Abstract In 2023, the UN climate conference celebrated the successful operationalization of new funding arrangements (FAs), including the new Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) from climate change. However, given how little money has been received by the fund, the FRLD has been compared to an “empty bucket.” We use a governmentality analysis based on Mitchell Dean to explore the rationalities that have competed in shaping finance for loss and damage toward specific ends, and how the fund is designed as a result. In total, four competing rationalities have been at play: optimizing, additional voluntary support, scaling finance to needs, and historical responsibility. We show that governing takes place through an empty fund aiming to empower recipients toward self-help and resilience. As questions of historical responsibility and liability have been silenced, the FRLD has been emptied of its radical potential for climate justice.
Abstract This special issue reflects on the state and direction of global climate governance ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Informed by Michel Foucault’s political thought and the wider field of climate governmentality studies that his work has inspired, we trace the power/knowledge regimes, political rationalities, and many practical tools and techniques that make climate change thinkable and knowable as a political problem. In this introduction, we draw upon the contributions to this special issue to examine how the Paris climate regime reinvents itself to maintain legitimacy amid geopolitical rivalry, rising anti-climate populism, and accelerating climate crises. We identify four practices that work to stabilize this governmental regime by promising future improvements, governmentalizing new frontiers, normalizing overshoot and climate disaster, and funneling climate expertise. We conclude by reflecting on the role and responsibility of global environmental politics scholarship in upholding, resisting, or rewriting the script of international climate cooperation.
Abstract To limit climate change, emission reductions must be complemented by technologies that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and store it permanently underground. As some countries lack sufficient geological storage capacity, cross-border CO2 transport and storage are gaining traction. Yet such cooperation raises political concerns about burden shifting and public acceptance. This study examines under what conditions citizens support exporting removed CO2 for storage abroad. Drawing on two survey-embedded experiments in Switzerland and the United Kingdom (N = 1,500 each), we show that support is higher when partner countries are democratic, pursue ambitious climate policies, locate storage sites away from residential areas, and enjoy domestic support for CO2 storage. By contrast, storage costs play a comparatively smaller role in shaping public support. These results highlight the importance of engaging in international climate cooperation in ways that are cost-effective but also socially and politically responsible.
Abstract This article examines the apocalyptic climate imaginary as a biopolitical formation shaping how life is governed under conditions of ecological breakdown. Rather than a singular rupture, climate collapse appears as a chronic, uneven, and increasingly normalized condition that structures how futures are imagined and acted upon in the present. Drawing on Foucault and Lemke, we analyze how this imaginary organizes life through knowledge regimes, hierarchies of worth, and processes of subject formation. We identify three overlapping biopolitical orientations—avoidance, preparation, and endurance—through which climate collapse is lived, governed, and contested. These orientations redistribute responsibility, differentially secure survival, and generate distinct practices of adaptation, care, and resistance. Together, they reveal how the apocalyptic climate imaginary functions not only as a mode of governance but also as a site of political struggle where alternative ways of living with and responding to collapse are negotiated.
Abstract Participation asymmetries between Global South and Global North states in international environmental agreements (IEAs) have long been debated. Although developing states are often assumed to prioritize development over environmental protection, this belief is rarely questioned, and the underlying causes of their distinct participation patterns remain underexplored. This article mobilizes the literature on the “sovereignty–environment nexus” to argue that developing states participate strategically in IEAs, seeking the most equitable outcome in “sovereignty bargains.” To examine this claim, it focuses on three areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) where sovereignty claims are constrained: Antarctica, outer space, and the deep seabed. The article introduces a data set of more than 1,700 international agreements and quantitatively investigates the participation of developing states in IEAs. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, the analysis finds no significant difference in participation between developing and developed states when the bargaining context does not involve territorial aspects of sovereignty. Moreover, developing state participation positively predicts environmental rule inclusion in ABNJ agreements involving natural resources. These findings reveal a key condition under which the Global South can act as a powerful agent of change in global environmental politics.
Abstract This research note investigates the range of “focusing events” that have driven public attention to climate change in Australia over the past two decades. While scholars have widely recognized the significance of focusing events for catalyzing stronger climate action, few studies to date have sought to assess the specific categories of events that drive the greatest public attention to the issue. Focusing on Australia, this study analyzes Google Trends data from 2004 to 2022 to identify the highest spikes in national “climate attention” over that period and attempts to correlate these moments with relevant events that may have driven these upticks. In so doing, the study aims to provide policymakers and activists with insights into the sorts of events that provide the most fruitful opportunities to push for stronger policy action.
Abstract The late Arild Underdal profoundly impacted how scholars and policymakers understand international and domestic environmental governance. We summarize his influence on studies of leadership in international negotiations, policy integration, treaty design, climate clubs, regime effectiveness, and the domestic politics of international environmental agreements. For each topic, we also offer brief suggestions for future research based on Arild’s academic legacy. Finally, we highlight Arild’s role in academic leadership and research organization.
