DeepDCarb is a collaborative project between researchers at the University of East Anglia and the University of Heidelberg, funded through an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (Project number: 882601).

The standard advice to politicians confronting long-term challenges such as decarbonisation is to adopt time-consistent commitment devices such as binding policies. Yet politicians appear unable to do this. The state-of-the art struggles to explain the causes, and hence the solutions, to this impasse. Political scientists argue that politicians fear retribution at the next election; psychologists claim that citizens understand what is at stake, but expect politicians to lead. The untested assumption is that both are locked into a ‘governance trap’ which greatly reduces the political feasibility of rapid change.

DeepDCarb seeks to significantly advance the academic state-of-the-art by directly interrogating the relationship between politicians, citizens/voters and other actors in a uniquely detailed and comparative manner, drawing on an unconventional combination of methods and unrivalled new data sets.