2.2.1 Follow the Science

This first set of ideas is categorised according to those that see science as the basis for solutions and politics as that which often stands in the way of climate mitigation (see Victor & Heller Reference Victor and Heller2011; Jordan et al. Reference Jordan, Lorenzoni and Tosun2022). Like other perspectives reviewed below, this view sits firmly within a wider perspective on how the world works – in this case science based. But, unlike the next two, the intention behind this critique of politics is in creating a stable policy environment for climate change mitigation. As explored in more detail in Chapter 4, scientific research, evidence, and ideas have contributed more towards getting climate change onto global and national public policy agendas than any other set of ideas. To this limited extent, then, scientific climate perspectives, and how they have been expressed socially, can be seen as having contributed towards politicising effects. There are, however, elements within scientific and activist communities that express a particularly dim view of politics – often born out of frustration that policy outcomes lag far behind goals.

From the ‘follow the science’ viewpoint, science not only offers a planetary perspective that reveals climate change as an issue but it also tells us what to do about it. Science here is understood as objective and uninfluenced by politics or society, and hence correct and/or beyond reproach (cf. Forsyth Reference Forsyth2012). National policymaking bodies cannot offer this planetary perspective, whilst politicising climate mitigation can open it up to wider debate and the risk of polarisation, making it harder for scientific evidence to be heard (Radaelli Reference Radaelli1999). A particular fear is that of non-objective narratives skewing climate debates and the influence of misinformation on the views of publics and their voting patterns and, indeed, politicians themselves (Office for Science 2023). The global scientific consensus, at the same time, increasingly shows us that anthropogenic climate change is accelerating and directly appeals for an increase in the pace and scale of change to transform energy, land, urban, and industrial systems (IPCC 2018; 2022). As suggested by the youth activist Greta Thunberg, in her now infamous appeal to the United States (US) Congress, politicians should ‘listen to the scientists’ and act accordingly to rapidly reduce emissions (Milman Reference Milman2019).

The recommendation aligns with the view that scientific insights are sufficient to action mitigation fully. This notion is reflected in communications by some scientists: “… it is now incumbent on our political leaders to turn the advice we in the scientific community have been providing them into the concrete action the public is demanding” (Kejun & Masson-Delmotte Reference Kejun and Masson-Delmotte2018). It infers that political actors have sufficient authority and democratic support to enact whatever changes ‘science’ dictates, but also that this can be achieved without much consideration of broader, non-climate political interests and ideas. Publics, interestingly, are often seen as ‘demanding’ climate action. This not only minimises the degree of denial of and/or disinterest in climate change but also the degree of public objection to some climate change solutions, such as the siting of low-emissions infrastructures or non-means tested carbon pricing hitting poorer social groups harder. Some take a step further by suggesting that climate change is explicitly a problem of politics (Kejun & Masson-Delmotte Reference Kejun and Masson-Delmotte2018). Policy should, as a result, be removed from the realm of political contestation and conflict.

One popular suggestion is to cede responsibility for climate policymaking to scientists and/or elite technocrats that can proceed with policies based on scientifically correct (objective) knowledge. Climate experts should discuss and design climate policy within expert bodies, underpinned by the right kinds of knowledge, and sheltered from unwelcome political contestations. This has elsewhere been referred to as technocratic governance, which has the effect of suppressing the breadth of deliberation and shaping policy preferences by omission (see Wood & Flinders Reference Wood and Flinders2014). This type of step is, of course, still deeply political and is an enactment of science as technocracy (Bickerton & Accetti Reference Bickerton and Accetti2020) or of administrative rationalism (Dryzek Reference Dryzek2022). A few steps on from this position is that of eco-authoritarians who argue that, because climate is an existential issue and politics impedes its mitigation, it “may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” (James Lovelock in Willis Reference Willis2021; see also Paterson et al. Reference Paterson, Tobin and VanDeveer2022). This assumption, that processes of policymaking and policies can be placed at a remove from politics, encapsulates the narrowness of this view of politics.

Critics suggest that these views are ‘anti-political’ and lean heavily towards a ‘there is no alternative’ and/or ‘we know best – trust us’ type approach to policymaking (Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2010; Stirling 1998 in Millstone Reference Millstone, Scones, Leach and Newell2015). There is no sense here of expert groups needing to build broader coalitions of support for particular mitigation policies, nor of recognising that political processes include conflict. This, in turn, suggests that broader social and political deliberations on climate change solutions are not required and/or that they can be minimised. Taken together, the ‘follow the science’ viewpoint can be understood as depoliticising in several senses. It narrows down visions of how to address climate change by limiting the range of alternative imaginaries of the future or possibilities for policymaking today (Fagan Reference Fagan2023: 6). It obscures the social and political structures and struggles involved over the long timeframes of achieving mitigation. This is partly because the interest is in reducing emissions but not recognising or addressing other outcomes of mitigation policy, be they job, economy, or justice related. Suggestions that responsibility for climate policy should be passed to proscribed elites who are not directly answerable to the public depoliticise by obscuring policy deliberation from publics (cf. Kuzemko Reference Kuzemko2015). It neatly sidesteps important questions of political and democratic legitimacy: who elects experts, on what authority they would implement policy, and to whom they should be answerable (see Willis Reference Willis2020).

