Historical materialist policy analysis and climate change policies

The authors discuss the potential of historical-materialist policy analysis (HMPA) to understand the politics and policies of climate change mitigation. The core aim of HMPA is to analyse how specific policies are formulated against the background of competing and contradictory interests of different social forces and how, if at all, they contribute to social reproduction and the regulation of contradictory social relations and crisis tendencies. To operationalize HMPA for empirical research, the authors propose a three-step process: (1) context analysis, (2) actor analysis, and (3) process analysis. Focussing on Negative Emission Technologies (NETs) in particular, they argue that the integration of NETs into EU climate policy is not just a result of ‘rational’ decision-making or the efficacy of sociotechnical imaginaries. Rather, it is shaped by material interests of actors and their respective strategies. Specifically, HMPA permits to analyse why and how fossil capital and other capital fractions seek to normalise NETs to reduce stranded assets and to ease the political pressure to cut emissions across different economic sectors. They conclude that HMPA sensitises us for the inherent contestedness of such policy-making processes, thereby drawing attention to alternative political initiatives to counteract the potential of NETs to delay climate change mitigation.