ABSTRACT The EU has long been regarded as a normative leader in global environmental governance. Yet its restrictive measures on palm oil raise questions about how it exercises environmental authority within unequal relations. Drawing on securitisation theory and ecological neocolonialism, this study examines how the EU constructed and legitimised a threat narrative around palm oil. Using critical discourse analysis in its discourse‐historical variant, it analyses a corpus traced to the problematisation of palm oil at EU level, comprising regulatory texts, advocacy material, producer‐state and producer‐country non‐state responses, and the trade proceedings that followed. The analysis shows that this securitising move did not emerge ex nihilo but relied on discursive alignment, through which the EU grafted technocratic classifications onto established moral‐affective discourses concerning deforestation and biodiversity loss. The securitisation traced here also departs from its classical formulation by operating through the calculation and management of environmental risk rather than the suspension of established rules. This alignment enabled a shift from territorial control towards standardised governance, with instruments such as RED II and the EUDR making compliance a condition of market access. The findings suggest that, although these measures are framed as scientific imperatives, they acquire an ecological‐neocolonial character where regulatory, epistemic, and political‐economic asymmetries converge. Contestation generated illocutionary frustration for producer countries, as the proceedings addressed procedural issues without resolving their substantive concerns.
ABSTRACT In theory, climate adaptation policy cycles can be framed as being harmonized and goal‐oriented governance processes. Yet any examination of climate adaptation in cities reveals persistent tensions between this logic and the diverse forces shaping adaptation in practice. This article examines these tensions through efforts to realize climate‐resilient sponge cities in Germany and Austria. Drawing on qualitative interviews and document analysis, we examine the socio‐technical conditions shaping sponge city‐making across scales, and analyze how this process is operationalized and governed locally in Offenbach am Main, Bochum, and Vienna. We argue that sponge city‐making unfolds through entangled refinement : actors iteratively and selectively rework infrastructural, institutional, and knowledge arrangements to pursue particular adaptation futures amid uncertainty, fragmentation, and competing values. Competing descriptions of restored urban water cycles influence how sponge urbanism gets translated into goal‐driven urban renewal programs. This process drives new logics of spatial differentiation and reshapes the problems at the core of adaptation, as concerns about vegetation livability, health, and justice push against a predominant logic of stormwater control. Conceptually, we position sponge urbanism as a prism revealing the diverse practices, materials, and meanings that constitute urban climate adaptation, and theorize the operationalization of climate adaptation visions as a site of experimental governance.
ABSTRACT Adaptive governance has been largely developed and applied in the Global North, and there is a significant tension between its theoretical assumptions and the relatively concentrated governance structures and government‐led governance realities in the Global South. Therefore, whether adaptive governance can be effectively applied to the Global South largely depends on contextual conditions such as the role of government and social structure. Against this backdrop, this study takes the Yancheng Yellow Sea Wetlands as its research object, uses social network analysis to quantify and visualize the structural characteristics and evolutionary trends of actor relationships in the governance network, and combines semi‐structured interviews to address: (1) What structural characteristics does the governance network of the Yancheng Yellow Sea Wetlands exhibit? (2) Can adaptive governance operate effectively under the condition that the government maintains its overall coordinating function? (3) What impact does the government's overall coordinating function have on multi‐actor participation? The analysis results indicate that the Yancheng Yellow Sea Wetlands governance network exhibits an “organized polycentricity” structure—the government maintains a high degree of centrality within the network, undertaking core coordinating functions while simultaneously creating institutional space for multi‐actor participation. This “organized polycentricity” structure, to some extent, bridges the structural deficiencies of both the insufficient adaptability of a single government‐led model and the low decision‐making efficiency of a purely multi‐actor collaborative model. It provides a reference based on Chinese experience for wetland governance in the Global South, demonstrating a feasible path to create institutional space for multi‐actor participation while maintaining the government's coordinating function.
ABSTRACT Policy piloting is central to China's experimentalist approach to environmental governance. Pilot programmes often expand through multiple rounds, but the extant literature explores them as a whole, with how site selection criteria change during expansion underexamined. We conceptualise multi‐round policy piloting as a dynamic process in which testing error is layered onto testing correctness as a programme expands. Testing correctness favours sites that are able to demonstrate feasibility, whereas testing error broadens selection to settings that can reveal the limits of policy applicability. We examine China's Low‐Carbon Province and City (LCPC) pilot, the country's first large‐scale national decarbonisation experiment. Using Cox proportional hazards and piecewise constant exponential models, we analyse city‐level entry into pilot coverage across successive batches. Baseline comparisons show greater fiscal capacity among pilot cities in all batches. Regression results show that favourable implementation conditions are associated with pilot entry in the initial stage and remain relevant during expansion. Later‐round entry is associated with proximity to national benchmarks in energy intensity and industrial structure, suggesting that representativeness also informs selection of pilot sites during expansion. These findings shed light on the promise and the limits of policy experimentation in China's low‐carbon transition.
ABSTRACT Global leadership in phasing out fossil fuels is an important new frontier in climate governance, yet remains undertheorised within existing scholarly accounts of climate leadership. In this paper, we argue that ‘phaseout leadership’—climate leadership centred on curtailing fossil fuel supply—is a distinct kind of leadership that dominant typologies fail to capture. We develop a novel conceptualisation of phaseout leadership around three characteristics: material, institutional, and symbolic. Drawing on fieldwork across four first‐mover countries—Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark and the United Kingdom—we identify three recurring patterns of phaseout leadership: transformative, iterative, and performative. While transformative leadership directly confronts fossil fuel incumbency and instigates the level of ambition required to align production with international climate commitments, we find that most phaseout leadership to date remains iterative or performative. We contend that the durability of phaseout leadership depends on converting symbolic leadership claims into institutional‐in and material change through coalition‐building and policy coherence across industrial and just transition policies. Without this, both transformative and iterative phaseout leadership risk becoming performative, which may ultimately erode momentum behind global fossil fuel phase‐outs.
