Bureaucrats play an inherently political role in policymaking, particularly in domains like climate change, where policies may face sociopolitical backlash imposing unusually high pressure on policymaking. Yet, it is unclear exactly how bureaucrats respond to backlash, and whether and how they find new ways to exert policymaking influence despite broader policy conflict. We examine how bureaucrats respond to climate policy backlash by developing and applying a heuristic of six bureaucratic practices used to exert policymaking influence, through in-depth expert interviews (n = 68) in two cases of backlash against national carbon pricing: Australia (2011-2022) and Canada (2018-2023). We find that bureaucrats leveraged institutionalized advantages, including ownership of administrative processes (procedure-steering) and long-term perspective (time-biding), to maintain policymaking influence in response to backlash. Over the longer term, bureaucrats' responses to conflict diverged, with bureaucratic practices increasingly used to push for greater climate ambition in Australia, but remaining unchanged in Canada. We suggest that long-term bureaucratic reactions to policy conflict depend on their underlying perceptions of policy instability, internalization of conflict, and misalignment with the preferences of politicians. Overall, we reveal complex practices through which bureaucrats can advance policymaking activities crucial for the public good, even in times of political gridlock.

Former coalmining communities are often portrayed as regressive and/or resistant to change due to deep dependence on carbon-intensive systems. Emerging research highlights the (latent) potential of post-coal affordances as endogenous social or material features that can create new political possibilities for such communities. However, affordances do not always translate into action, and post-coal transitions within and across Europe exhibit mixed experiences. Therefore, we examine how communities negotiate and navigate new possibilities through processes of wayfinding, spanning institutional, cultural, and everyday practices. We comparatively examine the towns of Loos-en-Gohelle (France) and Whitehaven (England), which, despite their shared coalmining pasts, are evolving in very different directions. Based on 49 semi-structured interviews and detailed field observations, we find that these practices refract within complex and fractious political settings, where industrial capture, governmental neglect, and persistent socio-economic inequalities can confine possibilities for action. We thereby demonstrate that the capacity for change is a product of ongoing political work both within and outside these communities. This enriches existing work on post-coal affordances by drawing attention to the social and political dynamics involved in their mobilization, thereby highlighting their contingency.

Renewable energy technology (RET) is expanding into new territories. Technological change, increasing demand, and siting constraints increasingly lead to RET development in already urbanized or industrialized landscapes. Here, the infrastructural context could make RET less visible and/or disruptive, but it could also exacerbate existing problems (e.g., environmental degradation) and create new social conflicts over the uneven impacts of energy transitions. It is therefore crucial to understand how these changing geographies affect the acceptability of RET. We examine the case of Dunkirk, France, where a controversial offshore wind project is being pursued in a complex socio-industrial context. Drawing on 43 semi-structured interviews and detailed field observations, we examine how meanings and responses over this project are shaped by the wider landscape(s) of infrastructure, institutions, and social or economic activity in which it is implicated. We find that the acceptability of a seemingly singular new wind project is shaped in important ways by people's relations to existing energy infrastructure (such as nuclear and onshore wind) and the wider industrial complex which it expands. We thereby show how RET becomes bound up in deep-seated and uneven patterns of industrial accumulation and saturation, which it can exacerbate.

Policy feedback is often viewed as either reinforcing or undermining policy stability. However, it can arise in multiple ways simultaneously, creating mixed policy feedback with complex effects on policy stability. We examine how mixed policy feedback affects policy stability by developing a framework to identify within- and across-level feedbacks, and applying it to two cases of contested climate policy involving domestic carbon markets in Australia (2014–2025) and Canada (2015–2025). In Australia, a nascent baseline-and-credit scheme eventually became entrenched despite initial policy instability, while in Canada, a seemingly stable carbon pricing policy survived early conflict but was later partially reversed. By examining how multiple feedbacks arose and interacted within changing political contexts, we show how mixed policy feedback can affect policy stability, leading to potentially surprising outcomes. This implies a need to go beyond assessing the net effects of mixed policy feedback to consider complex interactions alongside exogenous developments.

Social tipping points are moments when targeted interventions in collective behavior can trigger transformative shifts across society. Embedded in complex social-ecological systems, these tipping points have the potential to drive rapid, systemic change, addressing urgent challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality but also leading to negative or unintended consequences if not carefully guided. This Voices asks: how can we leverage social tipping points for good?

