The Changing Contours of Climate Politics

Abstract: While climate change was on the political agenda for at least a decade before Global Environmental Politics was established, what climate change politics is has dramatically shifted through its lifetime. Framed initially in terms of a collective action problem and interstate cooperation, both how climate policy and politics is practiced and how we have come to understand it have changed. This article charts and provides explanations for the principal shifts in how we understand climate change as political, focusing on the constantly diversifying sets of sites and actors involved; its expanding scope, from interstate negotiations to the full range of daily practices; the “climatization” of many realms of political and social life; and its increasing framing as a problem of political-economic transformation. We conclude by interrogating whether politics as such is now something that can be fully understood and practiced only via many interventions and conflicts where climate change is central.