Narratives and Discourses

Abstract

This panel examines how narratives and discourses structure energy and climate policy by defining what counts as a problem, who is responsible, and which solutions appear legitimate, urgent, or feasible. Across different political settings and governance arenas, the contributions analyze how competing frames, such as sovereignty and security, crisis or justice, shape policy agendas and public contestation. The panel highlights discursive dynamics around populism and polarization, showing how anti-elite or anti-regulatory rhetoric can delegitimize climate instruments and reframe corporate and state obligations. It also explores the politics of expertise and “neutral” knowledge, asking how technical evidence (including remote sensing and monitoring) gains authority, how claims of objectivity travel into rules and implementation, and where they become contested. Finally, the panel addresses the role of storytelling in just transition governance, focusing on how private-sector actors in carbon- and resource-intensive regions are narrated as partners, obstacles, or indispensable allies and reveal tensions between decarbonization, legitimacy, and risks of capture. Bringing these strands together, the panel advances a discursive lens on energy and climate politics that connects media and political communication to institutional design, regulatory enforcement, and distributional conflict, and offers tools for understanding why similar policies can provoke very different reactions across contexts.

Title	Details
Climate Change – ‘the Measure of All Things.’ The Missing Map of Climate Narratives.	View Paper Details
Eyes in the Sky, Rules on the Ground: ESA’s Non-Political Knowledge and Climate Governance	View Paper Details
Populism and Climate Discourse in the United States: The Case of Carbon Disclosure	View Paper Details
From Kilowatts to Sovereignty: The Securitization of Energy Discourse in Polish Pre-Election Media (2015–2023)	View Paper Details
Uneasy Allies: Narrating Energy-Extractive Private Companies in Czech Just Transition Fund Governance	View Paper Details