Environmental Politics

@environmentalpol.bsky.social

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As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and an active participant in international climate action, China’s climate policymaking should be understood within a global context which includes international actors from diverse background. Here, we investigate the channels through which international actors influence and shape the direction of China’s climate policy, shedding light on the overlooked yet critical interplay between domestic policy objectives and international climate governance. We find that international climate policy actors have established connections with influential policymakers in China and are well-connected to Chinese policy communities. The presence of international actors not only facilitates policy changes but also serves as a stabilizing force that enhances policy stability through networks. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of how state-social linkages shape state agencies’ knowledge and policy preferences, which in turn determine the government’s willingness to provide public goods, in this case climate mitigation efforts.
Climate scepticism and hostility to climate policy are common features of populist radical right (PRR) parties. Yet these attributes emerged first in many established conservative centre-right (CCR) parties, especially in Anglophone countries. Given these overlaps, and the growing support for PRR in many countries, are CCR parties also recruiting PRR or developing their own distinctive brand of nationalist populism to legitimate opposition to climate policy? These questions are addressed via a comparative discourse analysis of opposition to climate policy by the ‘Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party’ (Australia’s signature PRR party) and the influential climate sceptic faction within the Liberal-National Coalition (a CCR alliance). We found a remarkable convergence of discourses grounded in an exclusionary political, economic and extractivist resource nationalism, overlayed/reinforced with populism. Our study challenges the categorical differences between CCR and PRR parties and shows how factions within CCR parties can mobilise PPR to thwart national climate policy.
This study investigates how Chinese media politicize the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge by integrating computational analysis with qualitative interpretation across 14,126 news articles (2021–2023). Focusing on frames, discursive strategies, and actor configurations, the analysis shows that highly politicized frames – emphasizing responsibility attribution, diplomatic confrontation, and international conflict – dominate news coverage. Discursively, reports transform scientific uncertainty into political symbolism, using credibility disputes, procedural doubts, and selective emphasis on long-term risks to legitimize predetermined geopolitical positions. Actor networks further reveal a structural reliance on political elites while marginalizing scientific expertise. These patterns reflect China’s hierarchical media system, whose top-down information flows homogenize narratives and channel scientific ambiguity toward unified ideological reinforcement. The findings demonstrate how politicization operates under a non-competitive party system, showing that scientific uncertainty becomes a strategic resource shaped by structural media constraints.
This article reviews the rapidly growing literature on how corruption affects climate change mitigation, focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the preservation of carbon sinks. Analyzing 200 studies, we argue that corruption hampers mitigation, i.e. increases emissions, and worsens the storage capacity of sinks through deforestation and overfishing. Reducing corruption is vital to successfully combat global warming, because corruption makes climate policies less ambitious in their formulation and less effective when they are implemented due to low rule compliance. The findings of the studies in our sample were established through various types of data, research designs, and methods. We mapped trends in this literature and highlight points of disagreement. Importantly, we suggest that research moves beyond using country-level indicators because of the limitations of such data. We propose several critical avenues for a future research agenda to further understand the linkages between corruption and climate change mitigation.
The intersection of environmental politics, regionalism, and Congressional policymaking is not well-examined by extant scholarship, so it is unclear to what extent regionalism within parties explains Congressional actions, particularly as it pertains to shifting partisan dynamics and focus on nationalized issues, such as climate change. The authors use data from the League of Conservation Voters to track voting behaviors among members of Congress from 1971 to 2022. Findings indicate that regional differences within parties did not emerge until the Reagan administration, but subsequently increased in significance, hitting their peak during the Obama administration. By the Trump administration, regionalism within parties began to dissipate as partisan voting practices converged on environmental issues.
Research on the global climate movement underlines the importance of learning and diffusion processes for adopting similar master frames and movement tactics. At the same time, participation research suggests regionally different patterns of mobilisation and protest behaviour. Due to different historical socialisation processes, Western and Eastern European citizens show differences in political activity despite some signs of convergence. This article examines the sociodemographic characteristics and attitudes of climate activists from Eastern and Western Europe. Using protest surveys of Fridays for Future participants in 15 Western and Eastern European countries, we show significant differences between them. Western European climate activists tend to have stronger leftist attitudes, while in Eastern Europe apolitical stances are more common along with higher confidence in market solutions to solve environmental problems. Such differences are likely to affect the cohesion and success of the global climate movement.