Public policymaking on issues requiring ambitious yet socially and economically costly action can face backlash from target groups and wider audiences, threatening policy adoption and durability. As an abrupt negative reaction to policy action, backlash is challenging to study and requires distinctive analytical approaches. This is especially pressing for climate change mitigation policy, which faces growing yet dispersed empirical experiences of backlash. We develop a framework to study the socio-political conditions (economic, cultural, practical) under which backlash to climate policy occurs to enable comparative empirical analysis. We posit that backlash arises from significant incongruence between policy action and its socio-political context across one or more of these dimensions. We illustrate this approach using three cases of backlash to carbon pricing policy in Canada, France, and Mexico, revealing different ways in which incongruence can arise. Our analysis highlights the need for configurational explanations and a policy-in-context perspective when studying contentious reactions to policy action.

We explore why and how problems related to climate action emerge in specific, sometimes peripheral, places. Diverse forms of socio-political contestation over both fossil fuels and low-carbon shifts imply that the problems that climate policy is positioned against are neither singular nor self-evident. Climate action intersects with complex socio-material settings, which can produce new problems and amplify or refract existing ones (e.g. job losses, inequalities, marginalization). Understanding how this occurs is an urgent challenge which requires interrogating the emergence and evolution of problems on the ground. We examine the case of a proposed coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria, the UK’s commitment to ‘consign coal to history’, and what it reveals about the challenges of climate action more broadly. Drawing on 47 in-depth interviews and detailed field observations, we explain how the proposed coalmine invoked, and was inseparable from, many other issues including austerity, old and new extractivisms, environmental degradation, nuclear development, socio-spatial disparities, planning system deficiencies, and a widespread sense of being left behind. This shows how attempts towards climate action are inextricably embedded in broader problem-complexes that evade established policy domains and agendas (e.g. energy security, net zero). Other (often peripheral) problems which may or may not become policy problems nevertheless structure opportunities and/or obstacles for ambitious climate action, challenging the compartmentalization of climate policy problems and solutions.

Effective climate action is likely to require hard climate policies (e.g. regulation, pricing, phase-outs), but such policies are often contested. Contention can arise not only during policy development and decision making but also at the post-adoption stage where adopted policies may be challenged, threatening policy durability. However, existing research has not systematically analyzed patterns of actual public responses to hard climate policies following their adoption. This is needed to understand response variety and the prevalence of contention. In this paper, we systematically assess public responses in a sample of 50 national-level hard climate policy packages (covering framework and energy policies) across 21 OECD member countries between 2009 and 2022. We categorize public responses (support, acceptance, non-acceptance, backlash) using a typology involving disapproval and mobilization to assess the prevalence of post-adoption contention among mass publics. We draw on newspaper data specific to each case to detect contention. Findings reveal a relatively low prevalence of post-adoption contentious responses to hard climate policies. Nonetheless, contention is pronounced in some cases and is mainly associated with carbon taxation/pricing although not exclusively. The most contentious responses, labeled as backlash, cluster in the latter half of the study period. Findings suggest a need to analyze drivers of contention among mass publics which may be complex and involve factors spanning policy design, institutional politics, and societal context.

Policy action for sustainability transformation faces inherent and ever-present sources of conflict, pushback, and resistance (i.e., discord). However, conceptual frameworks and policy prescriptions for sustainability transformations often reflect an undue image of accord. This involves simplified assumptions about consensus, steering, friction, discreteness, and additiveness of policy action, conferring an unrealistic view of the potential to deliberately realize transformation. Instead, negotiating discord through continuously finding partial political settlements among divided actors needs to become a key focus of policy action for sustainability transformations. Doing so can help to navigate deeply political settings through imperfect but workable steps that loosen deadlock, generate momentum for further policy action, and avoid complete derailment of transformation agendas when discord arises.

