Politicizing climate change in times of populism: an introduction

ABSTRACT

With this introduction to the special issue on climate politics, democracy, and populism, we lay the ground for the multiplicity of analyses that follow. We highlight the essentially contested nature of concepts like (de-)politicization, populism, and democracy that reject the notion of a single definition. We do so by outlining what post-, de-, and re-politicization can mean, how diverse the perspectives on populism are, and which ones help guide us in this special issue. We present the different arenas where the politicization of climate change is happening and which mechanisms are at work, particularly concerning right-wing populism. We discuss our joint understandings of democratic governance and what challenges, as well as opportunities, populism brings to the table. We do not provide a single theoretical framework but rather a typology of the various understandings of these concepts to outline how each contribution relates to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• climate politics
• democracy
• politicization
• depoliticization
• climate change

1 Exploring the ‘populist moment’ in climate change politics

In November 2016, more than 20000 participants and delegates from 196 countries gathered near Marrakesh, Morocco, at the annual climate change summit under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While many negotiators, experts, and activists were fueled by optimism and excitement over the Paris Agreement that was reached one year earlier, their mood quickly changed after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election on November 8^th. To many, the idea that an outspoken climate change denier was democratically elected to become president of the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter was an ‘unwelcome surprise and bitter disappointment’ (Hirji 2016). In response, negotiators and other stakeholders in Marrakesh quickly reassured their commitment to tackling climate change.

After decades of debates around climate change mitigation were dominated by science, market mechanisms, technical solutions and what Erik Swyngedouw (2011a) would call a depoliticized understanding of climate change, the last ten years have witnessed more and more apparently populist rhetoric, politicized claims, and confrontational decisions that shape climate action (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach 2021, Huber et al. 2021, Joakim et al. 2021, Yan et al. 2021). Referring to Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) work on populism we summarize these developments as a ‘populist moment’ in climate politics. For Mouffe, this momentum is characterized as a time in history when ‘the people’ consider a social order as ‘unfair’ and organize something new, something that goes beyond the current liberal-democratic order (Mouffe 2016). Mouffe is agnostic whether right- or left-wing populists will win the day as the populist moment can lead to authoritarian practices, but – and this is certainly what she normatively wishes for – it also holds the potential to open up new opportunities for democratic responses to the climate crisis.

Over the last years, this populist moment has unfolded in the sense that we have seen a new and rather radical politicization of climate change through individuals, movements, and governments. Right-wing populists around the world have seriously challenged the narrative of climate change as a global challenge that rests on complex interdependencies, accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, and a threat to the world population as a whole. National leaders like former US President Donald Trump, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro were at the forefront of right-wing populists mobilizing against climate change mitigation efforts. At the same time, the current struggle for just, fair, and legitimate climate action can also be understood as an opportunity to re-politicize the climate crisis and deepen democratic debates about broader societal changes linked to climate mitigation measures. Left-wing leaders like Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa but also civil society groups like the climate justice movement, Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion have popularized progressive action on climate change through unconventional modes of protest, disruptive arguments, and demands for systemic change (Kingsbury et al. 2019, Marquardt 2020, Scherhaufer et al. 2021). It thus seems fair to say that climate change has become a major battleground for many local, national, and global political forces, turning it into an important cleavage between the left and the right (Hulme 2009, 2011, Ćetković and Hagemann 2020). Climate change has thereby turned into a major field of contestation in democracies around the world (e.g., in Brazil, Ecuador, Germany, the Philippines, and the US) after partisan and ideological cleavages have long characterized domestic environmental debates (Buttel and Flinn 1976, Dunlap et al. 2001).

The collection of articles presented here captures the broad variety of issues and theoretical perspectives on the populist moment in the field of climate change. The authors are guided by three key objectives: (1) They examine how populists deal with climate change and whether and how they politicize and potentially transform it into a major cleavage in societies across the global North and South. We thus seek to overcome the Eurocentric focus that dominates many studies on populism and thereby neglects left-wing populist traditions, particularly in Latin America (e.g., Huber et al. 2020, Joakim et al. 2021, Yan et al. 2021). (2) They explore what different roles left-wing and right-wing populism plays in this, acknowledging that climate populism from the left is less clearly defined. (3) Finally, they discuss what follows from this populist moment for democratically governing climate change mitigation, leaving open the question of whether populism and democratic governance can be reconciled. The special issue thus engages with the tense relations between politicization, populism, and democracy in the field of climate change.

