Principles of decarbonization politics

Climate change mitigation politics is not delivering on climate targets. Recent research suggests that a general formal framework that represents the behaviour of citizens, consumers, firms and parties explains why.

Political economy as a subfield of economics seeks to understand the behaviour of political actors by explicitly accounting for their incentives and modelling their decisions mathematically. The two new features introduced to established models of environmental policy by Besley and Persson are: intrinsically green values that co-evolve with new technologies, and the limited ability of political institutions to commit to targets over long time horizons.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Management, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Linus Mattauch

  2. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany

    Linus Mattauch

  3. Institute for New Economic Thinking and School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Linus Mattauch

  4. Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Sugandha Srivastav

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  1. Linus Mattauch
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Linus Mattauch.

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Mattauch, L., Srivastav, S. Principles of decarbonization politics.
Nat. Clim. Chang. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01663-y

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  • Published: 04 May 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01663-y

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