FFramework climate laws have been enacted across a growing range of countries, and are often assumed to provide stability in terms of climate policymaking. This chapter provides a more nuanced assessment. I argue that, while some common design elements of framework climate laws do indeed serve to bring stability to climate policymaking, in many respects framework climate laws depart from the ideal design type envisioned by the literature on time inconsistency, commitment devices, and non-majoritarian institutions. Moreover, framework climate laws can actually serve to make explicit political conflicts and sectoral trade-offs, and can thus serve to politicize even as they depoliticize. Furthermore, by seeking to introduce stability to climate policymaking in the sense of stability in policy design over time, framework climate laws simultaneously and deliberately seek to undermine and challenge stability as status quo. The chapter draws on examples of framework climate laws principally in European countries to illustrate the argument.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book’s fifteen analytical chapters and is divided into six sections. Each section places several individual chapters in conversation with one another. First, we reflect on how the authors engaged with stability, across the four forms we developed in the introductory chapter, before the second section does the same regarding re/politicization. Third, we engage with the running theme throughout the book that stability and re/politicization are not dichotomous but rather interact, and indeed, one can be pursued to achieve the other. Fourth, we explore manifestations of depoliticization encountered within the book and find that, in practice, many regimes pursuing stability are less depoliticized than often assumed. Fifth, we bring in the importance of temporality to our studies, before finally offering concluding remarks on the book’s arguments and suggesting avenues for future research. Throughout the volume, we have presented the antagonism between stability and re/politicization in a deliberately flexible manner, and we hope others will find it – as well as our four novel forms of each approach – to be useful in their own analyses.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

As coal burning was explicitly politicized with reference to coal’s contributions to climate change over the last ten to fifteen years, a number of policy norms associated with phasing out coal burning (or its financing) have emerged and stabilized in transnational politics. This chapter tracks aspects of these normative politics focusing on both the promulgation and diffusion of the new policy norms and a number of critiques and challenges – many grounded in distributional and procedural justice – to coal phaseout norms that emerge as a response to the transnational promulgation of coal phaseout policies.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

Norway is an active player in international climate politics, with strong consensus on the issue underpinned by cross-party Climate Settlements. Despite this, Norway has only marginally reduced its domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, attempts to establish a new Climate Settlement in 2021 failed. Does this failure constitute a break with Norway’s consensual climate tradition, and is this good or bad news for climate policy? In this chapter, we investigate whether and to what extent the consensus characterizing the 2000s and 2010s contributed to climate policy development or stasis. Focusing on two key sectors – petroleum and transport – we find that key Norwegian climate policies have developed through a dynamic tension of depoliticization and repoliticization over time, with mixed effects. We identify reasons for depoliticization and repoliticization and argue that it is useful to embrace agnosticism in the debate over politicization versus policy stability, instead exploring this on an empirical and contextual basis. Moreover, we uncover a dynamic of politicization in one policy area affecting policy development in another, arguing that such spillover effects warrant analytical attention.

This chapter investigates in detail the bargaining dynamics surrounding the economic governance reforms as well as their direction and timing. It contrasts expectations derived from traditional theories of European integration, that is, liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism, with those from more recent postfunctionalist/new intergovernmentalist perspectives. It argues that Council-centred enforcement, which, despite noncompliance, has been a dominant design feature at least until the sovereign debt crisis, does not sit comfortably with traditional theories but can be explained by policy salience and implementation uncertainties. On the other hand, the emphasis that traditional approaches assign to supranational pressures, such as noncompliance, commitment problems, threats of exclusion and veto, issue linkages, path dependencies, and supranational decision-making, allows to adequately account for the overall direction of reforms towards more tightening and delegation, notwithstanding the pooled enforcement in recent ancillary measures. Postfunctionalist theories overall fall short in highly politicized contexts, exactly where they should do most of the explaining.

