In this forum, we highlight a discord in strategies around climate change policy and politics. On one hand, there is widespread concern for the pursuit of climate policy stability : stability in the design of policy and institutions, but particularly making policy and institutional development irreversible . However, much recent literature has revived an insistence on the inevitability of political conflict for pursuing the often large transitions needed to mitigate and adapt to accelerating climate change. Here, addressing climate change requires conflict, to weaken the power of incumbent actors that have blocked ambitious climate policy enactment for decades. Scholarship deploying each perspective tends to explicitly accept the need for radical sociotechnical transformations to address the climate crisis, but each entails radically different approaches to how to pursue decarbonization. The article outlines a research agenda focused on thinking about how these two apparently contradictory dynamics in climate politics interact, to advance our understanding of what sorts of strategies might open up political space for rapid transformations.

Global environmental governance (GEG) is widely recognized as particularly networked. And negotiation sites are sites not only of formal decision-making processes but also of intense networking by various actors. Use of formal social network analysis to analyze both networked governance and governance networks in global environmental politics has to date mostly rested on relatively easy-to-get data, such as membership in formal organizations or treaties. These analyses give useful broad-brush analyses to help think about the social structure of environmental governance, but relatively limited inferences can be drawn about key processes that network analysis can help understand, such as learning, diffusion, and other forms of institutional interaction. This article proposes how to advance the value of the method in the field by focusing on the personal networks of actors who make up the decision-making processes in GEG. Negotiation sites could thus become important sites for collection of data about these networks, through direct observation of interactions, intensive short interviews, and surveys, in particular.

The paper describes and analyzes the responses of insurance companies to global climate politics. It shows how these responses failed to live up to the initial optimism of environmentalists and commentators about the potential of the involvement of insurers in climate politics. It then attempts to explain why insurers have disappointed environmentalist expectation. It shows that part of this is due to constraints and opportunities within the insurance business itself. But it then shows how much of the reason is to do with a simplistic understanding by environmentalists of the power of insurers. Examining the political-economic contexts in which insurance companies operate provides a clearer picture as to the limits to the role insurers can play in mitigating global warming.

This article challenges conventional accounts of the collapse of the climate change negotiations in The Hague in November 2000. Such accounts are usually based on assumptions about the dynamics of international environmental politics, in particular the assumption that individual state interests and collective global interests always collide. It argues that the recent emergence of an ecological modernization discourse concerning global warming raises serious questions about the validity of this assumption. The article then describes the contours of the emerging ecological modernization discourse, and discusses its implications for global climate politics.