Climate Policy

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state-building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning.

This seminar deepens central concepts and arguments through joint discussion of the latest applications and developments of sociological theory within a concrete problem space – the social conditions of (in)effective climate policy.

The paper compares technology policies for coal liquifaction and solar energy in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that there’s a dilemma between commercializing specific technologies and supporting keeping technological options open.

The book reconstructs the history of policies to support solar photovoltaics across countries.