Societal transformations for addressing climate change are intensely contested and at risk of resistance and backlash to ambitious policy action. But they are frequently modeled through heuristics such as S-curves which abstract from such conflicts, assuming increasing returns to scale as a driver of transformations. This is the case even while scholars accept the presence of political conflict in transformation processes. Within political science and allied disciplines, the notions of policy feedback and policy coalitions have been deployed to understand how such political conflicts may be understood. But these approaches risk gravitating toward an instrumental design impulse that inadvertently downplays conflict. We argue that policy action for societal transformations should be re-conceptualized as an unfolding series of battle-settlement events whereby heated episodic political struggles over a certain policy object or issue play out and eventually settle in ways that structure future debates while nonetheless remaining indeterminate and open to challenge or reversal. Such an approach reflects the varied empirical experiences of climate policy action to date which include both accumulation and reversal. It also helps explain trajectories of change that are discontinuous and lurching in contrast to common images of transformation as progressive and cumulative. We illustrate this approach through two cases of unfolding societal transformation on climate change: coal phaseout in the United Kingdom and renewable energy uptake in Australia.

A recent article in this journal (Jackson 2021) validly emphasized that debates about the Anthropocene need to recognize a diverse range of perspectives, worldviews, and forms of knowledge. In doing so, however, the author mischaracterized scholarship on earth system governance as being antithetical to a critical and pluralistic stance on the Anthropocene. In this commentary we address key concerns about the article: selective and misleading quotations regarding the earth system governance literature's diversity; unwarranted insinuations that juxtapose the implications of this literature with those of slavery and holocausts; and neglect of the breadth and diversity of scholarship on earth system governance. We underscore the need for scholarly debates on the Anthropocene to be informed by a balanced and rigorous assessment of existing scholarship, and for a constructive dialogue between global and locally situated ways of understanding the earth.

Hard climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phaseouts) is needed to meet ambitious climate targets, but when such policy is introduced, it can sometimes trigger backlash. Backlash involves an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a significant number of actors seeking to reverse a policy, often through extraordinary means that transgress established procedures and norms. Yet, explanations of policy backlash remain nascent and fragmented. I synthesize insights from within and beyond climate politics to argue that contested legitimacy is central to climate policy backlash, which provokes attempts toward delegitimation. I develop a conceptual pathway to explain the occurrence of climate policy backlash and generate hypotheses about how practices of delegitimation occur, and their effects. This contributes to explaining why backlash occurs, highlighting ideational factors alongside interests and institutions. Overall, I suggest the need for a contextually embedded approach to understanding the volatile dynamics of backlash, bringing political sociology into conversation with political economy.

The governance of innovation systems reflects upon how decisions are made, the rules that govern who makes decisions are formed, institutions are established and interactions occur. Governance strongly affects how innovation systems emerge and yet has received limited attention. Many actors fulfill certain functions, indicating that the emergence of innovation systems is likely to transpire in many different spaces at the same time. We expect governance to occur in multiple centers of an innovation system and in differing ways. Therefore, a polycentric governance lens can be a powerful means to evaluate the patchwork of decision-making centers, which we apply to offshore renewable energies. We observe that the system is governed polycentrically and identify five decision-making centers: legislative, market, industry, research & development and demonstration. Each center is unique and operates under different institutional conditions. We suggest that all innovation systems have a distinct polycentric composition.

The crises that cities face—such as climate change, pandemics, economic downturn, and racism—are tightly interlinked and cannot be addressed in isolation. This paper addresses compound urban crises as a unique type of problem, in which discrete solutions that tackle each crisis independently are insufficient. Few scholarly debates address compound urban crises and there is, to date, a lack of interdisciplinary insights to inform urban governance responses. Combining ideas from complex adaptive systems and critical urban studies, we develop a set of boundary concepts (unsettlement, unevenness, and unbounding) to understand the complexities of compound urban crises from an interdisciplinary perspective. We employ these concepts to set a research agenda on compound urban crises, highlighting multiple interconnections between urban politics and global dynamics. We conclude by suggesting how these entry points provide a theoretical anchor to develop practical insights to inform and reform urban governance.

