Dasom Lee

Geoengineering is an object of deep political contestation. Unlike climate mitigation, public responses to geoengineering technologies cannot be as easily explained by political ideology alone. Hypothesizing that climate denialism mediates ideology’s influence on public support for geoengineering, we ask: (1) What is the relationship between political conservatism and support for solar geoengineering, and does it differ by country and technology? (2) Is this relationship mediated by climate denialism? We answer these questions using mediation analyses of public attitudes toward three climate intervention technologies across thirteen countries. Our findings show that conservatives are generally less supportive of geoengineering, and this opposition is largely rooted in climate denialism with variation across technologies. Once denialism is controlled for, conservatism is associated with greater support for certain technologies in some countries but not others. Therefore, the relationship between conservatism and climate intervention support does not reflect a single, stable ideological effect.

With the rise of conservatism in many parts of the world, political polarization has become more divisive. Considering the urgency of climate change, cross-ideological cooperation on energy policy is needed, and clean energy conservatism may provide a strategic entry point to further promote a support base for energy transition policies. Drawing on nationally representative survey data, the study finds that conservative respondents show significantly stronger support for nuclear energy and weaker support for renewables. Although both economic and environmental considerations influence energy preferences, the weight placed on these factors varies across the ideological spectrum. These findings echo trends observed in North America and Europe, where conservatives tend to prioritize economic and energy security concerns over environmental ones. However, the Korean context presents more nuanced patterns that resist simple ideological classification. In particular, the relationships between ideology, economic and environmental reasoning, and energy preferences are more complex than a straightforward opposition between conservative and progressive values. These results contribute to the growing literature on clean energy conservatism by showing how global patterns may manifest differently in non-Western settings.

How do different states produce different sociotechnical imaginaries of the same technology? Existing comparative work has documented cross-national divergence in imaginaries but has not isolated the mechanisms through which prior institutional arrangements shape imaginary formation. We address this gap through a computational and discourse analysis of data centre regulatory documents in Australia (90 documents, 30,792 paragraphs) and South Korea (36 documents, 5,055 paragraphs). Drawing on Mutter and Rohracher’s (2022) framework for analyzing sociotechnical imaginaries along four dimensions — spatial boundedness, temporality, socio-material relations, and coherence and contestation — we demonstrate that these dimensions, while productive, cannot fully account for divergences produced when a new technology enters regulatory states with fundamentally different institutional histories. We identify two additional dimensions: governance agency, which captures whether the state positions itself as the driver of technological development or the arbiter of externally initiated proposals; and regulatory posture, which captures whether regulatory vocabulary is enabling or permissioning. Together, the six dimensions reveal how Australia’s consent-based, federally constrained institutional settlement absorbs data centres into pre-existing categories of land use and environmental management, while South Korea’s developmental state settlement invents data centres as a distinct national infrastructure object with dedicated legislation. We name this distinction regulatory absorption and regulatory invention, and argue that it advances the sociotechnical imaginaries literature by specifying how already-stabilized institutional arrangements constrain which imaginaries become possible around new technologies.