Abstract Carbon pricing attempts have been repeatedly thwarted at the federal level in the United States. Yet, in 2022, the United States adopted a federal price on oil and gas methane emissions as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), imposing a cost on an industry with significant political clout using a politically unpopular policy instrument. What made the first US federal carbon pricing scheme politically feasible? Using interviews with key insiders in the IRA negotiations, I provide the first study of the political history behind the methane fee. Synthesizing and expanding on the extant literature, I suggest that four enabling conditions rendered carbon pricing politically feasible: industry division, effective ideational arguments, a conducive legislative pathway, and quiet politics. While carbon pricing is sometimes written off as a political nonstarter, theorizing political feasibility as the product of multiple, conditional factors recognizes that opportunities for pricing reforms—though circumscribed—are also contingent.
Abstract New digital industries like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining are voracious energy consumers, with complex implications for states’ climate action, economic development, and energy security. We explore the politics of these emergent industries by examining subnational regulatory responses to the recent “crypto rush” in North America. We explore the interplay of material and interpretive dimensions of energy security and climate action in the US states of Texas and New York and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Québec, explaining why some regulators ban cryptocurrency mining while others do not. Although some fossil fuel–abundant energy jurisdictions position mining as just another industrial consumer, jurisdictions with credible climate commitments have restrained the industry, situating mining as a threat to green industrial expansion. Cryptocurrency miners have responded by promoting digital production as a path to future energy security, a strategy we anticipate will be replicated by other digital industries.
Abstract Among OECD states with an outsize responsibility for mitigation efforts, there has been substantial variation in climate ambition in their respective Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This variation in climate ambition occurs across states and also over time in subsequent NDC submission cycles. This article is the first to use qualitative comparative analysis to examine the role of ideas, interests, and institutions in shaping climate ambition trajectories across two rounds of NDC submissions. I find that states with low fossil fuel interests and nonleft partisanship can overcome institutional barriers to submit ambitious NDCs and form positive ambition trajectories. Conversely, high fossil fuel interests and nonleft partisanship form the dominant pathway that constrains climate ambition shifts across conferences of the parties. I focus on Japan as an illustrative case study that demonstrates how climate laggards can improve over time and in turn deepen understandings of the domestic changes that drive positive ambition trajectories.
Abstract Sea level rise (SLR) is increasingly reframed as a global political problem, no longer confined to local adaptation needs or the struggles of atoll nations. Recent UN debates and the creation of the Ocean Rise & Coastal Resilience Coalition (ORCRC) mark the institutionalization of SLR debates within global climate governance. This article asks how SLR is rendered governable as an object of global politics, and how that problematization reshapes the solution space for local adaptation. Adopting a poststructuralist governmentality framework and focusing on the ORCRC, I trace the visibilities, rationalities, technologies of governing, and subject positions inherent to the emerging global governing of SLR. Through a globalized vision of (coastal) resilience, this governmentality privileges the rollout of transnational knowledge infrastructures, embeds adaptation in cost–benefit logics, and opens coastal cities to investment. I argue that the dominant problematization of SLR as a biophysical challenge for humankind risks obscuring the socioeconomic and colonial drivers of climate vulnerability, which could undermine the transformative potential of the SLR agenda.
Abstract Carbon markets are a leading global policy response to climate change. This article introduces a framework for analyzing carbon markets grounded in economic sociology. The framework centers on the cognitive, network, and institutional foundations of markets. A comparative case analysis of the outcomes of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in the Brazilian and Indian sugar industries illustrates how the framework can guide research. Sugar mills in both countries were governed by the same international CDM rules and operated in broadly similar political-economic contexts. However, a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of sugar mill participation in the CDM reveals different dynamics at work in the Brazilian and Indian CDM markets. Owing to the cognitive complexity of the CDM, carbon market intermediaries were pivotal role in recruiting sugar mills to the CDM market. As key nodes in carbon market networks, their strategies and operations were shaped by the distinct national climate institutions of Brazil and India, producing markedly different market outcomes.
Abstract Youth are increasingly regarded as key actors in climate politics. At the global level, youth participation is visible at the conferences of the parties (COPs) to the UNFCCC. While the number of youth participants has gradually increased, the structural dimensions of youth participation, especially their networks in international policymaking, remain underexplored. This article addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing youth involvement at the UNFCCC COPs from COP1 to COP27 using social network analysis. By examining coaffiliation and side-event co-organization networks, we argue that youth actors persistently contribute to climate political spaces as active network cocreators. Despite structural inequalities, youth-to-youth collaboration, from both Global South and Global North, bridges informal and formal modes of engagement in climate politics, asserting youth agency. Moreover, the varied communities of youth networks show that youth are heterogeneous actors pursuing diverse mobilization strategies, not necessarily based on ideational affinity.
