Addressing concerns about climate policies: the possibilities and perils of responsive accommodation

Responsive accommodation is a political strategy that addresses concerns about a policy proposal by incorporating amendments that address those concerns. This approach can broaden the policy’s appeal, but is strategically risky, as it can alienate the policy’s base of support. We examine this strategy and its application in the politics of climate change. Using a novel survey experiment, relative public support is evaluated for two amendments to a carbon tax proposal – revenue neutrality assurances and a carbon tariff – designed to ease concerns about taxes and global competitiveness. Analysis shows that support for a carbon tax increases when coupled with a carbon tariff, but decreases among some of the policy’s supporters when described as revenue-neutral. These results suggest that policymakers using a responsive accommodation strategy must carefully weigh its possible risks and rewards in their particular context.     

Bourdieu,environmental NGOs,and Australian climate politics

Environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Australia have struggled to generate and sustain public concern about climate change. If debates about climate policy can be viewed as sites of contestation between competing actors, Australia’s environmental NGOs have found it difficult to compete against countervailing forces that have sought to shape public attitudes to climate action and the contours of policy responses. While to a significant degree this reflects the power of those forces and the sentiments of the government of the day, there is also a case to be made that some of Australia’s most prominent environmental NGOs have appeared wedded to strategies inconsistent with building or sustaining public support for action or guiding policy responses. How have Australia’s largest environmental NGOs engaged climate politics, and why has this engagement taken that form? Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology provides unique insight for coming to terms with the multifaceted nature of the constraints, opportunities, and drivers of political action, from the context of climate politics to the forces behind Australian NGOs’ engagement with that politics, and the limits of that engagement. Bourdieu’s work also suggests possible avenues for more effective forms of political communication on climate change in the Australian context.     

Drivers of political parties’ climate policy preferences: lessons from Denmark and Ireland

ABSTRACT

Political parties are important actors in domestic climate politics. What drives variation in parties’ climate policy preferences? To contribute to a growing literature on the party politics of climate change, we focus on the roles of public opinion, party competition, and parties’ traditional policy preferences in shaping parties’ climate policy preferences in Denmark and Ireland. In case studies that draw on in-depth interviews with policy practitioners, we show how parties respond to public opinion, accommodate issue-owners, and are powerfully constrained and enabled by their existing preferences. These mechanisms also help to explain different responses on climate policy across the left-right spectrum. Competition between mainstream parties is particularly powerful, but can constrain as much as it enables ‘greener’ climate policy preferences. While climate change may be a distinctive problem, the party politics of climate change features similar incentives and constraints as other domains.     

The European Council,the Council and the Member States: changing environmental leadership dynamics in the European Union

ABSTRACT

The leadership dynamics between the European Council, the Council and the Member States in European Union (EU) environmental policy since the 1970s are analysed. The puzzle is that, although the EU was set up as a ‘leaderless Europe’, it is widely seen as an environmental leader, albeit sometimes as a one-eyed leader amongst the blind. While differentiating between leadership types, it is argued that the European Council has the largest structural, the Council the most significant entrepreneurial, and the Member States the most important cognitive and exemplary leadership capacities. Most day-to-day environmental policy measures are negotiated by the Environment Council (in collaboration with the European Parliament). The European Council’s increased interest in high politics climate change issues is largely due to the EU’s global leadership ambitions. Member States have traditionally formed environmental leadership alliances on an ad hoc basis although this may be changing.     

Religion and environmental politics in the US House of Representatives

Does religion affect legislators’ behavior on environmental policy in the US? Studies of environmental policy making have not examined this question, although the literature suggests that religion might affect legislative behavior on environmental policy. This study examines the relationship between US House members’ religion and roll-call voting on environmental legislation from 1973 to 2009. It finds significant differences across religious traditions. Legislators’ party and characteristics of constituencies relevant to environmental politics increasingly, but not entirely, mediate these differences.     

Procedural justice in local climate adaptation: political capabilities and transformational change

Climate adaptation politics presents both obstacles and opportunities for correcting inequities that leave some communities especially vulnerable to climate-related environmental harms. By revealing these obstacles and opportunities, theories of procedural justice can help to identify procedural reforms and political strategies that advance the interests of vulnerable populations. An account of procedural justice is proposed that foregrounds the capability for political control over one’s environment, defined as having the political power to influence adaptation decisions. While the variables shaping this capability in the politics of environmental injustice often interact in ways that reproduce environmental inequities, adaptation politics has the potential to produce more transformational outcomes. To illustrate this potential, differences between the politics of environmental injustice and the politics of climate adaptation are drawn on to sketch the basic features of a typology of vulnerable populations’ political capabilities in the politics of climate adaptation, before highlighting the potential points for intervention.     

