Energy Security, Climate Change, and Routines as Maladaptive Politics

Abstract

Energy transitions suffer from a central political challenge. Future costs of the energy transition are directly linked to investments in mitigation and adaptation measures today, yet governments continue to underinvest in decarbonization policies and are far from meeting legally binding targets. While interdisciplinary explanations trace multiple motives behind inaction, I argue that climate inaction must be embedded in political mechanisms that sustain it. Routines are one such mechanism. Building on literatures of temporality, normative change in international politics, critical energy security studies, and routines, I argue that moments of crises have so far not been transformative in the context of climate and energy security because of how actors construct the politics of crises temporally. The temporal construction of crisis engenders a selective reading of the timescales that are perceived to matter, which in turn gives way to reproducing dominant routines that have historically been thought to secure against crises. Such routines, however, no longer secure outcomes against crises; they reproduce the very cause of climate change, namely the dependence on fossil fuels. I illustrate the explanatory mechanism between crises and routines through a case study of Germany’s energy security response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.