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.

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.