From Policy to Mobilisation: Repertoires of Endorsement and Contestation in Response to the European Green Deal

Over the past decade, climate change mitigation and adaptation policies introduced by supranational and national actors have become a central arena of European contentious politics. While overt climate change denial has lost visibility, it is increasingly replaced by subtler forms of climate scepticism, including what has been termed conditional environmentalism, which may be equally consequential in delaying the green transition. This paper presents preliminary findings from the Trans4Demo project, which examines contentious politics surrounding European Green Deal–related policies across several EU member states and associated countries. The analysis draws on pilot research employing protest event analysis combined with political claims analysis. These quantitative approaches, where data allows since the research is ongoing, will be likely complemented by the outcomes of embedded qualitative country case studies that allow us to capture the diversity of mobilisation patterns and political actors involved. The analysis identifies a diversified set of repertoires of mobilisation triggered by the European Green Deal, ranging from bottom-up repertoires of civil disobedience backed by the feeling of urgency to realistic and pragmatic endorsement to repertoires of contestation, including disruptive protest or targeted political campaigning. Also, attention will be paid to emerging and under-studied arenas of contestation, e.g. courts litigations and/or other formats of democratic experimentation. It is expected that the emergence of these repertoires is shaped not only by political and/or ideological alignment, but also by sector-specific policy designs ans distributional effects, and national political contexts.