2.2.2 Techno-optimists

A second set of ideas, closely related to ‘follow the science’, suggest that most necessary solutions are already known and/or available, technology being foremost amongst them. It is encapsulated in the notion that technology will save us – a perspective informed by the assumption, increasingly common over the last century, that human ingenuity, channelled through scientific invention and innovation, can solve even the most ‘wicked’ global problems, thereby reducing the necessity for more radical systemic change (Millstone Reference Millstone, Scones, Leach and Newell2015; Green Reference Green2022). This ties in neatly with the view that we should follow the science as “… there is no doubt that we have the technological answers” (Kejun & Masson-Delmotte Reference Kejun and Masson-Delmotte2018). It is also in line with one of the dominant ideas underpinning modernity, ecomodernism – that technology is progress and that humans can (and should) control the planetary climate (Stirling Reference Stirling2014b). This approach, then, infers stability in this institutional sense.

The UNFCCC argues that the development, application, and diffusion of ‘climate’ technologies are essential to control, reduce, or prevent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (Article 4, paragraph 1). The OECD, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and UNEP likewise emphasise the central role of technoscientific innovation, trade, and transfer to sustainable development (Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015). For some, including the UNFCCC, national and local governments are viewed as vehicles for funding and disseminating technological solutions, thereby actively facilitating technology development and transfer to developing countries (UNFCCC 2016). Others offer an imaginary ‘technocracy for the common good’ future wherein societal interests are defined by science and digitalisation enables unprecedented monitoring and control of social and ecological systems (European Environment Agency 2022).

There are those, however, that suggest that government either stands in the way of, or simply is not that important to, technological advancement – again, offering a limited view of politics (Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015). Innovation from this viewpoint is something entrepreneurial and explicitly market based, the private sector has the motivation, funding, and expertise for technology development, whilst governments are seen as tending to fail at technological innovation.Footnote ¹ This view has been popularised by high-profile corporate and political characters such as Elon Musk and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Daggett Reference Daggett2018: 33). By focusing on technology over people, they represent an oversimplification of what needs to be achieved to mitigate climate change over the long term and of questions of who has access to what technologies.

For all the arguments about sufficient emissions reduction technologies being already available, many scenarios of how we get to 1.5°C, and some governance strategies, rely heavily on speculative and/or not yet commercially available technologies. This has been termed the ‘promethean’ approach to mitigation (Vogler Reference Vogler2016: 27). Potential geoengineering technologies most widely discussed fall into two categories – they are either designed to protect the earth from the heat of the sun or, more commonly, to take carbon out of the atmosphere (NETs). The upside, from the techno-optimist view, of leaning heavily on future technological solutions is that they also infer lower degrees of political, economic, or social change in the near term (Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015; McLaren & Corry Reference McLaren and Corry2021). They are often favoured by governments committed to meeting ambitious climate targets but fearful of damaging the economy (see Victor & Heller Reference Victor and Heller2011). Further, as noted by McLaren and Corry, “… the models used to evaluate potential geoengineering interventions tend to rely on idealised scenarios and assumptions about global control, distribution, or aggregation” (McLaren & Corry Reference McLaren and Corry2021: 20).

This can be problematic, and depoliticising, in many ways. Victor and Heller argue that the problem with this approach, which they refer to as the ‘engineer’s myth’, is the assumption that technological innovation leads directly to implementation. As with the follow-the-science viewpoint, this neatly sidesteps questions of the profound industrial and policy changes that will be required (Victor & Heller Reference Victor and Heller2011: 52). Techno-optimist viewpoints can often kick the politics of reducing emissions down the road and delay political debate about the wide range of other, non-technical, mitigation options available today (Clift & Kuzemko Reference Clift and Kuzemko2024). In turn, this places the IPCC’s target of 7% annual reduction in emissions (versus 2010 levels) by 2030 at risk. Indeed, this perspective can inform approaches that lead to climate mitigation deterrence (Lamberts in Kuper Reference Kuper2023). There is an extent to which focusing on the importance of technology to modernity, and on future technologies as providing solutions, also allows for greater stability of high-emissions energy systems. Notions about the dependence of ‘modern’ societies on energy and the promise of future geoengineering solutions are both essential to narratives of fossil fuel corporations, and their plans to avoid or at least radically slow phase out. Technologies are often presented as artefacts with their own agency – bypassing relevant social and economic questions of control, ownership (patents), distribution, and funding requirements for complex and often long-term processes of innovation.

2.2.3 Markets and Maths

Like the previous two ways of thinking about politics and climate change mitigation, this view is informed by a wider and very common perspective – that of neoliberal economics. As argued extensively elsewhere (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2001; Newell & Paterson Reference Newell and Paterson2010; Antonio & Brulle Reference Antonio and Brulle2011; Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015; Kuzemko et al. Reference Kuzemko, Lockwood, Mitchell and Hoggett2016a), market liberal ideas about climate change and about who should act to address it have heavily influenced global climate negotiations and global and national policy choices. Climate change came to global political attention around the same time as claims that the global ideological struggle had ended and that market liberal thinking had won/become orthodoxy for many policymakers (see Gamble Reference Gamble2000). Further deliberation about how to approach public policy design was not always, therefore, seen as necessary. It is also the case that the models upon which scientific narratives about anthropogenic climate change were based involved considerable mathematical simplifications of both the natural and social world, as the physics of climate were captured in equations and then executed in code (Edwards Reference Edwards2011). Climate models that fail to see the social world beyond a set of heavily simplified assumptions have played, and continue to play, a strong role in UNFCCC thinking (Millstone Reference Millstone, Scones, Leach and Newell2015: 41).

