Call for Papers: Environmental Politics in Turbulent Times
Unpredictability and deep uncertainty of environmental change present profound challenges for contemporary and future public policy-making. At the same time, a new geopolitical situation challenges environmental policy. Demonstrations against climate action show that climate policy can be vulnerable to defeat and ‘hard’ policies may trigger backlash of environmental policy. Climate policy can, however, also create new opportunities for competitiveness and security. These are examples of turbulence that contemporary environmental politics need to grapple with.
Against this background, this special issue from the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) aims to understand environmental politics in turbulent times. Under such circumstances, the ability of governing systems and processes to adapt while maintaining basic public institutions, values and functions becomes a central feature of public governance, and thus an important element in their long-term robustness (Ansell et al. 2024).
Turbulence is often used in social science research as a general metaphor to capture uncertainties and unpredictabilities of events that produce public disorder. The special issue goes beyond applying turbulence as a metaphor by theorizing it as an endogenous condition (‘a new normal’) for environmental governance. Ansell and Trondal (2018) have theorized turbulence as capturing dynamic interactions between events, demands and support, which leads to inconsistent, unexpected and unpredictable conditions for public governance. Such conditions are non-linear and crowded with multiple factors that may co-evolve to produce unpredictable outcomes unfolding over time. Building on this literature, this special issue aims to understand how contemporary environmental governance rests on, and is contingent on, turbulent conditions at various levels.
Environmental politics may in itself cause turbulence across policy levels (vertically or horizontally in a multi-level political system) (Leiren and Farstad 2024) but can also be affected by turbulence from other policy domains (e.g., financial crises, energy crisis and pandemic) (Dobbs et al. 2021). Accordingly, the distinction between crisis and turbulence can provide interesting analytical starting points for understanding contemporary environmental politics. While crisis requires urgent responses to situations that threaten fundamental values or life-sustaining systems (Boin et al. 2020), turbulence refers rather to the shifting ground upon which usual governance actions occur (Dupont and Torney 2021).
JEPP invite papers addressing the relationship between turbulence and policy-making in environmental politics at different levels of governance in the EU and their interfaces – such as the effects of the European Green Deal, which is evolving into a Clean Industrial Deal, vis-à-vis EU member states and non-member states as well as for external jurisdictions. Research questions may include how crisis-induced turbulence caused by environmental change establishes new avenues for policy-making and policy solutions (‘bouncing forward’) as well as dysfunctional conditions, moving policy-makers and policy solutions backwards (‘bouncing back’). We are also interested in studies examining middle-grounds between the two, and in particular studies of robust environmental politics and policy. This includes questions of how different actors – politicians, public administrations, interest groups or civil society – live with and handle turbulence. As the geopolitical situation has changed considerably since the EU established the European Green Deal, we are also interested in contributions addressing how this agenda is evolving under the contemporary ruptures to a rule-based world order, exemplified not only with the war against Ukraine but also how external events, such as the actions of the Trump administration, affect European environmental politics.
Submission instructions and deadline:
The deadline is abstract submission is 15 May 2025.
The guest editors will select successful abstracts and notify authors by 15 June 2025 to submit a draft paper of 7000-10,000 words to the guest editors by 1 December 2025.
Abstract Requirements
- Abstracts should be submitted to Merethe Dotterud Leiren (merethe.leiren@cicero.oslo.no) with “Environmental Politics in Turbulent Times” in the subject header.
- The maximum word count is 300 words.
The guest editors will share a draft framing paper by 1 July 2025. The draft papers will be discussed and reviewed at an online SI workshop in mid December. In early January 2026 the guest editors will notify all authors if they are invited to submit their papers to the special issue for review. These authors should submit final papers of no more than 10,000 words (inclusive of abstract, tables, references, figure or table captions and endnotes) at the JEPP’s Submission Portal for a regular double blind review process by 30 April 2026.
Timeline
- 15 May 2025: Abstracts submitted to the guest editors
- 15 June 2025: Notify authors
- 1 July 2025: Editors share a draft framing paper
- 1 December 2025: Deadline of draft papers to a SI workshop
- Mid-December 2025: Online SI workshop
- Early January 2026: Notify authors of invitation to submit to the SI
- 30 April 2026: Paper submission at the JEPP Submission Portal