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Governments are facing increasingly complex policy challenges, ranging from climate change, demographic pressures, rising inequalities and discontent, to the global health crisis that countries are presently confronting. Successful responses require more integrated approaches to policy making at all levels of government, so that economic, social and environmental actions reinforce each other rather than compete. They also require effective coordination across levels of government to manage shared responsibilities, mutual dependence and common challenges. This commentary highlights the progress in the multi-level governance concept since its first use, and focuses on some current dynamics driving multi-level governance, in particular the trend towards differentiated subnational governance. It then highlights that the way multi-level governance systems are designed has a direct impact on policy outcomes, hence the imperative to strengthen multi-level governance systems. The commentary offers insight into how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is tacking this imperative to best support countries in their development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention given to the environment by the British public has fluctuated over recent decades. Having peaked in 2007 it declined, yet has recently risen dramatically. This raises questions about why public attention to the issue changes over time and to what extent this is driven by other actors and exogenous forces. This article examines these processes at the monthly level through a system of simultaneous equations. Methodologically, protest is an important confounding factor when analysing the relationship between media and public salience. Substantively, protest itself can be predicted by prior public attention, but in turn, can be successful in increasing broader environmental salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate policy across the developed world remains inadequate, despite high levels of concern about climate change among the public. Yet public opinion on climate change is complex, with individuals differing on three key opinion dimensions: belief and concern, issue salience, and support for government action. In this study, we investigate how these dimensions intersect at the individual level. Based on data from an online survey conducted in 2018 in the United Kingdom (N = 787), a latent class analysis reveals that there are five climate change opinion publics. The two largest publics have strong beliefs that climate change is occurring, but view it as a low salience issue, or are wary of government action to address it. We also investigate sociopolitical covariates of each public. By providing a detailed picture of climate change views, these findings can help us to better understand the relationship between public opinion and climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions was originally devised in 1992 to guard people so poor as to be able to afford only fossil fuels from being priced out of energy by market mechanisms like cap-and-trade that were proposed to assist with limiting climate change. Non-carbon energy can now be made as affordable and accessible as fossil fuel, but tensions remain between measures to support sustainable development and measures to control climate change. Consequently, the distinction between subsistence energy and luxury energy continues to be surprisingly relevant to current international political struggles. The most fully justified method for normative assessment of Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, the Climate Equity Reference Framework, presupposes the distinction. Normative evaluation of the choice between maximally ambitious ratcheting-up of Nationally Determined Contributions in the immediate future and lazy reliance upon hoped-for carbon dioxide removal in future decades depends on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that the media’s principal role regarding public opinion is reinforcement of pre-existing attitudes – and that this idea is relative inconsequential politically – is pervasive, across many political and social science sub-disciplines, and in non-academic commentary. This article comprehensively challenges the evidential and theoretical underpinnings of this thesis, drawing on a wealth of contemporary survey data and media coverage research, across a range of issues, including climate change, Brexit, immigration, the economy and benefit fraud. It also argues that ‘reinforcement’ is an important and consequential power, and that the processes involved have significant implications for public misperception of salient political issues. It makes the case that the media create attitudinal uncertainty, and can have pervasive but subtle influences on political attitudes, particularly when there are persistent patterns of coverage across a range of media. But also that in contexts like particularly close political contests, such influences can be decidedly consequential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary representations of environmental futures often feature apocalyptic scenarios, particularly in film and popular culture. However, these dire warnings have seemingly been ineffective at motivating action on climate change. In response, there has been a call for specifically ethical engagement to provide an alternative means of motivation. This article offers an analysis of the effects of ecological apocalypse narratives on the (re)production of the ethical subject of climate change. The article illustrates the intertextual production of the ethics and apocalypse discourses in order to argue that rather than providing an alternative, the ethical motivation approach in fact (re)produces the assumptions and effects of apocalyptic narratives in a way that sediments a non-relational logic of the ethical subject, in both spatial and temporal terms. Such a logic makes responsive ethical or political engagement with ecological futures very difficult and limits possibilities for thinking progressively about climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the effects of a new US president on global climate politics will be rather less than might be expected. This is partly because the rhetorical differences between Bush, his predecessor Clinton and President Obama mask great continuities in US climate change politics since the early 1990s. It is also because, unlike in other issue areas, the EU has moved into a position of clear international leadership, which is likely to provoke diplomatic conflict, both for standard reasons of realpolitik but more precisely because of the different growth strategies pursued by each side and the different implications of those strategies for climate policy. Finally, the emergence of a dense pattern of transnational climate governance will increasingly constrain the options for either side in pursuing new climate change agreements after 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]