Work in Progress Series

Over the past two decades, the term 'carbon lock-in' has gained prominence and become a bedrock concept for understanding and explaining fossil fuel entrenchment. Carbon lock-in describes how existing technologies, institutions, actors, and norms constrain the rate and magnitude of the phase out of fossil fuel use. The current conceptualization of “carbon” in carbon lock-in is synonymous with fossil fuels or hydrocarbons. In this paper, we argue that considering technological advancements, the current conceptualization of carbon lock-in is incomplete. There is a need to distinguish between fossil fuel lock-in and carbon lock-in, especially to identify the consequences of carbon capture, conversion, and utilization (CCCU) technologies. In theory, these technologies can recycle CO2 to produce hydrocarbons. Some techno-economic scholars argue that CCCU can unlock fossil fuel lock-in by incentivizing renewable energy expansion and disrupting new extraction. However, even though CCCU technologies might address some of the negative effects of fossil fuel lock-in, it can introduce new unintended consequences, such as the reinforcement of harmful downstream industries, the continued centralization of corporate power, and new environmental impacts. Technological advancements in CCCU are leading us to re-conceptualize our understanding of carbon lock-in to better identify and analyze the outcomes.

Norm dynamics and contestation research has commonly studied norms as a single parameter. However, when norms are articulated in organising principles, these may be composed of more than one normative element, such as the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances (CBDRRC). This study questions if the normative elements that compose the CBDRRC principle have different relative weights, and if so, what are the implications for operationalizing and implementing this principle. We interviewed twenty-two climate negotiators to explore ideas and perceptions about the role and weight of each normative element in the CBDRRC principle. Our study describes the different weights associated with ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ and ‘respective capabilities’, in the light of ‘different national circumstances’, and how these weights are influenced by diverse strands of thought and influence perceptions of how CBDRRC ought to be implemented.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that Kenya is on track to provide electricity to all citizens by 2030, thus meeting SDG 7. Ten years ago, only 36 percent of Kenya’s population had access to electricity. What is more, more than 90 percent of the electricity Kenya produces is from ‘green’ sources. In 2022, just prior to COP 27, newly elected president, William Ruto, wrote a column in the Guardian newspaper championing renewable energy for Africa. How did Kenya achieve such a remarkable energy transition to become a champion of green energy? Is Kenya a model for other countries in Africa? This presentation examines the political economy of Kenya’s transition. It examines the domestic and international conditions that set Kenya on its path and identifies concerns and risks that have arisen as a result of Kenya’s impressive transition. The presentation will emphasize five issues for future consideration: 1) the high dependence on small-scale private providers; 2) the financial risks that have befallen the country due to the high number of private electricity contracts; 3) the expanding complexity of energy governance; 4) the determination of multilateral development agencies to help Kenya achieve SDG 7; and, 5) the meaning of ‘access’ and the equity and justice considerations that follow from that meaning. The analysis in the presentation is derived from quantitative and qualitative data collected in Kenya by the author and collaborators, as well as more than 20 years spent studying energy access and climate change in eastern Africa.

Now proven to be essential agents of change internationally, cities occupy a central role in societal responses to climate change. Although growing momentum exists to unleash the transformative potential of urban action, the extent to which current practice can address root causes and connections between unequal urban development and climate change is limited. I draw lessons from social and policy approaches to LA100 Equity Strategies, a community-informed analysis of equity strategies for Los Angeles, which can shed light on how cities can centre justice and equity in the transition to 100% clean energy.

In the last five years, the United Nations Environment Programme has been at the forefront of orchestrating market actors in the drive towards net zero emissions goals. Despite the relatively distant relationship banks and insurers have with real-world emissions, the lack of upward customer pressure typically faced by major consumer brands, and a challenging relationship with high-salience political environments, finance has been a significant part of the UN’s broader orchestration efforts, drawing in the collective commitment of USD trillions of assets under management. How should we understand this counter-intuitive trend? In this talk, I argue that the involvement of pensions, asset managers, banks, and insurers in UN-convened Net Zero initiatives—as well as in global governance initiatives addressing “sustainable finance” more generally—can be explained by the degree to which demands to navigate growing climate risks and uncertainties, expressed by commercial audiences, outweigh the adjustment costs that net zero commitments require. To illustrate the plausibility of this argument, I present a series of comparative cases across financial sub-sectors (The Paris Aligned Investment Initiative and the Net-Zero Banking Alliance) leveraging interviews with participants and conveners alike. The argument and analysis contribute to rethinking how salience, expertise, and the relationship between public and private authority shape the incentives of corporate actors in international affairs.

