ABSTRACT While a burgeoning literature has investigated the effects of extreme weather events on citizens’ climate attitudes and voting behaviour, politicians’ reactions to such events mostly remain a black box. Our mixed-methods analysis of plenary debates following the 2021 floods in Germany focuses on the framing competition in the Bundestag and its relationship to legislators’ ideology and constituency linkages. While climate change as a cause of the floods is barely discussed, far-right legislators attempt to capitalise on them by blaming governmental and institutional failures in dealing with the tragedy. Climate change adaptation is present in the discourse of most mainstream parties, but advocating for climate change mitigation is a strategy only adopted by the Greens. Our analyses also indicate that legislators react differently depending on their districts’ exposure to floods.

ABSTRACT European regions long reliant on fossil-intensive energy are undergoing change driven by the European Green Deal, yet the green transition remains uneven across regions. In Estonia’s Ida-Virumaa, one of Europe’s most carbon-intensive regions, the green transition intersects with ethnic diversity, economic precarity, and far-right populism, generating uncertainty in communities whose deep regional ties are rooted in the oil-shale industry and shaped by both the Soviet past and a contested green future. We show that locals hold multiple, overlapping identities, which the green transition can unsettle, fuelling social discontent and perceptions of injustice around green transition policies and measures. The paper further demonstrates how the Estonian far right strategically deploys selective intersectionality by reframing local demands for fairness through identity-selective narratives, such as gender, labour heritage, and land, to broaden political influence while excluding marginalized groups. The findings highlight the need for place-sensitive policies that tackle regional inequalities and strengthen the legitimacy of green transitions.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how climate activists interpret capitalism and shows that underlying shared anti-capitalist sentiments are significant conceptual differences. Based on 43 in-depth interviews with German activists recruited from public-facing climate groups and events, the study distinguishes two divergent conceptualizations. Older activists, shaped by the long 1970s, understand capitalism primarily as a cultural and value system, emphasizing individual change and consciousness-raising. Younger respondents, who grew up amid sociopolitical destabilization and the looming climate catastrophe, lack a similar positive schematic knowledge. Drawing instead on theoretical knowledge, they tend to frame capitalism as a system with built-in imperatives, but struggle to translate their diagnosis into a coherent prognosis. These patterns challenge simple distinctions between moderate and radical activism and reveal hybrid repertoires across cohorts. The study advances generational theory and clarifies why anti-capitalism is common yet remains analytically diffuse.

ABSTRACT We draw on the literatures of environmental vulnerability and natural disasters to explain the determinants of different green citizen actions. We test several propositions using a national public opinion survey in Guatemala, a country that combines high vulnerability to climate change threats as well as low adaptive capacity to cope with these threats. Our results show that ‘climate bads’ – as in when natural disasters result in physical harms to households or the physical destruction of homes, including the temporary relocation of households because of damaged homes – are consistent drivers of green citizen actions. Government environmental protection and the presence of NGOs providing relief assistance also advance a favorable environment conducive to citizens being green. Our findings show that green citizen actions matter in climate vulnerable nations like Guatemala, notwithstanding the country’s low adaptive capacity to climate change.

ABSTRACT The limited research on youth climate activism in the Global South highlights that repression is a key obstacle for such activism in Southern countries. How young climate activists navigate repression, however, has hardly been studied so far. To help close this gap, we examine Uganda’s vocal youth climate movement, which has arisen despite a restricted political context. Drawing on framing research, we argue that framing strategies can enable activism within shrinking spaces. Our analysis retraces the Ugandan movement’s collective action frames based on social media, showing a divide between moderate groups and a confrontative civil disobedience faction, with the latter being repressed. We find that Uganda’s very visible mainstream youth climate groups have employed three framing strategies to evade repression: aligning their frames with the Ugandan government, maintaining vagueness, and targeting international actors. This framing strategy allows for activism in constrained settings but also has its downsides.

ABSTRACT While inaction on climate policy is often attributed to the constellation of organized interests mobilized, we still do not possess systematic maps of who mobilizes, and on what side of the debate, and in what policy arena. Using a multi-arena approach, covering the executive, legislature and media, we present data on the aggregate population of organizations mobilizing on climate change in Australia – one of the top 20 greenhouse gas emitters in the world. Our results indicate that there is a core set of organized interests that dominate climate policy in Australia. Surprisingly, we find that the media is the only arena that has a strong fossil fuel bias with carbon intensive industries most active. These findings suggest some critical corrections to the standing wisdom around the unity of business actors, and the conclusions drawn from looking at only one arena or one set of actors.

ABSTRACT Status threat, defined as the perception that one’s group status, influence, and position in the hierarchy are threatened, has been shown to impact public attitudes across a variety of issue areas. However, the role that status threat plays in forming attitudes on the renewable energy transition is unknown. Using an original survey experiment in the United States, we examine how status threat shapes attitudes toward the renewable energy transition. Our results suggest that status threat, particularly economic status threat, decreases support for renewable energy policies. Since attitudes toward the transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to one dominated by renewable energy remain mixed, our findings suggest that status threat may be directly hindering the renewable energy transition, which is central to efforts to combat climate change.

ABSTRACT Anti-environmentalism is an important component of the broader conservative movement and represents an essential feature for the maintenance of this coalition over time. National Review, since its inception in the mid-1950s, has presented itself as the primary intellectual clearinghouse for conservative thought and the conservative movement. As such, in this article we examine how anti-environmentalism is presented as conservative coalition maintenance in the pages of National Review. Using automated text analysis of issues of National Review from 2009 to 2024 we find that the main topics regarding the environment presented in the magazine are the costs and burdens of regulation as well as the importance of reliable energy, namely that provided by fossil fuels. Topics such as climate change are also presented in the magazine but often in connection to the costs associated with regulations to counteract it.

ABSTRACT As climate change became more important to voters and political parties in the late 2010s in Europe, this paper asks whether aspects of public opinion on the issue also became more politicised, in the sense of being more closely linked to either party-family vote choice or left–right identity. We consider change from Wave 8 (2016–17) to Wave 10 (2020–22) of the European Social Survey (ESS). Climate consciousness increased overall, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Politicisation of climate change increased mostly in Western Europe, where climate consciousness increased more on the left, and for left-wing party voters, than on the right. The Populist-Right party family, as a group, was distinctive in the relative stability of climate consciousness among their voters. Our results show increased politicisation of climate change attitudes within Western European countries, but also convergence between polities of the East and West at higher levels of climate consciousness.

ABSTRACT Participatory processes have become central to environmental governance, particularly in regions undergoing socio-economic transformations due to phase-outs. We examine how power dynamics shape civil society participation in decision-making processes within the context of the German coal phase-out. In the coal region Lusatia, local actor participation is a key factor in selecting projects to be funded with the federal states’ share of the structural reorientation funds. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we analyze how power was exercised in participatory governance processes in Lusatia and the implications for civil society actors. Findings reveal discrepancies between the rhetoric and implementation of participation: public actors dominate decision-making, relegating non-state actors to a passive role in approving proposals. By highlighting the challenges of participatory governance in contexts characterized by historical economic decline, top-down management, and public disillusionment, our findings contribute to broader debates about the role of power in environmental governance and the politics of phase-out.