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The Amazon is a complex object of policy that comprises environmental, economic, social, and sovereignty concerns. Despite this complexity, governments are often portrayed as having a single understanding of the region as a political problem. In this article, we investigate how the Amazon has been constructed as a problem in 6240 Brazilian presidential speeches since 1985 using supervised machine learning. Conceptually, we develop a framework that accounts for how important transnational actors, such as presidents, construct objects of policy as particular problems depending on where and when they participate in politics. Empirically, we find that presidents often construct the Amazon as an environmental problem when speaking far away from the region, whereas they usually construct it as problems of economic integration or social development when speaking within in the Amazon. Furthermore, presidents increasingly mix problem-constructions to represent the Amazon as a complex and multifaceted object of policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of corporate political spending on environmental policy has drawn numerous attention from researchers and policymakers. However, few studies have analyzed the empirical effect of corporate spending on environmental policy in aggregate. In this study, I analyze the impact of corporate independent spending bans on state environmental policy, utilizing the repeal of such bans in 23 states following the 2010 Supreme Court's Citizens United decision as a research design. Through difference-in-differences tests, I find no evidence that the removal of independent expenditure bans influenced state environmental policy, regulations, or outcomes, or overall policy liberalism. I also find that corporate direct contributions did not increase in treated states, which may explain the lack of environmental policy effects. These results demonstrate that corporations did not utilize the new spending avenue after Citizens United to influence state environmental policy in aggregate and raise questions concerning corporate political spending and environmental preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political linkages between trade and environmental policy have rapidly increased since 1990. In this paper, I suggest a novel mechanism behind this phenomenon – ‘defensive issue linkage.’ As the scope of trade law expanded, it increasingly touched upon domestic and international environmental policies. As a result, environmental groups mobilized to seek carve-outs that preserve their traditional policy space. However, their opposition also led to the increased inclusion of proactive clauses that further the linkage between trade and the environment as policymakers strove to bolster ratifying coalitions. Using qualitative evidence from the US, EU, and Malaysia, I show that environmental groups mobilize in reaction to the expanding scope of trade policies and explore how this influences trade agreement content. A quantitative analysis of preferential trade agreements concluded between 1989 and 2016 then shows that general patterns of environmental clause inclusion are consistent with the channel of ‘defensive issue linkage.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green industries and companies provide crucial political support for ambitious environmental policy. In this article, I examine through which mechanisms green business interests influence international environmental negotiations. I theorize technology-based arguing as an influence mechanism that builds on combined technological and discursive power and can outstrip relational and structural business power rooted in material resources. I probe these propositions in a process-tracing case study of new wastewater regulations for ships in the Baltic Sea negotiated in the Helsinki Commission and International Maritime Organization. I find that green business built, expanded, and sustained state support for ambitious nutrient removal standards by persuasively arguing that advanced treatment was feasible. Provision of tangible evidence of technology development, availability, and uptake undermined the influence of reluctant and materially superior business interests. I conclude that even small green business actors can facilitate ambitious environmental policy when communication channels between innovators and policymakers are strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian environmental governance formally began in the 1970s with an ambitious vision critical of the status quo. Until the Justin Trudeau government from 2015, this vision had been largely eroded when compared to the transformative environmental ideas, ambition, and efforts initially put forth. Drawing on elite interviews in Canadian environmental politics and an articulation of the dominant system, we develop and demonstrate a novel explanation for Canada's systematic failure to act more ambitiously on the environment. We argue that this failure is the result of progressive selection of Canadian environmental governance in relation to the dominant system at key selection moments. It is at those moments when the environment is least prioritized and the economy most urgently needs attention that environmental governance suffers the most. The paper concludes by emphasizing how features of the dominant political-economic system not typically thought of as environmental can have systematic environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of Europeanisation on domestic policies is often associated with the alignment of European policies and discourses with national ones. The Habitats Directive mandating wolf protection entailed heated debates across the EU, suggesting diverging values and interests at various levels of policy-making. I present an analysis of wolf policy and politics in Germany, where wolves have returned after a long period of extinction. Tracing the dynamics of institutions involved in wolf management in 2000–2021, I