From a cultural to a distributive issue: Public climate action as a new field for comparative political economy

Abstract

This article reviews recent insights from the blooming Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature on climate change with the aim to demonstrate the importance of integrating climate change into the field of CPE and to highlight the contributions of CPE to our understanding of the social and political obstacles to effective climate policies. In addition, we advance two key points to bring the CPE literature forward. To tighten the dialogue between the “electoral politics” and “interest group politics” approaches, we propose understanding climate politics as a triadic conflict between losers of climate change, losers of public climate action (PCA), and winners of PCA. Second, we argue that the scope of CPE studies needs expansion. While existing CPE literature predominantly focuses on climate change mitigation, it is essential to consider climate change adaptation due to its significant distributive implications at the macro- and micro-levels of societies.