In Search of Climate Politics

In what ways is climate change political? This book addresses this key - but oddly neglected - question. It argues that in order to answer it we need to understand politics in a three-fold way: as a site of authoritative, public decision-making; as a question of power; and as a conflictual phenomenon. Recurring themes center on de- and re-politicization, and a tension between attempts to simplify climate change to a single problem and its intrinsic complexity. These dynamics are driven by processes of capital accumulation and their associated subjectivities. The book explores these arguments through an analysis of a specific city - Ottawa - which acts as a microcosm of these broader processes. It provides detailed analyses of conflicts over urban planning, transport, and attempts by city government and other institutions to address climate change. The book will be valuable for students and researches looking at the politics of climate change.

• Provides an original and systematic overview of how we should think about climate change as political.
• Provides a set of detailed empirical analyses, focused on a single city, that develop and illustrate the importance of the key theoretical insights: students of urban climate change initiatives will have the first book-length treatment of a single city.
• Readers will gain the insights of how many of the key political dynamics are clearest at this local, specifically urban scale, and then how those dynamics also inform climate politics at other scales.
• Readers will gain an understanding that climate politics cannot be reduced to a single logic, but through multiple interacting dynamics, and a framework for thinking through aspects of climate politics they may be working on.