identify key groups involved, their activities and positions as well as the impact of European rules and discourses. Unlike in some other Central in Eastern European countries, German wolf policy was strongly influenced by Europeanisation that helped to sustain the institutional path of wolf conservation, despite criticism from dominant land-use actors who politicised the issue to relax conservation rules. I suggest adding safeguarding of latent policies to the catalogue of outcomes of Europeanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that public support for climate action can be increased by bundling environmental policy with social and economic programs – the Green New Deal being one of the most widely known iterations of this strategy. Yet, party cue theory suggests that public support for the policy will be shaped by the strong Democratic associations of the proposal. In a preregistered survey experiment conducted among 1,203 residents of the rural western United States, I find strong evidence that the phrase 'the Green New Deal' functions as a partisan cue, lowering support for a bundled climate policy among rural residents by 9.1 percentage points. This depressive effect is robust even when framing around region-specific climate impacts is added to the survey question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of environmental policy is increasingly driven by the emergence and interaction of policy concepts and the frameworks, knowledge, and ideas they employ. We argue that policy actors' creative use of policy concepts often leads to their combinatorial development. In this policy process, the concepts interact and shape each other's policy relevance and future development under the influence of ideas, knowledge, and political factors. We formulate this new research approach using ideational and policy process theories. In particular, we explicate internal and contextual combinatory elements that enable policy change resulting from mutual development of policy concepts. For an empirical demonstration, we analyze the conceptual innovation, rise, and ramifications of nutrient recycling as a new segment of Finnish environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This explorative study draws on content analysis of the environmental policy documents of voluntary sport organizations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We develop a typology of ways in which sport organizations frame environmental problems and find four ideal typical frames: (1) a general non-committal frame; (2) a sport-specific technical frame; (3) a growth-oriented opportunity frame; and (4) a crisis frame viewing environmental issues as an existential crisis for sport. We then explain the emergence of these frames. To this task, we discuss how materialities, institutional mechanisms and wider environmental discourses matter for environmental framing in voluntary sport organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While political environmentalism played an important role in social mobilization against communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservationism appeared to be in decline across the region, and external pressure from European institutions and Western donors influenced environmental policy. What explains the effectiveness of protest since the environmental movement emerged in the 1980s? We trace the emergence and evolution of Polish political environmentalism, looking at three levels of the environmental movement's legitimacy: the level of practices, societal support, and discourse. Each phase identified between 1980s and 2017 saw shifts on different levels of legitimacy, and each ended with a spectacular environmental protest or a decision, bearing implications for the following phase. Since 2010, we see a deep polarization of Polish politics, limiting the effectiveness of environmental protest despite the movement's regained triple legitimacy in large parts of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy advocates are increasingly proposing 'bundled' clean energy policies to combat climate change while also creating jobs and transforming the economy. While such strategies may broaden the appeal of climate policies, these broad constituencies create challenges for policy communicators – how do messages about different aspects of the policy, coming from different messenger groups, influence public support for clean energy policies? This study uses a modified conjoint survey experiment (n = 2145) to test how the interaction between message frames (addressing climate change vs. creating jobs) and sources (business, environmental, or labor groups) influenced policy support for clean energy policies. Results show that job creation frames from business or environmental groups were most effective. We find evidence that certain message/source combinations work across partisanship divides: messages that were effective for one partisan group did not backfire – and often also increased policy support – when presented to the other group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While existing literature points to a number of factors that shape subnational support for climate policy, the extant scholarship has struggled to illustrate a clear and convincing explanation for subnational support of climate policy efforts and whether that support is meaningful. By looking to the United States, where subnational actors have an important role in environmental policy development and implementation, we find that legislators' ideology and membership in the minority party determines sponsorship of climate bills. Specifically, liberal legislators with the fewest opportunities to signal efficacy to their constituents are the most likely to support subnational climate change policy efforts. Given that the individuals most likely to support climate policy efforts are those without capacity, many support efforts may be more symbolic than substantive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy processes traditionally