The range of market liberal perspective on climate is, like the others, reasonably broad. There are those, often in Anglo-Saxon nations, who see climate action, and associated regulations of market actions, as an attack on free market democracy (Antonio & Brulle Reference Antonio and Brulle2011). Tied together with arguments about the importance of energy security to society, this can offer a very effective narrative of resistance to government interventions to ensure mitigation. Such arguments can also be effective at a time of growing anti-politics narratives within some political, media, and public circles, and given the growing lack of trust in national governments to act in the interests of publics (Hay Reference Hay2007; Flinders Reference Flinders2012).

The less extreme version of this way of thinking might be referred to as the ‘reformist’ approach, whereby climate change is seen as an important global issue but also as a market failure (Stern Reference Stern2007; see also Garner Reference Garner2011; Mazzucato Reference Mazzucato2013; Vogler Reference Vogler2016). From this perspective, responsibility for mitigation tends to be individualised and/or marketised, whilst governments are there to incentivise and create the right conditions for private innovation. The role of government can include setting clear targets; putting a price on carbon (preferably through trading schemes); and providing information and guidance. This leaves market actors to do what they do best, that is, provide a base for human creativity and innovation (Tomain Reference Tomain2017). Bill Gates’ recent book is, in its enthusiastic support of the power of entrepreneurs, technology, and enlightened investment strategies to save the day, is illustrative of this thinking (Reference Gates2021). Businesses are sometimes represented as not being able to afford to sit around waiting for ‘politics’ to get its act together (Banky Reference Banky2022).

The view that businesses will drive down emissions, by developing new products and services, aligns with arguments about individualising responsibility whereby ‘consumers’ are tasked with making better choices and/or changing their behaviours in favour of those (corporations) offering them the cleanest deals (Hay Reference Hay2007; Stevenson Reference Stevenson2017; Newell Reference Newell2021). When and how to reduce emissions becomes a consumer choice, rather than a government responsibility. India’s Mission LiFE (lifestyle), launched in 2022, represents this notion that climate mitigation can be achieved through collective individual actions (Mohan Reference Mohan2023).

Those most qualified to decide appropriate policy, from the ‘markets and maths’ viewpoint, are still experts, but this time with a heavy emphasis on neoliberal economists. In turn, given that businesses need a good degree of certainty to invest, stable political conditions are deemed necessary to enable long-term action on climate (Banky Reference Banky2022). This includes stable expectations about carbon pricing and the need for mechanisms, established at arm’s length from government, to ensure the control of prices across national election cycles and political interference (Blyth et al. Reference Blyth, Bradley, Bunn, Clarke, Wilson and Yang2007). This tendency to limit mitigation policy to carbon pricing and assumptions about which actor groups drive change are also embedded within the models and scenarios that inform much IPCC analysis (Clift & Kuzemko Reference Clift and Kuzemko2024).

In pursuit of the stable conditions understood as supportive of climate mitigation, solutions associated with this viewpoint tend towards two different forms of depoliticisation. The notion of placing responsibility for climate action with private sector actors has been referred to elsewhere as governmental depoliticisation (Wood & Flinders Reference Wood and Flinders2014). Democratically elected governments set expectations and mechanisms for pricing carbon but can then step back. As with ‘techno-optimist’ approaches, there are preferences for establishing independent bodies to ‘buffer’ experts from the vagaries of the electoral cycle, but this time those deemed sufficiently expert are economists, sometimes in tandem with science and technology experts. Another solution is to devise commitment devices that adjust automatically without democratic input (Stern Reference Stern2007; Jordan et al. Reference Jordan, Lorenzoni and Tosun2022). Such approaches also represent a form of democratic depoliticisation in that they place responsibility and decision-making at a further remove from electoral politics (Kuzemko Reference Kuzemko2015).

For critics of this perspective, the over-emphasis on neoliberal economics to frame approaches to climate mitigation amounts to another gross oversimplification – in seeing this profoundly human-induced crisis through puritanically mathematical lenses (Buller Reference Buller2022). This too sidesteps power relations, social experiences of climate change and mitigation policy, and complex questions of (energy) market incumbency. This is a critique also levelled at using mathematical models to predict pathways to a 1.5°C limited future (Fagan Reference Fagan2023; Clift & Kuzemko Reference Clift and Kuzemko2024). Passing responsibility to the private sector can infer that governments do not need to build up significant mitigation public policy institutions and can create structural imbalances in policy capacity. At its basis this view represents an empirically flawed understanding of real-world relationships between markets, companies, and states that is called increasingly into question when focused on complex questions of climate mitigation, and its failures so far. Not least, if we consider how engrained high emissions are in many social practices and that many corporations, despite government targets and incentives, continue to prioritise profit over emissions reduction (see also Buller Reference Buller2022).

2.4.1 Institutionalise Climate Mitigation

This policy perspective, most often expressed by neo-institutionalist public policy and political economy of climate scholars, puts forward arguments about how to maintain climate mitigation as an area of public policy for long enough to sustainably transform the global economy (Meckling & Nahm Reference Meckling and Nahm2018; Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Geels, Lockwood, Newell, Schmitz, Turnheim and Jordan2018; Rosenbloom et al. Reference Rosenbloom, Meadowcroft and Cashore2019; Jordan & Moore Reference Jordan and Moore2020). Here the emphasis is often on designing policies that contribute towards emissions reduction but also create new supporters of mitigation policy. Given the interest in policy stability, others have placed this group in the category of those that seek to depoliticise. Paterson et al. do so on the basis that this group seeks to defuse future political challenges to, and backlashes against, mitigation policies via means that are not made publicly transparent (Reference Paterson, Tobin and VanDeveer2022). Designing policy with positive feedback in mind is seen as a form of ‘subterfuge’ in that the full intentionality behind the original policy is not publicly and/or explicitly debated and deliberated – a form of discursive depoliticisation (ibid.).

