Towards Carbon Neutrality: Decarbonisation, Energy Transition and the Challenges of Climate Action 

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that in order to navigate clear from the most dangerous tipping points, global greenhouse gas emissions would have to decrease to net-zero by 2050. This requires a massive, economy-wide transformation in both the Global North and the Global South. As of 2022, some 90% of states have adopted targets that aim for either achieving net-zero emissions in the coming decades or for phasing out specific fossil fuel technologies, or both. And while extreme weather events, including heavy rainfall, droughts, and storms are becoming more intense and frequent, the 'climate crisis' is only one of many others, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the global repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the divisive conflicts in the Middle East. These and other crises take up political, financial, and societal resources, and they interact with governmental and societal responses to climate change. The main question for political scientists facing the climate crisis is that of the drivers and obstacles for climate action. For students of public policy, drawing on earlier research on policy diffusion and policy innovation, the main problem is that of feedback loops once decarbonization plans move from policy design to implementation phase. Comparative politics scholars can diagnose and explain the domestic determinants of political feasibility of radical political change. International Relations scholarship can further inquire into the role of institutions vs interests in guiding state action in conditions of limited trust, where most likely first movers will also carry larger costs. Moreover, as the discourse of ‘climate crisis’ leads to pressure for quicker and more efficient policy outputs, there is also a visible temptation to limit some aspects of democracy, justifying it with emergency and securitization – here, political theorists, working hand in hand with empirical political science, can investigate the variety of democracy imaginaries that different actors display. Finally, climate policy is an area that invites multidisciplinary inquiries, where political science can draw on or contribute to the work done by sociology, STS, innovation studies, psychology as well as natural sciences. This Section builds on the momentum generated by a series of earlier ones held at consecutive General Conferences since 2018 and will map current and ongoing research on the politics, policy, and governance of climate action. Its panels will be chaired by senior and junior researchers.