Backlash to climate policy

Domestic climate change mitigation scholarship focuses largely on explaining policy action/nonaction within and across countries, but less attention is given to explaining adverse counteraction where policy action is taken but later rejected. For example, while pushback, policy repeals, and social mobilizations against climate action have certainly attracted the attention (and consternation) of scholars in recent years, such counteractions tend to be treated as aberrations or unintended consequences. But counteraction should also be studied as a dependent variable, particularly given the growing and often varying experiences of post-adoption climate politics in advanced democracies over the last decade. Backlash to coercive or ‘hard’ climate policy (i.e. regulatory and economic policy that imposes mandatory requirements and/or sanctions) is a particular challenge because such policy is likely to be required to meet ambitious global climate targets but may provoke strong resistance. Backlash involves an abrupt and forceful reaction by a significant number of actors within a political community (e.g. mass publics, political elites, organized interests) seeking to reverse introduced climate policy, often through extraordinary means that transgress established political procedures and norms. Such reactions may attack not only policy substance, but also the underlying political authority of those involved in its formulation. Nonetheless, understanding why and how backlash occurs remains challenging. Some scholars have recently proposed explanations of backlash to move beyond its common use as a descriptive metaphor. Combining such insights about backlash as either escalating feedback (policy feedback view) or as an eruption of discontent (contentious politics view), this paper argues that backlash needs to be ultimately grounded in a view of contested legitimacy. This is because a coercive or ‘hard’ climate policy mobilizes a new relation of power over policy recipients which must be accepted as legitimate to become normalized and durable. But if this does not happen, then deep discontent is likely to be provoked, and the volatile reactions characteristic of backlash become possible. Such a view locates a common foundation for different emerging explanations of backlash, and for its diverse empirical manifestations (e.g. across both electoral and party politics, and social mobilization and dissent). It also foregrounds the need to empirically understand the processes by which legitimacy is contested within a specific polity. Cases from Australia, France, Canada are used to probe this argument, and to abductively derive propositions for comparative research. Overall, the approach suggests a primarily ideational explanation for backlash, rather than an interest-based or institutional one.