Remaking Political Institutions: Climate Change and Beyond

Abstract

Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems is not straightforward. Pursuing institutional improvement is an intensely political process, which plays out over extended timeframes, and is intricately tied to existing setups. Moreover, such activities are open-ended, and outcomes are often provisional and indeterminate. The question of institutional improvement, therefore, centers on understanding how institutions are (re)made within complex and nonideal settings. This Element develops an original analytical foundation for studying institutional remaking and its political dynamics. First, it explains how institutional remaking can be observed. Second, it provides a typology comprising five key areas of institutional production involved in institutional remaking: novelty, uptake, dismantling, stability, and interplay. This opens up a new research agenda on the politics of responding to institutional breakdown, and brings sustainability scholarship into closer dialogue with scholarship on processes of institutional change and development.