SEDAN DET KLIMATPOLITISKA ramverket antogs av riksdagen i juni 2017 har Sverige strävat efter att bli ett fossilfritt välfärdsland. Målet är att Sverige inte ska ha några netto-utsläpp av växthusgaser år 2045 och därefter uppnå negativa utsläpp. För att nå detta mål har staten krokat arm med näringslivet och riktat fokus mot utsläppstunga sektorer så som energi, transport och basindustri. Samarbetet har präglats av en stor teknikoptimism. Genom gröna teknikskiften ska den svenska industrins konkurrenskraft stärkas, nya jobb skapas och klimatnytta exporteras till världen. I denna omställnings berättelse saknas medborgarnasröster, drömmar och visioner. Behöver svensk klimatpolitik bli mer inkluderande för att vinna folkligt stöd och vad innebär det i så fall i praktiken?

In this paper, we discuss the unsettled politics of child and youth representation in international institutions. By introducing the collection of papers that constitute this Special Issue, we examine how international institutions empower children and youth through participation and recognition, but also how institutionalized rules, routines, and policy discourses constrain the realms of possibility available to them. While the contributions illustrate how the politics of age and generation underpin IR as subject matter, they also prompt us to think of child and youth representation as unsettled and multifarious. We identify three ‘troubles of representation’ that complicate the involvement of children and youth in global policymaking: (i) the problem of speaking for others; (ii) representative hierarchies and barriers; and (iii) young people’s liminal position in-between worlds. Finally, we discuss how young people’s in-betweenness offers a productive prism that invites us to revisit the politics of representation and identify avenues for future research.

The Paris Agreement ushered in an era of climate governance underpinned by a polycentric theory of change, emphasizing experimentation, collaboration, and innovation while downplaying political contestation, power asymmetries, and the need for regulatory action by the state. This article explores the roles the state plays in polycentric climate governance, focusing on the tension between the regulatory state, where authorities set, monitor, and enforce rules, and the orchestrating state, which facilitates collaboration with nonstate actors to induce behavioral change. Using decarbonization in Sweden as an illustrative case study, the article synthesizes the results of two research projects evaluating the promises and limits of polycentric climate governance. The results problematize the view that Sweden is a forerunner in climate governance, suggesting that while the Swedish government has mobilized support from important industries and cities in favor of decarbonization, that support may be insufficient to achieve necessary societal transformation for deep decarbonization. Finally, the study reflects on the conditions necessary for polycentric governance to effectively decarbonize society, highlighting the pivotal role of the regulatory state.

This chapter employs narrative analysis to examine how people who live in the shadow of carbon-intensive industries imagine a just transition to net-zero emissions. The analysis rests upon an interview study with local politicians, civil servants, union representatives, and citizen groups in the Swedish west-coast city of Lysekil, home to Scandinavia’s largest oil refinery. By mapping stories of climate (in)justice told in view of Sweden’s efforts to decarbonize, this chapter illustrates the cultural dimensions of carbon lock-ins and why some people resist transformative change. In the city of Lysekil, the refinery is not only an important source of local employment but also deeply entangled with community identity and sense of place. However, the chapter also points to the multiple interpretations of just transitions to climate neutrality and the power of narrative to open-up possibilities for decarbonized futures.

In this article, we study how Sweden’s transition to a fossil free society is interpreted and experienced by communities whose livelihoods and cultural identities are entangled with carbon-intensive industries. The study draws upon interviews with citizen groups in the coastal city of Lysekil, located next to Scandinavia’s largest oil refinery. Our analysis speaks to a growing scholarly literature on just transitions where we argue that a better understanding of place attachment as an active and operating force in local transition processes, can provide important information for just transition policy design. Based on our research on place attachment in Lysekil, we suggest that inclusivity in just transitions, implies acknowledging and addressing more than material aspects of loss, involving loss of direction, loss of identities and loss of imagined futures. Moreover, we argue that the vision of an inclusive transition requires a more nuanced approach to the concept of “community” which recognises different stories, voices, and perspectives and challenges taken for granted assumptions about local people's priorities in debates on just transitions. Finally, based on our experiences from Lysekil we contend that inclusivity requires communicative spaces where citizens can meet to listen, speak, and discuss future pathways towards a fossil free society. The visions of just and inclusive transitions, we argue, can only be realised if driven by a place-based dialogue on future pathways and if agendas for a fossil free transformation are locally anchored.

