Contested Pathways to Climate Transition: Interests, Institutions and Imaginaries

The transition towards climate neutrality is among the most pressing challenges facing contemporary societies. Achieving net zero is widely regarded as essential for securing a livable future. Yet transforming economies that have long been organized around fossil energy, growth, and mass consumption represents a profound challenge. In addition to technological innovation, it requires profound economic, political, and social transformations that threaten established privileges and expectations. As recent developments across Europe demonstrate, climate transition is therefore increasingly intertwined with conflicts and power struggles.

The workshop brings together two research groups that study climate transition in Europe, albeit from different points of departure. Our exchange sets out to unpack current conflicts and explore how different European societies, industrial sectors, and actor groups experience, negotiate, and respond to these challenges. Adopting a comparative perspective offers an opportunity to examine why climate transitions take different forms and generate different forms of contestation. The comparison of diverse projects across national contexts and sectors will provide a broad perspective on climate transition in Europe.

To discuss these empirical projects, the workshop proposes a common analytical lens centered on the interplay of interests, institutions, and imaginaries. The complementary dimensions of interests, institutions, and ideas have long been a cornerstone of social theory. They have been used to explain the stabilization and reproduction of social order, but also diverse processes of social change. Building on this tradition, we extend this framework through the concept of imaginaries, understood as collectively shared and contested ideas about the future. Across diverse contexts, we explore how interests, institutions, and imaginaries reinforce or challenge each other, and how they facilitate or constrain specific pathways towards net zero.

By bringing these questions into dialogue, the workshop aims not only to discuss individual research projects but also to advance a shared theoretical perspective on the current challenges, conflicts, and possibilities of climate transition in Europe.