‘Remaking Institutions’: Structural Politics of Energy and Climate Change Transformations

While transformations in governance systems are required to address many urgent global sustainability challenges, particularly energy and climate change, we still have poor understanding of many of the political dynamics involved in such transformations. The role of institutional change is particularly central but undertheorised. For example, many nations struggle to reform political institutions to support rapid and ambitious climate action capable of constraining climate change below agreed global targets of 1.5-2C. Core challenges include creating institutional capacity to support decarbonisation across all sectors of society, adapt to shifting environmental boundary conditions, and foster a long-term view in political decision making. While institutional weaknesses and failures are widely catalogued, an understanding of how improvements may be realised is lacking. A key need is to explain and theorise the processes by which institutions are, or could be, ‘remade’ within socially heterogeneous, historically encumbered, and politically contested settings. In this paper, I develop an approach to conceptualising and analysing ‘institutional remaking’. I define institutional remaking as the activities by which agents intentionally develop political institutions in anticipation of, or in response to, institutional weaknesses and failures (both experienced and/or envisioned). First, I build on explanatory insights from institutional theory (e.g. gradual institutional change, institutional work, path dependency) and normative insights from political philosophy (i.e. Amartya Sen’s notion of comparative improvement and ‘comprehensive social realisations’), to develop a conceptual lens for studying institutional remaking. Second, I develop a heuristic typology comprised of five categories of political dynamics which disaggregate multiple areas of struggle over institutions within processes of transformation (i.e. Novelty, Uptake, Dismantling, Stability, and Interplay), to provide entry points for empirical study (e.g. hypothesis development). Overall, the paper advances a novel approach to studying the structural politics of energy/climate transformations, by focusing on the production of social action within institutional settings and its effects. It makes several specific contributions. First, it develops an analytical lens which enables the study of unfolding processes with incomplete outcomes. Second, it innovatively reframes the challenge of institutional intervention from ‘institutional design’ to a more open-ended and political notion of ‘institutional remaking’. Third, it opens up new ways of studying how trajectories of institutional development could break out of path dependencies. Altogether, the findings impact on debates about how institutional interventions are pursued and realised by political agents seeking to deliberately reshape institutional frameworks.