The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts. We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.

With environmental protests on the rise, we ask: how do they affect support for pro-environment and environment-critical movements? We answer this question using evidence from two studies—a survey experiment and media content analysis—conducted in the Netherlands, a leading country in the green transition. Our experimental findings reveal an asymmetric bias in public support for protests. For the same protest action, public support is higher for environment-critical movements compared to pro-environment ones. This bias is most pronounced among right-leaning individuals with low education and low trust in science and politics. Our content analysis traces the bias back to newspaper reporting. While attention to protest groups is balanced across tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, tabloid reporting is more negative about pro-environment movements. These results highlight an important aspect of the backlash against environmental policies: a bias against pro-environment movements within parts of the public and media.

The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Business and Nature Platform and the Network for Greening the Financial System – attempt to address the uncomfortable reality of biodiversity governance failures and the risks of their own future failures by creating a series of diversions to deflect attention and by displacing the focus of biodiversity governance from core issues to their own efforts to develop metrics. These dynamics render these institutions both ‘failure-proof’ and inherently ‘failure-prone’, ultimately reinforcing rather than resolving the problems they aim to address.

Patterns of business opposition and support shape the pace and scope of environmental policy reforms. This article develops a theory of firm and business coalition position-taking that explains business unity and division over environmental policy. I argue that “coalition splintering”—divergent policy positions within a business coalition—is most likely when low-adjustment cost firms are under intense pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure over an environmental issue. Pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure influences firms’ genuine preferences for environmental policy when firms see environmental regulation as reputation-enhancing for their industry, and provides reputational benefits to firms willing to take a policy position in favor of regulation. However, powerful dynamics within business coalitions encourage unified opposition to environmental policy: firms want to maintain an effective business coalition and their influence within it given their engagement in multi-domain, multi-round policy processes, and can consequently be reluctant to break ranks to support environmental policy. Unified business support for environmental policy occurs when pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure and the inevitability of policy reform shift oppositional members of a business coalition to positions of strategic support. I substantiate my theoretical model using an original case study of oil and gas company position-taking on federal methane regulation in the United States.

The available choices of political responses to disruption in the global climatic system depend in part on how the problem is conceptualized. Researchers and policymakers often invoke a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency,” but such language fits poorly with current knowledge of the problem's physical causes and social impacts. This article argues that climate change is instead more like a political epic. It involves neither sudden onset, as in the concept of emergency, nor decisive resolution, as in the concept of crisis, but rather a protracted ordeal of (temporally) obscure origins and uncertain outcomes. This alternative ontology of climate change highlights its novel temporal properties, including unusually slow-moving or time-lagged causal dynamics, with unsettling implications for academic research on the climatic-institutional nexus. Normatively, it undermines arguments for democracies’ environmental superiority over autocracies that rely on the former's general superiority at resolving crises and responding to emergencies. At the same time, some new arguments for democratic distributions of power become possible within the epic frame. More broadly, embracing the assumption of epic climate change may redirect attention from Promethean, managerial, or technocratic solutions to questions about which values or identities deserve preservation amid presumptively interminable and imperfectly remediable sources of disorder.

While most literature on federal climate change policies has focused on failures to adopt broad policies, this article describes and explains successes in two important sectors. Regulations to improve the fuel economy of motor vehicles and efficiency standards for appliances and equipment have produced substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, although they largely have other goals and hence can be considered implicit climate policies. We synthesize the existing literature with our analyses of case studies to offer three explanations for the adoption of effective policies in these two sectors. First, the policies delivered politically popular co-benefits, such as reducing consumers’ energy bills, enhancing energy security, and promoting public health. Second, they gained business acceptance because they were narrow in their scope, avoided long-term economic costs, and helped industry cope with state-level regulations; industry often strategically tried to influence these policies rather than resist them. Third, the legislation that initiated and expanded these policies received bipartisan support, which was aided by co-benefits and business acceptance; more recently, these laws have been strengthened through the actions of Democratic administrations. We conclude by comparing these policy areas to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

During the last decade, environmental issues have gained saliency in Turkish politics, especially after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. This article is on the relationship between politics and deforestation in Turkey. It combines possible major drivers—political, economic, and climatic—of deforestation in Turkey with high-resolution satellite data on deforestation to conduct a systemic empirical analysis. The results show that districts in which Justice and Development Party mayors are in power have higher deforestation. The effect is around an average combined area of forty-two football fields in a given district. The article also shows that increased mining activities and newly built hydropower plants positively correlate with deforestation.

