Social tipping in Swedish Parliamentary Debate on Climate Change can access transformative policy pathways to realise safe and just futures for all. In this thesis, social tipping processes is applied as a theory of social change to understand, identify, and navigate such instances of abrupt self-reinforcing change. The aim is to describe topics of the Swedish Parliamentary Debate on Climate Change 2010-2021, understand how political salience affects the structure of debate, and identify barriers and enablers for social tipping in parliamentary debate. In this pursuit, a mixed-methods approach based on computational content analysis is applied to study patterns emerging from two natural language processing models, a deep learning classifier and a Structural Topic Model. The results indicate that the last decade was decisive to diversifying the parliamentary debate on climate change beyond energy politics, as contemporary debate has a broader focus on the green transition of industry and transportation. Since early 2018, the intensity of debate has doubled from 2.5% to 5% of parliamentary debate, plausibly due to increased issue contention between governing parties and coalitions. Two case studies of politically salient topics, climate targets (16) and energy politics (22), indicate that social tipping in parliamentary debate is a complex and context dependent social process. The political consensus on Sweden’s long-term goals carries transformative potential, however, as climate issues are increasingly contested there is an increased risk of policy lock-ins. To facilitate social tipping, parliamentarians should transcend imaginary lock-ins to the status quo by promoting global diffusion of stringent net-zero targets and inclusive and fair policies for the green transition. / What makes effective climate policy politically feasible? Formas-ID 2020-00175
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-205531 |
Date | January 2022 |
Creators | Bjerser, Petter |
Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Stockholm Resilience Centre |
Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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