Climate Backlash and Policy Dismantling: How Discursive Mechanisms Legitimised Radical Shifts in Swedish Climate Policy

Abstract

Climate backlash and policy dismantling, that is, the reversal of existing decarbonisation policies, can be observed in an increasing number of countries. Typically, policy change tends to be slow, while climate backlash can unfold quite fast. How is such rapid political change made possible? Here, we investigate the case of Sweden, where a newly elected government significantly revised and changed existing climate policies. This change was forecast to increase carbon emissions rather than reduce them and included the abolishment of existing policies. While this process, in hindsight, could thus be seen as policy dismantling, it was characterised by a highly ambiguous debate that portrayed the new climate political approach as superior and much more effective than previous governments' approaches, and there was little, if any, opposition to these changes. To understand how such radical political change was possible, we examine policy documents and political debates and identify the discursive mechanisms employed in its legitimation. Our findings suggest that the parties in government used a set of discursive mechanisms to speak to different climate political discourses—welfarism, liberalism and nationalism—simultaneously. This created an effect that we call discursive flipping, which is qualitatively different from discursive blending, and that appeased potential opposition from both the left and right. As part of this, the creation of epistemic confusion seemed particularly effective in disarming opposition. We argue that discursive mechanisms are useful conceptual tools to examine the discursive legitimation of radical policy change, here realised by rendering discourses so ambiguous that opposition became discursively difficult to uphold.