Ideational Politics of Domestic Climate Policy: Delegitimation and its Consequences

Understanding how to make climate policy stick has become a key focus among scholars working on decarbonization and policy feedback in recent years. This requires that climate policies are not only be adopted but also remain durable in the face of often-fractious post-adoption politics, and ideally also enable policy stringency to be ramped up over time. However, while much attention has been given to interest-based competition (e.g. costs and benefits) and cognition (e.g. beliefs, values, learning), deeper struggles over the socio-political construction of legitimacy of climate policy action remain overlooked. Yet, the durability of climate policy will crucially depend on competing processes of legitimation (embedding policy action) and delegitimation (undermining policy action) within a political community. Delegitimation threatens climate policy action by undermining its justificatory and authoritative basis, potentially leading to policy removal and/or rejection. This paper examines mechanisms of delegitimation in domestic climate policy action and the consequences for ongoing climate policymaking. It comparatively analyses delegitimation processes associated with backlash to hard/coercive climate policy (such as regulation, taxes/pricing, phase-outs) in several country cases (i.e., Australia, Canada, France). Delegitimation has been argued to play a central role in policy backlash, and this is likely to be especially salient within fractious and polarised contemporary political settings (Patterson, 2023). Mechanisms of delegitimation include argumentative, institutional, and behavioural forms, with potential consequences ranging from policy repeal or weakening, to destabilisation of broader policy agendas, weakened authority of policy proponents, and entrenched political divides. The cases studied empirically unravel different mechanisms of delegitimation occurring and their interplay across different settings, and the ways in which particular consequences for climate policy action are produced. Overall, this contributes to understanding the ideational politics of domestic climate policy adoption and post-adoption, especially how processes of delegitimation – a crucial but understudied form of contention – occur and spread. More broadly, it contributes to understanding interactions between the wielding of public authority and resistance to it within struggles over contentious public good issues such as climate change, which is a key challenge in pursuing durable transformations in governance and society.