Green Backlash and Climate Change Policies

In this essay, Robert O. Keohane, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, addresses one of the questions posed by the organizers of IGCC’s Research Workshop on Climate Change and Democracy: under which conditions can climate change and climate policies trigger green backlash?

Keohane’s first hypothesis is that for a social movement to generate a domestic backlash, it must achieve a degree of success that makes it sufficiently threatening to groups supporting the status quo for any potential opposing coalition to overcome its own collective action problem. The difficulties of collective action afflict all social movements—progressive or not—that seek what Mancur Olson called collective goods. If these difficulties are sufficient to make progressive social movements unthreatening, they eliminate the incentives for their potential opponents to organize. Only if the conditions for backlash exist will the framing of advocacy demands affect whether backlash occurs.

His second hypothesis is that the more targeted is a social movement, the more likely it is to generate a backlash. However, Keohane also believes that more targeted social movements are more likely than diffuse ones to succeed, so tensions between efficacy and avoiding backlash are likely to be inherent. Villains are useful for social movements, but constructing villains reinforces enmity.

Finally, his third hypothesis focuses on international backlash. For an international backlash against green policies to materialize, there must be serious climate action by some countries, and resistance by others who are sufficiently powerful to challenge the activist coalition.

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On January 30–31, 2025, IGCC convened a first-of-its-kind research incubator to examine the links between climate change, democratic backsliding, and public backlash against green policies. The conversation aimed to bridge the divide between scholars within the political and climate sciences to promote interdisciplinary studies at the crossroads between global environmental and governance challenges. Workshop participants prepared memos before the meeting responding to two questions: under which conditions can climate change and climate policies trigger a green backlash? And what are the consequences of climate change disruptions and green backlash for democracy? These memos are now published as part of an ongoing IGCC essay series on Climate Change, Green Backlash, and Democracy.