Matthew is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester. His research approaches climate change through a set of political economy lenses. He has worked variously on the UNFCCC, transnational climate change governance, carbon markets the insurance industry, on the political economy of decarbonisation, and the cultural politics of low-carbon transitions. His current research project explores the contested politics of how shifts to a low carbon society produce novel forms of subjectivity and challenge established ones, and he is currently planning a new project on using Social Network Analysis to understand patterns of global climate governance. He has recently acted as a Lead Author by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, working on the chapter on international cooperation for the 5th assessment report. He is a past co-editor of the journal Global Environmental Politics (2008-12, with Jennifer Clapp) His books include Global Warming and Global Politics (Routledge 1996), Understanding Global Environmental Politics: Domination, Accumulation, Resistance, (Palgrave 2000), Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (Cambridge University Press 2007), Climate Capitalism: global warming and the transformation of the global economy (with Peter Newell, Cambridge University Press 2010), Transnational Climate Change Governance (with Harriet Bulkeley and 8 others, Cambridge University Press 2014), and most recently Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Devices, Desires and Dissent (ed. with Harriet Bulkeley and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge University Press 2016).
Recent publications
- Hughes, Hannah and Matthew Paterson, ‘Narrowing the Climate Field: The Symbolic Power of Authors in the IPCC’s Assessment of Mitigation’, Review of Policy Research, 2017, advance online at: doi: 10.1111/ropr.12255.
- Harriet Bulkeley, Matthew Paterson and Johannes Stripple (eds) Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Devices, Desires and Dissent, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
- Erick Lachapelle, Robert MacNeil and Matthew Paterson, ‘The political economy of decarbonisation: from green energy “race” to green “division of labour”’, New Political Economy, 22(3), 311-327, 2016.
- Matthew Paterson, ‘The sociological imagination of climate futures’, in Paul Wapner and Hilal Elver (eds) Reimagining Climate Change, London, Routledge, 2016, pp. 14-28.
- Esteve Corbera, Laura Calvert Mir, Hannah Hughes and Matthew Paterson, ‘Patterns of dominance in the authorship of the IPCC’s Working Group III 5th Assessment Report’, Nature Climate Change, 6, 94-99, 2016.
- Robert MacNeil and Matthew Paterson, ‘This Changes Everything? Canadian climate policy and the 2015 election’, Environmental Politics 24 (3), 553-557, 2016. Impact factor 2.164, 1 citation.
- Michele Betsill, Navroz K. Dubash, Matthew Paterson, Harro van Asselt, Antto Vihma, and Harald Winkler, ‘Building Productive Links between the UNFCCC and the Broader Global Climate Governance Landscape’, Global Environmental Politics, 15 (2), 1-10, 2015.
- Jason Thistlethwaite and Matthew Paterson, ‘Private governance and accounting for sustainability networks’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 34 (7), 1197-1221, 2015.
- Matthew Paterson, ‘Governing Mobilities, Mobilising Carbon’, Mobilities, 9(4), 570-584, 2014.Impact factor 1.569. 4 citations.
- Erick Lachapelle and Matthew Paterson, ‘Drivers of national climate policy’, Climate Policy, 13(5), 547-571, 2013.
- Matthew Paterson, Matthew Hoffmann, Michele Betsill and Steven Bernstein, ‘The Micro foundations of Policy Diffusion towards Complex Global Governance: An Analysis of the Transnational Carbon Emission Trading Network’, Comparative Political Studies, 47 (3), 420-449, 2014.