Culture and (collective) identity need to become more central in thinking about how ambitious climate policy for decarbonization can be enacted within domestic (i.e., national, subnational) politics. Policy attention has long centered on material costs and benefits of action, including distributions of costs/benefits between different actors and over time. The challenge of reconciling concentrated short-term costs to specific actors and groups with diffuse long-term benefits to a much wider range of actors remains central, particularly considering inequality both within and between societies. But culture and identity also play an important role in shaping the opportunities, challenges, and dynamics of realizing ambitious climate action (e.g., following Hulme, 2009). For example, the social construction of risk and action, the feasibility of phasing-out specific industries and transitioning toward new practices, and the fractious dynamics of populism and polarization that threaten to derail collective action all have strong links with issues of culture and identity. Culture in the most general sense refers to a basic social fabric that ascribes meaning to people in their relations and practices, and which may be tied to history, language, community, and artifacts. This creates tendencies to think about the world in particular ways, influencing preferences and decision making (Zaval, 2016). For example, Adger et al. (2013) view culture as comprising “symbols that express meaning” which “create collective outlooks and behaviours.” Bulkeley et al. (2016) view culture as not only a milieu mediating social relations, but also as co-emergent with everyday socio-material practices (e.g., relations with infrastructures and technologies), forms of subjectivity (e.g., embodiment of social identities and roles) and resistances (e.g., frictions against deliberate changes). In this sense, culture not only infuses people's ways of making meaning, but is also continuously (re)produced through engagements with others and the material world. Collective or social identity (hereon, simply “identity”) refers to conception of self and others in relation to perceived commonalities with a wider group such as experiences, interests, and sense of solidarity (van Stekelenburg, 2013). Identity has long been an important topic in sociological, geographical, and political scholarship. For example, identity can motivate mobilization for shared causes in social movements (Meyer et al., 2002), is tied to place/space in geographical processes (Warf, 2010), and is linked to demands for recognition and dignity as well as partisan tribalism in contemporary polarized politics (Fukuyama, 2018). Furthermore, identity can arise at a range of scales. For example, climate change scholars have highlighted national (e.g., Eckersley, 2016), community (e.g., Mayer, 2018), political (e.g., McCright & Dunlap, 2011), and religious (e.g., Peifer et al., 2016) identities. Culture and identity are related but not synonymous. Identity can be seen as an aspect of the broader notion of culture. Both culture and identity are increasingly highlighted in climate change literature over the last decade and provide complementary entry points for understanding intangible drivers of collective behavior regarding climate policy. Yet, these issues may be approached in widely varying ways,1 and implications for strategic climate action are not always clear. Bringing different lines of thinking into dialogue is needed to explain the dynamics of climate (in)action and to find opportunities to advance climate policy within complex social-political-historical contexts. In this Commentary, I briefly survey some prominent ideas on culture and identity in climate change literature to provide an orientation for thinking about how climate policy for decarbonization might proactively engage with these still under-recognized issues. More broadly, I contend that without attending to matters of culture and collective identity, climate policy for decarbonization may encounter deep-seated resistance and even provoke political backlash. Culture and identity can influence multiple areas of climate policy for decarbonization. For example, the phasing out of coal mining within communities and nations (Brown & Spiegel, 2019), the creation of new everyday low-carbon practices in housing and mobility (Bulkeley et al., 2016), the durability of national climate policy (Lockwood, 2013), the impact of right-wing populism on climate action (Lockwood, 2018), and the mobilization of youth movements (Wielk & Standlee, 2021) have all been linked to matters of culture and identity. More broadly, Hulme (2009) argues that climate change is fundamentally refracted through culture in how it comes to be understood and gain meaning and value, and Ghosh (2017, p. 8) argues that a “broader imaginative and cultural failure … lies at the heart of the climate crisis.” Several prominent thematic clusters on issues of culture and identity in strategic action are observable in climate change literature (Table 1). First, culture can be seen as a mediator of perceptions (e.g., risk, expectations) and responses (e.g., adaptation and/or mitigation actions). This approach2 locates culture in an intermediate causal role between external forces and emergent collective action, and tends to view identity as relatively static but productive of action. Second, culture can be seen as generative and co-constitutive of everyday socio-material practices. This approach3 locates culture in the interplay of discourse, materiality, and practices, and suggests a view of identity as multiple and incoherent, and hence indeterminate. Third, culture can be seen as a disruptive force due to investments in cultural categories, especially group identities, that clash with climate action. This approach4 locates culture in conflictual interactions linked to grievances and norms, and views identity as largely static and antagonistic. Nevertheless, this typology of stances is illustrative rather than exhaustive; the three approaches reflect differing emphases but the boundaries between them are still blurry. The focus in this line of thinking concerns how people come to make sense of climate change within their cultural context and (possibly) act in response. Here culture is seen as linked to place attachment and also as a complex fabric of social life through which climate change risks come to be understood within specific communities (Adger et al., 2013). For example, this could include communities at risk of drought, flood, or sea-level rise (Adger et al., 2013; Rühlemann & Jordan, 2021; Thomas et al., 2019), pro-environmental actions of individuals (Zaval, 2016), and even the translation of general interventions such as carbon markets into specific political economies with traditions in governance and extant narratives about climate change (Knox-hayes & Hayes, 2014). Feola et al. (2019) argue that a dynamic perspective is needed to examine how culture and the experience of climate change are interconnected, and propose a focus on “knowing” (i.e., knowledge processes), “being” (i.e., sense-making through lived experiences and practices), and “doing” (i.e., responses). This encourages differentiated and context-sensitive examinations of how climate change relates to diverse communities (e.g., urban/rural, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, wealthy/non-wealthy). A stance toward culture as mediator of action is useful in place-based studies of people and environmental change, where the focus is on the capacity of people to respond to external change and/or the ways in which they adapt to new circumstances. The focus in this line of thinking concerns how everyday socio-material practices arise and reproduce, and their embeddedness in discursive formations that construct particular roles and expectations. Here culture is approached in relation to situated activities (e.g., mobility, work, leisure, caregiving) and discourses that shape what is desirable and how people see themselves (Bulkeley