The varying levels of climate delayism in Central Asia: consequences for the region’s geopolitics of the energy transition

Central Asia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. There is, however, a lack of research on how local business and political elites, and the general public perceive climate change, its impacts, and risks. To account for the material and ideational factors influencing clean energy transition in Central Asian petrostates I offer an alternative analytic framework that I call ‘contrasting adaptation.’ I argue that the energy transition has resulted in two contradictory responses at multiple levels of political governance: a formal response that is broadly supportive of new ‘green’ identities and policies, and an informal response that seeks to delay plans to decarbonize local business models and continues to prioritize ‘old’ oil and gas activities through new transnational networks. At an international level of governance, an emerging discourse about the EU’s ‘unjust’ interventionism though the CBAM reflects the material distributional conflicts arising from it and serves to justify the local elites’ delayed policy implementation of global climate commitments. At a trans-national level, elite actors are seeking to preserve individual advantage through the support of other hydrocarbon producers –and China– to delay the energy transition. Transnational ties and resources, and new foreign policy alignments, help sustaining these domestic groups. At a sub-national level, as democratic institutions still lack the strength to integrate contending interests and views, the discourse on climate change is viewed through the lens of conservationist values. Meanwhile, the heavily controlled public discourse on climate change is increasingly portrayed as a Western-led project seemingly disconnected to the region’s critical water management problem. The paper examines the links of climate delayism in these different sites of political contestation, and the pressures they create for the attainment of Central Asia’s climate goals.