Climate change presents a profound political, social, and economic challenge to all states around the world, regardless of regime type. All states, including democracies, authoritarian states, and everything in between, need to grapple with how to integrate environmental and climate-related concerns into broader planning, policy, and decision-making processes. While closely connected, environmental concerns such as biodiversity loss, pollution, and waste are distinct from climate-related concerns which encompass emissions reduction, the transition to low-carbon energy, and adaptation planning around climate impacts. All these issues carry serious security and social risks if left unaddressed. Understanding how different political systems approach this task, and how effectively they address these issues, is a central concern for scholars of climate and environmental politics.
Given the scale and urgency of the climate crisis, some argue that more authoritarian forms of governance may be necessary, with a concentration of power seen as necessary to deliver reforms, and overcome the short-termism and policy gridlock often attributed to democratic systems. This recent work on climate builds on an earlier body of literature on “authoritarian environmentalism,” which explores how centralized political structures in non-democratic contexts have the potential to create fast and decisive environmental action.
These arguments are certainly not without controversy. Critics have argued that democracies are better placed to address crises such as climate change. They point to the strengths of democratic systems, which have the potential to provide the transparency and participatory institutions that are essential for securing long-term public support for genuine climate action.
Further, one critical issue that much of the authoritarian environmentalism literature and its later incarnations in the climate sphere often fails to grasp is the considerable variation in authoritarian regime responses to climate and the environment. While countries like China and Singapore have mounted ambitious environmental and renewable energy plans, closely aligning environmental concerns with the political system and thus forming the empirical inspiration behind much of this literature, they only represent part of the picture.
There is another group of authoritarian states whose political and economic survival depends on fossil fuels. Russia is one of the most prominent examples, but similar dynamics are at place in states across the Middle East and North Africa. Often dismissed as authoritarian petrostates and climate laggards, these countries nonetheless play a major role in shaping global emissions trajectories. Without understanding the domestic policymaking and international engagement on climate, global climate efforts will fall short.
Autocrats and Climate Policymaking
Despite the rise of authoritarian environmentalism scholarship, we still lack a solid empirical grasp of how non-democratic states formulate and implement climate policy, with the existing tools for examining and trying to understand the policy process grounded in liberal, democratic, pluralist traditions.
However, there is a growing recognition within both the environmental politics literature and public policy scholarship that we need to pay greater attention to how policy is made and implemented in political systems outside the narrow context in which this literature first emerged. So, how is policy made in non-democratic contexts?
Existing work, as Williamson and Magaloni point out, tends to privilege explanations centred on the autocrat. They write, “discussions of the policy process typically reflect a simple model in which the autocrat dominates decision-making,” with the autocrat selecting a policy which is then implemented. By definition, in authoritarian political systems, the autocrat looms large. When it comes to the climate and environmental space, the autocratic leader has the capacity to shape policy and politics in several important ways.
When it comes to the climate and environmental space, the autocratic leader has the capacity to shape policy and politics in important ways.
First, the leader can set the policy agenda and shape how environmental and climate issues are discussed. Second, they have the power to intervene directly in policy activities, be it legislative development, or through shaping the bureaucracy—by appointing ministers and key officials or creating or abolishing ministries and agencies, for example. Finally, the autocrat also plays an important role in controlling dissent and restricting (or enabling) the voices able to be heard in society as well as the information available to the public.
We certainly see elements of this play out in the Russian context. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin plays a key agenda-setting role in the climate space, which is at times contradictory. He has in the past commented on the importance of Russia’s climate commitments and talked up Russia’s “contributions” to solving the problem by virtue of its vast forest resources. At other times, Putin has spoken of the advantages for Russia of a warming climate, such as the expansion of agriculture and extended navigation periods for the Northern Sea Route.
These contradictions are not simply rhetorical; they help shape public and policy discussions of the issue. As Poberezhskaya and Martus note, “when President Putin casts doubts over [anthropogenic climate change], the media reproduce this message without challenge,” effectively turning it into official discourse. This underscores the powerful role the president plays in shaping what and how issues are discussed. While he tends to play a hands-off role in policymaking, Putin’s role in restricting the space for civil society and cracking down on any form of dissent is well known.
Focusing exclusively on the autocrat’s role risks obscuring the very complex set of actors, ideas, institutions, and interests that exist in non-democratic settings.
Yet despite the prominence of the leader, focusing exclusively on the autocrat’s role risks obscuring the very complex set of actors, ideas, institutions, and interests that exist in non-democratic settings, as they do in democratic ones. Thus, we need to look at more than just the leader in order to understand the policy process, and how environmental and climate politics plays out in authoritarian states. So, how does this play out in the case of Russia?
