Climate Change, Policy, and the Populist Radical Right
About the Event
As climate change has become the defining crisis of our time, so too have the urgent measures required to address it taken the center stage in public and political debates across the world’s wealthiest democracies. Paradoxically, populist radical right parties have in recent years (re-)branded themselves among the most vocal opponents of ambitious climate action, despite the fact that questions related to the environment or climate change have relatively little to do with these parties' traditional nationalist and nativist agendas and their electorates’ key concerns related to immigration, globalization or economic anxiety. At the same time, climate change remains a typical valence issue; the vast majority of citizens agree on the need to protect the environment and tackle climate change. Why, then, do populist radical right parties decide to politicize the issue in the first place, and what are the conditions under which they benefit from doing so? This talk will examine these questions through the lens of local opposition against wind energy in France and Finland.
About the Speaker
Pauliina Patana is an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and core faculty in the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown. She received her PhD in Political Science from Cornell University. Prior to joining Georgetown, Pauliina was a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on transformations in European political landscapes, including the effects of globalization and economic re-structuring on party support and competition, the rise of populism, political representation in diversifying societies, and the politics of climate change and redistribution.