The international politics of energy transitions, climate battles, and 21st century power rivalry
This year's Government and Opposition journal's Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture reviews the energy and climate progress of recent decades and argues that fragmentation reflects not only collective action failures, but a distributional contest playing out at every political level.
Over the past three decades, global energy transitions and international climate cooperation advanced through an ambitious institutional architecture spearheaded by organizations such as the IEA as well as the UNFCCC. The political vision of this project was premised on the assumption that multilateral commitments could gradually decouple economic development from fossil fuel dependence and accelerate the uptake of carbon efficient technologies. Yet the distributional politics of that transition have proven far more intractable than the architecture suggests.
Building on the last decade of energy and environmental politics research, this lecture argues that the fragmented energy and climate progress of recent years is not simply a result of a collective action problem but a fundamentally distributional contest at all political levels. For actors interested in stabilizing the climate and governing the energy transition, the future requires confronting big challenges and hard trade-offs.
Meet our speakers and chair
Federica Genovese is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Oxford and Fellow at St Antony’s College. Her research focuses on international and comparative political economy, with particular attention to climate policy, globalisation, and the politics of crises. In 2024 she received a Philip Leverhulme Prize aimed at researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising. Her writings have been published with Cambridge University Press and in American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Organisations, among other outlets. Her work has been supported by many foundations including the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust, the Climate Social Science Network, and the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded her a 2023 Research Leadership Award for a project on the political economy of climate vulnerability.
Erik Jones is Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and Non-resident Scholar at Carnegie Europe. Professor Jones is author of The Politics of Economic and Monetary Union (2002), Economic Adjustment and Political Transformation in Small States (2008), Weary Policeman: American Power in an Age of Austerity (2012 — with Dana H. Allin), The Year the European Crisis Ended (2014), and From Club to Commons: Enlargement, Reform, and Sustainability in European Integration (2025 — with Veronica Anghel). He is editor or co-editor of more than thirty books and special issues of journals on topics related to European politics and political economy including reference works like The Oxford Handbook of the European Union (2012) and The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics (2015). Professor Jones is also co-editor of Government and Opposition.
Yaprak Gürsoy (@ygursoy) is Professor of European Politics and Chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies in the European Institute at LSE.
More about this event
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