this point, how much of the contents of my research from my internship will make its way into my senior integrative project, other than perhaps in a theoretical introductory paragraph, but the skills I learned from working at the Wuppertal Institute will doubtlessly inform my work and my thinking throughout the semester.