This article proposes a processual–relational perspective on region-making and its effects in world politics. It revisits the concepts of regionalism and regionalisation to unearth the relational mechanisms underlying these archetypical pathways of regional emergence. Regionalism refers to the bounding of regions – the definition of its inside and outside, and of which actors fall on either side. Regionalisation denotes the binding of regions, the amalgamations of relations around a shared territoriality. I argue that regions affect world politics in their making through the boundaries raised and relations produced in the process. I then mobilise network theory and analysis to propose a framework for studying the making and makings of regions. Regions’ binding and bounding are rooted in brokerage dynamics that sustain clusters of relations denser inside a regional boundary, rather than outside, and allow some actors to control interactions across that boundary. I illustrate this framework with a case study on the emergence of the Amazon as a region in world politics. I analyse interaction networks in UN-level environmental negotiations involving the ecosystem. The analysis shows how the making of the Amazon has been tied to preserving the position of Amazonian states as the main brokers, speaking for and acting on behalf of the region.

As major global challenges intensify in the twenty-first century, which domestic institutions will best enable countries to take decisive and positive action? This article explores this question in the realm of environmental policy. Scholars and practitioners have long argued that ‘democracy’ yields the best environmental outcomes, but others now maintain that ‘eco-authoritarianism’ may be the best way forward. The author unpacks the theoretical mechanisms behind these debates, and adds important nuance in making three arguments. First, the link between elections and eco-policy depends on what citizens want. Secondly, the relationship between civil liberties protections and environmentalism depends on which actors within society hold power. Finally, political constraints make environmental policy change – be it environmentally friendly or damaging – more difficult. The study empirically tests these arguments and finds strong support for the expectations regarding elections and civil liberties. There is only limited evidence that constraints stymie eco-policy change.

Cultural theory (CT) has been widely used to explain variations in risk perception but has rarely been tested in Canada. This contribution represents the most thorough attempt to adapt CT to the Canadian context. Study results suggest that respondents’ commitment to egalitarianism was strongly correlated with risks from technology, while respondents’ commitment to hierarchism was strongly correlated with risks from criminal or unsafe behaviours. Respondents’ commitment to individualism was also correlated with risks from criminal and unsafe behaviours but differed from hierarchism in that individualism was not correlated with risk perceptions from prostitution and marijuana use. Respondents’ commitments to fatalism were strongly correlated with risk perception of vaccines. These conclusions are reinforced by results from a survey question that tests the extent to which such cultural predispositions map onto the myths of nature hypothesized by CT and by a survey experiment that tests how cultural commitments predict perceived risks from a controversial pipeline.

Decentralized environmental governance theory suggests that decentralization can produce better environmental performance mainly because lower-level governments are closer to the people and environmental issues and are considered more legitimate than the national government. However, China's decentralized system of environmental governance has been often regarded as a key factor in creating pollution problems rather than in solving them. To explain this puzzle, this article, using Blame Avoidance Behaviour in government theory as a theoretical framework, examines how blame avoidance behaviour shapes China's decentralized system of environmental governance from three perspectives: first, actors and the chain of blame shaped by the hierarchical power structure among environmental policymakers and implementers; second, the strategies of discursive domination and decentralization for blaming environmental problems on local officials; and lastly, the contextual factor of “hierarchical governmental trust.” Drawing on documentary discursive analysis and extensive fieldwork, this article suggests that the dysfunction of China's decentralized environmental governance structure may in fact be an outcome of a blame-shifting game between central and local governments.