“Listen to the science!” has been one of the most used and well‐known slogans of the climate
movement in the past years. Indeed, few topics on the global political agenda have been more
intensely driven and shaped by the progress of scientific insight and ever more robust statistic models
than climate policy and politics. While the climatological basis of activists’ arguments is ubiquitous, the
political research into climate and sustainability offers countless new questions to study in an age of
pressing public awareness and more frequent extreme weather events linked to climate change.
Within the climate dimension of this special issue, potential topics range from climate policies, their
creation, implementation, and effectiveness, to party politics of climate change and politically relevant
impacts of climate change. As much as political decisions and their implementation might influence
the evolution of climate change, the development already impacts policy and politics. Two angles of
study are thus possible: on the one hand, contributions in this dimension may investigate how political
actors on any level deal with climate change. On the other hand, authors may focus on how climate
change and related extreme weather events influence voting behavior, the relationship between
society and politics, and eventually the entire political system.
The second dimension of the issue’s title focusses on the 17 UN sustainability goals and their relation
to existing policy implementation. Contributions may therefore focus on policy formation and
implementation or on the evaluation of policy measures and programs.
In this special issue, we thus invite statistics‐based and policy‐centered contributions to the field of
climate and sustainability. We especially invite submissions on the following areas and topics:
- Climate policy implementation
- Policy evaluation and impact assessment
- Comparative perspectives on climate policy effectiveness
- Climate change and party politics
- Climate and mobilization
- Climate change and democracy
- Voter opinion and attitudes towards sustainability
- Comparative perspectives of environmental policy analysis on sustainability goals
We accept the submission of research notes (5,000 words max.) and full articles (9,000 words) for this
special issue.