Project description
A closer look at why decarbonisation is so challenging
Long-term political challenges are often characterised by a chasm between the scale of action required and the adequacy of current political commitments. In the debate on decarbonisation, for instance, politicians avoid binding policies for fear these may come at a political cost to themselves, while citizens appear to want decarbonisation but expect politicians to lead. The EU-funded DeepDCarb project will analyse the relationship between politicians, citizens/voters and other actors. The project will create and use 13 new data-sets and analyse them using time-sensitive statistical techniques to investigate the policy instruments used by governments to engineer greater societal commitment to deep and rapid decarbonisation. DeepDCarb will also explore how far politicising and/or depoliticising contentious issues such as the delivery of deep decarbonisation enables more effective policy delivery.
Objective
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, greatly imperilling the achievement of the 1.5 and 2oC limits in the landmark Paris Agreement.
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.
It will establish a new subfield of interdisciplinary research that:
• Explores the commitment devices that all states in the world have adopted, via a nested array of 13 new datasets and time-sensitive statistical techniques;
• Opens up the ‘black box’ of societal commitment formation in a sample of large emitters (including the EU-28) to explore the relationship between politicians and citizens (1990-2020);
• Investigates the scope for unlocking traps by bringing actors together in deliberative fora such as citizens’ assemblies, thus confronting the uncomfortable question of how far societal commitment is more effectively engendered by depoliticising or politicising contentious issues.
The findings, to be widely disseminated through a programme of publication and public engagement, will contribute significantly to understanding the scope for unlocking the profound impasse in society’s struggle to deliver deep decarbonisation.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
NR4 7TJ Norwich
United Kingdom