LIST OF PANELS

Addressing climate change and limiting its most adverse impacts requires rapid and comprehensive mitigation measures. The transformation of current carbon-intensive economic systems to carbon-neutral systems will not be brought about by market forces alone. Far-reaching public policies need to be enacted to phase out unsustainable technologies and scale up sustainable ones. However, the implementation of ambitious climate mitigation policies faces a wide set of social and political challenges.
 
The purpose of this panel is to collect contributions that investigate the challenges and enablers of decarbonization policies. It focuses on three salient aspects that are currently the focus of academic and policy discussions: political dynamics, social acceptance, and policy feedback. 
 
Policy-making is a complex process involving a variety of actors: policy-makers, experts, civil society organizations, private sector organizations, and citizens. It is shaped by institutional rules and pre-existing policies. Understanding how these factors influence climate policy-making is key to assessing the political feasibility of ambitious climate mitigation strategies and understanding how obstacles to rapid decarbonization can be overcome. Policies to phase out carbon-intensive technologies and policies to scale up sustainable technologies face specific challenges at different development stages. Understanding how such challenges play out in different settings can provide important lessons for future policy-making efforts. 
 
Investigating challenges and enablers of ambitious climate policy-making, in particular in a comparative perspective, is of major importance to assess the social and political feasibility of different decarbonization pathways. We intend to foster dialogue among scholars studying climate policy-making in different settings and from different perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. The panel will contribute to academic and policy debates, allowing to draw lessons and identify best practices. It will provide policy insights that are particularly relevant at a time when the European Union is designing the Green Deal and other countries discuss ambitious climate mitigation strategies.

The purpose of this panel is to collect contributions that shed light on the social and political challenges and enablers of the implementation of ambitious climate mitigation policies. It focuses in particular on the role of political dynamics, social acceptance, and policy feedback in shaping climate policy-making.
 
The panel aims at furthering the understanding of (1) the political dynamics behind climate policy-making, with a specific focus on the role of incumbents and political coalitions; (2) the determinants of social acceptance and opposition to climate policies, with a specific focus on the role of social norms and elite cues in shaping attitudes toward decarbonization policies;  (3) the role of policy feedback, institutional factors and path-dependency in shaping climate policy-making, with a particular focus on policy-sequencing.
 
We welcome papers investigating these aspects at different (local, national, transnational) levels, and in different jurisdictions. We particularly welcome contributions focusing on policies to reduce emissions in the transport and land sectors, which are so far relatively underinvestigated.
 
We encourage the submission of conceptual and empirical papers, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods. Papers with a comparative perspective are particularly appreciated. We believe that interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-fertilization are key to understanding the enablers and challenges of decarbonization. We therefore welcome papers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including Political Science, Policy Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Social and Behavioral Sciences in general.