Mapping alliances, tensions, trajectories: A global typology of Energy and Climate Strategies

States have a considerable amount of discretion to make strategic choices about their energy and climate policy (cf. Blackwill and Harris 2016). These choices heavily influence, how ‘geoeconomic games’ will play out and shape the planet’s geopolitical future. 2020 saw wa-tershed moments and “a dramatic shift in energy policy” involving the US, India, China, Russia, and Saudi-Arabia (Johnson 2020). Simultaneously, the first national updates on Na-tionally Determined Contributions (NDC) – climate and energy policy commitments under the Paris Agreement – were due. Either these policy shifts will change geoeconomics and geopolitics of energy, or climate change will. This contribution presents a global typology of current national strategy choices in the fields of climate and energy policy. This will help to reveal emerging geopolitical tensions. How nations choose to approach these issues is geopolitically and geoeconomically relevant. Nations have a range of strategic options at hand. Generally, they face a trade-off between mitigating climate change and adapting for its impact. Most of these strategic options have an international component – i.e. strategic development aid or pipeline projects. Thus, ener-gy and climate policy are geoeconomic and geopolitical issues. Studies have focused on what drives these national climate and energy strategies. Compara-tive stocktakes of national climate security policies exist as well but do not capture post-Paris developments or analyse small samples. Equally, these contributions have not put the observed climate security policies into a broader national energy policy perspective. This contribution focuses on national climate and energy policy choices together. To do so, it joins two strains of research. The first focuses on national climate security policies. The sec-ond analyses NDCs from 2015 and the 2020 update round as official statements about na-tional climate and energy policies. This study will first present the by far broadest and most up-to-date stocktake of national climate security policies by analysing all available high military planning documents pub-lished between 2000 and 2020 – currently over 350 documents 93 countries from around the world. The analysis is conducted as Framework Content Analysis (Hackett and Strickland 2019). The analysis is used to establish a global typology of climate security policies. In a second step, a global typology of NDCs is added. The results of these two analyses are merged to present a global 2-by-2 matrix of national energy and climate security strategies to identify nations with ambitious/less ambitious ener-gy and ambitious/less ambitious climate security strategies. Finally, the paper discusses po-tential drivers that may influence these national strategy choices. This study’s contribution is two-fold. It will provide an integrated assessment of geopolitical-ly relevant climate and energy policy choices. Thereby it offers material for further elabora-tion on possible dynamics and future trajectories. Also, it will provide a starting point for research on the dynamics of non-traditional security issue adoption (Hameiri, Jones, and Sandor 2018). Blackwill, Robert D., and Jennifer M. Harris. 2016. 978-0674737211. Climate Analytics. 2021. https://climateactiontracker.org/. Hackett, Alison, and Karen Strickland. 2019. https://doi.org/10.7748/nr.2018.e1580. Hameiri, Shahar, Lee Jones, and Adam Sandor. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogy024. Johnson, Keith. 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/the-new-geopolitics-of-energy/. Tobin, Paul. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00433.