Mainstream parties and climate policy development: what role for intra-party politics?

Mainstream parties’ adaptation to the climate agenda is generally understood in terms of their existing ideological profiles or inter-party competitive dynamics. We know much less about the role played by intra-party politics (IPP). In this article we develop a novel analytical schema for understanding IPP and its relationship to climate policy development in mainstream parties by exploring how internal tensions in the ‘Ecological Modernisation’ (EM) framework play out in the intra-party setting. Utilising the case of the UK Labour Party (2020–24), drawing on 28 elite interviews and documentary analysis, we demonstrate how power dynamics between competing factions, key ideas and previous political experiences shaped Labour’s decision to drop its ambitious £28bn annual Climate Investment Pledge. The analysis has important implications for understanding how mainstream parties engage with the climate agenda and why their traditional governing ambitions (e.g. economic growth and stability) may come to trump climate policy goals.