Forskningsseminarier: Miljösociologi

7 December

Midterm-seminar: The Conditions of Climate Policy Leadership in Sweden
Presenter: Filippa Werner Sellbjer
Opponent: Rikard Warlenius, Senior Lecturer, Södertön University

The seminar is hybrid. Contact the organizer if you would like to participate online. 

Abstract
This dissertation investigates how politicians and researchers serving as experts in climate advisory bodies experience their ability to accelerate the pace of the climate transition in Sweden through policy change. The aim is to identify structural and ideational barriers to advancing the climate transition in Sweden that these actors encounter or reproduce, with the broader goal of supporting similar efforts in Sweden and abroad. It focuses on politicians and researchers by virtue of the roles they occupy within institutions with key political impact, in principle enabling them to enact climate policy leadership. While politicians have structures of implementation and public deliberation at their disposal to drive change, scientists are often understood as influential through their ability to shape how politicians interpret the world and, by extension, act upon it.

However, although focused on agency, this dissertation shows how actors who appear institutionally powerful are nevertheless structurally constrained in their capacity to accelerate climate-policy change. As a theoretical point of departure, politicians are understood as situated between two main structural imperatives that they must navigate. By extension, experts seeking to deliver salient policy advice must decide how to relate to the feasibility constraints facing the actors they advise. On the one hand, Sweden is situated within capitalism, where the imperative to increase the scale of production increases the need to intensify decarbonization; on the other is the representative imperative, through which elected politicians must secure and maintain electoral support. The dissertation thus examines how these structural constraints are perceived, navigated, and reproduced by actors positioned to exercise climate policy leadership.