05/05/2026
Congratulations to Dr Liam Beiser-McGrath, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy, who has been awarded funding from the Global School of Sustainability at LSE’s Global Sustainability Research Fund, for their successful proposal, “Status Anxiety and the Green Backlash: Understanding Distributional Resistance to Climate Policy in Advanced Democracies”.
The project tackles one of the most pressing questions in contemporary climate governance: why ambitious decarbonisation policies are increasingly meeting organised political resistance across the democratic world. Dr Liam Beiser-McGrath, in collaboration with Dr. Julian Limberg (King’s College London), will research how status anxiety, the fear of losing relative socio-economic standing, is a critical psychological mechanism through which distributional conflict translates into opposition to climate action.
The project is funded for two years and will consist of original research conducted in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA.