et al., 2016). For example, Ghosh (2017, pp. 9–10) explains how “culture generates desires” such as over automobiles (e.g., entailing mobility and freedom), appliances (e.g., services, comforts, and aesthetics), and places to live (e.g., nearness to water's edge as conveying social status). Paterson (2007) examines the cultural politics of automobiles, including how they come to epitomize freedom but can also simultaneously constrain freedom when they become essential for day-to-day living. From another angle, Brown and Spiegel (2019) highlight the role of intersectional injustices (e.g., linked to gender, race, class) and persistent discursive formations (e.g., linked to colonialism, patriarchy) as key areas of struggle within transitions away from coal production in specific communities. Distilling a view of cultural politics, contrasted against a common focus on informational and frame-centered approaches, Bulkeley et al. (2016) argue for a focus on interactions between “devices,” “desires,” and forms of “dissent.” This encourages reflection on the multifaceted material and discursive dynamics that afford or hinder shifts in everyday practices. A stance toward culture as generative and co-constitutive of everyday practices is useful in studying how climate action arises within particular combinations of discourses and materialities. The focus in this line of thinking concerns how climate action collides with political fault lines linked to personal investments in cultural categories. Here culture is seen as a force associated with group identity, particularly at the level of a polity (e.g., a nation) but also in place-based communities, that is often disruptive to climate action through mobilizing resistance on the basis of ideology, values, and worldviews. For example, this line of thinking is present in literature on right-wing populism and its potentially negative consequences for climate action (Hess & Renner, 2019). In this light, Lockwood (2018) argues that right-wing populist opposition to climate action is best explained by ideological and cultural factors rather than structural economic factors, due to the role of symbolic appeals and cross-class support. More generally within a heterogeneous society, Laidely (2013) observes that differential cultural (and economic) capital can create resentment among non-elites toward climate policy when it is perceived as imposing deprivation or reflecting status-seeking by elites. At a national level, scholars observe a fusion between fossil fuels and aspects of national identity in multiple countries including the United States (Daggett, 2018), Poland (Kuchler & Bridge, 2018), Russia (Bouzarovski & Bassin, 2011), Canada (Dalby, 2019), India (Lahiri-Dutt, 2016), and Australia (Curran, 2021). Conversely, national identity projecting an outward sense of responsibility for impacts on other places can support political responses to climate change, such as in Norway and Germany (Eckersley, 2016). At a group level, McCright and Dunlap (2011) find significantly higher climate change denial among politically conservative white males than other groups in the United States, arguing that this is due to identity protection under shifting cultural norms, and Krange et al. (2019) find a similar pattern in Norway. Daggett (2018) argues that such resistance is linked to “petro-masculinity” where moves away from fossil fuels may be viewed as threats to identities that are tied to fossil fuel production and consumption activities or symbols (e.g., large cars, certain forms of labor). From another angle, place-based communities may hold a shared generational identity tied to fossil fuels (e.g., coal mining towns), which can create complex social dynamics and ambiguities in energy transitions (Della Bosca & Gillespie, 2018). A stance toward culture as disruptive, or at least problematic, for climate action is useful in studying aggregate patterns of resistance especially when deep socio-political divisions are present. Different stances toward culture and identity are clearly useful for different types of research questions, and no single approach will provide a complete analytical vantage point. Nonetheless, there is an opportunity for dialogue across different strands of thinking. Approach 1 (Culture as mediator of perception and action) draws attention to the historical embeddedness of culture within specific places, reflecting a core concern with the resilience of cultures threatened by external forces as well as the complex ways that culture conditions human responses. Yet, it also suggests a somewhat static and homogenous view of culture, which could be enriched by insights about continual cultural production and reproduction (highlighted by Approach 2) and cultural cleavages and contestation within a community (highlighted by Approach 3). Approach 2 (Cultural politics of everyday practices) draws attention to the (re)production of culture through and with practices and discourses, reflecting a core interest in the formation of subjectivities, desires, and socio-material relations that create ambiguities and tensions in climate action. Yet, it could also be taken to overemphasize fluidity and abstraction which could be enriched by attention to historically formed meanings for people in a place (highlighted by Approach 1) and fractious and divisive social forces linked to worldview and ideology (highlighted by Approach 3). Approach 3 (Clashing cultural investments) draws attention to the cultural roots of struggles over political change, reflecting a core interest in how such cleavages drive conflict between social groups within a community. Yet, it also suggests a somewhat reified and “negative” view of culture (at least concerning some groups), which could be enriched by insights about place and historically formed meanings (highlighted in Approach 1) and the construction of cultural categories and their indeterminacy which can allow for change (highlighted in Approach 2). Importantly, conceptual differences will no doubt complicate efforts to combine insights from different approaches (e.g., key variables, assumptions about the fixity/indeterminacy of culture and identity, focal scales of analysis). Nonetheless, creative exchange of ideas is possible through sources of inspiration for questions and forms of inquiry, and inclusion of new issues. The importance of a multifaceted approach to studying culture and identity comes into focus when considering strategic questions of climate policy and governance. Finding ways to realize transitions/transformations toward decarbonization in nations, regions, and communities is a central challenge in contemporary politics, but continues to prove extremely challenging. How might attention to culture and/or identity support efforts to realize ambitious climate policy for decarbonization (e.g., its prospects and/or pace)? This is not necessarily about using culture and/or identity instrumentally (e.g., harnessing the arts for public engagement), but rather, about giving careful attention to the ways in which climate mitigation policy relates with extant cultures and identities, and considering whether there are opportunities for policy to proactively address areas of potential discord (e.g., regarding conflicting experiences of loss, meanings, identifications and values). This is unlikely to be straightforward. For example, Adger et al. (2013, p. 116) state (regarding climate adaptation) that “[c]ulture and identity are difficult to incorporate into public policy: losses of public goods such as community and place are not easily compensated or swayed by arguments over economically rational adjustments to risk.” Moreover, cultural conflicts might not be resolvable through any specific policy intervention. But at the same time, there are arguably ways in which climate policy can better take account of culture and identity, and could even proactively target these aspects to better attune climate action to specific social-political-historical contexts. Three key policy implications concern: (1) engagement