Embracing the politics of transformation: Reconceptualising policy action as battle-settlement events

Sustainability transformations are intensely contested and at risk of backlash to ambitious policy action. Political elites and mass publics opposing policy action sometimes push back fiercely, especially in wider contexts animated by populism, resentment, and deeply divided preferences and values. This threatens policy enactment and durability, potentially setting back broader policy agendas, and derailing efforts towards realising transformations in governance and society. This is particularly evident for climate change policy where experiences of backlash have shown that even when ambitious policy is adopted, heated political battles may continue, and policy durability and expansion is not guaranteed. However, literature on sustainability transformations pays insufficient attention to the potential for such conflict, and its implications for understanding how ambitious policy action may be advanced in non-ideal real-world arenas, where conflict is endemic and consensus is elusive or impossible. In this paper, we develop a framework for conceptualizing policy action in societal transformations as an unfolding sequence of ‘battle-settlement’ events. Distinct from (and complementary to) recent literature emphasising the role of coalitions and policy feedback in achieving durable policy action, we argue that the notion of battle-settlements better captures the open-ended character of ongoing political struggles over deliberate societal transformation and their oftentimes messy and lurching trajectories. By ‘settlements’, we refer to limited and often bitter compromise between rival actors over distributions of power and resources which are forged through mutual struggle. Arguably, a policy feedback view risks jumping too quickly over the politics of reaching settlements and reflecting a narrowed view of endogenous policy effects which can overlook unexpected consequences and wider contradictory interactions. The notion of battle-settlement events usefully foregrounds historical and contextual contingency, a combination of authoritative enforcement and mutual buy-in, and a fragile balance of provisionality and finality to decisions which may not easily become locked-in. We illustrate the utility of this approach through various empirical experiences of backlash in climate and environmental politics to show how conflict arose and settled, and the implications for broader trajectories of transformation. This contributes to envisioning and analysing new ways of dealing with inevitable conflict in climate change transformations, by bringing ideas about political settlements from other fields into conversation with developmentalist thinking on political change and transformation (e.g., coalitions and policy feedback). Thereby, it contributes to understanding dynamics of policymaking and resistance within transformations in governance and society for sustainability.