Fredrik von Malmborg

Rising powers of the populist radical right comes with an increasing use of hate speech and different forms of violence to ostracise political opponents in what can be labelled as nasty politics. This paper aims to provoke a discussion to get one step closer to an ethical practice that can delegitimise nasty politics and other injustices. Drawing on three stories of activists being severely harmed by nasty politics the paper portrays the anxiety of not being able to live as human beings with dignity, but also the power of hope. To victims, nasty rhetoric is perceived as a swarm of instants that keep coming in a vertical temporality. It leaves many victims with fear of physical crime and anxiety from not knowing when life will go normal. They resign or stay silent in the public policy debate. Nasty politics also ignites hope based on anger, radicalising some victims as social activists. Not to turn violent, but to intensify peaceful protests to pursue their science-based argumentation for justice and strong climate policy.

Green criminology refers to the study of harms on humanity, the environment and nonhuman species committed by powerful institutions and organisations as well as ordinary people. It addresses violations of environmental morality, environmental ethics, animal rights, nature rights, eco-justice and social justice. Analysing climate change crimes is particularly challenging. Few actors can cause great harm across the globe with many invisible victims. In addition, the International Court of Justice recently advised that nations that commit climate change crime can be held legally accountable if they fail to minimise severe harm to the climate system. Rising powers of far-right populists have come with increasing influence of climate change deniers over policy, and climate policies are denounced and aborted. In parallel, far-right politicians systematically use hate speech and hate crime as a tactic to polarise climate politics, mobilise ingroup followers, and delegitimise and silence pro-climate advocates, eventually harming democracy. This paper theorises on the links between climate change crime, hate crime and democracy crime and suggests a broadening of green criminology to better analyse crimes and victims of climate politics. Green criminology should not only address power in the political economy, but the ideologies and governance styles associated with politics.

The western populist radical right has turned culture oriented. With this comes an increased focus on religion, particularly Christianity. Previous studies tend to see the relationship between the populist radical right and Christian theology as a case of hijacking where religion is abused. This review article takes another perspective and analyses the relationship between Christian theology and practice on the one hand, and the populist radical right politics as strategy and style in governance. The analysis centres around five interlinked core traits of nasty politics. It is found that the strategies and styles applied by populist radical right leaders and parties in Europe as well as the US, as manifested in the core traits, are well established in Christian theology and practice. Power over thought, dualistic polarisation and persuasion are found more generally in different mainstream Christian theologies and practices. Punishment and disruption are less articulated in mainstream Christianity but are central in American evangelical Christianity. The study adds new knowledge, first from its focus on politics as strategy and style rather than politics as ideology, second from its identification of Christian influence not only within a country, but from other countries and continents through an international networked movement.

Background: The clean energy transition required for the decarbonisation of societies to meet climate, energy and sustainability goals make policymakers targets for broad business and non-business advocacy, ensuring that their often-conflicting interests are protected or considered in public policies. The concept of policy entrepreneurs foregrounds the role of agency in understanding such advocacy acts. This paper aims to further the understanding of policy entrepreneurship by comparing strategies used by policy entrepreneurs from various social spheres, who advocate policy change or the status quo, in four longitudinal cases related to EU energy and climate policy from 2011 to 2023. Results: Policy entrepreneurship was mainly of a cultural-institutional nature, aiming at altering or diffusing people’s perceptions, beliefs, norms and cognitive frameworks, worldviews, or institutional logics. However, the European Commission’s (EC) actions also included structural entrepreneurship, aiming at overcoming structural barriers to enhance governance influence by altering the distribution of formal authority and factual and scientific information. The motives of policy entrepreneurs in the four cases differ, but strategies do not differ significantly between actors from the public, private and civic spheres of society. However, the results indicate that civil society policy entrepreneurs focus on building broader coalitions, than do public and private sector entrepreneurs. There is no indication that policy entrepreneurs from a certain sector are more successful than others in setting the agenda, changing the perceptions of policy actors, or influencing actual policy change. Conclusions: It is concluded that policy entrepreneurs advocating policy change are more active and use more elaborate strategies than policy entrepreneurs advocating the status quo. They are also more successful in influencing policy outcomes. The EC was the only policy entrepreneur using structural entrepreneurship, but other policy entrepreneurs were also found to act in non-transparent ways, hiding who takes decisions. The EC acts to expand its reach into areas where the EU holds no or limited legal competence according to the Treaty of the EU. In all, this comes with democratic deficits related to accountability and legitimacy and raises concerns about technocratisation of EU policy processes. These tendencies should be combated to reinstate and reinforce the position and powers of both national and European legislators in formally making important decisions that impact the lives of European citizens and sustainability in the EU.