Sub-Saharan Africa is among the world’s regions hardest hit by climate change while also experiencing rapid religious transformation, as new religious movements challenge established Christianities. In our research project Climate crisis and religious change in sub-Saharan Africa, the starting point is that religion profoundly influences people’s attitudes and behaviours towards the environment for a large portion of the world population. Moreover, while climate scientific debates predict that climate change is the second most important driver of global biodiversity loss after human-induced habitat destruction, and this is only predicted to worsen as global temperatures increase more rapidly, social scientists and political ecologists urge that there is a need to complicate the narrative that considers climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ generating societal stress, conflict and vulnerabilities. In rural northeastern Madagascar, rice and vanilla farmers, mainly Tsimihety ethnicity, live in the vicinity of Marojejy National Park (55 500 ha) and experience environmental challenges of biodiversity and forest loss, cyclones and changing weather conditions that make it difficult to estimate farming tasks and harvests. During the past 30 years, the people’s environments and livelihoods have been modified and managed more intensively by transnational and bilateral development and environmental conservation organizations together with the Madagascar state. Recently, development authorities have recognized that churches are well-positioned to promote climate action: they wield public authority and control both extensive service infrastructures.

However, in rural villages Christian churches struggle how to maintain and attract followers while emphasizing their commitment with God. Moreover, different Christians interpret weather changes as God’s signs and as a moral question rather than relating it with scientific explanations concerning anthropogenic factors, such as deforestation. By building churches and burying properly their dead, the Christian people seek to mark relations to places that have ensured access to land relevant to their subsistence production and social reproduction. I highlight the significance of place-based cultural conceptualizations, social relations and practices as well as political economic structures and dynamics in understanding how people, who are often marginalized from decision making, navigate, negotiate and act with often imposed environmental governance efforts in the context of shrinking resources and growing inequalities.

International environmental non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are often viewed as the vanguard of climate policy, advocating for more stringent rules than national governments propose. However, this paper shows that some of these INGOs are part of the climate establishment – insiders working within the multilateral process and cooperating with Fortune 100 firms to influence rulemaking, soft law and firm behavior. Like many governments, the climate establishment misdiagnoses global climate politics as a collective action problem that can be solved by cooperating with large emitters instead of as an inherently agonistic conflict between fossil asset owners, regulators and civil society. Using new data, the paper identifies the climate establishment, and maps their ties to Fortune 100 corporations through shared participation in partnerships using social network analysis. Both the overrepresentation of business interests in the multilateral climate regime and the ties between the climate establishment and large corporations raise legitimate questions about whether these environmental INGOs can be effective advocates for rapid decarbonization

This paper grapples with the question of whether climate change itself can be understood as an inter-state war. Drawing upon existing secondary and primary sources I suggest that while climate change may not be a war in the traditional sense this distinction reflects as much the limitations in existing frameworks and ways of understanding as it does provide any definitive conclusions. This challenges us to radically rethink our understandings as to what exactly constitutes war and global politics to better reflect the changing dynamics of the 21st century. Additionally, I present a novel theoretical and conceptual approach which integrates key aspects of political ecology into a framework for state behaviour which places the human-environmental relationship at its core and argues that a state's relationship with its environment is the most foundational dynamic around which all of its efforts grow.

This pilot study examines the World Bank’s adoption of an indirect and soft governance mode, orchestration, and its respective governance outputs. Despite the absence of consensus among member states, some IGOs have mobilized ideational or financial resources to achieve their organizational goals by influencing target countries indirectly through intermediary actors such as non-governmental organizations and private enterprises. Based on the Orchestration-Intermediator-Target (O-I-T) theoretical framework, this research scrutinizes the World Bank’s orchestration role in respect of two carbon funds, the Bio Carbon Fund, and the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. Within the theoretical framework, the key variables are identified and evaluated to confirm, disconfirm, or suggest refinement of four hypotheses generated by the O-I-T model. This study goes beyond the classic O-I-T framework’s emphasis on the governance process. It examines respective governance outputs by incorporating the latest theoretical development on the influence of various types of intermediaries on governance outputs.

