New Politics of Climate Change
New Politics of Climate Change
This research stream develops a critical theoretical framework for understanding how welfare states are being restructured through climate adaptation and mitigation policies. Drawing on comparative historical analysis and text-as-data methods, I examine the political economy of climate policy across diverse national contexts.
Key Projects:
Do Welfare States Adapt? Uses text-as-data to trace whether national adaptation plans route climate hazards through welfare instruments versus infrastructure, insurance, or individual responsibility across Europe and the U.S.
Climate & Inequality: Argues that economic inequality erodes “distributional capacity,” helping explain why some states decarbonize without building resilience and vice versa
Mitigation vs. Adaptation Sequencing: Uses event-history models to test whether mitigation ambition delays national adaptation planning—finding complementarity rather than crowd-out, especially in the Global South
Critical Theory of Ecowelfare: Develops theoretical foundations for understanding the “adaptation state” as an emerging mode of climate governance that operates through social policy
Methods: Comparative policy analysis, text-as-data (topic modeling, sentiment analysis), event-history modeling, critical theory
Geographic Scope: Global analysis with particular focus on Europe, North America, and comparative Global South contexts