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Decision-support tool Typology

Political stances compass

Faced with an ecological crisis whose findings are established, political responses diverge radically. This tool records them, places them and unpacks them, to see more clearly.

A marker before you go in.

The existence, human origin and severity of climate change (IPCC, 2023), like the collapse of biodiversity (IPBES, 2019), are not political stances: they are robust scientific findings.

What is legitimately contested is what to do about them: how fast, at what cost, for whom and towards what ends.

The first family, “Contesting the problem”, is treated here as a documented political phenomenon (Oreskes and Conway, 2010; Roberts et al., 2025), not as a defensible scientific position.

Glossary

Typology : a classification that distinguishes and organizes positions, actors and statements.

Stance : the overall position of a group of actors in the face of the crisis. These are ideal types in Weber's sense: nobody coincides perfectly with a box, and the same actor may move between them depending on the issue, the audience or the moment.

Controversy (sociology) : a situation of public disagreement in which actors clash over the definition of a problem, its causes and its solutions, around contested facts, interests and values.

Frame of reference : a framework of meaning that organizes what is thinkable and legitimate.

Discourse (political science) : the set of concrete statements through which the crisis is defined, justified or contested.

Weak / strong sustainability : weak sustainability accepts that destroyed natural capital can be replaced by technical or financial capital; strong sustainability holds some elements of the living world to be non-substitutable (Boisvert et al., 2020).

How to use it
  • Compass : situates the 18 stances on two axes. Click a dot to open its card.
  • Cards : browse the stances as thumbnails, then open the ones that interest you.
  • Table : compare the structuring dimensions row by row.
  • Search and filters : search for a concept, an author, an actor, an example; filter by family.
  • Inside an open card: Esc closes, ← and → move from one stance to the next.

Reading the compass

The horizontal axis runs from regression, that is an openly assumed fossil hardening, through to systemic transformation, by way of the status quo and then reform. The status quo is therefore not the origin of the axis: one can move backwards.

The vertical axis takes up Dryzek's distinction between prosaicdiscourses, which deal with problems inside the political and economic chassis of industrial society, namely the market, the administrative state, liberal democracy and the growth imperative, and imaginativediscourses, which redefine that chassis. This axis does not measure how deeply the balance of power is upended, which is read instead on the horizontal axis and on the justice scale.

No stance matches this search.

A summary comparison. Click a stance's name to open its full card (ten analytical dimensions).
StanceFamily and number In one sentenceAs stated from within Key conceptsSustainability, living world, vision Preferred solutionLevers used Growth and technologyRegime of accumulation Observed footholdsQuebec and Canada

No stance matches this search.

Methodology

The structure of the families follows that of the previous version of this tool, a classification by depth of the change sought, from openly assumed obstruction to systemic transformation, and adds two complements: a family called Warning on limits, which belongs to a diagnostic axis rather than to a degree of radicality, and a Point of vigilance devoted to authoritarian drifts.

This classification is not peculiar to Pareto: it overlaps with the continuum of the Just Transition Research Collaborative (2018) : status quo, managerial reform, structural reform, transformation. That continuum itself derives from the two-axis mapping of Hopwood, Mellor and O'Brien (2005). Our families B and C belong for the most part to the two reformist registers, family E to the last two. The JTRC points out, moreover, that its transformative pole largely joins degrowth thinking, and that maintaining the status quo can itself be held to be unjust.

The theoretical backbone remains Dryzek, in his fourth edition (2022) rather than the third: it adds a discourse to the corpus, gray radicalism, and closes the book on the Anthropocene and ecological reflexivity. This tenth discourse corresponds to our stance Fossil obstructionism, which the previous version had built without canonical support. It is not to be confused with Prometheanism, which Dryzek treats separately: the family that brings them together is therefore called Contesting the problem, since its unity lies in the refusal of the diagnosis and not in a shared programme of obstruction. All ten of Dryzek's discourses are represented here. The compass makes explicit the two axes he proposes: the more or less deep challenge to the industrial system, and the opposition between prosaic and imaginative discourses, which the previous version already used in the form of labels.

Three later frameworks complete Dryzek without replacing him, none of them covering the whole spectrum: Ekberg et al. (2022) for obstruction, broken into three levels: primary (denial of the finding), secondary (deliberate delay), tertiary (unintended hindrance by well-meaning actors); the JTRC (2018) and Morena, Krause and Stevis (2020) for degrees of ambition in the just transition; Köhler et al. (2019) and Geels for sociotechnical transitions.

Twelve stances were added to the previous version to correct an asymmetry of granularity: the obstructionist pole was finely divided while the transformative pole fitted into a single box, which masked deep disagreements between degrowth, ecosocialism, decolonial justice and deep ecology. The managerial families were differentiated too, since administrative expertise, citizen deliberation and market instruments do not belong to the same logic.

