Contested Societal Transformations: The Role of Conflict in Climate Policy Action

Scholars have explored diverse forms of conflict over responses to climate change. This ranges from party politics (Hess and Renner, 2019), polarization (Falkenberg et al., 2022), and populism (Lockwood, 2018), to obstruction (Brulle, 2021), knowledge-making (Jasanoff, 2010), discourse (Buschmann and Oels, 2019), imagination (Marquardt and Nasiritousi, 2022), and protest (Temper et al., 2020). Scholars also highlight various underlying processes of conflict including distributional struggle (Aklin and Mildenberger, 2020), cultural politics (Bulkeley et al., 2016), and (de)politicization (Paterson et al., 2022). But the implications of this complex array of often-overlapping conflicts for policy action remain ambiguous. Policy-oriented work highlights issues of policy feedback (Jordan and Moore, 2020), policy backlash (Patterson, 2023), generative criticism (Marquardt et al., 2022), institutional mediation (Finnegan, 2022), and state capacity (Meckling and Nahm, 2022). While others investigate how ‘just transitions’ (Green and Healy, 2022; Newell and Mulvaney, 2013) and deliberation (Willis et al., 2022) can proactively address conflict. Yet, conflict over climate policy action remains a formidable challenge. This Workshop will bring together insights from conflict-oriented and policy-oriented research, which remain insufficiently connected, to advance our knowledge of the role of conflict in climate policy action and development. Doing so is important to avoid the risk of narrowed instrumental and technocentric approaches in climate policy, and to widen the scope beyond formal policy and institutional processes. This will expand our understanding of conflict in climate policy-making (e.g., its sources, interactions, effects) and push forward repertoires for conceptualizing and analyzing contested climate politics and societal transformations.

Aklin, M., Mildenberger, M., 2020. Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change. Global Environmental Politics 20, 4–27. Brulle, R.J., 2021. Networks of Opposition: A Structural Analysis of U.S. Climate Change Countermovement Coalitions 1989–2015. Sociol Inq 91, 603–624. Bulkeley, H., Paterson, M., Stripple, J. (Eds.), 2016. Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Devices, Desires and Dissent. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Buschmann, P., Oels, A., 2019. The overlooked role of discourse in breaking carbon lock‐in: The case of the German energy transition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 10, e574. Falkenberg, M., Galeazzi, A., Torricelli, M., Di Marco, N., Larosa, F., Sas, M., Mekacher, A., Pearce, W., Zollo, F., Quattrociocchi, W., Baronchelli, A., 2022. Growing polarization around climate change on social media. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 1114–1121. Finnegan, J.J., 2022. Institutions, Climate Change, and the Foundations of Long-Term Policy-making. Comparative Political Studies 55(7), 1198–1235. Green, F., Healy, N., 2022. How inequality fuels climate change: The climate case for a Green New Deal. One Earth 5, 635–649. Hess, D.J., Renner, M., 2019. Conservative political parties and energy transitions in Europe: Opposition to climate mitigation policies. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 104, 419–428. IPCC, 2022. Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC, 2018. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C. Incheon, South Korea. Jasanoff, S., 2010. A new climate for society. Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2), 233–253. Jordan, A.J., Moore, B., 2020. Durable by Design?: Policy Feedback in a Changing Climate, 1st ed. Cambridge University Press. Lockwood, M., 2018. Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages. Environmental Politics 27, 712–732. Marquardt, J., Fast, C., & Grimm, J. (2022). Non‐ and sub‐state climate action after Paris: From a facilitative regime to a contested governance landscape. WIREs Climate Change, 13(5). Marquardt, J., and Nasiritousi, N., 2022. Imaginary lock-ins in climate change politics: the challenge to envision a fossil-free future. Environmental Politics, 31(4), 621–642. Meckling, J., Nahm, J., 2022. Strategic State Capacity: How States Counter Opposition to Climate Policy. Comparative Political Studies 55, 493–523. Newell, P., Mulvaney, D., 2013. The political economy of the ‘just transition’: The political economy of the ‘just transition.’ The Geographical Journal 179, 132–140. Paterson, M., Tobin, P., VanDeveer, S.D., 2022. Climate Governance Antagonisms: Policy Stability and Repoliticization. Global Environmental Politics 22, 1–11. Patterson, J.J., 2023. Backlash to climate policy. Global Environmental Politics 23, 68–90. Temper, L., Avila, S., Bene, D.D., Gobby, J., Kosoy, N., Billon, P.L., Martinez-Alier, J., Perkins, P., Roy, B., Scheidel, A., Walter, M., 2020. Movements shaping climate futures: A systematic mapping of protests against fossil fuel and low-carbon energy projects. Environ. Res. Lett. 15, 123004. Willis, R., Curato, N., Smith, G., 2022. Deliberative democracy and the climate crisis. WIREs Climate Change 13, e759.

1: What types of conflicts are salient in evolving climate policy making and why?
2: How and under what conditions do conflicts over policy action occur, both pre- and post-adoption?
3: How and to what extent does (or can) climate policy-making respond to conflict effectively?
4: What are the theoretical and empirical implications of a conflict-centered understanding?
5: What generalizable insights arise for the politics of policy-making more broadly?

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