dominated by government increasingly are open to participation by diverse non-governmental actors. This can result in more inclusive policy making, but undue influence that undermines democratic processes is also possible. We use insights from critical discourse analysis and framing theory to assess the discursive influence of non-state actors in the context of a government-led policy process to address eutrophication problems in the Lake Erie basin, shared by Canada and the United States. We analyze the actions of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation within the policy process to develop Domestic Action Plans to deal with nutrient runoffs. This research provides novel insights into how policy influence may occur in a process with multiplicity of stakeholders. In the context of efforts towards inclusive resource governance, this approach helps us reveal hurdles to the achievement of goals for sustainable resource use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the problem of defining the scope and substance of the climate adaptation policy, which operates with comprehensive objectives and engages with multiple meanings, policy tools, and sectors to allow societies to cope with the effects of climate change. Analyzing the design of Brazil's National Adaptation Plan sheds light on the main goals and tools of the country's adaptation strategy for the rural sector and its divergent policy approaches at distinct subnational levels. This study shows that the government's ambition for promoting change drove the design process by mainstreaming climate adaptation goals into well-established development agendas, but it resulted in the layering of existing sector-based instruments. The Plan became a mix of loosely coordinated and inconsistent strategies, lacking a common implementation approach. Thereby, this analysis provides insight into the politics of adaptation policies and the challenges of promoting policy integration in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that policies for a more sustainable society require narratives outside the status quo. This contribution studies the EU's environmental policy narrative of a circular economy (CE), which many consider promising in this respect. The results demonstrate that the CE narrative was created to transform EU policy discourses 'from within' but eventually perpetuated the established discourse of ecological modernization. This perpetuation resulted from specific strategic practices used to create the CE narrative, which (1) concealed conflict, (2) strengthened the agency of incumbents, and (3) excluded alternative voices. The analysis uses empirical evidence from 28 interviews with key stakeholders, 84 policy documents and participant observation data at the European Union (EU) level. The results suggest that the development of narratives outside the status quo depends on strategic practices that address (future) conflicts and offer new agency to change agents as well as transition strategies to incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did New York City's climate politics change after Hurricane Sandy, and why? Prevailing accounts of extreme weather's impact on climate politics draw on survey data and characterize climate policy in vague terms. However, weather does not do the work of politics; the specifics of climate policy matter. I develop a relational sociological approach focused on mobilized actors, political economy, and event theory. Drawing on interviews and document analysis, I show how senior disaster officials, New York's Mayor Bloomberg and his Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, community groups and Occupy Sandy activists responded to Hurricane Sandy. Actors maintained outlooks and practices consistent with their position in the city's power relations. This selective continuity shifted New York's climate policy from decarbonization-focused tentative cosmopolitanism to adaptation-focused defensive parochialism. I term this convergent prioritization of adaptation a 'fortress of solitude' social logic. Only subsequent events explain New York's 2019 low-carbon legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation to impacts of climate change is a key pillar of climate change policy, and local governments have historically played a major role in the design and implementation of these policies. An array of political, economic, institutional, social, and individual factors influence adaptation policy instrument choice. At the local government level, these choices also reflect inter-governmental dynamics that can constrain or support local efforts. We analyze eight hypothesized drivers of local adaptation policy instrument choice using fractional regression analysis and multilevel modelling. Local governments are pursuing diverse adaptation policy implementation styles that are associated with different levels of internal capacity, local political economies and problem perception. Dependence on national governments, the presence or absence of national adaptation mandates, national decision-making traditions, and national adaptation policy approaches may also influence local policy instrument choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research consistently finds a relatively weak relationship between environmental concern and pro-environmental behavior, as environmentally concerned individuals often fail to act pro-environmentally, both in the private and public spheres. While the strength of the concern–behavior relationship varies considerably across countries, existing research has yet to provide a complete account of these cross-national differences. In this study, we add to previous cross-national research on the concern–behavior relationship by focusing on the quality of government. Using multilevel analysis and data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), we demonstrate that people who are environmentally concerned are more likely to act pro-environmentally (in the public sphere), in countries where