Global Methane Politics (METH-POL)

The ambition of the Global Methane Politics project is to produce a pioneering body of research that simultaneously establishes the distinctiveness of methane politics, investigates and demonstrates the most significant political obstacles to methane emissions reduction, and has transformative impacts on global methane and climate policies and practices.

Research on methane politics is urgently needed because 1) methane is the second largest contributor to anthropogenic climate change; 2) reducing methane emissions provides one of the most obvious routes to short-term climate mitigation, including limiting warming to near 1.5°C; 3) methane has become widely recognised as an important international policy concern since the launch of the Global Methane Pledge (GMP) in 2021; and yet 4), very little research has so far been conducted on methane policy, regulation or politics in practice – which is a critical shortcoming if the GMP target of a 30% reduction in emissions by 2030 is to be more seriously pursued.

METH-POL will be novel, impactful and timely. Guided principally by research in political ecology, it will test a series of original hypotheses about the specificity of methane politics, the political barriers to methane emissions reduction, and the implications thereof for research, policy and practice. It will produce the first dedicated body of cross-sectoral, cross-national, multi-scalar, trans-disciplinary and comparatively informed evidence on methane politics. It will involve research on 16 countries, on the global North and global South, on every continent, on the top five methane emitting countries, on the major methane emissions sectors, and on a wide range of methane governance initiatives, institutions and techniques. And it will also involve extensive knowledge exchange with scientific, policy and practitioner communities.

A 5-year project, METH-POL will run from 2026 to 2030 – the critical years if the GMP 30-30 target is to be achieved.

The project will be led by Jan Selby, and involve a team of 3 postdoctoral researchers, two PhD researchers, and a project manager.

Project aims

METH-POL has five key objectives:

1. To produce an original, high-quality and rounded body of research on the politics of methane emissions and methane governance, which will create a basis for, and help inspire, future trans-disciplinary and social science-led work on the subject;
2. To investigate and deepen understanding of the specificity of methane politics, as a sub-set of climate politics that shares much with, but also departs in important ways from, CO2 politics;
3. To analyse and demonstrate the importance and impacts of politics in shaping patterns of methane emissions and obstructing methane emission abatement efforts;
4. To advance a novel methane-specific and politics-centred explanation of the poor record, so far, of worldwide methane emission reduction efforts; and
5. On this basis, and beyond the life of the project, to make transformative contributions to research, policy and practice on methane emissions and climate change mitigation.