(De)Politicizing Climate and Environmental Politics in Times of Crises: Contexts, Strategies and Effects

The world is confronted with a variety of global environmental threats that have increasingly become the subject of heated political debates and controversies. The climate and biodiversity crises are key reference points for new forms of activism and counter-activism, polarizing public opinion and fueling disputes between political parties and institutionalized political actors. Some argue that the politicization of environmental and climate issues is necessary to attract public and political attention and to mobilize and organize collective action. Others argue that it can be counterproductive, undermining social cohesion and leading to gridlock. Parallel to politicization, and sometimes closely intertwined with it, are attempts at depoliticization. Depoliticization includes the dismantling of political decision-making and the transfer of formerly political decisions to non-political areas such as administration, economy, law or science. Again, there are different assessments. Sometimes depoliticization is seen as an inappropriate simplification of complex controversies and an attempt to maintain the political status quo; sometimes, depoliticization is deemed necessary to avoid endless political debates and to come to terms with collectively binding decisions.

Politicization and depoliticization are established, albeit hardly consolidated, political science concepts for describing, explaining, and critically evaluating fundamental dynamics in different arenas, contexts and points in time. As such, they seem particularly well suited to illuminate the transformative (non-)changes and dynamics - at the level of individual behavior, communities and movements, and governance and policy - that occur in environmental and climate politics in the face of crisis. The proposed Research Topic aims to make use of these concepts for the analysis of current environmental and climate politics. To this end, it aims to bring together different conceptual and theoretical perspectives as well as different methodological designs for analyzing politicization and depoliticization in different issue areas and contexts. In this way, the proposed Research Topic will make a timely and relevant contribution also to the broader debate on socio-ecological crises and transformation dynamics. The analyses compiled in the Research Topic shall serve as a basis for practical implications regarding the shaping of environmental and climate policy in times of crisis.

We welcome theoretical, methodological, empirical and/or practice-oriented contributions from different subfields of political science that are related to the Research Topic's overall theme. We are especially keen to receive contributions that attempt to build bridges between political science analyses and related disciplines such as social movement studies or science and technology studies. Under the common frame of politicization and depoliticization in environmental and climate policy (in the broadest sense, i.e., including food, mobility, energy, etc.), the contributions will address a variety of more specific topics, such as:

(1) Actor strategies of politicization and depoliticization.
(2) Causes and drivers of politicization and depoliticization dynamics in environmental and climate politics.
(3) Assessments of politicization and depoliticization, including implications for democracy and sustainability.
(4) Impacts and effects of politicization and depoliticization on governance and policy-making, social-ecological conflicts and transformations.