government institutions are fair, effective and impartial. We also find that people are generally more likely to engage in pro-environmental behavior in both the private and public sphere in countries where the quality of government is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States (U.S.) wide differences exist in the environmental policies that individual states adopt. To better understand the reason for this variation I examine the conditions that shape the roll call voting behavior of state lawmakers on environmental policy proposals. I examine a variety of potential explanatory factors ranging from individual legislator characteristics (e.g., party, ideology and gender) and constituency-level conditions (e.g., citizen ideology, demographic characteristics and industry employment patterns) to indicators of campaign effort (business and pro-environment campaign contributions). Analyses of 22 states across four legislative sessions demonstrate support for many hypothesized effects. Similar to findings at the national level in the U.S. Congress, political party and ideology are identified as strong predictors of voting, but additional factors also have an influence. For example, the political leanings of district voters and activities of environmental interest groups have substantive effects on legislative voting patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about the religion and environmental attitudes relationship in the United States has yielded mixed results. Some studies find that religion relates to heightened concern about environmental threats and greater environmental interest whereas others find religion relates to diminished concern and interest. A new perspective that applies ideas from psychology and sociology may help resolve these discrepant findings. It is hypothesized that religious meaning reduces concern with environmental threats since meaning helps people cope with distressing stimuli. This reduction is specific to threats and does not extend to environmental interest. Using the 2016 General Social Survey to test this hypothesis, after controlling for sociodemographic and political variables, structural equation modeling shows Americans who are more religious experience diminished sense of danger from environmental threats, yet exhibit heightened general environmental interest. These findings align with the proposed theory and suggest new ways to promote environmentalism and policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has turned the Arctic simultaneously into an environmentally highly fragile space and a region offering manifold economic opportunities. The notion of 'Arctic Paradox' aptly captures the trade-off between environmental protection needs and economic prospects. We investigate how the European Union has positioned itself regarding this Paradox by asking to what extent its Arctic policy discourse integrates environmental concerns. Analysis involving the main strategies of EU institutions, and the EU's Arctic and major non-Arctic members finds three co-existing coalitions with differing visions of environmental policy integration in the Arctic. The aggregate EU discourse on the Arctic is currently 'green by omission', that is, by explicitly avoiding a clear stance on the trade-off embodied in the 'Arctic Paradox'. We attempt to explain this, and conclude by discussing the likelihood of the EU developing a genuinely environment-oriented Arctic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars who study the failure of climate change policy in the United States tend to focus on the mechanics of denial and the coordinated efforts of political operatives, conservative think tanks, and partisan news outlets to cast doubt on what has become overwhelming scientific consensus. In contrast, we address a factor that has been understudied until now – the role of climate change advocacy in the U.S. Congress. Using quantitative text analysis on a corpus of floor speeches published in the Congressional Record between 1996 and 2015, we find notable differences in the language partisans use. Democrats communicate in ways that are message-based, emphasizing the weight of scientific evidence, while Republicans tend towards a softer, cue-based narrative based on anecdotes and storytelling. We end with a discussion of what climate change advocates can hope to accomplish through the 'politics of talk,' especially in an age of heightened polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To determine to what extent politicians publicly discuss environmental issues in line with public opinion and economic characteristics of their constituents, we conducted a computational text analysis of the 115th House of Representatives' tweets about environmental issues. In polarized U.S. environmental politics, many Republicans attack the authority of scientists and regulators but some signal a desire for bipartisan policy compromises. Analyzing district characteristics and environmental communication on Twitter reveals that nominally pro-environment Republicans representing more moderate constituents fail to oppose their partisan colleagues, particularly during the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. At the same time, very few openly attacked climate science; instead, House Republicans primarily focused attention on fossil fuels, the Environmental Protection Agency and the right of the federal government to regulate economic activity. The 'Waters of the United States' served as a rallying cry for opposition to environmental regulation in the 115th House of Representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the future of 'environmental' policy in times of earth system transformations and the recognition of the 'Anthropocene' as a new epoch in planetary history? I argue that fifty years after the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, we need to revisit the 'environmental policy' paradigm because it falls short on five grounds. The paradigm (a) emphasizes a dichotomy of 'humans' and 