Virtual Panel: Political Economy of Environmental Policy

Abstract

This panel brings together five papers that examine environmental policy through a political economy lens, focusing on public opinion, state capacity, institutional design, and strategic investment across domestic and international contexts. The first paper analyses public support for green industrial policy in the United States, using a large pre-registered survey experiment run in four states. It posits that citizens evaluate renewable energy deployment and low-carbon manufacturing investments differently, highlighting the importance of perceived material benefits, symbolic costs, and partisan framing in shaping political feasibility. The second paper examines environmental policy implementation under conditions of economic crisis, using the case of Greece during the eurozone adjustment programmes. It demonstrates how austerity-driven declines in state capacity exacerbated long-standing weaknesses in environmental governance, offering insights into how macroeconomic shocks reshape policy outcomes. The third paper investigates why states invest in foreign energy infrastructure, theorising how the physical and technological characteristics of infrastructure assets shape economic and security returns. Combining network analysis with a detailed case study of a hydroelectric generation station in South Africa, it advances a novel framework for understanding the strategic political economy of transnational energy investment. The fourth paper revisits the “governance trap” thesis through matched surveys of British politicians and citizens. It shows that responsibility attribution for climate mitigation is structured more by ideology than institutional position, complicating assumptions about mutual blame-shifting while highlighting enduring political constraints on climate leadership. The fifth paper offers a cross-national analysis of environmental decentralisation, demonstrating that its effects depend critically on bureaucratic recruitment systems. It shows that countries that are decentralised have better environmental performance in the long run, while countries with meritocratic administrations achieve better performance overall. Together, these papers illuminate how environmental policy outcomes are shaped by political incentives, institutional capacity, and distributive conflict, advancing a nuanced political economy perspective on environmental governance.

Title	Details
Taking Responsibility: is There a Climate ‘Governance Trap’ in the UK and Does it Matter?	View Paper Details
Financing Foreign Infrastructure: Untangling Economic and Security Motivations	View Paper Details
Economic Crisis and Environmental Governance Under Austerity: Evidence from Greece, 2010–2022	View Paper Details
The Bureaucratic Politics of Environmental Decentralisation Outcomes	View Paper Details
Citizen Reaction to Green Industrial Policy Projects	View Paper Details