Political Spaces of Climate Governance: Policy Stability, Agenda Change and Politicization in the EU and US

ESRAH proudly hosts PD Dr. Frank Wendler's second DFG funded research project "Political Spaces of Climate Governance: Policy Stability, Agenda Change and and Politicization in the EU and US" that has started on 1 July 2023.

The politics and governance of climate change is going through two major dynamics of change. One is the increased salience and contentiousness of policies associated with targets of decarbonization as a topic of public political contestation, captured in the research debate with the concept of politicization. Another is the expansion of climate governance frameworks to agendas of general scope and policy integration of its targets into a broader range of fields, prompted through the launch of Green Deal agendas and reinforced through ‘green’ recovery programs adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine. While the effects of both dynamics on policy-making against climate change remain ambivalent, they put a spotlight on a key emerging research debate: namely, how to relate policy stability as a set of factors supporting relatively consensual, continuous and long-term policy-making to achieve decarbonization, and dynamics of political conflict and disruption arising from politicization and agenda change associated with exogenous shocks. 

The project seeks to advance this debate by proposing a theoretical framework based on the concept of political space, defined as the establishment of variable and potentially contested boundaries, venues and proposed rationales of climate change governance. Building on relevant theories of the policy process on the link between agendas, policy beliefs as well as related actor coalitions and institutional settings, the research program evaluates interaction effects between three dimensions of the political space created within climate governance frameworks: their policy dimension (agendas, scope and priorities of climate action), their institutional dimension (relevant venues, decision-making and accountability mechanisms), and their discursive dimension (level of policy beliefs and logics of justification and contestation).

By highlighting dynamics of change and stability within evolving spaces of climate governance, the project aims to recognize variability as a ‘sui generis’ aspect of climate policy frameworks while aiming at comparability between cases and the evaluation of vectors of stability and change. Empirically, the project compares cases of climate governance in the EU and US as entities associated with conditions of policy-making stability and more disruptive politicization and agenda change. Reaching beyond this established distinction, more recent policy-making developments in both settings however indicate an expansive dynamic of climate governance and contestation, and the increased use of ‘green’ conditionality in economic recovery programs as sources of climate mainstreaming and further policy integration. The comparison of both entities therefore establishes a highly promising and relevant setting for evaluating similar dynamics of policy-making of current climate governance in contrasting settings.

More information about the theoretical approach, ongoing work in progress and preliminary results can be found on Frank Wendler’s personal homepage.

More information about Frank Wendler's previous DFG funded project at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) can be found here.