with multiple sources of meaning, (2) recreation of identities, and (3) action formation among policy recipients. The three approaches profiled each suggest differing ways in which meaning/s of climate policy might arise. In Approach 1, meaning arises in relation to people's existing connections to place, shared narratives and history, and even shared experiences and values. Climate policy could aim to support social wellbeing of communities in specific places, and seek to tie into their existing shared narratives and values. For example, Hulme (2009) suggests that climate action could be reimagined through new myths (relating to nostalgia, fear, pride, justice) as forms of meaning-making tied to basic human instincts, which could translate differently in different places. In Approach 2, meaning arises through discourse and the embodiment of subjectivities and desires through everyday socio-material practices. Climate policy could aim to support new discourses of climate action that involve transformed forms of everyday life, and reconfigure infrastructure to reduce conflicting desires about low-carbon living. For example, if private automobiles remain necessary for fulfilling basic social roles (e.g., work, caregiving) then conflicting desires about their use will remain for many people (following Bulkeley et al., 2016, p. 189). In Approach 3, meaning arises through political ideology and worldviews, through both actual experience and symbolic affiliations/sympathies. Climate policy could aim to recognize and address areas of legitimate grievance among disaffected groups and build on foundational values and norms of a political community to recast the meaning of climate action. For example, Adger et al. (2017) explore how conservative moral values (such as authority, stability, duty, and sanctity) relate to climate change adaptation but also have particular resonance for “prevention of impacts, and protection of sovereign territory and nature” (Adger et al., 2017, p. 385). The three approaches profiled also suggest differing ways in which identity relates to climate policy, and how identity may be recreated. In Approach 1, identity is inherited from community, place and history, and through shared experiences. Climate policy could start with recognition of the importance of communities self-determining their identity and provide material support for activities which sustain or recreate identity. For example, Barnett et al. (2021) argue that a sense of group continuity, esteem, and self-efficacy is important for adaptation in communities. Such processes might unfold over long timeframes and require ongoing resources (e.g., to support deliberation and social experimentation). In Approach 2, the focus would be on people's subjectivity within and in relation to climate action, where subjectivity refers to the culturally constructed ways in which people come to see themselves through the discourses in which they are embedded and their relations to specific artifacts and infrastructures (Bulkeley et al., 2016). Climate policy could support “new ways of being” low-carbon citizens in the world, and the shifts in material circumstances that enable this. For example, this could involve changes in work and welfare arrangements that enable economic stability and social status without high-carbon consumption. In Approach 3, identity is linked to group characteristics or affiliation, and might also include defense against perceived threats to identity. Climate policy could seek to support processes of identity recreation in communities phasing out fossil fuel production (e.g., Bell & York, 2010; Della Bosca & Gillespie, 2018), and even champion new forms of national identity that are de-linked from fossil fuels. But a key challenge is to find ways to defuse the symbolic power of fossil fuels as anchors of collective identity for some. The three approaches outlined above also suggest differing implications for action formation by policy recipients. In Approach 1, the focus is on practices and actions within specific places, which are shaped by community norms but also respond to needs (e.g., vulnerabilities) through agency (e.g., pursuing wellbeing, resilience). Climate policy could seek to support communities to build their own capabilities to interpret and respond to climate change in ways they deem appropriate. For example, this could involve combining scientific and traditional knowledge, and supporting communities to experiment in developing their own responses (Feola et al., 2019). In Approach 2, the focus is on change in socio-material practices considering infrastructures, desires, and forms of resistance. Climate policy could seek to minimize frictions experienced by people in adopting low-carbon practices by reconfiguring infrastructures and supporting innovative emerging practices. For example, this could include enabling a community approach to domestic housing retrofits (Karvonen, 2016), or programs that encourage firms to align their practices with wider cultural values such as becoming low-carbon (Dowling et al., 2016). In Approach 3, the focus is on overcoming direct resistance from certain groups within a political community. Climate policy could be reframed in ways that potentially appeal to the values of opponents (e.g., conservative values) where possible. But alternatively it might seek to overcome resistance by appealing to core values in the political community or even recognize some forms of conflict as unavoidable in a wider cultural struggle over transformative climate action. Emerging research on culture and identity in climate action suggests that policy and governance scholars may need to look beyond instrumental strategies (e.g., incentives, sanctions, information provision) in efforts to realize ambitious climate policy for decarbonization. For example, emerging green (new) deal approaches seeking transformative climate action could make many people feel unsettled without proactive attention to the deeper cultural meaning of such action and its resonance with people's extant identities, which may not be immediately clear under a far-away vision of a transformed future. Diverse strands of thinking can inform policy making in this regard, but much more work is needed to elucidate, test, and innovate possibilities. More broadly, this agenda also extends to questions about the role of new technologies. Climate policy and governance literature has so far mainly focused on culture and identity in relation to sociotechnical transitions of existing infrastructures, and/or the politics of everyday devices (e.g., automobiles, buildings, appliances). But new technologies (such as geoengineering and algorithmic governance as well as deployment of nuclear power and carbon capture) intersect with culture and identity in complex ways. For example, meanings about human–nature relations, values regarding democracy, differing worldviews, and identity affinities (e.g., national versus global) will influence these debates, yet remain vastly underexplored. Thus overall, engaging with issues of culture and identity is a necessary complement to addressing material distributional issues in climate policy and governance. The consequences of neglecting these dimensions include overlooking key causes of political conflict, deep-seated resistance if ambitious climate policy collides bluntly with people's everyday lives, creating a sense of injustice for people or groups that can feed political volatility, and possible political backlash to climate policy. At WIREs Climate Change, we welcome proposals from authors for review articles that deal with understanding, explaining, and critically reflecting on the culture and identity dimensions of climate policy in decarbonization and transformation. This paper has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 949332). The author gratefully thanks Giuseppe Feola, Harriet Bulkeley, Mike Hulme and Elliot Whiteside for providing helpful comments on a previous version. Shortcomings are solely the responsibility of the author.