My take is somewhat different. Although there is a general interest in certainty and predictability around mitigation policy, this group is mostly interested in how to actively improve policymaking in order to create new political conditions conducive to greater long-term support for climate mitigation. This includes enacting policies capable of actively challenging incumbents, creating new, low-emissions markets and constituents, and reducing negative socio-economic outcomes of mitigation policy – all political acts that use policy to affect relations of power (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Geels, Lockwood, Newell, Schmitz, Turnheim and Jordan2018; Rosenbloom et al. Reference Rosenbloom, Meadowcroft and Cashore2019). On another level, it could be argued that it is precisely because this group of scholars take heed of the power of high-emissions incumbency and of the revival of anti-climate sentiments that they recommend designing mitigation policies that contribute towards an active transformation of support. They lean on notions of policy feedback and institutionalisation to consider how to improve mitigation policy – partly by designing policies that also contribute to other policy goals, like reduced energy costs, greater employment, improved health outcomes, or economic growth. This can extend to ‘nurturing a society-wide expectation that deep decarbonisation has begun and will persist’ (Jordan & Moore Reference Jordan and Moore2020: 4). This infers a recognition of the relationship between policy and politics over time, between mitigation and other policy goals, and of a longer-term and more proactive approach to policymaking. In Chapters 6 and 7 I draw on many of these ideas in exploring the politics of mitigation policy outcomes and to deliberate on how to learn from past policy experiences to improve policy design.

Some within this group argue that it is neither possible nor preferable to have a ‘stable’ policy environment – that is, that individual mitigation policies will need to be flexible and to change over time dependent upon the phase of sustainable system transformation (Rosenbloom et al. Reference Rosenbloom, Meadowcroft and Cashore2019; Jordan & Moore Reference Jordan and Moore2020). Instead of insisting on policy stability, they recommend focusing on the durability of the overall political project of climate mitigation. As such, unlike science, technology, and market-based ways of thinking, this approach does not argue for status quo in terms of broader systems of governance, but for policies that explicitly undermine some aspects of those systems, for example by redressing power relations between high-emissions incumbents and low-emissions alternatives.

This might equate to an approach that seeks to depoliticise questions of whether there should be climate mitigation targets and policies, to which their answer is a resounding ‘yes’, but leaves open possibilities to deliberate types of policy and targets, and their distributional outcomes, over time. Acts of politicisation, then, would focus on better understanding climate power relations and relationships between mitigation policy outcomes and other social needs, which often includes improved deliberation with those affected by policy, as a basis for keeping mitigation on agendas.

2.4.2 Bottom-up Approaches

Bottom-up approaches seek a sustainable transformation away from top-down, centralised systems of governance, including energy, to enable a more plural, participatory, inclusive, often citizen-led, pathway towards a low-emissions future (Stirling Reference Stirling, Scoones, Leach and Newell2014a; Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015; Gazmararian & Tingley Reference Gazmararian and Tingley2023). Here, neither nation-states nor markets will deliver the right kind of change or type of sustainable society (Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015) – with some emphasis on re-engaging citizens via a more participatory approach (Dryzek Reference Dryzek2022). The politics of climate change mitigation, from this perspective, should be situated more within localities with a view to a better distribution of benefits towards and within each locality. A focus on the local as a site of change and transformation, but also as where we best understand and appreciate nature, is common in Green Political theory, most Green Parties, but also to some indigenous ways of thinking, for example, the notion of ‘sumak kawsay’ (Martinez Novo 2012 in Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015). This view also informed Amory Lovins’ early work on the improved social outcomes associated with decentralised renewable energy systems (Reference Lovins1976).

Climate change has been conceptualised as a global issue, not least as scientific models have been so central to informing debates about climate change; however, the dominance of this way of thinking in how climate change has been governed is seen as a central part of the problem. One of the arguments is that ‘top down’ governance, be it national or global, is less democratic and lacks nuance – partly because it does not see or take account of local interests and problems associated with entrenched interests when seeking to reduce emissions (Stirling Reference Stirling, Scoones, Leach and Newell2014a; Willis Reference Willis2020; Newell & Simms Reference Newell and Simms2020). This perspective overtly questions aspects of current climate policy, including science-led governance, its ‘planetary stewardship’, and assumptions that problems can be solved through top-down science-based rational governance (Stirling Reference Stirling, Scoones, Leach and Newell2014a; Newell and Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015). The objection is to science acting on behalf of all ‘humanity’, whilst solutions should be distributed and subject to more local discretion.

Policies designed in a generic, top-down manner tend towards large-scale, technical solutions, like a global, undifferentiated, carbon price or geoengineering, that are controlling, do not involve the vast majority of society, and reinforce existing patterns of privilege (Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015). Decisions are often taken far away from the areas affected. By not including local experiences or preferences, however, remote decision-making is not only blind to localised impacts but can also support the ability of large-scale, transnational corporations to continue with business as usual and to shape climate solutions. Specific corporate strategies can be made more visible through local activism, to raise the profile of local outcomes, sometimes through movements that are co-ordinated nationally or transnationally (Harrison Reference Harrison2020). Common examples are local contestations of new coal plants, gas pipelines, large-scale renewables, and nuclear stations, in some instances with significant involvement from indigenous communities. More recently, questions of who is affected by non-emissions outcomes of mitigation policies, in relation to their localities, have also become more apparent (Gunster et al. Reference Gunster, Fleet and Neubauer2021). These include the negative effects of new processes of extraction that underpin renewable expansion, on local environments and land use, for example of lithium extraction in the Atacama, and of new, ‘clean’ infrastructures, including hydro-electric dams and electricity pylons.