With this introduction, we lay the ground for the multiplicity of analyses that follow, outlining the essentially contested nature of concepts like (de-)politicization, populism, and democracy that reject the notion of a single definition. We do so by explaining what post-, de-, and re-politicization can mean, what perspectives on populism are possible and which ones we have chosen. We also present the different arenas where the politicization of climate change is happening and which mechanisms are at work on a spectrum between left- and right-wing populism. While most contributions presented here focus on right-wing populism, some articles claim that also social movements like Fridays for Future and activists like Greta Thunberg can be labeled ‘populist’. We finally discuss our joint understandings of how we perceive democratic governance and what challenges and opportunities populism brings to the table. We thereby do not provide a single theoretical framework but rather a typology of the various understandings of these contested terms and concepts and how each contribution relates to it.

2 The (de-)politicization of climate change

Climate change has become a dominant, highly contested, and politicized topic. Following Schattschneider (1960), politicization is understood as the emergence of political conflicts that become more intense, more visible, and include ever more actors (Broekema 2016, Hutter and Grande 2014, p. 4). Politicization describes the successful attempt to move an issue like climate change to the realm of the political sphere where formerly it was not. In such a setting, an issue is put on the agenda, deliberation about it occurs, interests around it are formed, and collectively binding choices can be made (Zürn 2019). Politicization implies issues of salience, actor expansion, and polarization (Grande et al. 2019, p. 1450, Hoeglinger 2016, Hutter and Grande 2014, p. 4, Hutter and Kriesi 2019, p. 999). This often starts through discursive changes that challenge the institutional grammar of an established order, juxtaposing polarizing perspectives (Laclau 2005, Mouffe 2007). As a consequence, resources are mobilized and polarization occurs (de Wilde 2011). The concept of politicization can be used in a normatively favorable sense by denoting the openness of a (democratic) debate (Mouffe 2016, 2018). In a derogatory sense, it reflects a high degree of fragmentation and implies that those who politicize are not interested in objective solutions (Palonen et al. 2019).

The concept of politicization has been particularly popular in research on European integration, where post-functionalist interpretations helped explain the ‘permissive consensus’ of the post-Maastricht period (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 2012, de Wilde 2011). The question of an ‘ever closer Union’ turned from an elite discourse to becoming ‘the object of intensified conflicts over national sovereignty, political identity, and financial redistribution’ (Hutter and Grande 2014, p. 2). Scholars have shown that these debates primarily take place within national arenas (Hutter and Kriesi 2019, p. 998), and that politicization needs polarizing agents, which very often were populists from the left or right, who juxtapose ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ (see below). Within Europe, the general argument was that these populists do not emerge from mainstream parties but rather they form new platforms, movements, and eventually new parties (Hutter and Kriesi 2019, p. 999). In contrast, established parties have used tactics of depoliticization by delegating authority to scientific bodies and technocratic institutions (Schimmelfennig 2019).

Depoliticization refers to an attempt to close down debates and avoid controversies, pushing the argument that ‘there is no alternative’ to a defined pathway. Depoliticization often takes the form of professionalization, technocratization, or delegation to agencies. It can be understood as a governing strategy of political agents, as a process where specific mechanisms play out, and as an outcome in which these agents try to close an issue area to political debate (Feindt et al. 2020, pp. 4–5). Similarly, the increasingly prominent concept of the post-political describes a situation where political agents no longer fight over the underlying issues but rather accept consensus descriptions in terms of ‘indisputable facts’ that justify a specific action but close it to a broader debate on aspects like the societal roots of climate (in)action (Pepermans and Maeseele 2016, p. 480, Swyngedouw 2011b). The political, in the sense that a conflict is recognized and dealt with, is thus foreclosed; antagonisms are avoided; and politics is no more than an instrument (Rancière 1998, Crouch 2019). In contrast, re-politicization refers to a process that challenges these modes of depoliticization when resistance evolves, for example in the case of patronage politics that is being contested. Populism represents one attempt at re-politicization (Sheingate and Greer 2020).