While innovative approaches to urban transformations are increasingly proposed, scholars often overlook challenges faced by endogenous actors (e.g. urban planners) tasked with taking action within non-ideal, real-world settings. Here we argue that an ‘inside’ view of transformations (focused on judgment in practice) is needed to complement existing ‘outside’ views (focused on assessment), where the feasibility of action becomes a central concern. This recasts urban transformations in a discretised perspective. It suggests a view of transformation pathways as both directed and stochastic, and emergent from an unfolding series of ‘fuzzy action moments’. Principles for bridging urban science and planning are derived.

A key challenge for effective, ongoing urban climate adaptation is to adapt institutions within urban governance. While an extensive foundation of empirical knowledge on urban climate adaptation has accumulated over the last decade, our image of institutional adaptation continues to be dominated by a focus on planning. Whilst understandable, this can obscure a fuller range of areas in which institutional adaptation to climate change is being pursued. Furthermore, methodological path dependency in large-N analysis via a common focus on analyzing formal planning documents risks a skewed perspective as such documents may only offer a partial view. Building on the rich range of work to date assessing climate adaptation in cities, and notwithstanding continued major gaps such as in small-medium cities, we now need to find ways to examine the diversity of institutional adaptation occurring in practice, and to comparatively draw on the situated interpretive knowledge of case experts within individual cities to do so. With this aim in mind, this paper explores institutional adaptation in a specific domain (urban water) in a sample of 96 major cities across six continents through a survey of 319 case experts, examining the diversity of institutional adaptation across contexts and exploratively probing its drivers. Findings show that multiple forms of institutional adaptation are being jointly pursued in cities across all continents, leaning towards 'softer' rather than 'harder' forms, but nonetheless revealing a wide range of activity. Patterns in drivers suggest a political explanation for institutional adaptation (e.g. involving change agents and political pressure) rather than a rational one (e.g. involving response to climate-related risks and/or extreme events). Overall, there is a need to combine parsimony with expanded interpretive sensibility in advancing largeN research on institutional adaptation diversity in comparative perspective.

