Climate Policy Backlash: Taking Stock of an Unruly Concept

Policy backlash is now a widespread concern among climate and environmental politics scholars. Empirical experiences of strong negative pushback against climate and environmental policies across many countries involving diverse socio-political actors (e.g., mass publics, political parties and politicians, and specific social groups) are increasingly understood to be shaping the politics of policy change and societal transitions/ transformations. Moreover, wider socio-political polarization, unrest, and geopolitical tensions are thought to raise the chances of future backlash to ambitious climate and environmental policy action. In this context, the concept of policy backlash has rapidly been taken up among scholars but is now at risk of being used in fragmented and sometimes vague ways, undermining its potential to articulate and explain crucial (but complex) political dynamics of policy action. We therefore ask the question: In which ways is the concept of climate policy backlash being employed in recent climate and environmental politics literature, and with what consequences for how backlash is studied and explained? Our aim is to critically reflect on the concept of climate policy backlash and its use to: (i) recognise and consolidate insights across fragmented lines of thinking, (ii) situate current approaches in climate and environmental politics within wider debates, and (iii) stimulate constructive debate about the concept of climate policy backlash and its (comparative) empirical application. We observe a variety of framings in studies of climate policy backlash to date, which vary in terms of the objects of backlash, actors involved, and scope of analysis (e.g., issues, timeframes), thereby influencing the methods employed and the political forces and dynamics that are foregrounded (or downplayed). Across these lines of thinking, different underlying explanations of backlash are suggested, including backlash as reactionary political behaviour, interest-based countermobilization, counter-conduct, or ‘ordinary’ politics. Altogether this suggests a need for both conceptual scrutiny and development, but it could also indicate the empirical presence of varieties of backlash. At the same time, we urge careful attention to situating backlash at the interface of institutional and non-institutional politics (rather than one or the other alone), recognition that different actors may have different subjective perceptions of backlash, and the need to build on prior work rather than creating silos within this emerging concept. Overall, we argue that climate policy backlash is a complex and contradictory phenomenon, which can have both negative and positive effects on climate policy development, repoliticise but also depoliticise policy making, and reflect both extraordinary and ordinary politics at the same time.