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International environmental agreements: politics, law and economics, 15 (1), 29 - 43. doi: 10.1007/s10784-014-9266-1. 26 Swilling, M. and Annecke, E., 2010. This is a helpful complement to political economy accounts of macro shifts in the configuration of geo-political and material power over time, reminding us of the importance of granular analysis of the practice of transitions in specific contexts. Yet this approach frequently lacks a full theorisation of how energy systems relate to the power structures and conflictual dynamics of the broader capitalist political economies in which they are situated (Newell [13]; Malm [9]). In response, there has been a consistent call for the greater application of critical political economy perspectives in understanding sustainable transformation (Meadowcroft [10], Di Muzio [1], Newell [13], [14]). [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the implications of the reframing of climate change as a question of the 'end of the fossil fuel age'. This was a common interpretation of the logic of the Paris Agreement in the UNFCCC in December 2015, the implications of the IPCC's fifth assessment report, and in the framing of climate change by the fossil fuel divestment movement. The paper argues that this signifies an important shift in the framing of climate change, away from ones such as 'emissions reduction' or 'decarbonisation', towards more transformational understandings of climate change. It aims to contribute to attempts to repoliticise climate change by focusing on how this frame helps us re-emphasise the political conflicts inherent to climate change politics, ignored by more technocratic visions of 'economic efficiency' or 'transition management'. But at the same time, it seeks to problematise some attempts to recast climate change as political, by emphasising the tension between articulating climate change as a struggle between heroic social movements representing humanity and fossil fuel corporations and their allies in government, and the complexity of the socio-technical systems within which fossil fuels are embedded, which thus complicate the simplifying effects of the 'end of fossil fuels' frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with ever-growing climate-related financial risks, the role of central banks in climate governance has intensified debates surrounding central bank independence (CBI). Informed by elite interviews with UK monetary policy experts and a discourse analysis of Bank of England reports, this article reveals the internal views on repoliticisation of the Bank and CBI catalysed by the mandate to ‘facilitate the transition to net zero’. We find different interpretations of CBI that are shaped by perceptions of the Bank’s existing political status, with some claiming that the Bank is intrinsically apolitical and immune to repoliticisation and others viewing CBI as fragile or a strategically-deployed discourse. Across three distinct views of politics, and by extensions CBI, we identify dual dynamics of depoliticisation and re-politicisation that serve to legitimate and depoliticise prior mission creep whilst simultaneously licencing politicising debates on the bank’s institutional evolution. We demonstrate that the Bank of England is an indispensable case study in the green central banking literature for understanding the political economy of CBI within the context of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide an addendum to the rapidly growing concept of a global ‘green energy race’ between major states. It argues that although this framing has been useful in underscoring important dynamics in the process of decarbonisation, its narrow focus on installed capacity obscures a much broader and more complex process at play. In particular, it overlooks the critical role played by states aggressively investing in R&D and export manufacturing in the renewable energy sector. The paper thus supplements the concept of a green ‘energy race’ with that of a green ‘global division of labour’, which sees the process of decarbonisation not exclusively as an effort by individual states to install renewables domestically, but rather as a collective and interdependent process by dozens of states, all striving in different ways to promote capital accumulation on their soil. The paper provides an overview of data covering innovation, manufacturing and deployment in the clean energy sector, and offers a theoretical analysis of the trends observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]