Distributive Politics of the Energy Transition

Energy transitions are inherently redistributive, reallocating economic opportunities, political influence, and environmental costs across actors and territories. Yet existing scholarship on distributive climate politics remains fragmented by governance level, with international relations scholars examining global cooperation, comparative political economists studying national policy adoption, environmental justice researchers analyzing local conflicts, and economic geographers investigating regional development. This dissertation addresses that fragmentation through a cumulative four-paper design examining distributive politics across global, national, local, and regional governance levels simultaneously. Drawing on a shared analytical vocabulary of structural inequality, institutional mediation, and constrained agency, the dissertation asks whether distributive inequalities across governance levels reflect comparable political-economic mechanisms operating independently, or arise from different causes at each level that coincidentally produce similar outcomes. Each paper examines one governance level using level-appropriate methods: fuzzy c-means clustering and regression analysis for global technology cooperation participation across 131 countries and 38 IEA Technology Collaboration Programmes, Poisson panel regression for national climate policy adoption across 74 countries from 2000 to 2018, discourse network analysis for local implementation conflicts around small hydropower plants in Serbia from 2000 to 2020, and fuzzy c-means clustering and comparative case analysis for regional electric vehicle deployment across 25 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2018. The findings document a recurring three-part distributive pattern across all four governance levels. Pre-existing structural advantages: comprehensive capability portfolios globally, green industry economic strength nationally, territorial marginalization locally, and inherited industrial legacies regionally, systematically shape who benefits and who bears costs. Institutional arrangements mediate how these advantages convert into outcomes through participation thresholds in global cooperation, regime type in national policymaking, regulatory capacity and civic space in local implementation, and provincial autonomy in regional development. Political agency operates within the constraints these configurations establish, with its effectiveness varying systematically across levels: effectively precluded globally, conditionally effective nationally, path-dependent regionally, and partially effective locally. This convergence across four methodologically diverse independent studies suggests that distributive politics operates as a general feature of energy transitions wherever they allocate valued resources or impose concentrated costs, a scope demonstration extending distributive climate politics analysis across governance levels typically studied in isolation.