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Industrial policy has begun to move into the center of debates on climate policy. This represents a shift away from climate policy as we know it—as classic environmental policy. Industrial policy and environmental policy differ in their policy goals, policy instruments, and distributional effects, one primarily concerned with economic development, the other with cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This raises questions about policy interactions between industrial and environmental policy in broader climate policy mixes and how these affect global decarbonization. This article identifies complementary and conflictual dynamics between industrial policy and environmental policy in both domestic and international climate politics. It shows how green industrial policy can advance climate goals and cooperation but can also present challenges to deepening climate cooperation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Developing an understanding of policy interactions is central to leveraging the potential of industrial policy to accelerate global decarbonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanotechnology has been celebrated as driving a new global industrial revolution that has the potential to harness economic growth and remediate the environment, yet could pose risks to health and the environment. Two of the largest economic actors, the EU and the US, have made very different regulatory decisions toward nanotechnology. The EU introduced an official definition of nanotechnology and created several new nano-specific regulations in recent years, whereas the United States has followed more of a "wait and see" policy. I argue that politics, not technology, best explains the divergence between the US and the EU in creating nano-specific regulations, and I introduce a regulatory regime framework to show why, how, and where politics affect divergent environmental politics. To support this argument, I employ comparative case analysis of the EU and US from 2000 to 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to this special issue is the notion that the methods and conceptual tools of comparative politics can improve our understanding of global climate change politics. Building on recent advancements in the field of comparative environmental politics, the special issues offers a more comprehensive treatment of climate change politics in developed countries, emerging economies and least developed countries. In this introduction, I distil the key features of comparative politics, advocate for the more rigorous application of comparative methods in climate politics scholarship and highlight three groups of political factors--institutions, interests and ideas--that hold considerable promise in explaining climate change politics at the domestic level. The introduction concludes with an appeal to (re)think how international and domestic politics interact. Examples drawn from the articles assembled for this special issue are used to substantiate the claims made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]