Concepts like de-, post-, and re-politicization have also entered debates about climate change. There, nature and the environment are often presented and constructed as apolitical areas that are detached from societal struggles. Scholars from fields like anthropology (e.g., Lahsen 2009), geography (e.g., Mahony 2014), politics (e.g., Lövbrand 2011), and development studies (e.g., Forsyth 2003) have drawn attention to the politicization of nature and the politics attached to the environment to address the shortcomings of an objectivist and depoliticized notion of scientific expertise and a so-called realist conception of environmental risks. Controversies about who defines what, which data gains legitimacy and counts as relevant, and what gets marginalized or silenced are inseparable from political debates over norms and worldviews. In that sense, knowledge about global environmental change is performative by co-creating causes, effects, potential solutions, and affected constituencies (Jasanoff 2010, Beck et al. 2017). According to Miller (2004), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gained authority by globalizing the atmosphere and constructing a discourse that framed climate change as a risk to the global environment. Beck and Forsyth (2015) argue that the IPCC attempts to decontextualize its expertise from its political influences, and thereby diminishes its relevance and legitimacy for affected people.

Today, we witness a striking tension between attempts to depoliticize climate change by referencing science-based trajectories and technological fixes, while at the same time, social movements and other political actors openly politicize climate change by relating it to issues of justice, societal struggles, and political order. Scientific bodies like the IPCC as well as social movements like Extinction Rebellion express a sense that we are running out of time to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change, thereby reducing climate politics to the depletion of a naturally limited carbon budget (Marquardt and Delina 2021). The climate justice movement openly questions neo-liberal capitalism by criticizing the commodification of nature in climate change politics (Hadden 2015) and ongoing debates about geoengineering to solve the climate crisis demonstrate the different perspectives on climate politics ranging from emissions reductions all the way to societal change (Lederer and Kreuter 2018, Biermann et al. 2022).

Global warming has developed into a major topic at almost all political levels; it includes and affects ever more actors across different political arenas, and the degree of polarization has grown significantly in recent years (Pepermans and Maeseele 2016, Chinn et al. 2020, Linde 2020). Climate change is thus moving to the heart of the political sphere and it becomes a battleground for the promotion of and resistance to broader political reforms and societal change. Of course, the global climate negotiations under the UNFCCC have always been very political and full of contestation, but particularly climate mitigation has become much more salient in everyday politics. Climate change has thus clearly left the exclusive realm of the expert community, and policies, as well as discourses, are shaped by a wide range of actors as it entails broader societal consequences.

These debates on (de-)politicizing climate change are taken up in this issue’s contributions. On the one hand, Swyngedouw (2022) further develops his argumentation about depoliticization (Swyngedouw 2011b), arguing that the current climate discourse is making use of a particular form of populism that he analyzes from a Lacanian perspective. He claims that mainstream climate populism is deeply rooted in our desires for (material) consumption, as it acknowledges the climate crisis, but denies its political roots at the same time. According to Swyngedouw (2022), also more radical climate discourses obscure the power relations underpinning the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, various country-specific articles in this special issue demonstrate how climate change has emerged as a popular issue, leading to strong politicization. Fiorino (2022) focuses on the US, making the case that climate change has become one dominant cleavage in US politics and that populist arguments are being made on both sides of the debate. This is also the case for Germany, where the populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has discovered climate change as a politicizing factor (Böcher et al. 2022). In Ecuador, we saw a politicizing moment regarding climate change under its president, Rafael Correa (Kramarz and Kingsbury 2022). In the US, the Philippines, and Brazil, democratically elected right-wing populist leaders politicized the topic of climate change in their speeches, through policy action and institutional interventions. Yet, they do so in utterly different ways (Marquardt et al. 2022). Selk and Kemmerzell (2022) compare Austria, Germany, and Poland to show how right-wing parties politicize the climate quite differently. However, politicization cannot only be understood by looking at specific countries or parties. Also, temporal cleavages have evolved between those who argue for a climate emergency and those who long for ‘retrotopia.’ Hanusch and Meisch (2022) ask how these temporalities of both right- and left-wing populists are mobilized. Nordensvard and Ketola (2022) show that politicization is happening through specific narratives, contrasting the storytelling of Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg. It thus becomes evident that politicization and populism are closely connected in climate change politics.

3 Populism in climate change politics

Populism represents an essentially contested concept with conflicting imperatives and a lack of a ‘settled and shared definition’ (Woods 2014, p. 2). The term has attracted a lot of academic attention in recent years (excellent overviews include Abromeit 2017, de la Torre 2019, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, Müller 2016; Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017), but there is ‘still little agreement as to how to properly conceptualize populism’ (Moffitt and Tormey 2014, p. 1). Critics argue that the excessive use of the term has made it meaningless and an ‘empty analytical shell’ (Jagers and Walgrave 2007, p. 323). However, Moffitt and Tormey (2014, p. 382) suggest that ‘the plurality of definitions’ captures the complexity of populism. Moffitt’s (2016) distinction between four key approaches to populism – namely ideology, strategy, discourse, and political logic – provides helpful guidance to the field.

