Research

Opposition to the green transition is often attributed to the direct costs of climate policies, with particularly vulnerable individuals perceived as more resistant. While recent studies suggest rural Europeans may be more adversely affected by these policies, their attitudes have largely been overlooked. This article investigates whether, and in which context, rural Europeans are indeed less supportive of climate policies. It proposes that attitudes vary depending on the specific policy and its spatial effects. Drawing on survey data from nine European countries and an additional analysis in France, the study examines the urban–rural divide across a wide range of climate policies. Findings indicate significant differences in support for policies placing higher concentrated or cumulative costs on rural residents as well as those potentially generating other grievances, rooted in perceived cultural conflicts or symbolic lifestyle concerns. Climate politics must therefore account for the diverse geographic and contextual factors shaping policy attitudes.

The need to include pluralistic values of nature in conservation projects, including Nature-based Solutions (NbS), has become evident, and calls for value pluralism have gained traction. However, it is unclear how this can be implemented in practice. We explore how pluralism and related social equity are incorporated by practitioners involved in the governance of NbS, analysing five cases identified as exemplary by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We develop a conceptual framework of social equity founded on five components: recognition, participation, distribution, rights, and accountability. This framework guides our analysis of primary data from in-depth interviews and secondary data from project reports. We discuss how practitioners assimilate these components in their practices and in the design of governance processes. The results indicate a strong commitment to participation and local communities’ involvement, evidenced by specific practices across the projects, although at times driven by individuals rather than institutionally. Processes were conceived to foster actor participation, including those in vulnerable positions; build local capacity and strengthen ownership. Approaches to local communities’ involvement typically begin by eliciting their views and values to design projects with ecological and social benefits. We discuss good practices, like extensive stakeholder mapping, citizen committees to represent local views, and multi-stakeholder platforms to articulate and communicate people’s views and values. The findings underscore the need for a more comprehensive governance approach following an enhanced concept of pluralism that, beside considering plural values of nature and beyond social equity, includes diverse voices, perspectives and forms of knowledge in conservation governance.

The green transition has sparked resistance in many parts of Europe, particularly in rural areas. While existing research highlights the uneven economic costs of climate policies, it often treats attitudes as fixed and overlooks how they are shaped by the social and spatial contexts in which people live. This paper argues that rural discontent with climate policy emerges from the interaction between structural conditions and cultural narratives of place. Using a mixed-methods design, it first draws on geo-coded survey data from France to identify territorial patterns of policy support associated with key structural characteristics, such as population density, employment structure, and service access. It then turns to 53 in-depth interviews conducted in three distinct rural regions to interpret how residents understand and react to these policies. The analysis reveals two interrelated forms of place-based grievance: (i) perceptions of unfair material burdens, and (ii) perceived misalignments between climate policy logics and local identities, norms, and representations. The study proposes a place-based framework that moves beyond standard cost-benefit explanations by demonstrating how structural inequalities and cultural meaning-making processes jointly shape climate attitudes. It contributes to research on climate politics and political behavior by showing how place produces both shared grievances and context-specific forms of resistance, emphasizing the need for context-sensitive strategies to foster rural support beyond sole economic concerns.

As climate change effects become increasingly salient, the need for stringent climatepolicies becomes more pressing. The implementation of such policies is often met withresistance from the public due to their perceived costs and distributional implications.Scholars have mostly focused on material compensations to increase public supportamong policy losers. This paper goes beyond the existing literature by showing howwhat we term symbolic policies can enhance support for costlier policies. We definesymbolic policies as policies sending meaningful messages to the public but having lowmaterial impacts. We argue that without changing the material costs that climatepolicies impose, symbolic policies increase public support by altering the messagethat costly policies convey. We demonstrate our argument using survey experimentsand qualitative interviews conducted in France, showing that symbolic policies cansignificantly increase support for costly climate policies and increase perceptions offairness, elite responsiveness and policy effectiveness.

Are political attitudes shaped more by who people are or where they live? This study engages with the central “composition vs. context” debate in political behaviour to argue that sociodemographic traits, such as age, do not operate independently of place. Instead, their political expression is modulated by local context. Using survey data across nine European countries and qualitative interviews in France, I illustrate this by focusing the attitudes of rural youth with the green transition. Survey results show that while they express environmental concern comparable to urban peers – and higher than older rural residents, their support for climate policies is more conditional when they clash with rural material constrains and symbolic attachments. Both people and place matter. Yet, qualitative evidence reveals how attitudes emerge not just from people or places, but from people in places. The findings call for more interactive approaches to understanding spatial variation in political preferences.

Radical voting has surged across Europe over the past decade, extending well beyond its traditional strongholds in rural or deindustrialized regions. This trend is increasingly visible within large urban centres – spaces typically portrayed as socially progressive and economically dynamic. This paper investigates the rise of radical party support in France’s twenty largest metropolitan areas during the 2019 European elections, focusing on how local socioeconomic inequalities and patterns of social media use interact to shape electoral outcomes. Using a novel dataset combining mobile social media consumption data, neighborhood-level sociodemographic indicators, and electoral results, we employ three-level hierarchical models to examine variation in radical voting both within and between urban areas. Our findings show that support for radical parties is strongly associated with neighborhood-level structural socioeconomic disadvantage but that this relationship is significantly amplified in areas with higher usage of mainstream social media platforms. Crucially, this “social media effect” is not spatially uniform: it is strongest in larger cities marked by fragmented peripheries and deep internal inequalities. By situating social media within its broader spatial and socioeconomic context, this paper contributes to both political behavior and economic geography literatures. We argue that understanding contemporary radical voting requires a place-sensitive framework that captures how digital infrastructures intersect with material conditions to shape political discontent. These findings underscore the importance of integrating digital dynamics into spatial analyses of political behavior and call for more localized, context-aware approaches to governance.