Dawdling and daydreaming hardly sound like the stuff of serious environmental politics – we’re in a time of urgently needed action! But when human work and productivity are the cause of so much trouble, we might need to rethink whether they are actually the tools that will allow us to restore a damaged planet. In an emerging collection of essays, I ask what, really, is sustainable work: whose work and what kind of work is needed to enable a thriving, flourishing, multi-species future? This essay, on resistance, considers how some work undoes other labour, acknowledging contradictory orders, efforts, and infrastructures along the way. Drawing guidance from the tireless dam-building efforts of beavers, the poet W.S. Merwin, creative protest movements in authoritarian states, a lone Douglas fir tree standing in a clear-cut, the children’s fable of Alice in Wonderland, and more, the essay contributes to a wider study of how idleness by some—at least sometimes—might be crucial to allow others to work and live.

In a pilot study and initial review of news coverage (text and images) published by The New York Times (NYT), Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Washington Post (WaPo), and USA Today, I find that the IRA is represented as a superior policy in comparison to the Green New Deal (GND). In previous studies where I examined coverage of the GND across US news media from the center-left NYT to the center-right WSJ (e.g., Morris, 2021), I found that the GND policy resolution and its supporters—including a central advocate for the GND, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)—are cast as “dangerous” and “extremists” on par with Trump and his supporters.

In this way, both AOC and Trump are positioned as a grave threat to the “stability” of the nation. In contrast, my preliminary analysis of news coverage of the IRA reveals how President Biden and older figures of the Democratic Party such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi are positioned as saviors and the IRA as a route “back” to more stable national conditions. A clear “right” and “wrong” way of responding to the climate crisis is therefore established. Another key trend from my preliminary analysis of news coverage of the IRA is that critiques of the IRA articulated by young supporters of the GND and climate justice activists are denigrated as threatening to the stability of the nation and the stability the Earth’s climate. In this way, young climate justice activists are repeatedly represented (textually and visually) as obstructing the urgent action required to address the climate crisis. Climate justice activists are, therefore, positioned as on par with fossil fuel companies and are frequently portrayed as unruly and uncivil obstructionists. Ultimately, through this project I seek to contribute a critical pause / theoretical intervention regarding scholarly understandings of processes of (de)legitimization / how certain figures, perspectives, and responses to the climate crisis come to be understood as “right” and others as “wrong.” Many studies overlook the role of media, nationalism, and culture in processes of (de)legitimization and instead focus-in on mis/disinformation spun by fossil fuel companies and lobbyists alone. I plan to challenge this unidimensional understanding of climate communication and politics in my paper through a critical analysis of discursive formations and dynamics of power.

Bison reintroduction is occurring across the Great Plains of Canada and the United States. Most jurisdictions are looking for ways to bring bison back onto the landscape with support from conservation groups, Indigenous Peoples, and federal government agencies (namely, National Parks). Montana is an outlier in this effort as it recently changed long-standing policy so as to make wild bison a virtual impossibility on private or public lands. This paper uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework to explain policy change in Montana. Through an examination of pro-bison and anti-bison coalitions over the past decade, the paper demonstrates how the cattle industry was able to wield powerful narratives around wildlife disease science to stoke fear. The policy change in Montana is significant because without wild bison in the state, migratory bison in the West is an unlike future.

The ocean plays a key role in regulating the climate by absorbing atmospheric CO2. In light of the growing awareness of limitations of terrestrial CO2 removal (tCDR), the ocean is becoming the new ‘blue’ frontier for carbon drawdown. To ensure that the ‘hope’ presented by marine CO2 removal (mCDR) does not promote unrealistic ‘hype’, there is a need for assessments that go beyond techno-economic feasibility. This talk; (1) gives an overview of one such holistic assessment being carried out within the German research mission CDRmare; (2) outlines an approach to assessment of mCDR’s political (in)feasibility, in which political framework conditions are treated as independent variables shaping the feasibility of mCDR becoming part of Germany’s carbon management strategy and; (3) invites discussion of results from the actor mapping being undertaken to explore the political (in)feasibility frontiers of mCDR in Germany.

