JUSTCARBON · Just Carbon Transitions

Just Carbon Transitions

The Justcarbon project addresses a critical and evolving area in environmental governance: the role of domestic politics, expertise, and institutional structures in shaping national climate and environmental policies over time. The project's core objective is to comparatively analyze how Denmark and Norway develop their "environmental states" between 1990 and 2024, focusing on state structures, the organization of external policy advice, and the evolution of policy ideas relating to environmental welfare. The political and strategic context for the study is rooted in the transformation inaugurated by the 2015 Paris Agreement, where the responsibility for implementing climate mitigation was decisively shifted to national governments via nationally determined contributions (NDCs). This shift reinforced the importance of national experts capable of translating global climate imperatives into concrete national regulatory frameworks. Responding to this development, The project engages with emerging calls for a "post-IPCC" research agenda that centers on the domestic expert politics of the green transition, beyond an earlier focus on international climate science advocacy (see. Frandsen and Hasselbach 2024). Furthermore, studies of domestic expert politics have tended to focus primarily on the role of economists as sources of policy advice and the dominance of economic reasoning as the language of the state. The present project extends such a focus to situate them vis-à-vis other experts and interest representatives. The project builds upon and advances the sociological concept of the "environmental state"—an empirical-analytical framework capturing how governmental institutions organize societal activities to minimize ecological degradation while safeguarding environmental rights (Rea and Frickel, 2023). It critically extends this framework to enable systematic, comparative analysis across national contexts, focusing not only on protective environmental and climatic welfare but also on tensions with developmental and growth focused policy approaches. By integrating sociological theories of state structure and expertise with political science approaches to Policy Advisory Systems, the project establishes a comprehensive comparative framework. This framework operationalizes key mechanisms in environmental state development, including institutional histories, structures of access to technoscientific expertise (through Public Policy Advisory Bodies), and the ideational content of environmental policy advice—specifically, prevailing conceptions of nature and policy instrument preferences. Through a systematic comparison of Denmark and Norway over a thirty-year period, The project provides unique insights into the structural and ideational evolution of national environmental governance. It illuminates how shifts in the organization of expertise and advisory systems relate to environmental and climate policy outcomes, offering a deeper understanding of the political dynamics underpinning national green transitions. The contributions of the project are significant both academically and practically. Academically, it contributes to the sociology of expertise, comparative policy studies, and environmental governance research by proposing an extended, operationalized model of the environmental state that allows for temporal and cross-national comparison. Practically, it offers policymakers and stakeholders a clearer understanding of how advisory structures and dominant policy ideas shape national responses to environmental and climate challenges. In sum, the Justcarbon project provides a deeper, comparative understanding of how domestic expertise and institutional arrangements mediate the translation of global climate ambitions into national realities, contributing to the broader goal of effective and equitable environmental governance.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union