Overview
The working assumption of DeepDCarb is that the societal and political commitment to deliver deep decarbonisation emerges out of a dynamic, three-way relationship between politicians, publics and other actors. It therefore seeks to fully understand the conditions in which different democracy types address societal commitment dilemmas by adopting devices that seek to endure over very long periods of time. This will be carried out over a five-year programme of groundbreaking theoretical, empirical and methodological work, divided into five interconnected work packages (WPs) to provide a holistic perspective.
The project is committed to carrying out its work under high ethical standards and to publish its findings in open access outlets, commensurate with ERC requirements.
The project is committed to carrying out its work under high ethical standards and to publish its findings in open access outlets, commensurate with ERC requirements.
WP1 - Concepts
WP1 provides the conceptual and theoretical vision for DeepDCarb. It combines different disciplinary understandings of the governance of policy issues that share a significant temporal dimension, all in the context of salient macro-trends in democracy and climate governance. Out of this work, WP1 will forge a new shared and agreed terminology to guide a new sub-field of research.
WP2 - Policy/Governance
The aim of WP2 is to explore the nature of the commitment devices that have - or have not - been adopted since 1990. It will cover their scope, stringency and timeframe by assembling four uniquely longitudinal datasets and subjecting them to statistical analysis. For the first time, these data will uncover the changing pattern of political commitment empirically through time and across the world.
WP3 - Politicians
The connections between publics and their legislative representatives are an essential, defining characteristic of all democratic systems. WP3 investigates how far and through what devices politicians have interacted with publics and other actor types to deliver deep decarbonisation. It will explore how they understand climate change - and specifically deep decarbonisation - as well as how their own beliefs interact with their responses to constituent demands in relation to commitment devices.
WP4 - Publics
WP4 will offer completely new insights into public engagement with commitment dilemmas, via private and public-sphere processes. DeepDCarb will be uniquely equipped to assess whether the public sphere allows disengaged publics to become more engaged, or simply gives the powerful and the engaged new ways to exert control. It will explore these issues holistically, comprehensively and in a fully deliberative manner.
WP5 - Integration
The main aims of WP5 are twofold. Firstly, it will integrate the outputs of the other WPs throughout the entire project and from them extract underlying lessons that significantly advance the state-of-the-art and establish a new research agenda to guide the new inter-disciplinary subfield. Secondly, it will disseminate the main findings to the academics, policymakers and societal actors.