Stefan Renckens and Christian Elliott: Competition and Diversification in Institutional Proliferation: Measuring Fragmentation in Sustainable Finance Governance
by The Environmental Governance Lab

Scholars of international relations have long studied the rapid proliferation of new institutions across areas of global governance, and whether institutional proliferation leads to fragmentation and the undermining of legacy state-led regimes. As a response, new concepts and frameworks have been introduced to better understand changing global governance arrangements including regime complexes, governance architecture, and the application of organizational ecology to international affairs. However, we argue existing frameworks have critical limitations for analyzing global governance and characterizing the degree of fragmentation over time, often failing to simultaneously address sequencing, interactions between institutions, and the diversity of actors involved. We propose a methodological alternative to measuring fragmentation that maps which actors take on which governance functions when, across evolving sub-areas of a governance complex. Using the case of sustainable finance governance, we show the utility of the framework in identifying institutional competition and diversification. In the case of sustainable finance, results suggest that institutional proliferation is more often a matter of diversification than functional fragmentation or competition, and proliferation is driven as much by international organizations as entrepreneurial non-state actors. Though the substantive results may re-frame our understanding of sustainable finance at the global scale, our approach also offers a useful methodological starting point for comparative analysis of global governance complexes, an important frontier in international relations research.

Laura Tozer: Rescaling Urban Zero Carbon Action for Systemic Transformation

How can civil society, businesses, and policy makers at all levels of government scale up climate solutions to transform our cities? Discussions on low carbon urban transitions are often focused on hierarchical ideas about scaling up in a linear manner and emphasize socio-technical innovation and market take-up in sustainability experiments. Looking beyond commercialization, this paper together a wider range of political and cultural dynamics that have the potential to influence the impact and scope of zero carbon interventions. Drawing from relational scaling and embedding theories in human geography and urban studies, as well as the political dynamics of scaling from political science, this paper develops a conceptual framework that furthers our understanding of how catalytic change can be triggered in ways that build enough momentum to reconfigure urban systems towards decarbonization. This framework will then be applied to an analysis of a residential building retrofit case study in Canada. Society will not reach climate targets without substantially retrofitting buildings. Yet, building retrofits to increase energy efficiency and enable decarbonization have been difficult to implement effectively. They have been a particularly challenging climate solution to implement despite the fact that they can realize greenhouse gas emission reductions more quickly, are cost-effective compared to other climate change mitigation actions, and can be achieved using existing technologies. There is also no clear understanding of how to achieve the transformation this sector requires without exacerbating the challenges of energy poverty and gentrification. By examining a case study of residential building retrofit policies and experiments and analyzing gaps and opportunities to trigger catalytic change, this work in progress aims to addresses questions about accelerating just climate solutions to transform our cities.

Alexa Waud: Applying the “Politics of Decarbonization” framework to democratic interventions: Guiding impactful design and delivery

The European climate governance regime is notoriously technocratic. However, in the last few years growing pressure for climate action has crossed paths with the “deliberative wave,” participatory programmes, movement demands, and increasing recognition climate policies developed behind closed doors will not land amongst ordinary people. Now, European funders, governing bodies, and practitioners are searching for climate interventions that integrate democratic governance and citizen participation. Democratic Society (Demsoc) has been leading the democratic design in several flagship programmes including the upcoming Net-Zero Cities and its precursor Healthy, Clean Cities. From participatory budgeting in Vienna to building a community of practice for sustainable construction in Madrid the research team at Demsoc, myself included, has immediate access to a variety of climate projects with explicit democratic aims.

In this Work in Progress talk, which one could also call Work in Practice, I will share how Bernstein and Hoffmann’s (2018) analytic framework is being applied to climate interventions that have the explicit aim of democratization in addition to decarbonization. Instead of using the framework to analyze the trajectories of complete or established interventions, at Demsoc the theoretical framing – seeing decarbonization as a process of disrupting carbon lock-in at multiple scales in interdependent systems – has been translated and expanded into a tool, which is used throughout interventions’ design and implementation.

The motivation for this practice and the accompanying research is two-fold. Firstly, working through the framework iteratively throughout the project encourages practitioners to think about how an intervention can be designed to facilitate transformation, where systemic barriers exist, and how political mechanisms can drive change. Secondly, and importantly, the information entered into the tool doubles as a growing library of data points, which will enable the Demsoc research team to ask better questions about and begin to investigate the relationship between decarbonization (disrupting carbon lock-in) and democratization (disrupting systems that tend towards concentrating power).