In this article, we examine how young climate activists make use of the United Nations(UN) constituency system to give voice to children and youth in global climate governance.Our study is based on a mapping of accredited youth nongovernmental organizations( YOUNGO) as well as fieldwork at two UN Climate Change Conferences, where weconducted interviews, observed events, and analyzed plenary interventions. Informedby constructivist accounts of political representation, the article pays attention to theperformative relationship between institutionalized means of youth representation and“the represented.” When analyzing our material, we asked who speaks for youth, howyouth are spoken of, and how institutions shape representative speech. Our study iden-tifies three subject positions that offer competing interpretations of who youth are as apolitical community and what they want. Rather than taking youth’s demands andinterests as a starting point for representative politics, the article illustrates how theUN constituency system actively constructs youth and effectively molds young climateactivists into professional insiders.

In this article, on behalf of The Shadow Places Network, we outline a working manifesto of politics and practice. We mobilise the format of the manifesto to speak to an uncertain and damaged future, to begin to imagine other possible worlds. For feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose thinking inspires this network, shadow places are the underside of the capitalist fantasy, ‘the multiple disregarded places of economic and ecological support’. In turning towards shadow places, and the unjust and unsustainable processes that produce them, we call for an environmental humanities that reaches beyond abstraction, fosters new responsibilities, considers the uncomfortable, and generates reparative possibilities and alternative futures. We aim to continue to trace out a world of shadow places. We acknowledge that these shadow places cannot be known in full, but through a willingness to engage in careful conversation with the beings and places harmed by (or strategically shielded from) processes of the Anthropocene, we can learn how to relate to each other and these places in more just ways. Recognising that shadow places are impermanent and contingent, this working manifesto does not look to predetermine or prescribe but rather invites conversation, encounter and exchange. In so doing we choose to contribute to making different worlds possible by pursuing new collaborations, new methods and new politics. 

The 2015 Paris Agreement is often depicted as a turning point for global climate governance. Following years of diplomatic gridlock, it laid the foundations for a new global climate regime that invites states to partner with nonstate actors in the transition to the low-carbon society. This article critically examines the political rationalities that inform the pluralization of climate politics after Paris and the turn toward cooperative modes of governing. Drawing on an analysis of initiatives led by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that were launched to engage nonstate actors in the evolving Paris regime, we identify a global governmentality that mobilizes nonstate actors as active and responsible partners in the quest for rapid and deep decarbonization. In its search for cooperative and efficient forms of problem management, we argue, this form of rule nurtures a global space free from friction and opposition where businesses, investors, and industry are elevated as the real partners of government.

In 2017, the Swedish parliament adopted a new climate policy framework that lays the foundations for an ambitious decarbonization of all sectors in Swedish society. To live up to the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets, the parliament decided that Sweden should arrive at net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by year 2045 and thereafter aim for net negative emissions. This progressive climate policy agenda is embedded in a strong collaborative discourse. To begin the transition to a fossil-free society, the Swedish government has invited a wide array of actors to join forces in the formulation and implementation of low carbon initiatives. In this paper we examine the fossil-free society as a powerful socio-technical imaginary that underpins this collaborative effort. We trace the promise attached to this future dreamscape and how it is mobilized by the government initiative Fossil-Free Sweden (FFS) to gain support for industrial decarbonization in the present. Our study draws upon roadmaps produced by FFS together with the Swedish steel, cement, and petroleum industry, as well as semi-structured interviews with selected industry actors. We find that the FFS roadmaps work as powerful “techniques of futuring” that invite industry actors to anticipate the risks and opportunities attached to the fossil-free society and at the same time contribute to shaping that society. While effectively involving incumbent actors in the political project of decarbonization, our study suggests that the roadmaps consolidate around an imagined future that is a techno-optimistic extension of the fossil-intensive present