'nature' that is no longer defensible; (b) is incompatible with more integrated research concepts that have overcome this human-environment dichotomy; (c) deemphasizes questions of planetary justice and democracy; (d) fails to deal with novel normative challenges of the Anthropocene; and (e) may risk political marginalization of central concerns of human and non-human survival. In the second part I discuss institutional implications, arguing for novel approaches in science collaboration, new institutional arrangements and a more central place for questions of planetary justice and earth-system risks in governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development, ecological modernisation, eco-efficiency and the like have reframed material limits as conventional barriers to growth. Even in recent arguments for degrowth, limits recede to the background in favour of self-limitation. To reclaim limits as the grounds for an effective environmental politics. I reconstruct how the case for the limits to growth was reversed into a case for the growth of limits, and how foundational boundaries were increasingly blurred. Arguing that lifestyle politics is unlikely to be effective against the growth machine, I elaborate on the notion of form-of-life. If not understood as a solipsistic self-mastery but as the mutually formative encounter of living entities – provided with their own dispositions yet sharing a common destiny – this notion puts the focus on how freedom and equality are premised on, rather than hampered by, limits. I conclude with four reasons why a radical theory and politics for the environment should make use of the notion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to open a conversation about multispecies justice in environmental politics. It sets out some of the theoretical approaches, key areas of exploration, and obvious challenges that come with rethinking a core plank of liberal theory and politics. First, we discuss some of the diverse scholarly fields that have influenced the emergence of multispecies justice. We then discuss core concerns at the centre of this reconfiguration of justice – including broadening conceptions of the subject of justice and the means and processes of recognition (and misrecognition). The importance of deconstructing and decolonising the hegemony of liberal political discourse is crucial, and is part of a larger project for multispecies justice to rework a politics of knowledge and practice of political communication. Finally, we begin to explore what a commitment to multispecies justice might demand of politics and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the status of public opinion research in the environmental politics field and how individuals assess cues of cooperative behavior from other actors before they decide to incur private costs for the production of an environmental public good. It mentions motivate social scientists outside the environmental policy field to use findings from environmental scholarship in their work. It also mentions understanding of environmental attitudes at specific national and subnational levels, and on how environmental concerns stack up against other policy issues.

The use of information provision has been criticized as an ineffective way to increase support for evidence-based environmental policies, but it remains a dominant strategy among policy communicators. Using a survey experiment on climate change and genetically modified food (GMO) policy preferences in Germany and the United States (N = 3,000 total), we investigate how information provision shapes environmental policy attitudes and whether this effect is moderated by trust in science and trust in the source of messages. Findings show that information provision significantly shifted policy preferences towards the prevailing scientific opinion, but primarily among individuals whose prior attitudes conflicted with the scientific message. While trust in GMO science moderated message effectiveness in the U.S., generally the effects did not depend on levels of trust in science or trust in the message source. Results are similar for both countries, suggesting that the findings could be relevant to different political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theoretically argue for and empirically examine, for the first time, a triangular relationship between concern among citizens about the environment, media attention to environmental issues, and policy output. Previous work has studied these relationships, but analyzed the respective links rather in isolation from each other. This research has significant implications for the understanding of environmental policymaking and, more generally, informs the debate on whether politicians respond to what voters want and under what circumstances this occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence is presented of how the Great Recession affected prioritisation of environmental protection. World Values Survey data from both before the recession's onset and its aftermath shows that increases in unemployment rates had significant, negative effects upon prioritisation of environmental protection while changing growth rates or gross domestic product (GDP) had none. These results hold not only among advanced industrial democracies, but also generalise to Latin American countries. Additionally, the findings offer no evidence that the recession changed the way in which individual wealth relates to the prioritisation of environmental protection. As a strong environmental public opinion is an important factor in the successful implementation of environmental policy, the findings suggest that, if policymakers wish to maintain public support for implementing environmental protection measures, they should prioritise low unemployment over economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marshall Islands (RMI) is one of the world's smallest sovereign states, which should mean they are peripheral to global climate negotiations. Yet, they have recently