Climate activists are divided over whether to adopt strategies emphasizing stability and incremental change versus strategies promoting more extreme and immediate action. One way to promote policy stability is through private governance, that is, voluntary industry self-governance. Proponents argue this can stabilize expectations about the future, incentivize incremental reductions in emissions, and lock in policies and practices. This problem-solving approach serves to depoliticize debate but can lead to political backlash and repoliticization. I examine these dynamics through a case study of the financial sector, particularly the insurance industry. Collective attempts to ensure policy lock-in and stability include initiatives such as the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI), the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, and Net Zero Insurance Alliance. This is a case of failed depoliticization as demonstrated by the political backlash against these efforts.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book’s fifteen analytical chapters and is divided into six sections. Each section places several individual chapters in conversation with one another. First, we reflect on how the authors engaged with stability, across the four forms we developed in the introductory chapter, before the second section does the same regarding re/politicization. Third, we engage with the running theme throughout the book that stability and re/politicization are not dichotomous but rather interact, and indeed, one can be pursued to achieve the other. Fourth, we explore manifestations of depoliticization encountered within the book and find that, in practice, many regimes pursuing stability are less depoliticized than often assumed. Fifth, we bring in the importance of temporality to our studies, before finally offering concluding remarks on the book’s arguments and suggesting avenues for future research. Throughout the volume, we have presented the antagonism between stability and re/politicization in a deliberately flexible manner, and we hope others will find it – as well as our four novel forms of each approach – to be useful in their own analyses.

Around the world, countries have set up climate institutions that putatively “depoliticize” climate policymaking, removing decisions from the realm of partisan politics or delegating decisions to technocratic bodies. Here, we offer an empirical reassessment of such apolitical institutions in the UK, Norway, Denmark, and Australia. We find that what seems in many cases like depoliticization – upon closer examination – proves anything but. Instead, we offer a reinterpretation of climate advisory institutions as the path-dependent product of distributive and partisan conflicts. New climate institutions did not emerge merely as a result of norms about public goods provision and efforts to reshape intertemporal policymaking incentives, to provide stability, or to solve the gap between current and future welfare needs. Instead, these institutions addressed core distributive conflicts over climate policy, the short- or medium-term political needs of incumbent governments, or both. In turn, we argue that this political context surrounding their creation has limited the degree to which they can stabilize policy over time or depoliticize climate policy debates.

The history of global climate governance can be seen as a series of politicization conflicts. Countries seek to either legitimize and strengthen hard-won global rules or reinterpret or replace them. This chapter focuses on one such conflict, whether to replace or protect the Kyoto Protocol. This conflict primarily pitted the United States against the EU, but each drew other countries into their side of the conflict. By focusing on one conflict, this chapter provides insights into how processes and strategies of politicization unfold in international politics. Countries employed a range of tools, rhetorical and behavioral, to question or support the Kyoto Protocol inside and outside the negotiation process. Several of these strategies are currently employed in relation to the Paris Agreement, marking another politicization conflict.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

This chapter analyzes the role of peatland management in UK climate politics. It uses this case to develop a notion of “scope expansion” as a feature of the dynamic relation between stability and politicization over time in climate politics: policy regimes designed to ensure a stable environment for the pursuit of net zero end up identifying new objects of governance, generating new political dynamics around the preexisting political relations regarding that object. As the UK’s policy regime became more ambitious, one of these objects was peatland management, central to the pursuit of carbon dioxide removals in the UK context, and thus the “net” side of net zero. The chapter shows that peatlands have their own political dynamics, centered on questions of concentrated landownership, peat moor management for grouse shooting, and social movement campaigns for recreational access to peat moors. Attempts to manage peatlands for climate change policy, mostly through peat rewetting initiatives, encounter these existing political dynamics in ways that mostly limit the potential for rewetting and thus generate needs for repoliticization especially regarding landownership and grouse shooting.

Does decarbonization depend on policy stability that makes climate policies and institutional development irreversible, or does it depend on mastering a messy political conflict with uneven progress that might be inherent in large political economy transitions? This chapter draws on case studies of two large emerging powers, Brazil and South Africa, to argue that politicization of climate action seems inevitable in decarbonizing energy transitions. Fossil fuel coalitions are too powerful and the threat to them too existential to avoid politicization as they defend their interests. At the same time, Brazil shows that policy stability was a critical step in a large expansion of wind power there – not a full energy transition itself but providing an important alternative to fossil fuels. Both countries show that allies in the struggle against fossil fuels can be won and lost in non-climate political economies of energy transition. The potential for new industry and job creation, enhanced energy security, and impacts on communities that host infrastructure are all important to energy transition, with each following a political economy logic that may or may not focus on climate change.

As coal burning was explicitly politicized with reference to coal’s contributions to climate change over the last ten to fifteen years, a number of policy norms associated with phasing out coal burning (or its financing) have emerged and stabilized in transnational politics. This chapter tracks aspects of these normative politics focusing on both the promulgation and diffusion of the new policy norms and a number of critiques and challenges – many grounded in distributional and procedural justice – to coal phaseout norms that emerge as a response to the transnational promulgation of coal phaseout policies.

This chapter assesses the extent to which the emergence of Fridays for Future (FFF) resulted in a politicization of climate change and how this affected climate policy and politics in Germany from 2018 to 2022. We show that the politicization resulted in a situation in which the Merkel government decided to gradually phase out coal-fired power plants as the key climate policy decision of the last few years. While this step was triggered by the EU’s announcement in 2017 that it would adopt stricter emissions standards for large combustion plants burning coal and lignite, FFF increased the pressure on the government to act. The politicization of the issue also resulted in changes to climate politics. The positions of mainstream political parties and their candidates have converged in their positions on climate change and the need for climate action. However, this convergence refers to climate policy in abstract terms and not to the specific policy measures supported by the individual parties. While climate change became depoliticized for a while, geopolitical conflicts are expected to repoliticize it and to have an impact on climate politics and policy.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

Policy stability and politicization are not dichotomous. Rather, both disruption of the carbon lock-in status quo and the generation of policy stability around transformation toward decarbonization are inherently political. The desired relationship between policy stability and politicization changes depending on the structural and institutional conditions in place that reinforce carbon lock-in or catalyze and scale decarbonization. In this chapter, we elaborate on the relationship between stability and politicization and discuss how these dynamics are captured by a phenomenon we call the carbon trap. We conclude with the suggestion that the concept and politics of just transition offer ways to understand and pursue desirable politicized disruption of carbon lock-in and to catalyze stable policies and systems around decarbonization.