Social Dynamics of Climate Change Policy-Making and Political Action

This session invites papers that address climate change policy and political action. As each successive IPCC report continues to make clear, the science of human induced climate change and its impacts is well established. Despite the severity of ongoing and projected climate impacts on populations around the world, political action is slow and sporadic, and is often constrained by vested economic interests. As such, the most pressing — but also complex and difficult — research objectives on climate change involve understanding the social, cultural, and political dynamics and barriers to effective climate action. We invite submissions from a broad range of methodological and theoretical perspectives on climate politics, including (but not limited to): policy network and social network approaches, multi-level governance, discursive and cultural analyses, political ecology, climate justice, and eco-feminist approaches to climate politics. This session will generate valuable insights from environmental sociology on the challenges and opportunities for a more effective and equitable climate politics.