Description
Since the Paris Agreement, national climate action has been emphasised as the driving force of decarbonisation. Despite a recent suite of climate legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the European Green Deal, in 2023 more fossil fuels were consumed than any year in history. Global climate action is failing to bend the emissions curve. Nonetheless, a limited selection of states stand out as making claims to having reduced their emissions and possessing relatively ambitious climate targets.
The papers in this panel will critically examine such claims to climate leadership in a world where climate governance is organised around reducing national emissions, rather than coordinating the systematic dismantling of the fossil fuel industry. How should we understand the significance of climate change politics in states making claims to climate leadership? Do they represent laboratories that can and should be emulated, or limited exceptions that prove the rule of climate policy failure? What kinds of social movements, policy programmes and interventions might represent true climate leadership? Developing responses to these questions, the papers in this panel will critically engage with the practices of actually existing climate ‘leaders’ and the potential for progressive and radical forms of climate leadership.
