Deep Decarbonisation: The Democratic Challenge of Navigating Governance Traps

2026-07-22

The standard advice to politicians confronting long-term challenges such as decarbonisation is to adopt time-consistent commitment devices such as binding policies. Yet politicians appear unable to do this, greatly imperilling the achievement of the 1.5 and 2oC limits in the landmark Paris Agreement. The state-of-the art struggles to explain the causes, and hence the solutions, to this impasse. Political scientists argue that politicians fear retribution at the next election; psychologists claim that citizens understand what is at stake, but expect politicians to lead. The untested assumption is that both are locked into a ‘governance trap’ which greatly reduces the political feasibility of rapid change. DeepDCarb seeks to significantly advance the academic state-of-the-art by directly interrogating the relationship between politicians, citizens/voters and other actors in a uniquely detailed and comparative manner, drawing on an unconventional combination of methods and unrivalled new data sets. It will establish a new subfield of interdisciplinary research that: • Explores the commitment devices that all states in the world have adopted, via a nested array of 13 new datasets and time-sensitive statistical techniques; • Opens up the ‘black box’ of societal commitment formation in a sample of large emitters (including the EU-28) to explore the relationship between politicians and citizens (1990-2020); • Investigates the scope for unlocking traps by bringing actors together in deliberative fora such as citizens’ assemblies, thus confronting the uncomfortable question of how far societal commitment is more effectively engendered by depoliticising or politicising contentious issues. The findings, to be widely disseminated through a programme of publication and public engagement, will contribute significantly to understanding the scope for unlocking the profound impasse in society’s struggle to deliver deep decarbonisation.

United Kingdom, Germany

2026-02-15