Second-order beliefs – what political actors think others think – can shape agenda-setting and even shift public opinion. Because of the collective-action nature of mitigating human-caused climate change, such second-order political beliefs are particularly important to study. Through an innovative survey design focusing on a policy proposal to introduce meat-free days in canteens, we present the first simultaneous comparison of ordinary citizens’, locally elected political representatives’, and centrally employed public administrators’ own opinions and their ability to accurately identify the majority position of citizens. While citizens are split in their opinion on meat-free days in canteens, a clear majority of unelected elites support it, and most elected elites do not support this policy. Nonetheless, we find that all three groups tend to underestimate the level of policy support among citizens. Through rigorous analysis, we show that elected elites are significantly more likely to underestimate public support for a meat-free day compared to citizens and unelected elites. These results provide important insights into the dynamics of democratic governance and suggest that underestimation of citizens’ support for climate policies may further complicate an already challenging policy area.

Environmental issues have an international dimension, with causes and consequences that extend beyond national borders—including the effects of the policies designed to address them. This paper investigates how different levels of environmental regulation influence the long-term spatial distribution of firms and households. The results suggest that only highly asymmetric regulations align with the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, causing firms to cluster in areas with lax environmental standards. In contrast, moderate differences in regulation tend to improve environmental quality across regions and can generate positive spillovers for countries adopting greener policies, such as attracting new residents and stimulating investment. While this lends support to the Porter Hypothesis, it does so through a less conventional mechanism. Rather than fostering innovation, stringent regulations enhances regional attractiveness by expanding the market size.

Environmental governance, often characterized as a tug-of-war between central ambitions and local reluctance, provides a valuable lens for examining the dynamics of China’s central–local relations and their impact on policy processes, enhancing our understanding of both the changes and continuities of the Xi Jinping era. By analysing the eco-transformation of waste management through the framework of political steering theory, this article presents a nuanced avoidance strategy used by local governments, which we term minimum compliance. This strategy allows local authorities to cope with and sidestep centrally mandated policies while avoiding the consequences of policy failure. This study enriches the discourse on China’s central–local relations by exploring why top-level design has not reduced policy implementation deviations. It also highlights how local governments in the Xi era evade policy responsibilities in their daily operations and hedge against political pressure.

This paper investigates the dynamic effects of environmental and fiscal policy shocks in a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring price and wage rigidity and a polluting intermediate goods sector. I compare carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems under abatement cost and government spending shocks, considering three revenue-recycling schemes: lump-sum transfers, labor tax cuts, and consumption tax cuts. Abatement cost shocks reduce output and consumption, with stronger effects under cap-and-trade due to rising permit prices. These effects are mitigated when revenues are used to reduce distortionary taxes, especially consumption taxes. Government spending shocks stimulate output and labor, particularly under lump-sum financing, but their expansionary effects are dampened under cap-and-trade. Nominal rigidities amplify these dynamics. The findings support the double dividend hypothesis and highlight the importance of fiscal design and policy coordination. Carbon taxes, combined with targeted tax reductions, offer superior macroeconomic stabilization in the face of environmental and fiscal shocks.

How do state actors interpret and share information? Theories of the state have long recognized the role of legibility – the modes and practices by which states render society and nature knowable through intervention and information collection – in constructing and maintaining state power. Yet, research has only begun to explore the processes by which information is created and diffused within state administrations. Drawing upon theories of agency relations in states, this article explores how administrators’ communicative practices shape knowledge and legibility. Through examining memos, legislative studies, and draft legislation for decrees recognizing water rights in the French Protectorate in Morocco, I identify a set of common patterns in the construction of bureaucratic information as it moves from street-level administrators to central officials. In analyzing these patterns, I demonstrate how administrators’ obligations and their understandings of the state’s political projects determined not only how French officials collected information, but what they communicated to others. As information moved across administrative levels, officials iteratively changed information. Joining critiques and extensions of legibility theory that emphasize the role of non-state actors in the construction of state knowledge, I argue that we must also attend to intra-state dynamics. In tracing communication and information, I demonstrate that information is iteratively constructed by state agents according to their administrative position and transformed by its particular bureaucratic routes. Modeling legibility and the development of state knowledge requires attending to administrators’ agency, their relationships with each other, and their understanding of the state’s goals.

While existing research on policy diffusion has provided substantial evidence regarding the drivers of policy adoption across jurisdictions, limited attention has been given to the dynamics of policy textual learning across different levels of government. We fill this gap by using regression analysis to examine the patterns of policy textual learning evident in the clause similarity of seven environmental statutory policies in China. Within China’s decentralized and multilevel environmental governance, our findings reveal that horizontal policy textual learning is more prominent than vertical learning. Temporal distance negatively impacts policy textual learning, whereas spatial distance, contrary to traditional policy diffusion perspectives, does not universally explain multilevel policy textual learning. Additionally, subsequent versions of policy texts are not necessarily similar to earlier ones, challenging conventional assumptions about the adoption and adaptation of policies over time.

