As the climate crisis intensifies and technical solutions to emissions reduction become more universal and cheaper, social scientists have increasingly turned their attention from questions of policy design to questions of political feasibility. The two books reviewed here—Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment and Corporations at Climate Crossroads—address these questions head on, focusing on the last decade of climate politics from distinct perspectives. The former documents the actors and strategies that have systematically delayed climate action, providing a rich picture of the most relevant, multi-industry and multi-level private and public stakeholders against climate policy progress. The latter examines the conditions under which multi-level politics work, focusing on the patterns of climate governance engagement of large private stakeholders (corporations), with a specific focus on the United States.
Both take stock of the evolution of climate politics after the Paris Agreement (2015) and attempt to explain why the momentum of the past ten years has led to patchy political outcomes and mixed policy outputs. In so doing, they provide substantial, parallel contributions to the study of climate governance. Climate Obstruction offers a rich and expansive account of resistance to climate action. Corporations at Climate Crossroads provides rigorous empirical evidence on corporate climate behavior.
Taken together, the two books illuminate opposing poles of contemporary climate politics: obstruction and engagement. They present different perspectives, working through different types of evidence and units of analysis. This is not to say that the lessons from these two impressive pieces of research are mutually exclusive. Together, they point to the fact that, while engagement with climate governance is not only nominally but also technically possible, institutionally engineered resistance drags us down in the battle for climate change. This review summarizes each book, discusses theoretical and empirical contributions across the two, and provides thoughts on future research that these books pave the road to.
Climate Obstruction is an ambitious edited volume that brings together more than 100 scholars (31 lead authors and nearly 80 contributing authors) to assess how climate action is intentionally slowed or blocked across sectors, regions, and levels of governance. The editors define “climate obstruction” as deliberate efforts to impede policies necessary to meet scientifically grounded climate targets (as assessed by the IPCC), emphasizing that such efforts extend far beyond outright denial of climate science. A central contribution of the volume is its systematic documentation of what the authors describe as “discourses of climate delay”—arguments that acknowledge climate change while questioning the urgency, feasibility, or desirability of particular policy responses.
The book is organized thematically, with chapters examining obstruction by fossil fuel companies, but also utilities, transportation, and agriculture sectors; obstruction by information supply (media) and elite discourse (far-right political movements and public relations firms); and finally, obstruction from actors operating within local authorities, international institutions, and legal bodies. Several chapters also focus on obstruction in the Global South and in less traditional dimensions of climate politics like adaptation, underscoring that resistance to climate action is neither geographically nor institutionally confined. The overarching claim emerging from the 13 chapters (as well as the core 10 findings in the Introduction) is that obstruction is widespread, adaptive, and deeply embedded in most contemporary political economies. Obstruction increasingly relies on delay rather than denial and poses a fundamental challenge to effective climate governance at almost any level of political operation.
Where Climate Obstruction emphasizes resistance, Corporations at Climate Crossroads asks why some corporations nonetheless take meaningful climate action. Lily Hsueh develops a multilevel governance framework to explain variation in corporate climate behavior, arguing that firms respond to a combination of internal organizational dynamics, domestic regulatory pressures, and global governance norms. Corporate climate action, in this account, emerges from the interaction of these nested institutional environments rather than from any single driver. According to this theoretical framework, corporate climate action is not automatic or predetermined but depends on managerial preferences, organizational authority, and internal firm dynamics.
An important contribution of Corporations at Climate Crossroads is its attention to the identity of internal corporate stakeholders. Hsueh shows that firms’ climate behavior is shaped not only by external regulation and global norms, but also by the workforce composition, professional identities, and internal expectations about corporate responsibility that emanate from firm-level managers. By opening up the “black box” of the firm, the book moves beyond depictions of corporations as unitary actors and highlights how internal politics condition responses to climate governance.
The book’s empirical core is a large-N analysis of corporate climate behavior that draws on original datasets tracking firms’ mitigation commitments, disclosure practices, and emissions outcomes. Hsueh supplements this analysis with case studies, including corporate responses to U.S. climate policy initiatives and participation in global governance mechanisms such as the UN Global Compact. A key contribution is the book’s insistence on distinguishing between symbolic commitments and substantive emissions reductions, an analytical move that addresses long-standing concerns about greenwashing in corporate sustainability research. The result is an empirically rigorous study of corporate climate action that traces how, in most cases, corporate behavior is neither uniformly obstructionist nor consistently progressive.
