Picking Fights with Big Oil: How Institutions Shape Conflictual Climate Politics in the UK and Norway

Political scientists increasingly emphasize domestic distributional conflict as a, if not the, central political dynamic affecting climate policy-making (Aklin and Mildenberger 2020; Colgan, Green, and Hale 2020). Consistent with this framing, growing ranks of climate activists have become sceptical that transformative and timely societal responses to the climate crisis can be agreed cooperatively where the fossil fuel industry enjoys so much power. Accordingly, activists have adopted an explicitly conflictual stance against the industry, aiming to politicise its role in causing the climate crisis as a means to pressuring governments to regulate its activities. Is this conflictual stance effective in generating the political and policy change activists seek? In this paper, we answer this question by studying two contemporaneous attempts by climate activists to politicise domestic oil and gas production on climate grounds — in Norway and the UK, the largest oil and gas producers in Europe. Using a comparative case-study approach, involving elite interviews as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis of media reporting and Parliamentary debates, we trace the effects of these campaigns on political parties’ positions, and government policy, regarding oil and gas production. We find that in both countries, civil society groups frame the expansion of oil and gas production as inconsistent with their governments’ pretensions to climate leadership. Groups exploited key ‘focusing events’ in 2021—Norwegian national elections (in September) and the UK’s hosting of COP26 (in November) – to politicise oil and gas production, mobilizing social pressure on the government, political parties and business actors. Different policymaking institutions mediated this conflictual approach in each country. In the UK, the open and competitive interest group landscape and majoritarian electoral institutions favoured these conflictual tactics. While the conservative government did not change its policy of expanding oil and gas production, the Scottish National Party and, crucially, the Labour Party, became more opposed to expanded oil and gas production. By contrast, in Norway, conflict over oil and gas policy was moderated by the country’s consensus-oriented political institutions—specifically, the strong tradition of tripartite mediation in labour market politics, and proportional representation electoral rules. Ultimately, key parties effectively rejected calls to cease expanding oil and gas production, maintaining their longstanding commitments to the industry’s growth. Because our study extends into 2022, and hence the period of high oil prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we are able to further explore whether these patterns endured in a context more favourable to the oil and gas industry. We find that, broadly speaking, they did. We make two main contributions: first, to understanding the role that civil society groups play in generating political conflict over climate policy and the conditions under which this conflictual approach is more or less effective (Cheon and Urpelainen 2018; Hadden 2015; Nulman 2015); second, to understanding the role institutions play in mediating these distributional conflicts and hence in shaping climate policy outcomes (Finnegan 2022, 2023; Mildenberger 2020). Our findings have important implications for the design of politically-effective climate strategies by civil society groups and political parties.