Taken together, this viewpoint politicises by raising the salience of local and place-based experiences of both high emissions and mitigation policies as a basis for a redesign of how transitions are governed. Recommendations of greater place-based deliberation, participation, and decision-making in processes of reducing emissions, across sectors, suggest a different form of politicisation. This involves broadening out who is involved in decision-making and who’s experiences are considered as a method of improving how mitigation is governed – hence claims of bottom-up approaches as more democratic.

Critics point to a lack of detail regarding how it might be possible to move from top-down towards more local discretion and governance. This includes issues around identifying specific policies to deliver more decentralised political and market systems; the lack of consideration of ways in which the costs of current systems are distributed nationally to level out varied regional costs to citizens; and recognition of the numbers of local citizens that do not support climate mitigation. In response, and recognising that local actors often need wider structural change to effect transformations, one suggestion is to combine top-down and bottom-up approaches in ways that keep local empowerment but also consider clear and coordinated roles for national and global governance strategies and cost distributions (Stirling Reference Stirling, Scoones, Leach and Newell2014a; Newell Reference Newell2021).

2.4.3 High-emissions Capital

This next approach is explicitly focused on politics as uneven power relations and on the privileged position of corporations within those relations (Paterson Reference Paterson and Gabrielson2016; Franta Reference Franta2021; Newell Reference Newell2021; Buller Reference Buller2022). Seeing it as one of the main impediments to sustainable change, it seeks to make overt the role of incumbent corporations, with vested interests in high-emissions practices and behaviours, and their methods of delaying, shaping, and resisting mitigation policy. These power relations sit within broader political and economic contexts which underpin continued fossil fuel extraction, trade, and use (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2009; Di Muzio Reference Di Muzio2015; Newell Reference Newell2021), and a continuation of fossil fuel based capitalism (Newell & Paterson Reference Newell and Paterson2010; Buller Reference Buller2022). Focusing analytical attention on the relative power of incumbency reveals the significant difficulties involved in phasing out high GHG emissions practices. Politically powerful incumbent corporations can be found in energy, transport, finance, agriculture, consumer, buildings, and industrial sectors and they actively maintain their positions of influence through possessing financial, political, and knowledge power. Power is, in turn, closely related to their ability to position themselves as the providers of crucial goods and services that modern society, and economic growth, have come to depend upon.

For eco-Marxists it is the capitalist character of contemporary economies that causes environmental damage, partly through systemic private property and processes of commodifying nature and of extraction, that fundamentally limits transformative change (Paterson Reference Paterson and Gabrielson2016; Alami et al. Reference Alami, Copley and Moraitis2023). They point to the deeply intertwined relationship between fossil fuels, particularly oil, and the ways in which many societies are organised and operate (Di Muzio Reference Di Muzio2015; Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2014). For others there are particular issues associated with market-led variants of capitalism. Given the degree of influence that incumbent corporations have had, over knowledge production, how ideas about climate change and its mitigation have been communicated, and over the supply of vital services, it has proved extremely difficult to politicise their role, whilst doing so remains an ongoing battle (Tomain Reference Tomain2017; Franta Reference Franta2021; Buller Reference Buller2022). Some reveal shifts in the strategies of incumbent corporations – away from climate denial towards shaping policy in ways that suit their interests – using well-funded, advertising, greenwashing, and offsetting strategies (Stevenson Reference Stevenson2020; Franta Reference Franta2021; Buller Reference Buller2022; Lund et al. Reference Lund, Hajdu and Planting Mollaoglu2023). Others point towards the ways in which the struggle is becoming more polarised and debates ‘shrill’ – relating the influence of fossil fuel corporations to right-wing populist resistance to sustainable change.

For many within this group, sustainable change would only come about as a result of a complete overthrow of these relations and an explicit rise in class consciousness about who produces emissions, their costs, and who pays the price (Huber Reference Huber2023). This might be made more possible by exposing incumbent fossil fuel tactics, influence, impacts, and power relations (Tomain Reference Tomain2017; Newell Reference Newell2021). Illustrative here are the ‘Just Stop Oil’ campaigns and widespread revelations about the scale of energy company profits during the 2022–2023 energy affordability crises. Revealing obstacles, making public the manner in which incumbent corporations fight change, and the capitalist contexts within which they can be powerful is also viewed as essential knowledge in designing counterclaims and policies (Gunster et al. Reference Gunster, Fleet and Neubauer2021). Others emphasise the need to move towards de- and/or post-growth systems, which infer greater welfare but far less extraction (Kallis Reference Kallis2018; Hickel Reference Hickel2019; Jackson Reference Jackson2021).

Critiques of this broad perspective are that with the emphasis on power and resistance, there is relatively less consideration of change. This might include engagement with changes that have already occurred in terms of the rise of alternatives to fossil fuels and/or with how to practically enact the shift away from deeply embedded fossil fuel based political, social, and economic systems. Beyond suggestions of revealing the tactics and impacts of resistance to sustainable change, there is less detail on what policies, actionable by policymakers today, would create the conditions for a deeper transformation. Focusing on structures and elites also tends to obscure the degree to which a range of high-emission practices are embedded within high and many middle-income countries and of social resistance to change.