played a crucial role in negotiating the Paris Agreement and emissions reductions at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). The success at Paris is well documented. Here we explain how they also acted as successful policy entrepreneurs at the IMO. Specifically, we find that RMI's success can be explained by three factors: vision of the entrepreneur; development of capacity within RMI and the region, and commitment of key actors to create and seize opportunities in available forums, to realise that vision; and strategies to mobilise broader international support. These findings have implications for the literatures on policy entrepreneurship in climate governance and studies that highlight the capacity of small states to influence international affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An effective climate agreement should simultaneously foster broad participation, high ambition, and sufficient compliance: this is the 'effectiveness trilemma'. While the Paris Agreement has been acclaimed for spurring universal participation, its mitigation mechanism – an unenforced bottom-up framework of voluntary pledges – has been criticized for lacking ambition and incentivizing free riding. Does the Paris Agreement come with effectiveness trade-offs? How ambitious is the Agreement, and how likely is it that countries will comply with it? Using an effectiveness formula to assess ambition, I find that the Paris Agreement constitutes an important improvement compared to business-as-usual. Further, based on evidence from interviews with 21 climate negotiators and observers, the compliance prospects of the Agreement are evaluated as moderately positive. I conclude that the Agreement has the potential to overcome the effectiveness trilemma, and outline policy measures for achieving that objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustaining and increasing climate policy ambition in the presence of heterogeneous interests and potential veto players is a key challenge for climate governance. We examine the conceptual and empirical significance of transfers to balance heterogeneous interests and build support for raising climate policy ambition in the development of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). We provide insights into how to strategically sequence 'brown cushioning' and 'green push' policy incentives within the EU ETS to deliberately incentivize transformative change among actor constituencies towards decarbonization endogenously. The analysis demonstrates the significance of preventive and compensatory buy-in, via allowance allocation and revenue spending design, for the introduction and each major reform of the scheme. Given the potential for a substantially increasing value distributed within the EU ETS, future policy options should aim to strengthen the scheme's inherent incentives towards decarbonization and to prevent an increasing structural divide among EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing uptake of environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is well documented, but little is known about why countries prefer certain types of provisions over others. Exploiting a fine-grained dataset on environmental provisions in PTAs, we hypothesize that environmental provisions are more likely to be adopted when they aim at preserving countries' regulatory sovereignty. We find that the likelihood of adoption is indeed higher for defensive provisions, but this likelihood decreases if there is a large variation in PTA members' stringency of environmental regulations, and in particular, for PTAs with asymmetric power relationships. While countries first and foremost attempt to preserve their regulatory sovereignty when adopting environmental provisions, countries with stringent environmental regulations and strong bargaining power vis-à-vis their trading partners also try to level the playing field and pursue more offensive interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the evidence of global warming amounts, the demand increases for effective policy responses that can counter a dangerous rise in the global temperature. Here, we demonstrate and explain the spread of one such policy: carbon pricing. By employing the concept of policy diffusion, we show that the two carbon pricing policies – carbon taxes and emission trading schemes – have diffused as a result, not of independent policy choices in different states, but of an interdependent process of states learning from and emulating each other under the influence of international organisations. In this way, carbon pricing has transitioned from being a policy employed only by pioneer countries to becoming a global norm to which every responsible state is expected to conform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational advocacy networks (TANs) use local experiences and knowledge to teach climate negotiators about the adverse human rights effects of climate policies. Employing a variety of tactics, including information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics and accountability politics, they initiate instrumental and social learning processes among state representatives. Learning about rights impacts leads to a policy transfer between the human rights regime as the source institution and the climate regime as the target institution and institutional interaction through commitment. I concentrate on the activities of one particular TAN, the Human Rights and Climate Change Working Group, and how it has fostered the institutionalization of human rights into the Paris Agreement 2015. My research relies on a content analysis of primary and secondary documents, expert interviews and participatory observations at the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) in Warsaw (2013), Paris (2015) and Bonn (2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the party political learning of the German Greens, a powerful agent of environmental policy in European politics, we identify the strategic and programmatic