Government positions and climate change: paradigmatic conflict versus consensus in environmental performance

Historically, environmental policy was framed as a fundamental trade-off between economic growth and ecological preservation. Since the mid-1980s, however, this dichotomy has been largely replaced by the paradigm of ecological modernization, expressed in concepts like “green growth” and “sustainable development,” which hold that economic growth and environmental protection are mutually reinforcing. This shift was accompanied by the assumption that a broad political consensus on reconciling economic growth and environmental protection would lead to superior environmental outcomes. Yet, the persistent gap between climate targets and actual emission trends necessitates a critical re-evaluation of this “consensus” approach and of whether the original antagonism between environmental protection and economic growth has genuinely been overcome. To assess this claim, this study tests six distinct conceptualizations of government ideology and policy focus, analyzing government positions across 35 advanced democracies from 1990 to 2021. The findings show that neither the focus on technocratic environmental issues, nor the classic left-right divide, nor the newer, more encompassing green-alternative versus traditional-authoritarian dimension predicts emissions performance. Instead, emissions decline where governments adopt growth-critical positions and even more where environmental ideology contrasts growth-oriented productionism with growth-critical environmental protection. This suggests that the depoliticization of climate policy may be part of the problem: ideological contestation over growth itself, not environmental consensus, emerges as the more effective driver of decarbonization.