International Studies Quarterly
Climate Change and National Security: What Drives the Agenda?
2026-04-06
States increasingly recognize the security implications of climate change and have moved to institutionalize responses in policy and practice. Yet in recognizing the relationship between climate change and security, states have identified the nature of the threat posed in different ways, enacted different policies, and prioritized different agencies in dealing with that threat. Crucially, these varied choices have different implications for the practices pursued to advance climate security. Drawing on interviews with policymakers and analysis of key policy documents among countries that have embraced the climate–security agenda, this paper maps alternative national approaches to climate security before examining the reasons for both the embrace of this agenda more broadly, and its embrace in particular ways. It reveals the role of a range of disparate factors in influencing this embrace in different settings, shedding light on the conditions in which the climate–security relationship is recognized. In this context, however, it also points to the limits of reductionist accounts of the drivers of state behavior in IR. Indeed affirming the case made for analytical eclecticism by Sil and Katzenstein (2010), the analysis underscores the utility of problem-driven research not limited by the commitments of parsimonious theories of international relations.