Bringing Policy Back In: A Typology for Studying EU Climate Policy Imaginaries

Research on climate futures has proliferated in recent years, yet a striking gap persists: while scholars and modellers extensively examine what the world will look like as temperatures rise and which technological and economic pathways might achieve mitigation targets, the policy content of these imagined futures receives remarkably little systematic attention. Climate scenarios typically focus on techno-economic dimensions of potential future policies while ignoring political and socio-cultural determinants of feasibility such as behavioural routines and actor perceptions. Consequently, future-oriented climate policy scenarios often recommend mitigation pathways that are technically and economically feasible, but whose political feasibility has not been sufficiently considered. This neglect matters because precisely these dimensions shape social acceptance and, ultimately, whether ambitious policies can be adopted and implemented. This paper argues for bringing policy back into climate futures research by shifting the analytical focus to the governance architectures, regulatory philosophies, and instrument choices that distinguish competing visions of climate action. The European Union provides a compelling case: despite ambitious climate targets, debates centre not on whether to act but on how – through market mechanisms or regulatory mandates, technological innovation or behavioural change, efficiency improvements or sufficiency principles. These are fundamentally questions about policy paradigms, yet current frameworks lack the conceptual tools needed to systematically map and compare such variations. To address this gap, the paper introduces a typology distinguishing climate policy paradigms along two dimensions: worldview (anthropocentric versus ecocentric) and intervention logic (technological versus behavioural solutions). ). Technological anthropocentrism has dominated climate policy through policies aimed at eco-efficiency improvements (ecological modernization), more recently expanding to include carbon removal and geoengineering. Behavioural anthropocentrism emphasizes infrastructural changes encouraging climate-friendly consumption while remaining compatible with economic growth, with Green New Deal-type programs representing prominent examples. Behavioural ecocentrism prioritizes sufficiency and reduced consumption, encompassing degrowth and post-growth perspectives. Technological ecocentrism combines innovation with nature-based approaches. The four paradigms capture normatively and practically distinct visions of climate governance and ensure analytical openness to policy futures beyond current climate policy corridors. The paper outlines how applying this typology to EU climate policy discourses by a wide range of state and non-state actors can generate new insights into the political feasibility of different policy approaches. It proposes a mixed-methods approach that combines computational text analysis (topic modelling, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis etc.) with qualitative case study analysis to explore the distribution of paradigmatic visions across actor groups and identify political feasibility spaces for different types of climate policy.