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Historical-materialist policy analysis (HMPA) aims at analyzing how specific policies are formulated against the background of essentially competing and contradictory interests of different social forces. It examines how, if at all, these policies contribute to societal reproduction and the regulation of social contradictions and crisis tendencies. This article provides a concise introduction to HMPA as well as to the key theoretical concepts and perspectives underpinning its policy concept. Against this background, it further elaborates on how to operationalize HMPA for empirical research, drawing on but also going beyond the three-step process of context-, actors- and process-analysis suggested by the Research Group 'State Project Europe'. In this way, we seek to enhance the analytical and methodological repertoire of historical materialist political science, and at the same time open up new analytical perspectives within the comprehensive field of critical policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenge of realizing a social ecological transformation to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis has been a prevailing topic in public debates over the last few years. What has long been negotiated as a rather technical and scientific issue, reached the political agendas with the flare-up of protest by groups such as 'Fridays for Future', 'Extinction Rebellion' or the campaign 'Ende Gelände' in Germany. Even the dominant topic of the Corona pandemic in recent months has not changed the omnipresence of the climate crisis in political debates. Nevertheless, political and structural change seems to be challenging. In this article, we investigate the mechanisms by which an unsustainable mode of living upholds its resilience against transformative attempts. We will illustrate our conceptual models with examples from the field of energy and climate policies in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]