DeepDCarb Publications - October 2022

Despite the proliferation of national climate change advisory bodies, very little is known about what advice they provide, to whom, and when. In ​Advising National Climate Policy Makers: A Longitudinal Analysis of the UK Climate Change Committee - recently published in Global Environmental Change - we systematically analyse all 700 of the recommendations made by the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) in the period 2009–20. The article shows for the first time how the CCC’s mitigation and adaptation recommendations have changed over time with respect to their addressee, sectoral focus and policy targets. We reveal that they became: more numerous per year; more cross-sectoral in their nature; clearer in targeting a specific addressee; and more focused in referring to specific policy targets. 

By drawing on Fischer’s synthesis of policy evaluation to derive a measure of policy ambition, we also show that despite many of its recommendations being repeated year after year, the CCC has become more willing to challenge the policy status quo. We conclude by identifying future research needs in this important and fast-moving area of climate governance notably understanding the conditions in which the recommendations of advisory bodies (do not) impact national policy.

Secondly, Environmentalism as an Independent Dimension of Political Preferences is now out in the European Journal of Political Research and features in the virtual Open for Climate Justice collection . The background for the paper is that - despite environmental issues being an important aspect of party competition and voters’ political preferences - political behaviour research often considers environmental attitudes as a component of a broader ‘second-dimension’ and either subsumes it into this or omits it. We use Western European data from the fifth wave of the European Values Study to demonstrate that:
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1. Environmentalism loads as a separate dimension for publics
2. Environmentalism has somewhat different social predictors that for other issues
3.  Environmentalism has important associations with party preference that differ from those of other second dimension issues.

Our findings have crucial implications. Firstly, not accounting for environmentalism in studies of political behaviour misses an important part of the picture. Secondly, subsuming environmentalism into a broader ‘cultural’ dimension may lead to incomplete conclusions about both social predictors and the electoral consequences of political attitudes and values. Thus, allowing for a separate environmental dimension opens up novel perspectives on political representation in Western democracies.