The ideological perspective is arguably the most prominent approach to populism. Scholars like Mudde (2004), Abts and Rummens (2007), and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012) have conceptualized populism as a ‘thin-centered ideology’ (Mudde 2004, p. 543) that needs to incorporate ideas and meanings of ‘thicker’ ideologies like nationalism, in order not to be completely devoid of meaning (Moffitt 2016, p. 25). This becomes most obvious with campaign slogans like ‘Take Back Control’ or ‘Make America Great Again’ that stress the loss of national sovereignty and identify globalization or immigration as the main enemy from which the populace has to be protected (Sheingate and Greer 2020).

Other scholars have investigated populism as a form of strategy mobilized by political leaders (e.g., Roberts 2006) and expressed through populist movements’ organizational features (e.g., Barr 2003). For example, Weyland (2001) defines populism as ‘a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers.’ Such a concept focuses on how populist leaders direct and mobilize ‘the people’ and how they pursue political power (Weyland 2017, p. 50). Populism is thus not defined by a leader’s norms and values, but by the direct relationship with the followers. Such a perspective, however, can be problematic, as it identifies direct modes of engagement as populist for a broad range of organizations (e.g., social movements) and modes of governance (e.g., community politics) (Hawkins 2010, p. 168).

Scholars have also taken a discursive approach to populism, understood ‘as a particular mode of political expression, usually evident in speech or text’ (Moffitt 2016, p. 28). Such a perspective refuses to see populism as a yes or no category, but rather as ‘a gradational property of specific instances of political expression’ (Gidron and Bonikowski 2013, 8). Populist discourses work independently from a normative political program. For example, the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, might use a populist discourse, but his ideological foundation is socialism – and not populism (Hawkins 2010). Empirical studies (Koopmans and Muis 2009, Hawkins 2010) show that actors who we might commonly not consider populists frequently apply a populist discourse.

Ernesto Laclau (2005) criticizes the above-mentioned approaches and instead proposes the conceptualization of populism as a political logic. Moving away from the specific contents of politics, Laclau shifts the focus to the ontological status of the populist concept itself. He describes populism as the structuring logic of political life, because ‘any political project is premised on the division between two competing antagonistic groups’ (Moffitt 2016, p. 29) such as elites vs. the people. By articulating demands, the people hold the power for societal renewal and political change: ‘And if “the people” are the subject of the political, then populism is the logic of the political’ (Moffitt 2016, p. 30).

Despite these conceptual conflicts and contradictions, we – following Mudde (2017) see a broad consensus in the literature about at least three core components that constitute a common understanding of populism that serves as a basic conceptual framework for the articles in this special issue: the people, the elite, and the construction of the people as a unified entity against a constructed or imagined external enemy (e.g., in Mudde 2017, p. 28). Populist power rests on a constructed group of the people who feel excluded from or unheard in the political process, no matter whether this group is imagined as marginalized coal workers, disadvantaged middle-class families, or neglected but vulnerable minorities. Populists mobilize against often abstract, technical, and market-driven climate change-related policies such as carbon pricing schemes, which are described as political agendas of the liberal elite against the ordinary people. Thus, environmental concerns have become a very salient dimension of contestation. In such a setting where society is divided into ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, ‘politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’ (Mudde 2004, p. 543). While such a focus provides some legitimacy, populists also have to identify a threat from an outside enemy to effectively politicize and set up a clear antagonism. Eventually, existing forms of political representation and intermediation are criticized as being deficient to provide remedy from the threat.

When in 2017 the Oxford Handbook on Populism (Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017) and afterward in 2019 the Routledge Handbook on Global Populism (de la Torre 2019) were published, the editors did not include the environment or climate change as topics for dedicated chapters. However, since then, scholars have explored the various connections between populism and environmental politics. For example, a special issue in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers explores through numerous case studies how the rise in authoritarian leadership and populist politics shapes environmental politics and governance (McCarthy 2019). Contributions to another collection explore the relationship between populism and environmentalism (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach 2021). In a recent attempt, Huber (2020) sheds light on the role of populist attitudes to explain both climate change skepticism and support for environmental protection. In her case study about California’s San Joaquin Valley, Chandrasekaran (2020) relates environmental populism to environmental justice groups. Bosworth (2020) turns to the People’s Climate March to examine the construction and contestation of ‘the people’ through languages and space. Beeson (2019) argues in his book on Environmental Populism that some populist forms of political action could lead to more progressive and effective environmental policies.