Background: Improving energy efficiency on a global scale is crucial to meet climate targets of the Paris Agreement and the UN sustainable development goal on ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Energy efficiency is considered the first fuel in the clean energy transition. Contextualising this narrative, the energy efficiency first principle (EE1) was introduced as a concept in EU climate policy in 2015. EE1 was made legally binding in the EU in 2023, to be applied in policy, planning and investment decisions across all sectors that affect the energy system. Understanding the process through which new legislation is developed and adopted is important for understanding the policy itself. Understanding the policy process of EE1 is particularly important since it introduces a paradigm shift in EU energy and climate policy and provides better knowledge of transformative policy change which is of general importance for policy and governance towards a clean energy transition. Results: This paper determines the decade-long policy process and the agency of policy entrepreneurs to make EE1 legally binding. Based on qualitative text analysis of policy documents, position papers and reports from EU negotiations, combined with interviews of key actors, the study shows how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as the European Commission were critical policy entrepreneurs in the process. NGOs considered the unequal treatment of energy supply and energy demand in EU energy policy to hamper efficient use of the energy system and suggested the EE1 principle to overcome this problem. Using linking strategies, relational management strategies, arena strategies, etc., NGOs persuaded the European Commission to propose legislation on EE1. But the initial framing was too technical for decision-makers to understand. Successful coupling of the problem–policy package to politics was done when problem-framing was revised, also referring to the Paris Agreement on climate change and the energy crisis in Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine. Conclusions: It is clear that coalition-building is important for policy entrepreneurs to gain broad acceptance for their policy proposals. In addition, timing and endurance of policy entrepreneurs is of great importance for coupling a problem–policy package to politics. Political decision-makers must be receptive to the problem and its policy solution. As for EE1, it took almost 7 years before the politics stream was mature and receptive to the policy. But as identified, the agency of policy entrepreneurs can conceal the relations between informal and formal decision-making powers and thus reduce accountability, legitimacy and justice in policymaking.

Growing powers of far-right populist parties in European countries has led to more divisive politics on climate change. This is the case also in Sweden, a country that has long been seen as a frontrunner in climate policy and a stronghold of liberal democracy. With a far-right populist nativist party currently holding tangible powers, Swedish climate politics have turned into an antidemocratic politics with rising greenhouse gas emissions in less than two years. Using contemporary Swedish climate politics as a case study, this paper qualitatively analyses the divisive nature of right-wing populist climate politics, with particular focus on the systematic use of hate speech and hate crime for political purposes – nasty politics with nasty rhetoric. Based on empirical data from 157 items from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and social media from June 2021 to June 2025, as well as a review of recent cross-disciplinary literature on hate speech and hate crime, this paper explores the use and nature of nasty rhetoric, raising questions for discussion among scholars, policymakers and civil society beyond Sweden. It is found that leading right-wing politicians, including the prime minister, cabinet ministers and leading parliamentarians, portray climate science as “a point of view”, green politicians as “strawmen” that should be “killed”, female climate journalists as “left pack” and “moron hags” that “will be raped”, and the climate justice movement as “saboteurs”, “totalitarian terrorists” and “a threat to Swedish democracy” that should be “sent to prison” and “executed”. The use of nasty rhetoric can be described as a double-edged sword, aiming to silence the opponents to the current paradigm shift in Swedish climate policy, while at the same time mobilising followers through conspiracy theories with fantasies and symbolic threats to expand the weird sport of nasty rhetoric. Reviewing the literature, people persuaded to follow and expand the use of nasty rhetoric seem to be influenced by ideology, but also social processes as well as dark personality traits. The pro-climate opposition is also using insults and accusations, not to silence the Tidö parties, but to reveal right-wing populist climate policy and politicians as a naked emperor.

