Growing calls for ambitious climate change action are challenging for governance because such action can trigger backlash. We have seen this in cases such as the Yellow Vests in France, and acrimonious policy rollbacks in Canada and Australia, among others in recent years. But why do societies sometimes accept costly public good action, but at other times push back suddenly and reject it? Although the issue of backlash is increasingly recognised by scholars and policymakers, it remains not well understood. The challenge of BACKLASH is to empirically study, and to theorise, this type of contentious reaction to policy action. Doing so is important for advancing ambitious climate action that is also socially acceptable, particularly in the context of issues such as right-wing populism, social polarisation, entrenched interests, conflicting visions of the future, and complex processes of societal change.
The aim of BACKLASH is to explain how, why, and under which conditions climate backlash emerges, focusing on advanced industrial democracies. The Objectives are to: 1) Identify the drivers of climate backlash across varying national contexts, 2) Determine the mechanisms and processes by which climate backlash occurs, 3) Establish whether and how climate backlash spreads within and between countries, and 4) Explain the forms and variation of climate backlash, within and outside of mainstream politics. To do this, BACKLASH will compare countries at two levels: 1) among OECD countries, and 2) among four national cases, namely Australia, Canada, France, United Kingdom. This will help to explain why and how backlash occurs, to inform policy making to try to avoid it. The findings are especially important for successfully implementing the European Green Deal in coming years, and for understanding how ambitious and acceptable climate policy can be realised more generally.
