Public authority in stressed political systems: The contested legitimacy of change and stability in climate governance

Realising transformative climate action is a key challenge in domestic politics across advanced democracies. Failures to achieve this to date have been attributed to factors such as conflicting interests, lock-ins, and knowledge politics (e.g. denialism), among others. However, an important dimension which has so far been relatively overlooked is contestation over the legitimate wielding of public authority itself (i.e. the formal power to make and enforce rules by a democratic government). This is particularly salient under conditions of accumulating structural stress in political systems becoming mismatched with changing contexts under climate change, because the existing scope of public authority may start to be questioned. For example, both climate activists and right-wing populists, in very different ways, contest contemporary mobilisations and absences of public authority related to climate change. More broadly, debates over climate action (or non-action) often get stuck at not only an instrumental level but also a moral one regarding what constitutes legitimate regulation of collective behaviour. This creates a ‘double bind’ because climate change threatens the legitimacy of existing political systems (by exposing a chronic failure to address the problem), but the legitimacy of transformative climate action is also contested as it threatens the existing political order. Hence, drift in political systems makes both the status quo and radical alternatives objectionable to different constellations of actors (spanning mass publics, political elites, and organised groups) on the basis of differing judgments about the legitimate scope of public authority. As a result, both change and stability are contested, witnessing conflicting claims and desires about the rightful wielding of public authority and its consequences for reconfiguring political systems. This paper focuses on the question: How are attempts to mobilise public authority to regulate collective behaviour legitimated and delegitimated, by whom, and with what consequences for climate governance? It draws on examples of climate advocacy and resistance to show how various forms of contestation witnessed in contemporary climate politics (e.g. pro-climate action protests, reactions against specific policy proposals, backlash movements) can be traced back to underlying claims of involved actors about the rightful wielding of public authority. This highlights key moral foundations of contestation over policy and institutional change in climate governance, as it manifests endogenously (in contrast to normative analysis). It implies a need to simultaneously consider complex questions of ‘legitimate coercion’ and ‘legitimate resistance’ within the broader problematique of adapting inert political systems to profoundly changing contexts.