Transformative, Iterative or Performative? Conceptualising Patterns of Fossil Fuel Phaseout Leadership

ABSTRACT Global leadership in phasing out fossil fuels is an important new frontier in climate governance, yet remains undertheorised within existing scholarly accounts of climate leadership. In this paper, we argue that ‘phaseout leadership’—climate leadership centred on curtailing fossil fuel supply—is a distinct kind of leadership that dominant typologies fail to capture. We develop a novel conceptualisation of phaseout leadership around three characteristics: material, institutional, and symbolic. Drawing on fieldwork across four first‐mover countries—Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark and the United Kingdom—we identify three recurring patterns of phaseout leadership: transformative, iterative, and performative. While transformative leadership directly confronts fossil fuel incumbency and instigates the level of ambition required to align production with international climate commitments, we find that most phaseout leadership to date remains iterative or performative. We contend that the durability of phaseout leadership depends on converting symbolic leadership claims into institutional‐in and material change through coalition‐building and policy coherence across industrial and just transition policies. Without this, both transformative and iterative phaseout leadership risk becoming performative, which may ultimately erode momentum behind global fossil fuel phase‐outs.