Who are the Climate Policy Professionals? Career Hubs and Types of Policy Professionals in the Climate Policy Field

In this article we contribute in several ways to the study of policy professionals, i.e. the political actors who are employed by various organizations to affect politics, but who are not elected to office (Selling & Svalfors, 2019). A typical focus in the study of policy professionals is the special advisors working in government (Yong & Hazell, 2014). First we expand this focus to include the policy professionals (n=1100) working to affect the development of climate policy, one of the most important policy issues of our time, in the Danish climate policy field (Blach-Ørsten, Larsen, Willig & Nørgaard, 2024). We identify policy professionals as the people working with public affairs and communications in the 120 most important organizations in the climate policy field. Second, on the basis of data on the full careers of the policy professionals, we construct a weighted and directed career network with 7.700 positions among approximately 2000 organizations. We identify the organizations that are central in the outwards flows – the career hubs (Bühlmann et al. 2024) in the career network. This lets us know the extent to which climate policy professionals are tied together by organizations within the climate policy field or whether organizations outside of the field, such as media and consultancies, are important for their careers. Similarly, we see which organizations within the policy field that are able to send former employees to other organizations within the climate policy field. Preliminary results indicate that the largest corporate interest groups and firms are especially central. Thirdly, we develop a typology of climate policy professionals based on a cluster analysis of their career characteristics, which include; sectors, organizational shifts, advisor roles in politics, organizational centrality, position, geography and education. This lets us distinguish between policy specialists, climate specialists, communication specialists, and generalists among others. The group of climate policy specialists is a minority among policy area agnostics, which highlights that policy professionals most commonly rely on more general policy formulation and network-based skills rather than specific technical expertise. We discuss how our findings develop the original conceptualization of policy professionals and its continued relevance. Blach-Ørsten, M., Larsen, A.G., Willig, I., Nørgaard, D. (2024). From news beats to polcy field’. Paper presented at the Nordmedia conference, august, 2025, Odense. Bühlmann, F., Ellersgaard, C.H., Larsen, A.G., Lunding, J.A., 2024. How career hubs shape the global corporate elite. Global Networks 24, e12430. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12430 Yong, B., & Hazell, R. (2014). Special Advisers: Who they are, what they do and why they matter. Bloomsbury Publishing. Selling, N., & Svallfors, S. (2019). The lure of power: Career paths and considerations among policy professionals in Sweden. Politics & Policy, 47(5), 984-1012. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12325