Although, there are increasing references to deliberative and participatory democracy in the climate governance literature, and increased focus on climate content amongst those who study democracy, there is little cross pollination between the two fields. This Work in Progress / Practice is beginning to bridge that divide. This bridge will create space for us to wonder about and analyze the dynamics of decarbonization and democratization and how they relate to one another.

Heather Millar: Stuck in the Middle: Decarbonization of New Brunswick’s electricity generation system 2010-2021

Canadian policy makers and energy scholars acknowledge that significantly reducing GHG emissions from Canada’s electricity system is a crucial step toward achieving “net-zero” emissions by 2050 (Government of Canada 2020; Dion et al. 2021). Canada is a leader globally in low-emissions intensity electricity generation (Shaffer 2021, 2) but this standing masks broad disparities between provinces reliant on large-scale non-emitting hydro power such as Manitoba and British Columbia and fossil-fuel dependent provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (Macdonald 2020; Shaffer 2021; Hoicka and MacArthur 2018). Within this context, the province of New Brunswick presents a curious puzzle: in 2019-2020, 80.4% of its electricity generation was from non-emitting sources, a dramatic change from 40% non-emitting in 2010. How did one of Canada’s four “fossil fuel-based provinces” (Shaffer 2021) achieve this decarbonization? This study finds NB’s initial decarbonization was spurred by a combination of nuclear refurbishment, coal phase-outs, increased interprovincial energy transmission, and small-scale community energy projects, all of which were framed by policy makers, utility officials, and regulators as providing economic benefits to the province. However, we find that the very factors that have contributed to improvements in New Brunswick’s energy system are likely to hinder further decarbonization. The province has been unwilling to scale up in-province renewable energy generation, has sought to delay further coal phase-outs, and has been unable to secure increased high transmission agreements with Quebec. We argue that New Brunswick’s current state reflects the pernicious challenge of a “double-carbon trap” in which jurisdictions manage to improve their emissions pathways over a basic threshold but which stall or plateau prior to achieving deep decarbonization (Bernstein and Hoffmann 2019; Seto et al. 2016). The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which changes to the framing of the issue and increasing the capacity of regulators could help the province get “unstuck” on its path toward deep decarbonization.

Sarah Sharma: Relationally Comparing the Global North and Global South: Examining Climate Resilience Across and Within Amsterdam and Dhaka

This book project is designed to examine how climate resilience policies unfold within and across two distinct cities: Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Dhaka, Bangladesh. In so doing, I build a relationally comparative framework to understand the International Political Economy and Environment (IPEE) of climate resilience in global capitalism to analyse how this policy framework unfolds in an interdependent, yet unique manner in each case. There is an outstanding need to further provincialize research on global South to rebalance IPE in a manner that reflects the hybridization, localization, and transformation of global governance in different contexts. I argue that contrasting Dhaka against Amsterdam relationally allows for contributions to knowledge on neoliberalization and climate change in the global South while understanding that these processes cannot be divorced from historical and regulatory processes in the global North. Further, I argue that Dhaka’s experience with climate resilience should not be presented against Amsterdam’s to “add in” analysis on urban governance from the global South. To do so maintains the normalcy of experiences in the global North and subjugates urban experiences in the global South in the realm of global development, rather than international politics. As such, my book project places examinations of climate resilience in Amsterdam and Dhaka in conversation with one another and considers these cases as sites that reflect historical and contemporary structural processes in the broader global political economy while being simultaneously shaped by contextually relevant governance institutions and relations of power.

Amy Janzwood and Christian Elliott: Public Interventions and Private Governance Responses in Corporate Carbon Risk Disclosure

CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) has facilitated nearly 10,000 corporate climate risk disclosures in its twenty years of operation. Despite an influx of public authority (government-led initiatives and rules) that threatens to compete with CDP, the private governor has instead expanded its “governance space,” drawing in even greater numbers of disclosures to its platform. To explain this puzzle, we argue that the consequences of public intervention in private governance, whether competitive or cooperative, are a function of the subsequent costs and benefits firms face when deciding to disclose voluntarily with private governors. Using process tracing and interview data, we find that the degree to which public interventions can crowd-in firms to private governance and expand private governance space depends on the extent to which private governors can respond to or shape public interventions in ways that maximize complementarity. This paper critically contributes to understanding the outcomes of public-private governance interactions by illustrating how private governance initiatives can co-evolve with public authority to ratchet up public rules.