The Russian Environment between Liberalism and Illiberalism
Russia is an important actor when it comes to the environment and climate, both in terms of its natural resources and its impact. The country is home to one-fifth of the world’s forests, which play an important role in regulating global temperatures and storing carbon. Russia is also one of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and exporters, and the fifth-largest greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitter. This means that global action to effectively address the climate crisis requires Russia’s participation.
Environmental policy within Russia has long been seen as a liberal “archipelago” in an illiberal regime, dating back to the Soviet period. In his wide-ranging history of nature protection from Stalin to Gorbachev, Douglas Weiner, for example, charts how the conservation movement, including individuals and groups from geography faculties, student societies, and leading scientists, was able to chart a partially independent path within a repressive society. This continued into the post-Soviet period, though as Tysiachniouk, Tulaeva, Kotilainen, and Henry explain, from the 2000s onwards, environmental activists have struggled against an increasingly illiberal state.
Environmental policy within Russia has long been seen as a liberal “archipelago” in an illiberal regime, dating back to the Soviet period.
However, while the country’s environmental politics may have had a more liberal, open tradition of local activism and expert-level debate, Russia’s climate politics presents an interesting comparison and operates differently in a number of ways.
Despite a long history of scientific research on climate dating back to the Soviet period, there is an equally long history of amplifying those voices within the scientific community skeptical of anthropogenic climate change. This creates ambivalent messaging and undermines public engagement with the issues.
Further, unlike local environmental issues, such as opposition to a pipeline or the destruction of a forest, which typically involve specific regional actors and can serve as manageable outlets for dissent, climate change poses a different kind of challenge to the regime. It is more abstract, less immediate, and less visible. This makes it harder for activists to mobilize public support for the cause.
A genuine shift away from fossil fuels would pose a wholesale challenge to contemporary Russia’s political and economic system.
Finally, and most importantly, addressing climate change in a fossil fuel-dependent economy, where oil and gas revenues underpin both economic stability and the authoritarian political order, is far more complex. A genuine shift away from fossil fuels would not just require technological developments or minor policy adjustments; it would pose a wholesale challenge to contemporary Russia’s political and economic system. As such, climate action becomes enmeshed with questions of power, control, and regime survival.
Climate Policymaking in Russia: Similar and Different to Democracies
In a paper recently published in Environmental Politics, I undertook a detailed examination of a recent climate law in Russia to try and understand how climate policymaking unfolds in an authoritarian state. I focused on the 2021 Law on Greenhouse Gas Emissions (the GHG Law), which emerged during a brief period when there was substantial policy activity in the climate space.
To do this, I used one of the most prominent tools in public policy, the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), which explores how policy problems emerge on government agendas and what happens during the decision-making process that follows. MSF dissects the policy process into three independent streams (problem, policy, and politics), which gives us leverage to explore the complexity and ambiguity that frequently characterize policy processes across all regime types. While originally developed for understanding liberal democratic policy processes, the MSF has proven to be a valuable tool outside these settings, and one that helps us compare how policy processes differ in authoritarian settings.
The GHG Law revealed several similarities between policy processes in democratic and authoritarian states. First, when it comes to the problem stream—where policy issues first come to the attention of policymakers though activities such as key focusing events, or the emergence of new data on an issue—the dynamics resemble democracies. Climate issues rise to the agenda through the hard-to-ignore crises posed by wildfires and droughts, with the Russian government’s own data pointing to the increasing severity of climate-related events.
Second, international developments can also be a major impetus for attention. In this case, Russia’s signature of the Paris Agreement in 2016 created a “window of opportunity” for policy action, just as it has done in democratic settings. In designing the GHG Law, Russia’s policymakers drew on European-style carbon pricing proposals and concerns related to the anticipated economic impact of the European Union’s (then proposed) Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). International norms and events thus prompted action in an authoritarian setting, much as they do in democracies.
Third, the politics stream in the GHG Law case was characterized by debates, disagreements, and competition. Here, we saw two groups of actors emerge. On the one side, a group of climate pragmatists, who recognized the economic necessity of developing a stronger climate agenda to ensure Russian companies could operate freely in more climate-sensitive markets such as the EU and respond to CBAM. This expert policy community, with its center in the Ministry for Economic Development, mobilized its technical expertise to draft laws and generate solutions, also highlighting the political value of international engagement in the climate policy space.
