Political Spaces of Climate Change Governance: Dynamics of politicization and policy stability in the EU and US

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Frank Wendler
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441493451

Public controversy on how to deal with climate change has moved to the center of political debate in many Western democracies. Extant research has responded to this dynamic by referring to the concept of politicization, defined as an expansion in the scope, salience and contestation of public controversy and applied extensively in research EU and global governance. Key questions of emerging research on this topic are how expansive dynamics addressed as politicization interact with conditions of policy stability, defined as incremental decision-making on ideally irreversible climate action targets, and how different variants of contentious debate on climate change governance affects its policy-making results. Concerning these questions, the research literature arrives at widely different observations and conclusions about the drivers, scope and consequences of politicization. Against this backdrop, the proposal adopts an ideas- and discourse-based perspective from its predecessor project, with a twofold rationale: first, to systematize forms of contestation from the clash of competing beliefs about problem definitions of climate change and related policy solutions as proposed by political agents; and second, to capture the variable and contested formats of climate governance as a highly connective field of action that emerges only from the projection of transformative logics and targets to existing policy-making fields. From this point of departure, the project pursues a twofold advance of research agendas arising from the debate on politicization: first, to produce insights about the interaction between agendas, institutional settings and discursive contestation of climate governance, conceptualized as related dimensions of its political space and their interaction; and second, to arrive at a systematization of the variable and contested forms of frames to define action against climate change, both as a target in its own right and as part of broader political agendas. Based on this approach, the main research question of the proposed project is how dynamics of expansion and limitation of political spaces of climate governance can be explained from the interaction of their three main dimensions, and what effect their change has on the processes and results of policy-making. The empirical work program builds on ongoing comparative work on processes of climate governance in the European Union and the United States by proposing a comparison of four main types of climate governance processes, distinguished by the relative scope and salience of climate targets within their respective agendas. These are categorized as cases of policy transformation, ‘green’ conditionality, ‘climatization’ of governance and policy adjustment, and set in a comparative perspective within the contrasting settings of the EU and US. In terms of method, the project combines elements of quantitative content analysis with field research and a mixed-method approach usi

• DFG Programme: Research Grants