lessons learned from their failure in the 2013 general elections and explain the party politics that facilitated these lessons. We advance research on learning from failures by understanding failures not as objective facts but as constructed in political discourse. Tracing the main discursive elements of failure constructions, we argue that such constructions empower agents of learning and direct what actors learn from failures. Party elites might engage in strategic constructions of failures to promote their agenda and position in the party. Empirically tracing how the party political discourse of the German Greens constructed the 2013 elections as a failure, we demonstrate how this discursive construction intertwines with party politics and helped shift the intra-party balance of power and political direction of the Greens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental taxes are often argued to be key to more effective environmental protection. People's willingness to pay such taxes in contexts with varying levels of quality of government (QoG) is investigated. Applying multilevel analyses on data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the QoG Institute, links between environmental concern, ideology, and QoG are explored. The results show that people who state that they are concerned about environmental issues and live in high QoG countries are more willing than people in low QoG countries to pay environmental taxes. Moreover, people in low QoG countries holding leftist political value orientations are less willing to pay environmental taxes than rightists and other value groups. Environmental concern and leftist political ideology are more important drivers of public support for environmental taxes in high QoG countries than in low QoG countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 20 years, scholars have examined the role policy transfer has had on the development of environmental policies across the globe. The literature in this area has discussed everything from the movement of cap-and-trade policies to the movement of rain barrels. As the name 'policy transfer' implies, studies tend to focus on the successful movement of a policy or program. Part of the reason for this focus is that studies tend to neglect the role power and time play in the transfer process. To begin addressing this, the concepts of power most commonly associated with the three faces of power debate and ideas of political time, policy time and 'chronological' time (i.e. timing, tempo, time) can help explain a range of environmental transfers (or non-transfers) better than the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In industrialised countries, emissions from fossil-fuelled vehicles show little sign of abatement, with citizens' opposition to policy interventions arguably the key reason. To better understand the sources of public opinion towards particular types of policy instruments designed to reduce vehicle emissions, we focus on the perceived consequences of such instruments, notably the extent to which they are regarded as effective, fair, and unintrusive. Switzerland is the empirical focus because it lags behind neighbouring European countries. We assess public support for seven policy instruments, identified by existing literature and expert interviews. A survey-embedded experiment with a representative sample of 2,034 citizens provides support for the argument that policy instruments perceived as effective, fair, and unintrusive achieve higher levels of public support. These results may help policymakers design interventions that strike a balance between political feasibility and problem-solving effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines success of the green parties in Swiss federal elections of October 20, 2019. It reports the Green Party (GPS) won 13.2 percent and the Green Liberal Party (GLP) 7.8 percent of the votes, and two green forces together thus secured more than one fifth of the votes for the National Council, Switzerland's lower house of Parliament. It mentions although neither party was able to achieve representation in the government, their success has shaken the foundations of Swiss party politics and, if repeated, may see them enter government.

The article explores the concept and practice of regenerative culture drawing on our experience as activist researchers within Extinction Rebellion Manchester from August-December 2019. It defines relationship between regenerative culture and a foundation of self-care, people care and planet care. It reports how in 2018 in Great Britain Extinction Rebellion (XR) launched itself as a mass environmental movement aiming to achieve systemic change through non-violent civil disobedience. It mentions need of establishing a citizens assembly to oversee the transition towards climate justice.

The concept of prospective environmental (in)justice (PEJ) is proposed to make sense of situations in which development proposals and the actions of state and market actors create injustices even before the development projects become a material reality. Through this concept and its application to two cases of opencast gold-mining, a broader conceptualization of socio-environmental (in)justice is invited that considers multiple forms of injustice of rural communities in Romania and Bulgaria during more than a decade of waiting for the 'actual harm' of mining to happen. The mere prospects of opencast gold-mining have, in fact, shed light on deep-seated and ongoing dimensions of socio-environmental injustice such as, land-grabbing, slow community disappearance and marginalization, daily psychological damage, disavowal of alternatives and disqualification as political subjects. These injustices experienced collectively could be seen as constitutive moments of systemic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the concept of the glass ceiling of transformation, terror management theory, and how language around environmental issues has evolved in neoliberal environmental states.

