Climate Change and Political Strategy
ed Hugh Compston
Routledge 2011 (Amazon link)

According to its blurb, this book “analyses the political dynamics of climate policy in affluent democracies from a number of different theoretical angles in order to improve our understanding of which political strategies would be likely to enable national governments to make deep cuts in GHG emissions while avoiding significant political damage.”
Hmm, two problems here. One is obvious from the pre-Copenhagen debacle nature of the articles (all appeared in an issue of the 2009 issue of the journal Environmental Politics). The idea of a globally agreed and enforced emissions cap in tune with holding climate change to survivable levels is, frankly, deader than Gordon Brown’s political career. So work within this framework is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
The second is the frankly hilarious – and revealing – notion that “significant political damage” is a deal-breaker. No doubt Abraham Lincoln’s more pusillanimous advisers were telling him that slavery was not a deal breaker for the continuation of the United States. So it goes.

Still, there’s usefulness throughout (well, almost throughout) in this collection. After an introduction the eight chapters are grouped in three categories – “Technique”, “Politics” and “Communications”

In “Risk analysis and climate change” Nick Pidgeon and Catherine Butler dryly point out that “While contemporary risk approaches align well with dominant political rationalities in affluent Western democracies, they have serious limitations as a basis for the delivery of aggressive climate policy aims.”

In the second section, Hugh Compston, editor of the volume, insults (or “robustly assesses”?!) the abilities and capacities of policymakers.

“However, the complexity of reality and the limited cognitive resources of human beings mean that understanding the causal relations in the world that underlie conceptions of problems and solutions must necessarily involve simplifying and relating new information to existing ideas in order to produce meaningful and structured interpretations. Sociological institutionalists argue that information is selected and processed by cognitive structures (variously named schemas, frames or inferential sets) that determine ‘what information will receive attention;how it will be encoded; how it will be retained, retrieved and organised into memory; and how it will be interpreted, thus affecting evaluations, judgments, predictions and inferences.”
page 72

Roughly translated from academese, this means “our lords and masters ain’t nearly as sharp as they think they are. Or as sharp as they would need to be to get us out of this omnishambles. And neither are we, come to think of it.”

The most useful chapter to activists, by a very long chalk, comes from Sarah Pralle in the Communications section. Her “Agenda-setting and climate change” takes the reader through, well, how policy is (and isn’t) made, by whom and then – gasp- provides some useful concrete advise for people trying to keep climate on the agenda.

Overall, there are no truly dreadful chapters, but this is definitely one to borrow* rather than buy.
Usefulness to activists; Medium to low.
Readability; Medium to low.

* And yes, we will lend you this book if you want, if you’re in Greater Manchester.

PS While looking for an image of the cover, we stumbled upon this “Climate Clever: How Governments can tackle climate change (and still win elections)” and will be trying to blag a copy…