Emergency frames are mobilized in contemporary sustainability debates, both in response to specific events and strategically. The strategic deployment of emergency frames by proponents of sustainability action aims to stimulate collective action on issues for which it is lacking. But this is contentious due to a range of possible effects. We critically review interdisciplinary social science literature to examine the political effects of emergency frames in sustainability and develop a typology of five key dimensions of variation. This pinpoints practical areas for evaluating the utility of emergency frames and builds a shared vocabulary for analysis and decision-making. Emergency frames in sustainability debates can stimulate collective action on issues for which it is lacking but can have consequences. This Review examines the political effects of emergency frames in sustainability and develops a typology of different effects to build a shared vocabulary for analysis and decision-making.

Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems is not straightforward. Pursuing institutional improvement is an intensely political process, playing out over extended timeframes, and intricately tied to existing setups. Such activities are open-ended, and outcomes are often provisional and indeterminate. The question of institutional improvement, therefore, centers on understanding how institutions are (re)made within complex settings. This Element develops an original analytical foundation for studying institutional remaking and its political dynamics. It explains how institutional remaking can be observed and provides a typology comprising five areas of institutional production involved in institutional remaking (Novelty, Uptake, Dismantling, Stability, Interplay). This opens up a new research agenda on the politics of responding to institutional breakdown, and brings sustainability scholarship into closer dialogue with scholarship on processes of institutional change and development. Also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.