Our Distinctive Approach
METHPOL is theoretically inspired by research in political ecology, in has four ways:
Methane politics is different
Political ecologists often emphasise how the material properties and profiles of particular natural resources and pollutants can give rise to specific political dynamics as well. Building on this insight, METHPOL’s core analytical premise is that methane politics may be considered a distinct sub-set of climate politics, different from CO2 politics, and that this specificity has important implications for methane and climate mitigation efforts. This issue is particularly explored in themes 1 and 6 of the project.
Methane politics is multi-dimensional
Research on environmental politics mostly focuses on policy responses to environmental problems. But political ecologists go beyond this, to also examine how political dynamics structure environmental problems themselves, and how both ecological problems and the responses to them have uneven socio-ecological consequences. METHPOL does likewise, exploring all four moments of the methane-politics relationship: 1) the political causes of methane emissions; 2) the politics of methane policies; 3) the politics of mitigation implementation measures; and 4) the knock-on social and ecological consequences of both methane emissions and methane mitigation. These four moments of methane politics are explored in the project’s themes 2, 3, 4, and 5.
The global methane crisis is political
There exist plenty of low- and even negative-cost technical solutions for methane emissions. Yet these are clearly not being implemented at anything like the scale required. And it follows that the global methane crisis is fundamentally political rather than technical in its causes – a premise that is also in line with political ecologists’ insistence that environmental crises are fundamentally rooted in politics. Politics, here, does not just mean policy: politics instead denotes differences in power, interests and values along multiple scales and axes. The project will explore this politics across all of its six themes.
Methane politics is multi-scalar
Political ecologists typically combine ‘place-based’ analysis with broader exploration of how local places and practises are shaped by national and global structures and hierarchies. Political ecologists also often seek to decentre the West in their analyses, and make visible the perspectives and experiences of the less powerful. METHPOL is designed to do similarly, combining investigation of international policy processes with local case study research, whilst also seeking to visibilise the practises and views of those at the sharp end of methane pollution and governance.