This special issue is now the first attempt to systematically link climate change politics, particularly on the right, to the contested field of populism. We thereby aim to better understand how the mixture of (de-)politicization and populism affects liberal democratic climate governance not only in Europe but across a diverse set of countries of the global North and South. Recognizing that populism is deeply embedded into societal conditions and thus ‘always needs to be contextualized’ (Anselmi 2018, p. 1), the contributions showcase that the people, the elites, and the supposed external enemies are very differently constructed. They exemplify how right-wing, and to some extent also left-wing populists, turn towards climate change as a contested political issue.

Right-wing populism has been identified as one force of politicization on the domestic level (Zürn 2019), and right-wing populists of various strands have discovered climate change politics as a major battleground (Fraune and Knodt 2018, Lockwood 2018, Forchtner 2019). Lockwood (2018, p. 714), for example, argues that climate change is part of a broader ideological dispute but still frames it as a ‘collateral damage’ of right-wing populism. In an attempt to classify climate-related populism in Northern Europe, Vihma et al. (2020, p. 22) distinguish between three idealized types of right-wing populism related to climate change, which they label as climate science denialism, climate policy nationalism, and climate policy conservatism. We take this up arguing that climate science denialism and nationalism can be witnessed in Germany (Böcher et al. 2022; Selk and Kemmerzell 2022), the US (Fiorino 2022), and Brazil (Marquardt et al. 2022). However, in countries like Austria or Poland we rather detect climate policy conservatism (Selk and Kemmerzell 2022), and a similar trend is visible in the Philippines (Marquardt et al. 2022).

While the destructive links between climate politics and right-wing populism seem rather obvious, the situation is less clear when it comes to populism on the left. Especially left-wing activism and movements such as Extinction Rebellion or Friday for Future as well as progressive new-left party politics in some regions of, for example, Latin America can be labeled as left-wing populism. They have not only mobilized the image of a crisis that demands urgent action and asked the mainstream to ‘panic’ due to a climate emergency. They have also brought new concepts to the table and have given far-reaching alternatives a voice. Left-wing activists and politicians brought the topic of climate change to the public and onto the official agenda of various institutions. The targeted ‘elite’ consists of politicians and businesspeople who do not listen to the scientists (and indigenous communities), and it thus needs ‘the people’ in the form of the young generations or indigenous groups to re-politicize climate change. On the one hand, this can be witnessed in specific countries, as shown by Kramarz and Kingsbury(2022) in the case of Ecuador. On the other hand, it is debatable if, how, and to what extent whole climate movements such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, or the climate justice movement subscribe to left-wing populism as an opportunity for radical democracy. Advocating for marginalized groups and giving attention to the ones most affected by climate change, these protests can be seen as a form of democratic intervention that brings voices to the political process that normally remain unheard. Providing an additional perspective by refusing to focus on right- and left-wing extremes, Swyngedouw(2022) argues that not only do radical climate movements and climate deniers take a populist tone, but that even the most established climate discourses and practices are fundamentally populist. All authors do, however, agree that the populist strategies, mechanisms, and ways of disrupting established institutions have repercussions for democratic systems, to which we turn in the next section.

4 Democracy, populism, and climate change

The relations between politicization, populism, and democracy are complex, and in the words of Mudde (2016, p. 57) they contain ‘the good, the bad and ugly.’ While populist rhetoric, strategies, and interventions can be openly anti-democratic, populist arguments can also help illuminate the democratic deficits of political decision-making and bring issues to the core that the mainstream has neglected. On the one hand, scholars claim that populism will lead to more authoritarian tendencies since populism is inherently anti-democratic and a threat to established institutions, pluralism, and the rule of law (Žižek 2006, Inglehart and Norris 2016). On the other hand, populism has historically been associated with a broadening and deepening of democracy, in particular, through populist mass movements in the US (Goodwyn 1978) and Latin America. Populism can thus be a positive force for democracy, enacting the sovereignty of the people and emancipatory radical democracy. Laclau and Mouffe in particular have stressed this democratizing and emancipating potential of populism (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Laclau 2005, Mouffe 2018). Scholars like Moffitt (2016) argue that the effects of populism on democracy depend on historical, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts and thus merit a more deeply empirical and less normative understanding. As such, populism represents a potential corrective for liberal democracy by encouraging innovative forms of participation (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012, Inglehart and Norris 2016, Moffitt 2016), which underlines the importance of exploring the contexts in which populism plays out.