Initially developed for the US context, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is increasingly used to analyze policy processes in the EU. But policymaking in EU differs from the US context, why the applicability of ACF in the EU context should be scrutinized. This paper discusses limitations of ACF for analyzing supranational EU policy processes. Policymaking in EU is mainly about collaboration and competition of organizations. Thus, the central concept of ACF—individual beliefs —is difficult to apply. Organizations have cultures, not beliefs. The formal path to policy change in EU is negotiations to reach consensus. These take place in different modes, affecting policy learning. If systems boundaries are adapted to EU governance, organizations are given more attention, and ACF theories are developed to better explain negotiations and policy learning, ACF can complement macro‐level studies of European integration with meso‐level perspectives to better explain policy change in EU.

Wicked problems are inherently societal and cut across temporal, geographical and value related dimensions. Climate change is considered a super wicked problem, appearing at the intersection of science, economics, politics, and human behaviour. The diverse interests, traditions and values of people, companies and politicians make ideological, ethical and religious beliefs and worldviews important in public discourse and policymaking on climate change. The social and political context of climate change also make climate politics emotional. Growing powers of climate denying far-right parties around the world has led to even more emotional politics on climate change. Such politics is not only based on emotions, but shaped to invoke emotions. Right-wing and far-right populist politicians use emotional governance with nasty rhetoric including hate speech and hate crime to polarise climate politics, mobilise ingroup followers, and delegitimise and dehumanise outgroup advocates of strong climate policy while at the same time radically demounting climate policy to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Based on a qualitative case study of nasty rhetoric in Swedish climate politics, used strategically by the current government in a process of autocratisation, this paper analyses the impacts of emotional governance with hate speech and hate crime on politics and governance in liberal democracies. It is found that nasty rhetoric make many climate scientists and journalists silent, reducing the flow of information that make people freely form an opinion on climate policy and hold policymakers accountable. It is also found that many climate activists are radicalised, leading to increased state repression that reduces the civic space and possibilities for civil society organisations and concerned people to take part in policy debates. In all, nasty rhetoric reduces the dignity and equality of people and undermine the legitimacy of democracy, which may lead to its breakdown. The paper ends with a discussion on social, political and academic debates on how to curb nasty rhetoric, where both advocates and opponents to restrictions on nasty rhetoric accuse the other for being antidemocratic.

Background: Improving energy efficiency on a global scale is crucial to meet climate targets of the Paris Agreement and the UN sustainable development goal on ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Energy efficiency is considered the first fuel in the clean energy transition. Contextualising this narrative, the energy efficiency first principle (EE1) was introduced as a concept in EU climate policy in 2015. EE1 was made legally binding in the EU in 2023, to be applied in policy, planning and investment decisions across all sectors that affect the energy system. Understanding the process through which new legislation is developed and adopted is important for understanding the policy itself. Understanding the policy process of EE1 is particularly important since it introduces a paradigm shift in EU energy and climate policy and provides better knowledge of transformative policy change which is of general importance for policy and governance towards a clean energy transition. Results: This paper determines the decade-long policy process and the agency of policy entrepreneurs to make EE1 legally binding. Based on qualitative text analysis of policy documents, position papers and reports from EU negotiations, combined with interviews of key actors, the study shows how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as the European Commission were critical policy entrepreneurs in the process. NGOs considered the unequal treatment of energy supply and energy demand in EU energy policy to hamper efficient use of the energy system and suggested the EE1 principle to overcome this problem. Using linking strategies, relational management strategies, arena strategies, etcetera, NGOs persuaded the European Commission to propose legislation on EE1. But the initial framing was too technical for decision-makers to understand. Successful coupling of the problem–policy package to politics was done when problem-framing was revised, also referring to the Paris Agreement on climate change and the energy crisis in Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine. Conclusions: It is clear that coalition-building is important for policy entrepreneurs to gain broad acceptance for their policy proposals. In addition, timing and endurance of policy entrepreneurs is of great importance for coupling a problem–policy package to politics. Political decision-makers must be receptive to the problem and its policy solution. As for EE1, it took almost seven years before the politics stream was mature and receptive to the policy. But as identified, the agency of policy entrepreneurs can conceal the relations between informal and formal decision-making powers and thus reduce accountability, legitimacy and justice in policymaking.