Conference Agenda

Domestic climate policymaking, especially ‘hard’/coercive policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phase-outs) risks triggering volatile pushback from mass publics. This is challenging in contemporary democracies given political gridlock, heterogeneous public preferences and values, and reactionary populism. However, our knowledge of what drives volatile pushback – or backlash – to climate policy action in specific settings remains fragmented. Sometimes minor policy actions prove highly controversial but major policy actions do not. Moreover, conceptual approaches to policymaking often underestimate the potential for volatile pushback by focusing on policy design/adoption but not post-adoption politics (e.g. policy process theories), or on mostly gradual and endogenous feedbacks (e.g. policy feedback) which obscures relations with the wider context. In recent years, both climate politics scholars and contentious politics scholars have begun to examine volatile pushback to climate policy, usually in small-N cases. What is now needed is a more systematic basis for studying the emergence of volatile pushbacks to climate policy action comparatively across contexts.

In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework to analyse drivers of volatile pushback to hard/coercive climate policy action by mass publics. The framework spans attributes of both policy action and socio-political context, across three dimensions: interests, values, and embeddedness. Interests are foregrounded by distributional conflicts over climate policy, values are foregrounded by conflicts over meaning, and embeddedness is foregrounded by place-based dependence of people on spatial configurations of infrastructure (or lack of it) in everyday life (e.g., work, access to services). All three dimensions are likely to be important in explaining grievance formation, and thereby volatile pushback. We argue that volatile pushback arises through clashes between policy action and socio-political context in one or more of these dimensions. We illustrate the framework with recent cases of volatile pushback to hard climate policy in several countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, France, UK). Altogether, this suggests a need for systematic configurational analysis across both small-N and large-N scales to study how and under which conditions various drivers interactively produce volatile pushback against certain forms of hard/coercive policy. The approach also helps to bridge debates among climate politics scholars examining contention from different angles (e.g. political economy, culture, geography), which risk becoming fragmented, by examining volatile pushback as a dependent variable of common concern.

Overall, the paper contributes to understanding the nature and dynamics of domestic policy contention at the interface of ‘Architecture and Agency’ and ‘Democracy and Power’ within transformations in governance and society.

Climate policy backlash is of increasing concern to earth systems governance scholars and policy practitioners. Such abrupt, forceful and often transgressive negative policy reactions not only test policy durability, interests and beliefs, but more deeply question the underlying socio-political legitimacy of domestic climate policies [citation removed] . In particular, policy backlash undermines efforts by policy practitioners– such as bureaucrats– who are constrained by trying to bridge volatile societal demands and the need for urgent and science-based climate policies. How do bureaucrats navigate this contention in the pursuit of good public policy? Classic public administration theories suggest that– within institutional bounds and despite various constraints– bureaucrats in advanced industrialised countries often use ‘little p’ political practices to successfully steer policies. But the use and impact of these bureaucratic practices have not been tested in the face of climate policy backlash. More broadly, bureaucratic agency has been under-studied and its potential impact in countering contestation has been under-appreciated.

This paper addresses this gap by building on public administration and policy feedback studies. It first outlines a set of propositions about how the inherently political practices of bureaucrats affect and are affected by climate policy backlash in the immediate and long term. These propositions are tested in application to two national-level cases of contentious climate policy-making: Australia’s Clean Energy Future package (immediate effects 2011-2014 and legacy effects 2014-2023) and Canada’s Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (immediate effects 2018-2021 and legacy effects 2021-2023). Case data draws on semi-structured interviews with key policymakers (N≈30 per case), supplemented by document analysis. These cases reveal how both the architecture and agency of bureaucracy are essential to understanding the dynamics of climate policy backlash– especially the longer-term policy legacies of backlash events. The relatively stable careers of bureaucrats compared to other policy actors enables them to take a longer view, identifying with clarity the ongoing effects of past contentious events on subsequent policies. Such findings support a call for scholars of backlash (and contentious politics more broadly) to better consider wider timescales of policy effects. In turn, the paper provides a fresh application of bureaucratic politics theory in public administration, demonstrating how bureaucrats undertake ‘little p’ politics despite– and often because of– the extreme situation of policy backlash. Finally, this paper offers insights into how public administration can contribute to the field of environmental governance by re-visiting the importance of bureaucracy in supporting effective, durable and fundamental societal transformations.

Over the last 25 years, climate tipping points (CTPs) have emerged as a research topic of growing concern and interest in the climate. Current anthropogenic warming sits at ~1.1°C above preindustrial levels, and recent research suggests that several tipping points may be triggered within the Paris Agreement temperature range of 1.5 to <2°C, making the subject CTPs a relevant and important topic in climate change communication. This growing relevance has been reflected in more frequent appearances of CTPS in the media to warn of dangerous climate change. This study investigates the current state of knowledge about/familiarity with CTPS among Norwegians and compares the effects of communicating about CTPs on climate risk perceptions compared to standard communication about climate change in general. CTPs differ from traditional climate change information as it introduces large-scale system dynamics where thresholds can be reached, resulting in non-linear changes that are irreversible on human timescales. There has been little investigation on the level of understanding of CTPs and the effect they may have on climate change communication, despite the growing scientific literature and media coverage on the topic. In order to investigate this, we conducted a survey with 851 respondents in Norway, in which the respondents were randomly presented with a scientific text, either about CTPs and non-linear climate change, or containing more general information about climate change. The results show that information about tipping points does not lead to a significant increase in concern about climate change compared to the effects of traditional climate change information and misconceptions of CTPs were analysed in order to build upon this research in future studies. Extended results, limitations of the study, implications for climate change communication and directions for future research will be discussed.

How do non-state actors (NSAs) adapt their discursive strategies across the regime complex on food security? The governance of food security is characterized by increasing normative overlaps between the international regimes on food and agriculture, climate change, biodiversity and even trade. Non-state actors see these overlaps as opportunities to engage in a “battle of ideas over the future of food systems” (IDS & IPES-Food 2022). Using competing discourses such as “agroecology”, “nature-based solution” or “climate-smart agriculture”, they seek to influence normative trajectories and strategically engage in norm contestation.

The literature has only started to document how non-state actors problematize norm collisions in their discourses. For instance, norm collisions may need to be activated by advocacy coalitions intervening at the interface of these regimes. In this paper, I go one step further and argue that NSAs' discursive strategies vary from one regime to another, as actor constellations and the discursive power that actors can wield evolve according to the institutional context.

This paper seeks to document (1) how NSAs position themselves in discourse networks and (2) how they adapt to the increased complexity of global governance. I use discourse network analysis to track the evolution of discursive strategies throughout time and across the regime complex on food security. I specifically target norm collisions between food security and three other issues areas (climate change, biodiversity, and trade) and a diverse range of NSAs (NGOs, agrifood corporations, philanthropic organizations, expert and scientific groups).

This study shows that (1) NSAs strategically exploit institutional overlaps in the governance of food security but their influence is relative to their position in discourse networks and therefore varies depending on the institutional context; (2) normative inconsistencies may appear when some NSAs seek to align their discourses with dominant frames in a particular forum, while they are continuously challenged in other venues; (3) in the regime complex on food security, norm collisions increasingly give rise to vague terms that, while raising the suspicion of a number of NSAs, are difficult to effectively oppose.

This paper is of interest for a broad audience interested in normative trajectories in global (environmental and trade) governance, as well as scholars interested in competing visions of sustainability in food systems.