This group faced strong opposition from a pro-fossil fuel coalition of government actors from the Ministry of Energy, and a range of business associations and companies from the fossil fuel sector. These two groups openly debated the economic consequences of ratifying the Paris Agreement and introducing the GHG Law, which the pro-fossil fuel coalition argued would have a significant cost for the economy.
Climate politics looks very similar across the democratic-authoritarian spectrum in states with significant oil, gas, and coal industries. Yet at the same time, there are also critical differences.
This is very similar to the debates we see playing out in carbon-intensive democratic settings between pro-climate actors who want stronger action on climate and emissions control, and pro-fossil fuel actors who vigorously resist the imposition of GHG controls and other policy options that may limit their activities. In this way, climate politics looks very similar across the democratic-authoritarian spectrum in states with significant oil, gas, and coal industries. It is also far from the simplistic, autocrat-dominated, policy environment which much of the earlier literature assumed.
Yet at the same time, there were also critical differences, which highlighted not just how climate policymaking differs in illiberal, authoritarian settings, but also showed how challenging any meaningful climate action is in Russia. One of the most glaring and obvious differences highlighted by the GHG Law case was the restricted discourse found within authoritarian Russia. In democratic settings, we see a diverse range of voices, including media and NGOs, who point to the risks of failing to act on climate. Yet in Russia, the increasingly repressive nature of the state during this period, narrowed what was permissible in terms of public discussion of policy options. Russian NGOs have been faced with a compounding range of restrictions since at least the first introduction of the Law on Foreign Agents in 2012, forcing many into exile, and limiting their ability to provide input into policy discussions.
Overall, this means we see a very narrow policy community, unlike in democracies where think tanks, NGOs, and a range of community, business, and government actors contribute to discussing the policy options available. While, as discussed above, the policy environment surrounding the GHG Law was competitive and contested with different actors pushing for their own ideas and interests, these discussions are generally restricted to executive branch actors from the key ministries, in addition to powerful business associations and companies.
While the initial stage of the GHG Law process saw the climate pragmatists able to get an ambitious draft law on the agenda, which would have set quotas for industry GHG emissions reduction and penalties for exceeding them, the pro-fossil fuel coalition launched a sustained, coordinated, and ultimately successful campaign against this. Faced with this strong resistance, the climate pragmatists conceded virtually all their ambitious measures, leaving only mandatory GHG monitoring and voluntary reduction commitments in places. The resulting compromise law was approved in 2021, marking a clear victory for the pro-fossil fuel bloc.
Ultimately, while similar policy battles play out in the climate politics of all states, democracies can tolerate dissent and disagreement over whether to take action, and what form that action will take. Yet in Russia, any serious shift away from fossil fuels poses a fundamental threat to the system. The rents derived from fossil fuel production, sales, and exports provide elites cohesion and regime stability. Seriously addressing climate change implies restructuring these core political and economic bargains, a very risky prospect for the regime.
While similar policy battles play out in the climate politics of all states, democracies can tolerate dissent and disagreement over whether to take action, and what form that action will take.
Beyond One-dimensional Analysis
Russia’s GHG Law illustrates how climate policymaking in authoritarian settings shares some core dynamics with democratic systems, including in terms of how policy problems emerge, how policies are formulated with reference to the broader international context, and the negotiation and bargaining that goes on amongst policy actors.
However, at the same time, the state’s control over information and restriction of the diversity of voices heard, plus the narrow policy community and existential stakes of transitioning the fossil fuel state towards cleaner, greener energy, produce a constrained process which limits the potential for genuine climate action. Understanding both the similarities and differences between authoritarian and democratic states sharpens our insights into climate politics and highlights the formidable obstacles to effective decarbonization in fossil fuel-dependent autocracies.
While some authoritarian states may be capable of rapid, top-down policy shifts, the Russian case shows that authoritarian governance certainly does not automatically translate into effective climate action.
Examining Russia’s climate policymaking brings us back to the broader question raised at the start: how do different political regime types respond to the challenge of climate change? While some authoritarian states may be capable of rapid, top-down policy shifts, the Russian case shows that authoritarian governance certainly does not automatically translate into effective climate action, particularly when fossil fuels are deeply embedded within the political and economic order. Understanding these dynamics challenges one-dimensional narratives about the effectiveness of authoritarian environmental and climate governance and also reinforces the need for context-specific analyses of the constraints that some authoritarian states face when it comes to ambitious climate action.
Ellie Martus is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Australia. Working across environmental politics and public policy, Ellie’s research explores the role of industry in shaping environmental and climate policy, particularly in authoritarian contexts.
