The introduction critically examines current understandings of climate mitigation politics and makes a case for thinking politically and proactively about mitigation. This is contrasted with approaches that explicitly seek to draw narrow boundaries around mitigation politics and/or to avoid it. It sets out the overall approach to the book, how it relates to existing research on mitigation politics, and introduces the four ‘phases’ of climate politics that form the historical analysis in the book.

Chapter 3 constructs the broad and historicised conceptualisation of mitigation politics by building on, critiquing and combining insights from constructivist political economy; climate policy, political economy of transitions; and socio-technical transitions research. The aim of this chapter is to present a perspective on mitigation politics that at once allows for analysis of different phases of climate mitigation policymaking and politics over time, recognises and incorporates mitigation-related constraints and opportunities, and takes account of a wide range of features of politics – collective choice, agency and capacity, deliberation, and social interaction. Doing so also offers up a more nuanced and detailed account of different but related varieties of politicisation – and how they interact with one another. The following four chapters apply this broad, inclusive, and historicised framing to explore and interpret different phases of constructing mitigation policies that have emerged over the past 40 years or so.

This chapter describes how the book contributes to the understanding of lawmaking under authoritarianism by specifying the conditions under which legislatures perform their lawmaking function within authoritarian regimes, showing the mechanisms through which legislatures operate and influence the contents of policies, and helping to elucidate the ways in which legislatures may be consequential both to policymaking and politics, thus extending the scope conditions of power-sharing accounts of lawmaking to any type of autocracy. It also suggests how the theory and methods employed may be used to study the role of business and bureacracies in authoritarian regimes, and to recast the approaches to federalism and policymaking under dictatorship, and to the role of legislature in regime transitions.

This Companion volume presents the latest research on the history of multinationals and their impact on society and the environment. While often associated with large corporations like Ford or Coca-Cola, multinationals are defined not by size but by their ownership and control of assets in multiple countries. A key contribution of business history research has been to highlight the remarkable diversity in multinational strategies and organizational structures over time and to provide nuanced perspectives on the complex and often polarized debates surrounding their operations, showing how equally diverse and far-reaching are the impacts of multinationals. Understanding their historical role provides valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders navigating today’s economic landscape.

We offer an integration of temporal approaches to the psychology of violent extremism. Focusing on the role of remembering, we draw attention to how memories and perceptions of the past motivate the use of violence in the present. Reminiscing about a glorious past elicits nostalgia, which, in turn, may increase present-day feelings of relative deprivation, collective angst, and threat. Furthermore, remembering historical perpetrators instills threat perceptions and negative intergroup emotions, whereas remembering past victimization elicits moral entitlement, thereby justifying more extreme means. We explore how different imaginings of the future – for the self and community – function as a double-edged sword either fueling or preventing radicalization in the present. Imagining can stimulate utopian or dystopian visions, which, in turn, may encourage mobilization of more extreme means by instilling a sense of legitimacy and hope in terms of utopias and moral obligation and urgency to prevent dystopias. However, imagining can also elicit a realistic, positive future outlook for the self and wider community, functioning as a protective shield against radicalization into violent extremism instead. We conclude by providing primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention recommendations based on our temporal approach aimed at policymakers and key stakeholders and avenues for future research.

In October 1947, just more than two years after the Japanese Empire officially surrendered to the Allies and the most destructive conflict in human history finally ended, the veteran American statesman Henry L. Stimson published an article in Foreign Affairs.1 As the flagship journal of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, it was a natural forum for someone such as Stimson, a former secretary of state and (twice) secretary of war with over four decades of experience at the highest levels of American government, to share some of their ideas.2 In his piece, entitled “The Challenge to Americans,” Stimson outlined what he felt were the opportunities and struggles the United States faced in the aftermath of World War II.3 He opened with a declaration: Americans faced “a challenging opportunity, perhaps the greatest ever offered to a single nation. It is nothing less than a chance to use our full strength for the peace and freedom of the world.”

This chapter examines Stimson’s first months back at the War Department following the Fall of France in June 1940 and how its position within Washington shifted from the margins to the center of US policymaking. It examines the dysfunction and turbulence at the War Department in the years prior to Stimson’s arrival and the specific reforms Stimson made to mitigate this upheaval and ensure the Army was in the rooms where policymaking happened. By focusing on these changes and their application during those intial months, this chapter argues that the War Department turned into a crucial buraucratic, political, and policy operator because Stimson and his inner circle overhauled its organizational structure, fashioned concrete policy objectives, and deliberately worked to influence domestic politics and policymaking. By consciously performing as a political actor, the War Department gained leverage over its bureucratic rivals at the Navy and State Departments and became a consequential policymaking nexus inside the Roosevelt administration and within the US government.

Chapter 9 summarizes our theoretical expectations and empirical findings about IO exits. It outlines the implications of IO exit for international cooperation, future research, and policymaking. It also provides additional insight into IO exits that have occurred as regional conflicts have engulfed the world in recent years, exemplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The chapter analyzes how IO exits might affect international cooperation as multilateralism is being contested on several fronts. It also discusses that patterns of democratic decline and polarized domestic politics may lead the future of IO exits to be different than the past. Even while this contestation is happening, however, we show that IO exits (as well as threats and reentry) extend beyond current affairs; they have been a relatively steady occurrence over time. We conclude by arguing that despite – and sometimes because of – occasional exits, international cooperation continues through IOs and a robust set of other international institutions. We outline several exciting areas for future research that may be inspired by the findings from this book.

Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

This chapter provides an overview of policymaking that is being done at international, regional, and national levels, highlighting some of the key processes and frameworks relevant to climate-related migration and displacement. We discuss the extent to which these policies respond adequately (or not) to the needs and complexity of the challenge. We also describe a range of actors that have been actively engaged in these policymaking processes and the nature of their influence on these processes. We assess the different levels of actors in descending order of scale, starting with an overview of international policy frameworks and processes and then moving through regional and national level processes and approaches. Although we assess each level separately, they should be viewed as a network or web of interconnected actors and processes that influence one another, even as they evolve.

The eight very different higher education institutions define excellence in ways that make sense to the people they serve and reflect the demands of culture and place. They are places that have looked for and pursue a clear sense of purpose and where institutional behavior aligns with stated values and goals. These portraits offer insights into the ways institutions can create cultures of excellence without slavishly following the norms and metrics celbrated by international ranking schemes. They also show policymakers that concentrating resources on a few institutions is not the only way to lift quality and strengthen a national system.