Renegotiating nature in the Anthropocene: Australia’s environment movement in a time of crisis

The Anthropocene raises two interrelated problems for the Australian environment movement. The first concerns the movement’s normative and political relationship to non-human nature: climate change in particular is forcing an urgent reconsideration of how nature is to be understood and managed. The second problem concerns the implications of full recognition of the rights of First Peoples for environmental justice. These issues may lead to crises of identity, legitimacy, and effectiveness for the Australian movement. The normative bases upon which Australian environmentalists may draw in order to ‘protect nature’ in the Anthropocene are discussed. Setting aside the simple emancipatory ambition of preservationist environmentalism and the Australian movement’s earlier Romantic protectionism, a new pragmatic, pluralistic environmental politics – based on precaution, the avoidance of pain and suffering, and protection of the most vulnerable – is suggested.     

Varieties of market-based policy: Instrument choice in climate policy

Since the 1970s, European and US regulators have used different varieties of market-based environmental policy, which are rooted in competing types of liberalism: price instruments and quantity instruments, respectively. In the case of climate change, however, the EU and the US have converged on hybrid policy mixes. This convergence in instrument choice is examined in two cases: the emergence of the EU Emission Trading Scheme, i.e. the import of quantity regulation to the EU; and the creation of California’s feed-in tariff, i.e. the import of price regulation to the US. Increasing convergence in instrument choice is the result of international diffusion through learning and shifting domestic coalitions. This demonstrates that the two varieties of market-based environmental policy increasingly blend, and how policy import is driven by domestic government–producer coalitions rather than by policy-maker ideas of ‘best practice.’     

Assessing President Obama’s climate change record

ABSTRACT

President Obama’s climate change record is assessed by looking at his success in translating policy goals into policy outputs (laws or regulatory action) during his time in office. Obama’s campaign speeches are examined to identify specific promises to take action on climate change before proceeding to examine whether, how and with what success he managed to act upon these pledges. Obama is shown to have set out a multi-pronged approach to deal with climate change in his campaign speeches and succeeded in translating many of his goals into policy outputs. This finding contributes to debates about Obama’s ‘green’ credentials.     

De-Europeanising or disengaging? EU environmental policy and Brexit

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) has had a profound effect upon its members’ environmental policy. Even in the United Kingdom (UK), the EU’s most recalcitrant member state (historically labeled the ‘Dirty man of Europe’), environmental policy has been Europeanised. As the UK moves to the EU’s exit door it is timely to assess the utility of Europeanisation for understanding policy dynamics in the UK. Drawing upon interviews and extensive engagement with stakeholders, this article analyses the potential impact of Brexit upon environmental policy and politics. The analytical toolkit offered by de-Europeanisation is developed to identify the factors that drive and inhibit de-Europeanisation processes, thereby providing insights that may be applicable in other settings. Disengagement and policy stagnation are presented as more likely environmental outcomes of Brexit, with capacity emerging as a central explanatory variable.     

How to tell the truth about climate change

Scientific knowledge, it is argued, is insufficient to overcome climate skepticism. Spiritual truth is proposed as a way to do so. First, the cases of Eric Holthaus and Paul Kingsnorth are examined. Though they knew about climate change, they were only able to tell the truth and act on it after a personal collapse that transformed them. Telling the truth in this way carried a political force that their previous advocacy did not. These figures help animate and adapt Foucault’s notion of spiritual truth for climate change. Finally, this theory of spiritual truth is compared to Naomi Klein’s argument that climate science determines political truth and Bruno Latour’s argument that politics should decide the truth of climate science. Spiritual truth accommodates the insights these perspectives provide while adding transformation as a key element for telling the truth about climate change.     

Divestment discourse: war,justice, morality and money

The fossil fuel divestment movement has been a vibrant novel development in climate change politics in recent years, particularly in North America. Here, the character of the discourse used to promote divestment as a strategy is explored. The divestment discourse is shown to rest on four overlapping narratives, those of war and enemies, morality, economics and justice. All four are clearly discernible in statements from movement activists, in coverage of divestment campaigns by major news sources and in the movement’s aims, objectives and strategies covered in alternative media. The war narrative, with the formulation of fossil fuel companies as enemies to be overcome to ensure survival, is the dominant narrative. By polarising climate action and identifying an antagonist against which to mobilise, divestment discourse has articulated climate change as an explicitly political phenomenon, in contrast to the primarily consensus and collaboration-based approaches that have predominated in climate politics.     