2.4.4 Just Transformations

There have been long-standing mitigation debates that seek to raise, expose, and explain various inequalities and injustices involved in processes of climate change action. Here politics is also often understood as patterns of distinctly uneven power relations, be they ideological, post-colonial, or economic, embedded in structures that shape who has political power and why. Inequalities matter in many ways, including morally, but also because they have implications for global climate change negotiations and timeframes for sustainable action. Solutions are targeted at improving justice outcomes and avoiding injustices associated with some types of climate action. This is a complex area of study, as there are many different types of injustice associated with climate change and with actions taken to mitigate (Goldthau & Sovacool Reference Goldthau and Sovacool2012; Newell & Mulvaney Reference Newell and Mulvaney2013; Jenkins et al. Reference Jenkins, Sovacool, Błachowicz and Lauer2020). As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, the most politically accepted injustices are those related to historic responsibility for emissions and differential capacities to take mitigation actions – as recognised in UNFCCC agreements and the varied timeframes associated with net zero commitments. There has been a lot of focus on the unequal outcomes of climate change for nation-states, regions, and groups within society, whilst insightful new research quantifies national responsibility using an equality-based approach, thereby highlighting injustices associated with not mitigating soon enough or at a sufficient scale (Hickel Reference Hickel2022).

I focus here more on debates about injustices associated with existing climate mitigation policy, sometimes framed in terms of just transitions. Although it has been accepted that developed countries should act first, there are further layers of injustice that this perspective highlights. In terms of fossil fuel phase out, IPCC scenarios and models and the Glasgow Climate Pact suggest that coal should be phased out first – as it is the highest emitting fossil fuel. Although this differentiates between fossil fuels, it fails to differentiate between nation-states within the UNFCCC agreement. Recent research puts forward a more equitable approach that takes historic emissions responsibilities and capabilities into account. This would amount to OECD countries phasing out coal, and then oil and gas, first allowing space for low-income countries to develop fossil fuel reserves (Muttitt et al. Reference Muttitt, Price, Pye and Welsby2023). Further injustices are associated with fossil fuel phase out, but this time for certain sections of society, emphasising job losses and other negative social implications for associated communities as these industries fade (Newell & Mulvaney Reference Newell and Mulvaney2013).

Another set of injustices associated with mitigation policy is that only a limited range of countries, mainly OECD but including China, India, and South Korea, already benefit economically from the global clean technology ‘race’, whilst most others are left behind (Lachapelle et al. Reference Lachapelle, MacNeil and Paterson2017). Indeed, the ability of some countries to ‘capture’ the new opportunities associated with sustainable change “… reflect and advance existing uneven capitalist relations that are both historically constituted and socially differentiated” (Newell Reference Newell2021: 39). Here countries, and incumbent corporations, can use their financial and political power to shape mitigation rules to continue to gain financially. Many low-income countries have far lower possibilities to access finance for renewables and less institutional capacity and policy space available to pursue clean industrial development pathways (Wade 2003 in Newell Reference Newell2021: 41).

In the interests of making the process of reducing emissions more just, this broad group seeks to reveal, better understand, and politicise injustices involved in political processes of reducing emissions (see Jenkins et al. Reference Jenkins, Sovacool, Błachowicz and Lauer2020). In this way current mitigation policy orthodoxies, like market-oriented policies (Newell Reference Newell2021), non-differentiated processes of fossil fuel phase out (Muttitt et al. Reference Muttitt, Price, Pye and Welsby2023), or transition policies that do not address injustices within current energy provision and access (Crespy & Munta Reference Crespy and Munta2023), are subject to critical examination. Research by Aklin and Mildenberger places distributive conflicts at the centre of global climate negotiations, thereby inferring that a far greater degree of political attention to such issues is required for deeper and sustained cooperation (Reference Aklin and Mildenberger2020).

From these kinds of justice perspectives, the current and future politics of climate change mitigation pivot around whether we can find cooperative solutions to the many problems facing the planet and its inhabitants. These would include all peoples rather than defending rules which consolidate the interests of the already powerful (Gamble Reference Gamble2000: 120). Some, however, also point to the ways in which incumbent actor groups utilise just transitions narratives in the service of mitigation delay (Harry et al. Reference Harry, Maltby and Szulecki2024). On a related note, analytical foci on justice can distract from the complexities of reducing emissions in a just manner within a wider context of growing geopolitical competition and relatively fewer opportunities to agree overarching just mitigation norms – like future extraction based on equity principles. In practice, most countries pursuing green industrial development are doing so for (relative) national gain.

2.4.5 Social and Cultural Politics

This perspective asks us to move our gaze from large-scale actors and politico-economic power relations towards the role of publics, and culture, in understanding structured obstacles to mitigation and to upping the pace and breadth of policy change. By bringing societal questions to the fore, it is complimentary to foci on incumbent corporations and uneven and unjust power relations. It reveals embedded everyday practices and cultural norms, such as mass consumption (as a basis for economic growth in many countries), cultures of waste, growth in meat-based diets, and high-emissions lifestyles, and how they obstruct attempts to mitigate (Paterson Reference Paterson2007; Shove & Walker Reference Shove and Walker2010; Bulkeley et al. Reference Bulkeley, Paterson and Stripple2016). This approach can also be used to explore and explain how social norms underpin contestations of mitigation policies – either through refusals to adopt lower emissions practices and behaviours, contestations of particular policies, or through voting preferences. For example, embedded norms around consumption are a double-bind: most current consumption results in GHG emissions, but consumption has become increasingly important to growth in consumer-led, deindustrialised economies (Dauvergne 2008 in Newell & Simms Reference Newell and Simms2020). In places with policies that attach a greater amount of responsibility to individuals for enacting change such cultural oppositions really matter. Especially given insights that suggest that some people do not connect climate change to their everyday actions and/or see it as global rather than localised or personal (Willis Reference Willis2020; Stokes Reference Stokes2016).