Despite the development of the environmental state, climate change is accelerating. The concept of the 'glass ceiling' – denoting an unexplained barrier, impeding the state from using its powers effectively to mitigate threats that it acknowledges should be addressed – has been put forward to account for this. Here, a structural account of this phenomenon is advanced, which suggests that environmental policies are generally outcompeted among government priorities wherever they threaten the capitalist growth imperative. In addition, social/cultural factors, based on the psychology of denial, provide a necessary contribution to our understanding. A three-fold denialism is at work: of climate change itself, the measures required to tackle it (where these contradict a modern faith in material progress), and the potential incapacity of the state to protect society (discouraging close attention to the effectiveness of its climate policies). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The limits of the environmental state in the context of the provision of economic growth are addressed by applying materialist state theory, state-rescaling approaches and the degrowth/postgrowth literature. I compare state roles in a capitalist growth economy and in a postgrowth economy geared towards bio-physical parameters such as matter and energy throughput and the provision of 'sustainable welfare'. In both cases state roles are analysed in relation to the economy, welfare, and the environment, as well as state spatiality. Finally, I address the state in a transition from a growth economy to a sustainable postgrowth economy. I argue that materialist state and sustainable welfare theories are capable of informing state-led 'eco-social' policies that, if integrated in a comprehensive policy strategy, have the potential to overcome the growth imperative in the economy and policymaking and break the growth-related glass ceiling of the environmental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoliberal nature of the environmental state prevents a transformation to long-term sustainability. Taking the case of Britain, I scrutinise the rhetorical invention of the environmental state by identifying and analysing the commonplaces that informed political arguments for environmental policymaking between 1997–2015. The analysis shows that the rhetoric of the British environmental state is grounded on neoliberal commonplaces, which entails an understanding of environmental problems and solutions that precludes actual transformation. Ultimately, neoliberalism functions as a glass ceiling to radical environmental transformation; a transformative rhetoric informed by commonplaces different to those of neoliberalism is paramount to the institution of a counter-hegemonic ecological paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the capacities of the state to facilitate a comprehensive sustainability transition? It is argued that structural barriers akin to an invisible 'glass ceiling' are inhibiting any such transformation. First, the structure of state imperatives does not allow for the addition of an independent sustainability imperative without major contradictions. Second, the imperative of legitimation is identified as a crucial component of the glass ceiling. A distinction is introduced between 'lifeworld' and 'system' sustainability, showing that the environmental state has created an environmentally sustainable lifeworld, which continues to be predicated on a fundamentally unsustainable reproductive system. While this 'decoupling' of lifeworld from system sustainability has alleviated legitimation pressure from the state, a transition to systemic sustainability will require deep changes in the lifeworld. This constitutes a renewed challenge for state legitimation. Some speculations regarding possible futures of the environmental state conclude the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy in the United States (US) is known for its media-specific approach to problems, and scholars have argued that this is ineffective. To combat these problems, some have argued for a more coordinated, integrated approach to policymaking. With Congressional gridlock prohibiting legislative solutions, the Obama administration offers some examples of a regulatory path to policy integration. Importantly, these efforts do not entail significant organizational remodels, which can be difficult to adopt. Three different 'types' of policy integration from the US Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management are described. These cases serve as a potential roadmap for broader implementation of policy integration within the fragmented US bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of environmental market-based policy instruments (MBIs), such as cap-and-trade and biodiversity offsetting programs, have extensively documented MBI's market-like features, including the ways they incentivize producing environmental quality, risk subordinating nature protection to capital accumulation, and are supported by state-driven projects of market-building ('re-regulation'). A less emphasized dimension of MBIs is examined: the ways these institutions are founded upon a substantial thickening of state infrastructural power, which amounts to expanding state control over economic and environmental life in ways that outstrip processes of re-regulation. Appreciating the linkages between MBIs and expanding state control over environmental quality may help explain routine conservative resistance to these policy developments. Affinities between MBIs and regulatory thickening also call into question the degree to which MBIs should be thought of as 'liberalizing' policy instruments and suggests that, perhaps counterintuitively, the growth of MBIs may present new opportunities for expanding public control over environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]