Despite their shared focus on the recent evolution of climate politics, the two books differ markedly in their specific orientation and subsequent arguments—and comparing the two triggers some important critical questions about each book’s scope conditions and limitations.
Climate Obstruction presents a clear theory and conceptual synthesis that is approachable to readers in the academy and beyond. Its broad scope allows it to identify recurring patterns of resistance around the world and to situate them within global political economy. The theoretical strength of the volume lies in its ability to reframe climate inaction as a product of organized political effort rather than apathy, ignorance, or technical constraint. By situating obstruction within broader power structures and incentive systems, the book moves the literature beyond univocal accounts of “bad actors” and toward a more nuanced understanding of winners and losers of climate politics. However, the remarkable breadth of the book comes at the cost of sacrificing some methodological coherence across the chapters. The volume relies largely on descriptive approaches. While it excels at documenting obstruction qualitatively and is wary of generalizability, it sometimes stops short of specifying causal mechanisms and evaluating the relative importance of different actors in explaining obstraction across different contexts.
Corporations at Climate Crossroads displays a different, almost opposite pattern. Hsueh’s empirical analysis combines state-of-the-art statistical modeling with carefully chosen qualitative illustrations. Yet the book’s theoretical framework is narrower overall. The multilevel governance approach provides a useful organizing lens for the chapters of the book, but it rests on strong assumptions about the coherence and effectiveness of governance institutions, which—as International Relations and local politics literatures would suggests—is highly debatable. At times, the framework functions more as a descriptive scheme than as a theory with clearly articulated scope conditions. The mechanisms through which governance pressures translate into sustained corporate climate action—particularly in politically hostile or institutionally weak settings—could be more explicitly theorized.
A not-too-subtle difference between the books is their different normative orientations toward the prospects for climate action in the next decade. Climate Obstruction adopts a somewhat pessimistic stance, emphasizing the durability and adaptability of obstructionist forces. The pessimism is certainly grounded in extensive empirical evidence, but it is up to debate whether it underplays the transformative potential of technological change. Rapid declines in the cost of renewable energy, storage technologies, and electrification have begun to reshape political coalitions and weaken incumbents even there where governments are pushing a backlash against climate action. The volume’s focus on obstruction is absolutely necessary to break patterns of “carbon capture,” but it is unclear how they interact with these new dynamics that suggests new disruptive transformation in the global political economy, perhaps even in favor of energy transition and climate adaptation, as recent commentary has indicated (see Jeffrey Colgan and Federica Genovese, “Global Climate Politics after the Return of President Trump.” International Organization 79, 1: 88–102, 2025).
By contrast, Corporations at Climate Crossroads is more optimistic about the capacity of governance institutions to steer corporate behavior. Hsueh demonstrates that regulatory pressure and global norms can incentivize firms to reduce emissions. However, the analysis sometimes assumes levels of institutional capacity and political stability that may not be widely credible nor uniform. In contexts where regulatory enforcement is weak or political opposition is strong, governance mechanisms may be less effective than the framework implies, and the book risks pointing to a world in which corporations may too easily accept regulatory pressure and adapt to global norms without shaping them a priori. Furthermore, we shall see how corporate behavior will adapt to energy scarcity and climate shocks in a world of fast technological transformations.
Taken together, Climate Obstruction and Corporations at Climate Crossroads offer a valuable and complementary portrait of contemporary climate politics. One maps the forces that resist change; the other explains when and why powerful economic actors engage more constructively. Each book has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but both advance the field by shifting attention away from abstract policy positions and toward political realities that shape climate outcomes.
For scholars of political science, these volumes underscore the need for future research that integrates the political economy of obstruction and the behavioral structures of corporate engagement into a more comprehensive account of climate politics. Climate action, as these books make clear, remains contested and deeply political.
Going forward, an element that neither of the two books fully unpacks but that remains fundamental to the democratic emergence of politically feasible climate action is the role of citizens (as voters and civil society groups). While quickly touching upon their roles, Climate Obstruction focuses primarily on organized obstructivist groups—firms, parties, political movements, and media organizations—while Corporations at Climate Crossroads centers firms and governance institutions. Yet in democratic systems, the attention and buy-in of citizens is a critical battlefield of obstructionists and corporations, and while lots of surveys have been done in the past decade to measure theoretical public acceptability of policy design, we know little about the way people (voters and consumers) behaviorally engage with obstructive forces and corporations, and more robust empirical work can be done to understand public backlash and counter-backlash in domestic and international climate politics.