Machin (2020) embraces this ‘ecological agonism’ where democratic disagreement over climate change provides an opportunity to develop alternatives, disrupt business as usual policy-making, and foster civic participation. Similarly, Nordensvard and Ketola’s (2022) analysis of Greta Thunberg’s storytelling shows that there is a democratic potential that Fridays for Future activists are making use of. Kramarz and Kingsbury(2022) argue that a populist moment provided a window of opportunity for Ecuador’s Yasuni initiative. Swyngedouw’s(2022) article does not provide much hope that left-wing voices will be heard, but he argues for a re-orientation in the climate change discourse in two ways to avoid succumbing to ‘the populist temptation.’ First, while the climate emergency discourse implies that it is not too late to act, we should acknowledge that the climate catastrophe is already real for many people globally. Second, we should also recognize that solving the climate crisis is not about saving humanity, but it has yet to be realized in light of the multiple tensions and conflicts in the world.

Depending on the context, populism can have various effects on democracy, which of course also depends on how we define what constitutes a democracy. Most obviously, populism can trigger processes of polarization and radicalization within established democratic systems. It can additionally trigger processes of devolution and foster participation from actors who are otherwise outside the political discourse through unconventional or disruptive interventions. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017, p. 1) argue that populism is ‘most fundamentally juxtaposed to liberal democracy rather than to democracy per se,’ and we follow their definition of democracy as being a combination of popular sovereignty and majority rule (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, p. 80). We claim that it is in particular the institutional setup of liberal representative democracies that aims to protect against a tyranny of the majority and thus includes elements like the rule of law, vertical and horizontal checks and balances, minority rights, a pluralist party system, and strong courts that guarantee separation of powers (Canovan 1999). These institutions often make liberal democracies very stable but also slow and complicated due to the multiple hierarchies, interdependencies, and the need for political compromises in a multilevel governance system (Scharpf 1985).

These factors lead to a general skepticism regarding an absolute recognition of the will of the people and thus make liberal democracies a main target of populist movements. Along these lines, Selk and Kemmerzell (2022) argue that conflicts in democratic societies about climate change cannot be separated from democratic devolution that liberal democracies in their view currently undergo. Marquardt et al. (2022) focus on strong populist leaders who juxtapose the will of the people against a pluralist party system and who were quite successful in doing so in the US, Brazil, and the Philippines. Fiorino (2022) shows in detail how the institutional setup was challenged by Trump and how he was able to undo many liberal elements within the policy field of climate change. Similarly, Böcher et al.(2022) delineate how the AfD in Germany is using climate politics to undermine parliamentarian routines and conventions. Hanusch and Meisch (2022) stress the important role of ‘retrotopias’ in right-wing populist discourses and how such constructions often allude to the good old times that were not only conservative but also much less complex than current systems. All these articles stress that populism is indeed a serious challenge for liberal democracy.

5 Conclusion

More than ten years ago, Held and Fane-Hervey (2011, p. 90) have argued that modern liberal democracies often struggle to effectively tackle global collective action problems like climate change. And indeed, governing the climate crisis provokes a variety of democratic challenges and conflicts, particularly in times of populism. By promising more direct forms of government and control by the people, in contrast to expert-driven intermediate government structures, populists undermine complex climate governance arrangements (Canovan 2001). At the same time, the ‘populist moment’ offers an opportunity to shed light on the sociopolitical aspects related to climate change and thus potentially democratize the field. While depoliticization promotes managerial and technocratic approaches to solving the climate crisis, it also delays more fundamental transformative changes which we believe are necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. Re-politicization from left- and right-wing populists is thus a trend that is here to stay and that will intensify the more climate change has effects on people’s lives and populists will include this in their political discourses. We, therefore, agree that taking populism seriously means acknowledging that ‘climate change is not just a policy problem, nor just a geographical phenomenon, but a site of cultural and conceptual change’ (Brown 2014, p. 129) closely tied to how we define and imagine democracy. The rich literature on populism and politicization offers a valuable entry point to investigate the democratic challenges of climate change governance, as demonstrated in this special issue.