This paper demonstrates tensions between national environmental policies and international free trade rules and traces business reactions to environmentalism through a study of the Can War, a controversy over a Danish ban on beverage cans from 1970 to 2002. At its core was a conflict between Denmark and the European Economic Community (EEC, later the European Union, EU) over free trade versus environmental objectives. This study of the Can War demonstrates how environmental concerns were entangled with national and economic interests, but also how brewers, retailers, and packaging producers used environmental and economic arguments in pragmatic ways and adapted to changing political and economic environments. Thus, the paper adds to the literature on the formative years of environmental politics, with a focus on business interests and a conflict between a nation-state and the EEC in a period when environmental concerns gained political momentum yet remained contested in a system based on free trade. This study also adds to the literature on waste-handling by demonstrating how the Danish return system changed from one based on reuse to one based on recycling; it further shows how beverage cans went from banned to uncontested, everyday objects. Through a comparison with Sweden, the case shows how national businesses influenced the design of new deposit and return systems for single-use packaging, wherein refillable glass bottles became marginalized. Overall, the study offers an understanding of the intricate relationships between environmental policies, business interests, consumer habits, and competing container materials, with aluminum as the winner.

Worldwide, voluntary agri-environmental programs encourage farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices. However, the impact of program design on farmers’ participation and long-term practice persistence is unclear. Toward improving program effectiveness, this study illustrates the value of a tailored practice-specific approach to agri-environmental program design. We present a case study of programs promoting cover crops, a conservation practice that can improve soil health and reduce nutrient pollution, drawing from five focus groups with farmers (n = 20) and program administrators (n = 14) in the U.S. Midwest (Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana). Participants perceived cover crop programs to best support farmers is characterized by flexibility and minimal transaction costs. Participants suggested a more data-driven approach to program design particularly for understanding the farm-level economic implications of cover crop use. Integrating financial planning and participatory research components alongside traditional financial incentives and technical assistance were proposed as valuable strategies to enhance program design and broaden the appeal of conservation practices like cover crops.

What are the characteristics of a political protest that enable it to win public support, and what is the role of the political environment? The literature has argued about the characteristics that induce the public to sympathize with protesters (such as the identity of the protesters, their demands, and their methods), but little research has focused on the role of the political context, which includes the presence of other protests making different (or even opposite) demands, the contrasting identity of the protesters, and protest methods. In the research reported in this study, we focused on two protests that unfolded during 2023–24 in Italy (protests by environmental activists and farmers/livestock raisers) to investigate the impact of protesters' identity on public perceptions of their action's legitimacy, when two protests with contrasting aims but similar methods occur at the same time. We used a pre-registered randomized experimental design that manipulated the sequence in which a sample of respondents was presented with descriptions of protests by both groups. Our findings suggest that the sequence in which protests are presented significantly affect respondents' perceptions. Once primed with the evaluation of the farmers' protests, in fact, they perceive climate activists' actions as more legitimate. Our results suggest that people tend to comparatively evaluate social movements and to adjust their opinions accordingly when exposed to cognitively dissonant information.

Sociolegal scholars have long debated the effectiveness of legal mobilization as a strategy for achieving social change. In addition to evaluating outcomes of wins and losses in court, they have identified several indirect effects of legal mobilization on social movements. Mobilizing new rights concepts can increase support for a movement, divide its base, and create new political allies or opponents. A win in court might lead to rights being institutionalized but not enforced, and it can serve to demobilize a movement base. This article contributes to this body of literature by arguing that movement groups can strategically mobilize the law to engage in co-optation from below – learning about an agency in order to build more effective organizing strategies. Using data gathered as a participant ethnographer in a grassroots environmental justice organization, I show how organizers used meetings with state regulators to learn how the agency interprets and enforces environmental laws and adjust their tactics in response. This study also demonstrates the value of conducting in-depth studies of local legal contests even as we seek to understand the role of the law in navigating our most pressing global challenges.

Brazilian landowners are obligated to conserve a minimum percentage of native vegetation within their properties (termed a ‘legal reserve’), but non-compliance can be compensated elsewhere through a biodiversity offset. Recent changes in rules for legal reserve compensation (LRC) have increased the allowed spatial scale and softened the ecological criteria required to select properties for compensation, potentially leading to considerable biodiversity losses. In this paper, we analyse whether these rules promote the conservation of tree species on private lands through LRC in the Cerrado biome, the most biodiverse savannah in the world. We modelled the potential distribution of 126 Cerrado tree species and simulated several potential biodiversity offsets to calculate expected species losses under former and current LRC rules. Our results show that biodiversity offsets established under current and former LRC rules can lead to up to 100% tree species losses. In contrast, setting a minimum similarity threshold between watersheds can reduce median tree species loss in biodiversity offsets to as low as 3% and prevents LRC with no common species between sites. Therefore, the current rule is expected to strongly impact biodiversity in the Cerrado. Similarity in species composition between watersheds must be considered in order to implement LRC offsets that effectively conserve Cerrado biodiversity on private lands.