The classic example of an embedded cultural norm that stands in the way of emissions reduction is that of automobile use (Paterson Reference Paterson2007). Car use in some societies is partly based on the growing need to travel to work and on the lack of accessible public transport alternatives, but, importantly, it is also about personal identity. Indeed, for many, cars are highly aspirational – owning one, particularly a high-spec car or sports utility vehicle (SUV), displays personal and career success. As middle classes expand globally, so too has car ownership. For some, this cultural norm is gendered in that (type of) car ownership can be related to social ideas about masculinity (Paterson Reference Paterson2007; Daggett Reference Daggett2018). Sociological surveys in the US found that white males, particularly those categorised as ‘cool dudes’, contribute disproportionally to mitigation denial and have held disproportionate amounts of power in political systems (McCright & Dunlap 2011 in Willis Reference Willis2020: 64). It is partly to this demographic that right-wing populist make their anti-mitigation policy appeals. Car ownership is also often understood as part of the American ‘way of life’ and closely related to views on access to cheap petrol (Daggett Reference Daggett2018: 32) and to petro-nationalism (Gunster Reference Gunster, Fleet and Neubauer2021). Objections to being restricted in individual choice of car or transport options can form a firm basis for objection to climate mitigation. This perspective, then, helps to explain why policies that raise the price of petrol, or infer that individuals might have less choice over the type of vehicle, have been socially and politically contested by some social groups. Such societal objections to moving away from car ownership or choosing lower emissions vehicles are particularly insightful given that transportation, globally, is the highest growing source of emissions.

There are, of course, plentiful examples of ways in which cultural norms shift over time and many interesting ideas about how culture, including ideas and how they are communicated socially, can be utilised by climate movements to engender greater support for new mitigation policies (Ciplet et al. Reference Ciplet, Roberts, Khan, Biermann and Young2015; Bulkeley et al. Reference Bulkeley, Paterson and Stripple2016; Newell Reference Newell2021). Examples in practice can be found in transnational movements for change, like Extinction Rebellion or divestment movements, and amongst younger demographics that have led in the drive towards used goods consumption, veganism, and alternatives to flying. Here citizens drive change through proposing new social and cultural norms but also in revealing and contesting old ones.

Cultural approaches envisage the political, then, as structured everyday life choices and practices and potentials for change. It also reminds us that there is a highly complex array of public attitudes that affect views on mitigation and different policies – revealing considerable tensions in relation to assumptions, in scientific and technocratic narratives, about publics simply ‘demanding’ or ‘opposing’ emissions reduction. The first step towards change is to understand the cultural aspect of mitigation politics and then strategically consider which high-emissions norms can be challenged and changed and how (see Ciplet et al. Reference Ciplet, Roberts, Khan, Biermann and Young2015: 30). Politicisation, from this perspective, could also involve greater deliberation, education, and access to information – an insight to which I return in Chapter 3 when conceptualising social interaction and deliberative forms of politicisation. Cultural approaches reliant on shifting cultural norms can result in more deeply embedded forms of change, and growing support for mitigation policy, but can also take a long time to achieve. At the same time, an over-emphasis on societal choice and change can obscure the many difficulties, often to do with affordability and access, experienced by people when trying to adopt certain low-emissions practices within high-emissions systems and structures. The focus on societal aspects of wider structures tells us little about, for example, corporate influence over climate mitigation.

2.4.6 State-led Change

The final set of ways of thinking about politics and mitigation focuses on the roles that public policy can play and argues that purposive state action is an important political dynamic for engendering and maintaining just, low-emissions change (Barry & Eckersley Reference Barry and Eckersley2005; Eckersley Reference Eckersley2004; Meadowcroft Reference Meadowcroft2011; Lockwood Reference Lockwood and Scoones2015a; Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015; Johnstone & Newell Reference Johnstone and Newell2018; Pegels et al. Reference Pegels, Vidican-Auktor, Lütkenhorst and Altenburg2018; Newell Reference Newell2021). What is being contested are assumptions that market actors or individuals should lead change, whilst arguing that the state needs to alter the structural conditions within which just and sustainable transformations occur. There is an assumption, here, that insufficient numbers of corporations and members of the public will be motivated to reduce emissions by themselves (IIPP 2023), that many do not have the capacity to do so, and that state bodies hold certain types of authority and motivations that suit them relatively better to the complex task of more just forms of transformation (Barry & Eckersley Reference Barry and Eckersley2005). From this perspective, however, change in national and local policy approaches is necessary given that not all governments embrace their full, possible capacities for just mitigation, be it for ideological or interest-based reasons, thereby limiting their mitigation-related agency (Kuzemko Reference Kuzemko2019; Sewerin et al. Reference Sewerin, Cashore and Howlett2022). This approach recognises the state as the site of legitimate ‘social and political power’ (Eckersley Reference Eckersley2004), and as possessing formal powers to regulate, tax, subsidise, and invest (Pegels et al. Reference Pegels, Vidican-Auktor, Lütkenhorst and Altenburg2018). This view directly contests orthodox economic, technocratic, and science assumptions that under-estimate state agency and/or the need for state action.