Collectively this issue contributes to the debate on the ‘populist moment’ in climate change politics in three ways: First, we show that populist voices on the left and the right have led to a re-politicization of climate change in countries around the world and this re-politicization is here to stay. The case studies from the global South, like Brazil, the Philippines, and Ecuador demonstrate that climate politics has become an important cleavage within political discourse, and populists of all kinds have taken a position on the issue. They situate the people against an elite, although in these countries the constructed elite is much more an international or globalist and less a national one. Our authors have also shown that we have to be very careful in making general judgments on the global North or South when it comes to populism. In fact, even apparently similar right-wing parties in countries as close as Austria, Germany, and Poland take different positions (Selk and Kemmerzell 2022) as do populist leaders in countries of the global South like Correa in Ecuador, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Duterte in the Philippines when it comes to debates on whether climate change is real or not (Kramarz and Kingsbury 2022; Marquardt et al. 2022). In many contexts, populist claims on climate change are closely interlinked or dominated by other cleavages, for example, economic inequality or migration. How these interlinkages and overlaps work and whether they reinforce each other represents an important open question for future research.

Second, politicians on the right and the left have discovered climate change as a major political battleground. They make use of populist arguments to substantiate their positions. While they all aim to defend ‘the people,’ defining the people dramatically depends on the context. In the US, ’the people’ Trump and the Republican Party claim to speak for are the marginalized and those losing out from globalization (Nordensvard and Ketola 2022, Fiorino 2022). Similarly, the AfD in Germany claims to represent those who have been left out by the ‘system Merkel’ (Böcher et al. 2022). In contrast, Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future speak for the young and future generations. While it seems fair to claim that this is also a ‘people’-centered argument (Nordensvard and Ketola 2022), other scholars refuse to label the climate school strikes ‘populist’ (Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020) since politics is always about a certain vision of ‘the people’. Nevertheless, our authors show that not only Correa in Ecuador but also social movements like Fridays for Future rely on the antagonism of the people and the elite. We can also see that quite opposing knowledge reservoirs are brought up. Whereas right-wing populists speak of personal experiences or lay knowledge, left-wing populists refer to the IPCC and science to justify their demands. This leads to very different meta-narratives (Nordensvard and Ketola 2022) and understandings of time (Hanusch and Meisch 2022). Another difference is the political base that sociologically carries right- or left-wing climate change populists, which remains an open question for further research. While right-wing populists seem to have dominated the landscape of climate politics over the last years, this could change in the future with dynamic political constellations and increasing demands for more radical climate action.

Third, regarding populism and democracy, our contributions come to differing conclusions, ranging from somehow positive outlooks regarding climate justice movements (Nordensvard and Ketola 2022) to pessimistic perspectives regarding the future of liberal democracy (Selk and Kemmerzell 2022). While this collection helps to provide a more nuanced and context-specific understanding, it remains an open debate if and how liberal democracies can and should give room to populist arguments to strengthen their democratic legitimacy. The cleavages and tensions identified here seem to multiply at the global level since liberal democratic institutions seem to be incompatible with an ambitious and effective international climate change regime. While new modes of governing like socio-ecological movements (Fischer 2017), cosmopolitan democracy (Bäckstrand 2011), or deliberative elements (Hayley and Dryzek 2014) hold the promise of expanding democracy beyond the nation-state, it should be investigated if and how current tendencies towards renationalization, populism, and post-truth act as powerful counter forces in an attempt to democratize global climate governance. After all, the ‘populist moment’ is not limited to the climate crisis but affects other (global) environmental concerns such as biodiversity loss or marine pollution. Stronger interaction between and learning across these environmental policy fields seems promising to shed light on how to address the politicization of global environmental problems in populist times.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank all contributors to this special issue for their commitment to this collection. We also thank Karin Bäckstrand, Frank Biermann, Stefan Cetković, Matthew Lockwood, Eva Lövbrand, Amanda Machin, and Jonathan Pickering for their valuable feedback during an authors' workshop in 2020. We highly appreciate the comments from an anonymous reviewer and we are particularly thankful to John Meyer for his support and editorial guidance throughout the entire process. We are grateful to FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for partially funding this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung [30.20.0.093PO] and Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas [2017-01889].