Inside activists or just good civil servants? The ambiguous bureaucratic politics of contested climate policymaking

The notion of green inside activism draws attention to the political agency of bureaucrats in shaping the long-term trajectories of environmental policies. Public policy scholars increasingly recognise that bureaucrats can act as creative political agents with the power to advance policy goals – whether through bureaucrats’ overtly activistic or everyday practices. Bureaucratic agency is especially salient in contested and long-term policy domains where polarisation, populism, and gridlock threaten to derail policy action. This is particularly so for climate change policy, where goals of political leaders to avoid or delay climate action can be in tension with a perceived need among bureaucrats to advance climate policy for the long-term public good. This raises questions about what forms of agency bureaucrats might mobilise to push climate mitigation ambition in situations of policy contestation and how this impacts policy trajectories over time. Policy feedback offers a useful lens to consider these questions. By focusing on long-term policy dynamics, policy feedback approaches help to study the impact of contestation on climate policy trajectories. However, actors’ agency often remains implicit in this approach. We therefore draw on insights from bureaucratic politics to investigate how the political agency of bureaucrats influences climate policy feedback. We examine two empirical cases of climate policymaking with similar levels of contestation but diverging policy trajectories (i.e., struggles over carbon pricing in Australia and Canada), through in-depth semi-structured interviews with key informants (n=68) and policy document analysis. We find that bureaucrats possessed capacities and, in many cases, a willingness to push for more ambitious policies towards their perception of the public good. However, the ways they did this were diverse and often subtle. Some practices centred on bureaucrats’ involvement in pro-climate coalitions (i.e., resembling green inside activism), but more commonly, they involved longer-term strategic behaviours aimed to inch policies towards their "north star" of greater climate ambition. We also find that bureaucrats moderate policy feedback irrespective of whether policy feedbacks are self-reinforcing or self-undermining. We posit that this moderating role is directly linked to bureaucratic perceptions of the public good and their judgements about its tension with political goals. Through this analysis, we contribute to understanding bureaucratic agency and its influence on meso-level policy feedback processes. The role of bureaucratic agency is oft-neglected but crucial to understanding how and why certain forms of policy feedback are generated. We enrich emerging debates about green inside activism by revealing a fuzzy boundary between (potential) activism and (mere) good practice in the bureaucratic politics of advancing climate policy. This also raises important questions about the normative role of bureaucratic agency in contested policymaking situations while offering some optimism about the potential for bureaucrats to contribute to advancing climate policy in ways that might not be obvious from the outside.