New DeepDCarb Publications - March 2022

A number of papers by DeepDCarb team members have recently been published.

'The political challenges of deep decarbonisation: Towards a more integrated agenda'' appears in the inaugural issue of the newly launched Climate Action journal. As the societal commitment to deep decarbonisation will eventually emerge from the interaction between policies, publics and politicians, in this paper we review the existing literatures on these three to identify salient research gaps. Our findings show that existing work has largely focused on one aspect in isolation. Thus, we set out a more integrated research agenda that explores the three-way interaction these, arguing that greater integration is required to understand better the conditions under which different political systems address societal commitment dilemmas.

 
Secondly, "The durability–flexibility dialectic: The evolution of decarbonisation policies in the European Union" has been published online in the Journal of European Public Policy and will feature in a forthcoming special issue 'Climate Policy: From Complexity to Consensus'. The paper distinguishes between three central dimensions of policy durability and uses them to shed new light on the long-term evolution of EU climate policy. It reveals that the EU has addressed the relationship between policy durability and policy flexibility by working iteratively across and between different policy elements (instruments, programmes, goals, etc.). In revealing these patterns, it addresses a greatly neglected feature of policy design processes: the dialectical relationship between durability and flexibility.

Finally, "The Role of Political Attention in Moderating the Association between Political Identities and Anthropogenic Climate Change Belief in Britain" forms part of the current issue of Political Studies. Using British Election Study data from 2016, the paper examines whether political divides on climate change at the elite level are mirrored by similar divisions among the general public. It shows for the first time in Britain that political identities interact with political attention in their relationship with climate change beliefs. For Labour partisans, greater political attention is associated with greater belief in anthropogenic climate change, whereas for Conservative and UKIP partisans, greater political attention is associated with lower belief.