LIST OF PANELS

We are currently witnessing a moment of profound social, economic and political transformation on a global scale involving struggles over how to address urgent issues such as climate change and other environmental disasters with serious implications for (re)ordering society (Dodge 2024; Fischer, 2017; Lindvall, Karlsson, 2024; Machin, 2022; Schlosberg et al., 2025). In both global and more-proximate contexts (national, subnational, and local), environmental concerns are caught up in these broader transformations, becoming the basis for broader political choices to be articulated, created, formed and reformed. This panel will focus especially on two dynamically intertwined but apparent oppositions in the current historical moment, in order to understand environmental inequities such as racism, xenophobia, anti-indigeneity/colonialism and their intersections, as well as the possibilities for changing 1) policy meanings (frames, discourses, narratives, and so on) and 2) governance practices and patterns (collaboration, contestation, deliberation, and so on). This panel gives priority to how meanings and governance practices on environmental policy emerge from groups – such as coalitions, social movements, and alternative communities – in specific, contextualized struggles who are often exposed to environmental inequities, while also paying attention to the ways in which those inequities are created in the first place (through domination in governance arrangements and public policy designs). We are seeing robust discussions of alternative policy and governance modes (e.g., green democracy, sustainability transitions) but also strong pressures to retain neoliberalism or an even stronger “gilded age” or authoritarianism (e.g., Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary). These are responses to the world’s crises with profound implications for the way we understand environmental issues.

Specifically, the panel identifies two dynamics that are intertwined despite their apparent opposition in the current historical moment. It also suggests ways in which these dynamics are at work to reconfigure environmental policy meanings and forms of governance. First, there is an apparent opposition of environmental politics as a distinct policy domain, on one hand, and second, broader struggles against structural domination (such as racism, colonialism, xenophobia, and patriarchy), on the other, but which, in political practice are deeply interconnected. That is, if we accept that environmental problems are deeply embedded in broader structures of domination, we can view the tensions between these agendas in political practice alongside their deep interconnections in the lived experiences of populations affected by environmental degradation. Recognizing these as interconnected raises a series of important areas of inquiry. For instance, some framings of environmental problems can sometimes hide wider dynamics of domination, allowing policy responses that go far enough to address immediate harms but do not challenge the underlying structures that produce them. However, the opposite risk also exists: when environmental struggles are fully absorbed into broader agendas concerning racism, colonialism, or economic justice, the specificity of environmental politics can disappear. This creates strategic and interpretive tensions for movements and policy actors alike.

Furthermore, these apparent oppositions – which are practically intertwined in practice – may illuminate questions related to evolving environmental meanings and environmental governance, as well as related political dilemmas faced by environmental movements as they build coalitions and establish narratives within changing societies. 

First, environmental meaning may be redefined as environmental problems are reinterpreted through broader struggles against domination. These processes are generally contested, as groups with lived experiences of environmental inequities or injustices form discourses and actions on climate and other environmental issues based on their lived experiences. They also confront desires to “return” to an imagined past, to (re)create existing power relations and forms of business/energy production that perpetuate  inequities and anti-democratic forces. While problematizations are central concerns in interpretive policy analysis (Durnová, 2022; Yanow, 2007; Wagenaar, 2015), policy meanings can go well beyond this to inform identities, relationships, solutions, interests, and ideas related to different notions of sustainability, vulnerability-resistance, and so on (Zittoun et al., in press; Veloso et al, 2025; Mendonça et al, 2024). We are interested in what meanings are at the heart of controversies on environmental issues in the context of profound transformations. Scholars have identified genuine conflicts between climate justice and technocratic and market-oriented approaches to climate policy (Basseches et al. 2022) and other divisions across coalitions in environmental politics (Bulkeley 2000; Dodge & Metze, 2017; Dodge & Lee, 2017; Metze & Dodge, 2016). However, the debate in practice has deep roots and raises questions about whether societies should leave power structures intact or seek to entrench and concentrate power among the already powerful, on one hand, or define new democratic forms of organization that transform power in ways better equipped to deal with emerging environmental (and other social and economic) problems, on the other hand. For instance, while environmental justice has become a major discourse on environmental policy issues, including climate change, it is also being profoundly undermined in some circumstances.  In the US, for instance, at the federal level , regressive forces are seeking to reestablish environmentally harmful practices and powers, despite  states making strides on environmental justice policy. In Brazil and in Latin America, similar tensions are visible, particularly in conflicts surrounding authoritarianism, extractivism, deforestation, and Indigenous territorial rights (Svampa, 2019; Gudynas, 2021; Motta and Hauber, 2023).

Second, the organization of environmental action through broader political coalitions and movements may lead to changes in governance. There are certain modes of governance that exist and are evolving to address environmental issues, sometimes directly addressing inequities or in other cases creating them – and emergent forms of governance coming out of different movements and organizing. We do not equate governance with government, but see governance as having important societal aspects in which collective environmental work is carried out outside of the confines of governmental action (Fischer 2017), where policy ideas are nurtured and also demanded (Audet, 2013; Dodge 2017; Hall & Talpin, 2010). These considerations suggest broader questions about the meaning of public policy and governance and its location: Where policy is made? Who participates in its production? And what risks do they assume as they mediate institutional contexts and lived experience? We invite papers that address the current tensions in environmental policy making during this period of profound economic, social, and political transformation, during which environmental issues are being (re)defined within a broader concern for societal  and environmental governance transformation.