This chapter examines the relationship between a politicized public sector and democratic backsliding. It is argued that politicization of public employment is an important, if understudied, component of the institutional landscape that makes democracy vulnerable. Bureaucratic politicization increases the likelihood that backsliding becomes endogenous by generating electoral advantages for incumbents and by raising the stakes of control over government. Politicization of the state administration allows incumbents to dole out patronage jobs; introduce political loyalty tests as a precondition for accessing basic government services; press public employees into campaign-related work; and utilize state funds for political purposes. Building on this volume’s aim of untangling the relationship between institutional subversion and backsliding, particular attention is given to the timing and sequencing of these processes. Evidence from Eastern Europe and a global sample shed light on how governments in countries that once seemed to be the front-runners of democratization concentrated political power by extending the economic reach of the state and subverting public sector independence. This study contributes to research on the illiberal political economy that supports backsliding regimes and their capture of key levers of political power.

The attentive public widely believes a false proposition, namely, that the race Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) measures unconscious bias within individuals that causes discriminatory behavior. We document how prominent social psychologists created this misconception and the field helped perpetuate it for years, while skeptics were portrayed as a small group of non-experts with questionable motives. When a group highly values a goal and leaders of the group reward commitment to that goal while marginalizing dissent, the group will often go too far before it realizes that it has gone too far. To avoid the sort of groupthink that produced the mismatch between what science now knows about the race IAT and what the public believes, social psychologists need to self-consciously embrace skepticism when evaluating claims consistent with their beliefs and values, and governing bodies need to put in place mechanisms that ensure that official pronouncements on policy issues, such as white papers and amicus briefs, are the product of rigorous and balanced reviews of the scientific evidence and its limitations.

This chapter analyzes the interconnections between energy policy and security and defense policies in Norway. It explains the background of energy and security regimes and analyzes policy interplay. Prior to 2022, Norway had barely considered the energy–security nexus due to substantial domestic energy supplies. Some interconnections were, however, visible via three cases: the economic security provided by oil and gas exports, security of hydropower infrastructure, and internal tensions around wind power. Repoliticization of the Norwegian energy policy took place in 2022, and questions of energy sovereignty and energy security also became a part of Norway’s energy policy vocabulary. In 2022, strong degree of securitization was not evident, but, lightly framed, there have been breaks from previous energy political practices – evidenced by new support for offshore wind power and visible military protection of critical energy infrastructure.

This final chapter compares the country findings and brings together the conceptual and empirical insights presented. It also aims to answer the questions presented in the introductory chapter: What are the security implications of energy transitions? What elements of positive and negative security can be found? How should energy security and security of supply be redefined in the context of the energy transition? Is there a hidden side to policymaking in the energy–security nexus? It first discusses the interplay between energy, security, and defense policies, followed by securitization and politicization. Subsequently, focus is placed on the security implications of energy transitions, and on negative and positive security. The chapter ends by summarizing the key technological, actor-based, and institutional aspects of the country cases, perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure, and final conclusions.

This chapter introduces the forty-six policy episodes that we study in detail. We present their timing, their politicization, and their substantive focus. The association between politicization and pressure, both problem and political pressures, proves to be rather variable across member states and looser than expected. We account for this finding by taking into account the endogenous political dynamics during the crisis. Policy responses at the national level were not only required by the failure of the CEAS and by the inability of the leaders to adopt joint solutions at the EU level, they were also the result of a series of endogenous factors at the national level, which operated independently of problem pressure and, in part at least, created the political pressure in the first place. The strategies of political entrepreneurs – Orbán, Salvini, Seehofer, and Erdogan – most clearly fit this bill, but anticipation of crisis situations to come, legislative cycles, conspicuous events like terrorist attacks, and sequels of policy decisions made earlier in the crisis all contributed to these endogenous dynamics.

Chapter 6 investigates the manifestations of the politicization and securitization of immigration over time in Spain, the UK, and the US, each of which experienced acts of terrorism between 2001 and 2005. The chapter’s objectives are to illuminate the trajectory of inter-political party competition regarding immigration and the propensity of the major parties to securitize and politicize immigration. It plots the interaction of the key variables of our immigration threat politics paradigm as these are illuminated in each country’s political context. Among these are the predominant threat frames, attitudinal influences, popular policy preferences, and patterns of inter-party politics regarding immigration. The evidence reveals that the shift from a predominant economic and/or cultural threat frame to a public safety one precipitates depolitization and a popular and an inter- party consensus regarding immigration in the near term. However, once restrictive policies are embedded and the salience of immigration recedes, familiar patterns of inter-party competition resume.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.