Distributional Conflict & Climate Policy Under the Microscope: Interest Group Lobbying in the UK

A number of scholars (Aklin & Mildenberger 2020; Colgan, Green & Hale 2022) recently have argued that the central political barrier preventing more effective international cooperation on climate action is not the much-heralded collective action problem but rather the domestic distributional conflicts arising from the energy transition. In such accounts meaningful and critically urgent policy progress has been hindered by the fact that the economic interests which have the most to lose from decarbonization (e.g. oil majors, manufacturing, electricity companies) are larger and better represented in domestic and international policymaking processes than those economic actors who may benefit from the energy transition (e.g. renewables, electric vehicles, insurance companies). In short policy obstruction by well-resourced economic incumbents and not free riding by self-interested states is the primary political problem. While certainly logical and supported by anecdotal evidence of the lobbying behaviour of big oil, to date there has been little systematic analysis of how the purported winners and losers of the energy transition seek to influence climate policy at the domestic level. In this paper we shed light on this question by analysing the political access and policy positions of key interest groups in the climate field in the UK from 2011 to 2021. As the home of two oil majors, a healthy renewable sector and a well-established environmental movement, the UK provides an excellent case in which to examine the political representation of the winners and losers of the energy transition. This decade is particularly significant as it marked a period of intensified climate policy activity in the UK, including the passage of the Net Zero Emissions law in 2019 and the adoption of the Clean Growth Strategy in 2017, both of which set ambitious targets for decarbonization. We carry out our analysis in two stages. First, we examine the relative access that business (firms & industry associations) as well as green NGOs have had to relevant UK ministries and parliamentary committees to gauge the extent of business dominance of the climate policy field. As a second step we analyse the positions that business organizations from different sectors and NGOs have taken on climate change in this crucial decade. Taken together this analysis allows us to discern the extent to which so called climate losing interests enjoy privileged access to British policymakers as well as the extent to which different business interests use the access they are given to block or delay stringent climate policy. References: Aklin, M., & Mildenberger, M. (2020). Prisoners of the wrong dilemma: why distributive conflict, not collective action, characterizes the politics of climate change. Global Environmental Politics, 20(4), 4-27. Colgan, J. D., Green, J. F., & Hale, T. N. (2021). Asset revaluation and the existential politics of climate change. International Organization, 75(2), 586-610.