Implementing EU climate and energy policies in Poland: policy feedback and reform

European Union (EU) climate/energy targets and policies are poised for the first full climate policy cycle – from adoption and implementation of the policy package for 2020, to reform for 2030. A dynamic approach to the ways in which EU policies affect policy development is developed by applying theories of domestic implementation, policy feedback and integration. Implementation experiences in Poland – the ‘least climate ambitious’ EU member state – affected Polish preferences for reformed EU policies. Existing EU policies, their ‘fit’ with Poland’s energy interests and change in anticipation of future EU policies explain much of the variation in preferences. Second, policy feedback from Poland significantly affected the EU 2030 climate and energy framework. As yet, the EU has succeeded only partly in gathering momentum through a ‘snowball’ effect whereby positive policy feedback from implementation generates further steps.     

Greening Leviathan: the rise of the environmental state?

‘Bringing the state back in’ to research on comparative, inter-, and trans-national environmental politics and policy will contribute to better understanding of the limits and prospects of contemporary approaches to environmental politics and the overall evolution of contemporary states once environmental issues become central. The rationale for the state as an analytical perspective in environmental policy and politics is explained, and an empirically oriented concept of the environmental state is introduced, along with a tentative sketch of its evolution in historical perspective. A research agenda on the environmental state is mapped out, centring around variation and convergence in environmental states across space and time; the political/economic dynamics of contemporary environmental states; and inter-linkages among environmental problems, the constitution of political communities, and the functioning of the public power. In conclusion, the ways in which the contributions to this volume address that research agenda are introduced.     

The politics of carbon taxation: how varieties of policy style matter

ABSTRACT

The momentum achieved for unilateral carbon taxes in seven European countries is examined. Why is it that small countries, despite being vulnerable to forces of international competition, have been able to implement carbon taxes? A review of national experiences does not suggest that the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix defines the room for such taxes, or point to a strong role for traditional left-right ideology. Rather, it is deep-seated patterns of national policy styles with neo-corporatist traits, providing a protective device for the open economies of small countries, which condition the introduction of carbon taxes. The associated routines of decision-making offer coordination mechanisms for proactive macroeconomic policies in which carbon taxation can find a place. Parliamentary democracies with proportional representation, as is common in the smaller countries, provide access to government for political parties that pursue carbon taxation. These in turn sensitise larger political parties to climate concerns, as they benefit from institutionalised practices and routines for problem-solving and consensus-seeking.     

What room for politics and change in global climate governance? Addressing gender in co-benefits and safeguards

Questions of equity, gender, power and rights are central to environmental justice in climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation). Drawing on the ideas of co-benefits and safeguards, the strategies for challenging mainstream discourse on gender in REDD+ – from the outside and within – are examined of two organisations that have attempted to bring a political concept – gender – into the largely technical discourse of climate policy. The analysis points to the risks of co-option that women’s organisations face, trying to challenge and change the mainstream discourse on gender in climate policy-making. The need for diverse and flexible strategies for resistance and influence in order to seize opportunities that may arise in countering the depoliticising force of global climate governance are highlighted.     

Social representations of governance for change towards sustainability: perspectives of sustainability advocates

There is a substantial body of literature on public understandings of large-scale ‘environmental’ phenomena such as climate change and resource degradation. At the same time, political science and economics analyse the governance arrangements to deal with such issues. These realms of research rarely meet: there has been little research into people’s understandings of the governance of environmental change. This study adds a psychological perspective to governance research by investigating social representations of governance that promotes societal change towards sustainability, and related practices. It examines data from qualitative interviews with sustainability-interested people in seven European countries (n = 105). The analysis identified building blocks of representations suitable as an analytical framework for future research on governance representations. The diversity of their content reflected a range of pathways to societal change. Representations often seemed to have a creative function as a guiding vision for individuals’ own practices, but their wider transformative potential was constrained.     

Is the trajectory of European Union environmental policy less certain?

ABSTRACT

The core themes and research questions of this volume, centred on the nature of environmental policy change in the European Union (EU), are laid out. An original heuristic framework to capture different dimensions, mechanisms and processes of policy change is presented. In order to contextualise the current situation, where EU policy scope has reached maturity and faces an uncertain future trajectory, EU environmental politics is divided into particular eras, looking closely at the nature of change in each period. This volume interrogates the extent to which change has occurred, the conditions or context within which it did/did not take place and the implications arising from stasis or change. The contributions to the volume are introduced and placed into the context of the broader trajectory of EU environmental policy.     

Hannah Arendt’s turn to the self and environmental responses to climate change paralysis

Environmentalists have struggled with how to mobilize people to act in the face of widespread and now inevitable consequences of climate change. Significant responses to this challenge, such as incentivizing individual Green choices in the market and avoiding the rhetoric of catastrophe, continue the philosophical and political trends, identified by Hannah Arendt, that contribute to world alienation and the decline of politics. Environmental thinkers are invited to use Arendt’s theories of the turn to the self and political action to think critically about contemporary strategies to address climate change.