References:

Audet, R. (2013). Climate justice and bargaining coalitions: a discourse analysis. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 13(3), 369-386.

Basseches, J. A., Bromley-Trujillo, R., Boykoff, M. T., Culhane, T., Hall, G., Healy, N., ... & Stephens, J. C. (2022). Climate policy conflict in the US states: a critical review and way forward. Climatic Change, 170(3), 32.

Bulkeley, H. (2000). Discourse coalitions and the Australian climate change policy network. Environment and Planning C: Government and policy, 18(6), 727-748.

Dodge, J. & Metze, T.  (2017). Hydraulic fracturing as an interpretive problem: lessons on energy controversies in Europe and the US. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 19(1), 1-13. 

Dodge, J. (2017). Crowded advocacy: Framing dynamics in the fracking controversy in New York. Voluntas, 28(3), 888-915. 

Dodge, J. (2024). Exploring counter hegemony and action research to address the climate crisis, Critical Policy Studies, 18(3), 514-524. 

Dodge, J., & Lee, J.* (2017). Framing dynamics and policy gridlock: the curious case of hydraulic fracturing in New York. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 19(1), 14-34.

Durnová, A. (2022). Making interpretive policy analysis critical and societally relevant: emotions, ethnography and language. Policy & Politics, 50(1), 43-58.

Fischer, F. (2017). Climate crisis and the democratic prospect: Participatory governance in sustainable communities. Oxford University Press.

Gudynas, E. (2021). Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology. Fernwood Publishing.

Hall, N. L., & Taplin, R. (2010). Environmental nonprofit campaigns and state competition: Influences on climate policy in California. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 21(1), 62-81.

Lindvall, D., & Karlsson, M. (2024). Exploring the democracy-climate nexus: a review of correlations between democracy and climate policy performance. Climate Policy, 24(1), 87-103.

Machin, A. (2022). Climates of democracy: Skeptical, rational, and radical imaginaries. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 13(4), e774. 

Mendonça, R. F., Veloso, L. H. N., Magalhães, B. D., & Motta, F. M. (2024). Deliberative ecologies: A relational critique of deliberative systems. European Political Science Review, 16(3), 333-350.

Metze, T. & Dodge, J. (2016). Dynamic discourse coalitions on hydro-fracking in Europe and the United States. Environmental Communication, 10(3), 365-379. 

Motta, F., & Hauber, G. (2023). Anti-environmentalism and proto-authoritarian populism in Brazil: Bolsonaro and the defence of global agri-business. Environmental Politics, 32(4), 642–662. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2022.2123993

Schlosberg, D., Rickards, L., Pearse, R., Della Bosca, H., & Moraes, O. (2025). Critical environmental justice in contemporary scholarship and movements: consensus and plurality of the discourse. Environmental Politics, 34(3), 399-420.

Svampa, M. (2019). Neo-extractivism in Latin America: Socio-environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Veloso, L., Curato, N., Ross, M., & Morán, A. (2025). Vulnerability is not a checklist: Grounded normative theory in global deliberation. Qualitative Research, 14687941251341997.

Wagenaar, H. (2015). Transforming perspectives: The critical functions of interpretive policy analysis. In Handbook of critical policy studies (pp. 422-440). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Yanow, D. (2007). Interpretation in policy analysis: On methods and practice. Critical policy analysis, 1(1), 110-122.

Zittoun, P., Ansell, C. Hassenteufel, P. & Dodge, J. (2026). The policy transaction perspective: A new pragmatist approach to policy processes. In B.G. Peters and P. Zittoun (Eds.), Contemporary approaches to public policy: Theories, controversies, perspectives (2nd ed). Palgrave Macmillan.

This panel prioritizes theorizing from the lived experiences of environmental inequity in diverse contexts around the world – stemming from racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, anti-indigeneity, etc. – and the discourses and practices that emerge from this positionality to articulate alternative meanings and forms of collective action on environmental governance or policy.  Central questions include: 

• What are the ways in which groups resist and fight back against environmental inequity? How do they create new forms of governance and collective action? How do they (re)frame environmental problems and political strategies of policy making?

• How do groups build unity across differences to make progress on climate/environmental justice that might compete with – or complement – other urgencies for groups who experience marginalization – such as healthcare, the cost of living, and now in some places war and internal oppression? In the US for example, groups once highly focused on climate change are turning their attention to affordability and the threat of attacks by internal security forces (ICE). It becomes a strategic question for the climate movement whether or not to pivot to their members’ greatest concerns in this moment or stay uniquely focused on climate change mitigation. 

• How do the forms of governance that generate experiences of environmental inequities unfold and how are these contested? We can turn our gaze critically to the ways in which deliberative, collaborative, “command-and-control” approaches to environmental governance affect groups inequitably or address inequities effectively. How are these modes of governance refashioned (or not) through political or policy action?

• How can the IPA community intentionally bridge sustainability transition literature with interpretive policy analysis to deepen our understanding of these questions? While many IPA scholars already engage with sustainability transition literatures, we can further the develop this area within the IPA community elevating the insights that interpretive and critical forms of policy analysis can bring.