What Dryzek's grid does not capture. His frame of reference is institutional first of all. Three criticisms are regularly levelled at it. Work in political economy, Malm's in particular, faults it for treating discourses as too autonomous from material interests, when inertia is explained above all by the structural power of fossil capital. Feminist and decolonial readings note that neither gender, nor race, nor the colonial legacy structures his two axes, when they determine who suffers what. Blühdorn argues, finally, that the decisive lock is normative and cultural rather than institutional, our societies knowing without acting. The six conceptual scales in this tool answer these blind spots in part: the justice scale carries what the axes do not, the relationship to the living world captures the normative dimension, and the growth scale makes material interest visible.

Symmetry of treatment. Each stance is first stated as its proponents would defend it, then paired with what it brings to the debate and what it is reproached for, with sources, including for the stances Pareto is close to. Only the point of vigilance is granted no contribution of its own. To this is added the question each stance puts to the others: the central teaching device of the tool.

Concepts. The cross-cutting notions are not free-form labels but six ordered scales, of two to six positions each, that is twenty-five concepts defined once and applied to all eighteen stances. This is what makes comparison possible: you see at a glance which stances share a position, including across families. Sustainability follows the classic opposition between weak and strong sustainability (Boisvert et al., 2020) and therefore has only two values. Two stances remain without a position on certain scales, which is information rather than a gap: democratic pragmatism leaves the question to debate, and the state of emergency is defined by a means rather than by a doctrine.

Key terms. The lexicon is shared across the whole tool: a term appears once and points to the stances that use it, which brings out overlaps that would otherwise be invisible, from ecological planning to the commons. Each term is filed under one of four natures, according to whether it names a current that calls itself by that name, a concept forged by research, a rallying cry claimed in public debate, or an instrument of public policy. Nine terms are flagged as disputed, because several stances use them in incompatible senses; their card specifies who uses them and in what sense.

Leading figures. Each card names an author or actor emblematic of the discourse, chosen for teaching clarity and because their role is documented. This is neither an official spokesperson, nor a reduction of the person to the stance, nor a judgement upon them: several of these figures have elsewhere defended positions foreign to the box in which they appear.

Political footholds. The mentions of parties situate tendencies observable in platforms, votes and public statements, not fixed identities: a party most often houses several stances depending on the issue and the spokesperson. These attributions are dated, revisable, and should ideally rest on a documented survey; they commit Pareto, not the authors cited.

Acknowledged limits. Every typology cuts up a continuum. The borders between neighbouring stances are porous, the positions on the compass are indicative, and the corpus remains dominated by Western sources despite the inclusion of decolonial and Indigenous work.

Version notes

20260812

  • From 6 to 18 stances; the transformative pole, until then a single box, is differentiated.
  • Addition of the families Warning on limits and Point of vigilance (state of emergency and authoritarianism of limits).
  • Addition, for each stance, of a “contributions / criticisms” block and of a question addressed to the other stances.
  • Addition of a two-axis compass, full-text search and filters by family; the table no longer requires full screen.
  • References assigned stance by stance; bibliography brought to more than seventy entries.
  • Party attributions grouped, dated and explicitly presented as revisable tendencies.
  • Shift from Dryzek 2013 (3rd ed.) to 2022 (4th ed.): the stance Fossil obstructionism is attached to “gray radicalism”, a discourse added by Dryzek in that edition.
  • Family A renamed Contesting the problem : it brings together the refusal of the diagnosis in its two forms, active denial and the refusal of limits, which the word “obstructionism” conflated. Prometheanism accordingly moves into the status quo band, since it does not campaign to undo existing policy.
  • A fifth position, Relativized , added to the crisis-framing scale, between Denied and Carbon-centred. No stance now shares its conceptual profile with another.
  • Families anchored to the continuum of the Just Transition Research Collaborative (2018) and to Hopwood, Mellor and O'Brien (2005).
  • An unstable reference on carbon populism replaced by Ekberg et al. (2022) and their three-level typology of obstruction.
  • A shared lexicon of 81 de-duplicated terms, sorted into four natures, all defined, with 9 terms flagged as disputed and an alphabetical index.
  • The 84 free-form labels replaced by a controlled vocabulary of six scales and some twenty concepts, each defined, clickable and filterable; addition of a glossary and of compass colouring by concept.
  • Addition of a leading figure per stance; the compass's horizontal axis extended leftward to distinguish regression from the status quo; the stance's name shown on hovering a dot.

20260629

  • New title; the family “Soft obstruction” renamed “Structural delay”.
  • The Liberal Party of Canada moved to structural delay; addition of carbon populism and of the glossary.
Index of key terms

Eighty-one terms, all defined, de-duplicated and sorted by nature. The nature indicates whether the word is claimed by the actors or forged by research to describe them. The sign ≠ marks the terms that several stances use in incompatible senses.

Glossary of concepts

Each stance is situated on six ordered scales. Click a position to see its definition and the stances that share it. The colour runs from the least committed end of the scale to the most committed; it indicates a position, not a judgement.

Full bibliography

Theoretical framing: environmental discourse analysis (how actors build and set against one another their narratives about the crisis), political economy (underlying power relations and economic interests) and political ecology (ecology, power and justice in socio-environmental conflicts).