One set of arguments, emerging from sociotechnical transitions (STT) and economic historians’ studies of how complex systems change, focuses our attention on the role of public policy in proactively driving long-term sustainable transformations (Fouquet Reference Fouquet2010; Mazzucato Reference Mazzucato2013; Pegels et al. Reference Pegels, Vidican-Auktor, Lütkenhorst and Altenburg2018; Geels & Turnheim Reference Geels and Turnheim2022). This is partly because innovative thinking starts small, in niches, and often needs support to reach mass audiences and to compete with powerful incumbents (Geels & Turnheim Reference Geels and Turnheim2022). Support can take the form of long-term research and development (R&D) strategies, subsidies, and/or new market creation. Here politics is seen as the often ‘hidden dimension’ of technology experience curves, but caution is advised – certain political conditions nurture new low-emission technologies, but they are not always the same conditions that enable the phase out of incumbent technologies (Breetz et al. Reference Breetz, Mildenberger and Stokes2018). Sustainable transformations require that low-emissions alternatives are accessible and affordable in order for high-emissions practices to be phased out – at least if living conditions are to remain reasonably constant and/or improve. Relevant here too are recent studies on green industrial strategies and ‘green economic planning’ – which emphasise the role of the state in playing a more active role in guiding markets and creating conditions for structural complementarities between financial institutions, industrial policy, and private sector actors (Pegels et al. Reference Pegels, Vidican-Auktor, Lütkenhorst and Altenburg2018; Ban & Hasselbalch Reference Ban and Hasselbalch2024).

Others argue that, for the state to take a more purposive role in driving change, it would need to adopt ecological sustainability as its ‘core’ function. This approach recognises that states have multiple public policy goals, some of which might infer high emissions. As such, states would need to decide that environmental goals would trump other objectives, including core objectives like GDP growth and security (Dryzek et al. Reference Dryzek, Downes, Hunold and Schlosberg2003; Eckersley Reference Eckersley2004; Meadowcroft Reference Meadowcroft2005). Here environmental multilateralism can be seen as one driver of greening the state (Eckersley Reference Eckersley2004; Death & Tobin Reference Death, Tobin, Corry and Stephenson2017), whilst ecological democracy – with active civic participation and public deliberation as a key element – is seen as undermining liberal democracy’s separation of public and private spheres over time (Eckersley Reference Eckersley2004). Others suggest a ‘mission-led’ approach that explicitly harnesses state capacities – not least to fund long-term, knowledge-based innovation projects – in meeting normative goals, including mitigation (Mazzucato Reference Mazzucato2013).

There are also assumptions, from this perspective, that governments often have political capacities useful in ensuring certain justice outcomes – that is, that the costs and benefits of large-scale processes of change are better distributed within societies. Carlotta Perez’s history of technological transitions points to the formative role of state distributional policies in ensuring that the benefits of new technologies were more broadly disseminated – thereby also embedding change socially (2000). Others, recognising that change is often disruptive, argue that national and local governments can play a role in reducing levels of socio-economic disruption (Kuzemko Reference Kuzemko2019; Newell & Simms Reference Newell and Simms2020). This infers some challenge to depoliticising narratives which claim that change is possible without much socio-economic disruption. Here contrasts are drawn between the United Kingdom’s (UK) socially regressive approach to coal phase out in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Dutch strategically steered phase out of coal, which was socially fairer (Newell & Simms Reference Newell and Simms2020). Dutch authorities provided subsidies for new businesses, relocation of government industries to affected regions, and training for miners – the sorts of strategies also being offered by regional authorities in Alberta, Canada, and in parts of Germany.

As things stand, public policy both drives and constrains emissions reductions all around the world (Kuzemko et al. Reference Kuzemko, Lockwood, Mitchell and Hoggett2016a; Skovgaard & van Asselt Reference Skovgaard and van Asselt2018), with states taking different roles as shaped by domestic institutions. Countries like the UK and US have long had preferences for incentivising market action and remaining ‘technology neutral’; China’s state-led approach to technological change makes the most of government finance and subsidies (Mazzucato Reference Mazzucato, Scoones, Leach and Newell2015); whilst renewable energy transitions in Germany and Denmark have involved a more coordinative role from public bodies (Kuzemko et al. Reference Kuzemko, Lockwood, Mitchell and Hoggett2016a). Green industrial strategies, in China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, the EU, UK and, as of the time of writing, US, may differ between countries, but they tend to infer relatively high levels of state intervention and planning (Ban & Hasselbach Reference Ban and Hasselbalch2024). Such strategies, like energy efficiency, renewables, public transport, and agricultural and landscape management, are seen as ways of boosting employment and growth (Scoones et al. Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015).

Taken together these views suggest politicisation as something governmental, by focusing on the distributive, financing, and other convening roles of the state and, as such, reflect some of the core ideas underpinning this book. However, there are several important limitations. From post-growth perspectives, the types of state response suggested do not go far enough – not least as climate mitigation policies not only do not solve but can also further exacerbate wider environmental and extractivist issues. Here normative commitments to growth and the separation of emissions reduction from wider environmental and extractivist issues stand out as particular obstacles. Within broader high-emissions structures, it is often hard to separate the state from forces responsible for environmental damages (Garner Reference Garner2019: 97). Solutions then focus on limiting certain forms of consumption and demand. From an electoral politics perspective, this approach underplays the degree to which mitigation is a party positional issue – falling off and/or down agendas as parties relatively less supportive of, or anti-, mitigation (re-) gain power. Without support for mitigation, or specific policies, governments can be limited in their choices and policy delayed. In more extreme cases, like the current Republican administration in the US, some state actors can feel emboldened to reverse mitigation policies.