Abstract When a global crisis hits, competition between policy domains heightens as priorities switch. International organizations (IOs) whose mandates are not directly concerned struggle to maintain attention to the issue they promote. Such was the case for IOs involved in global environmental governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines discourse as one specific means used by IOs reacting to crises. It conceptualizes three discursive practices IOs perform when crises reshape priorities: meaning-making, relevance-claiming, and action-timing. Empirically, the article investigates how the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) responded to the pandemic. Analyzing a comprehensive corpus of 251 statements from UNEP’s Executive Director Inger Andersen (2020–2023), it shows how UNEP connected environmental and health crises, asserted institutional relevance, and sought to maintain momentum on long-term goals to keep environmental issues on the agenda during the pandemic. The findings contribute to research on IOs and crises, highlighting discourse as a strategic resource for agenda-keeping.
Abstract International bodies like the United Nations increasingly champion ecosystem restoration as a key tool to combat environmental degradation. Democratic governance is often positioned as a key element of restoration “success.” We compiled a list of restoration “successes” from the UN Restoration Flagship Program and used the Economist Democracy Index to classify each according to the regime type under which restoration took place. Surprisingly, most “successful” restoration initiatives were located in undemocratic contexts. We also assessed country-level restoration pledges against regime type and found that undemocratic governance systems similarly seemed to express a disproportionate commitment to restoration. We present this information together with a discussion on the broader dynamics of democratic development agendas, probing assumptions about democracy as a necessary precondition for environmental success. We forward that the ways different political regimes variously enable or constrain ecosystem restoration have significant implications for global environmental governance, and we urge more critical and nuanced conversations on the complex interface between regime type and restoration outcomes.
Abstract The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), one of the world’s largest investment funds, made two fossil fuel divestments—first removing coal companies from its portfolio and later removing some oil and gas companies. Although the two divestments occurred in similar contexts, they had significant differences in both process and outcomes. The evidence presented shows how overlapping fossil fuel and neoliberal hegemonic structures affected the choices and impacts of strategic actors working both for and against fossil fuel divestment. This study contributes to international political economy by presenting a framework for examining interactions between coexisting hegemonies that overlap without being equivalent. Using this framework, the study identifies how strategic actors may negotiate conflicts between power structures to achieve their goals and points to trade-offs resulting from leveraging one power structure against another.
Abstract Solar geoengineering, in particular, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), has the potential to reduce near-term climate risks, albeit while introducing risks of its own. But SAI, or at least configurations of it characterized by exclusivity and conspicuousness, also has the potential to function as a status symbol in international politics by signaling a country’s power and preeminence. The implications of SAI playing such a role would be significant: status seeking would influence decisions about SAI separate from other considerations, bigger deployments would seem more likely, and SAI could become the focus of competitive “prestige races.” Researchers should start to consider these possibilities, beginning with an effort to identify which configurations of SAI are most likely to qualify as status symbols.
Abstract Transparency is at the center of the Paris climate regime and one of the key mechanisms by which it seeks to catalyze voluntary climate action. In this article, we analyze the micropolitics of transparency and the power that resides in the seemingly technical and mundane reporting provisions of the Paris Agreement. Informed by Michel Foucault’s decentered account of power and government, we trace the ways of thinking and reasoning that underpin the Paris Agreement’s push to disclose, measure, and evaluate climate performance and how its complex transparency apparatus seeks to arrange things so that states behave as they ought. We identify measure-ability as the governmentality that gives the Paris Agreement’s transparency regime a particular matrix of means and ends. It is a liberal form of climate rule, we argue, that seeks to foster measure-able states that do not need to be governed by others but will govern themselves.
In this introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary special issue of Global Environmental Politics (GEP), we reflect on and celebrate the first 100 issues of the journal. To that end, we collected data on the authors who submit their manuscripts to GEP, those who publish in GEP, and the many scholars who review for GEP. Using this information, we evaluate trends over time, particularly in terms of collaboration and diversity. We find that coauthorship has become much more common in recent years, with many early-career scholars publishing in teams. Gender balance among authors has improved considerably over the last quarter century, and people who engage with the journal are diverse in the theoretical and methodological approaches they bring to bear on global environmental politics. However, as most authors work at universities in North America and Europe, geographic diversity remains low, resulting in a lack of representation from the Global South. We end by introducing the articles included in this twenty-fifth anniversary special issue, all of which look to the journal’s past to derive lessons for our collective future.
Eco-anxiety is surging as environmental crises escalate. As the ecopsychology literature reveals, the effects and intensity of eco-anxiety vary across cultures, circumstances, and personality types. Eco-anxiety can prompt some people to disengage from environmentalism and can even become a debilitating disorder. Yet, high eco-anxiety also correlates with pro-environmental lifestyle choices, increased participation in environmental collective action, and a spirit of resistance. In this Forum article, we consider the implications of eco-anxiety for global environmental politics (GEP) and argue that it can be harnessed to create positive change. Historically, periods of heightened environmental concern have preceded GEP milestones. Eco-anxiety may now be contributing to a resurgence of youth advocacy, grassroots activism, and direct-action environmentalism. Such trends highlight potentially positive influences of eco-anxiety on GEP, although further research is needed to disentangle the sociocultural dimensions and subemotions of eco-anxiety and determine how these can be productively harnessed within GEP.
