How Can Psychology Contribute to Climate Change Governance? A Systematic Review

Abstract

The urgency to reply to climate change requires a governance perspective that connects multiple societal levels and sectors and involves a plurality of actors. Psychologists should take an important role in addressing the ongoing climate crisis, together with other practitioners, scholars, policymakers and citizens. This systematic review aims to show the contribution psychology has offered in the governance of climate change, illustrating how psychological scholarship is positioned in the interdisciplinary discourse on climate governance and the way psychological constructs and theories are implemented. Following the PRISMA guidelines, two electronic databases (APA PsycInfo and Scopus) were screened, and 52 publications meeting the eligibility criteria were included and thoroughly analysed. The literature at the intersection between climate governance and governance is relatively scarce, yet it covers different domains and scales of analysis. Psychological contributions are always integrated into a broader interdisciplinary discourse spanning from the environmental to the social sciences, yet a scarce theoretical specificity has been documented. We found an abundance of research on the determinants of pro-environmental behaviours, which often neglects context-grounded factors, while the relational and dynamic dimensions of governance concerning group processes and collective engagement are rarely taken into due consideration. We argue that psychologists should continue engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations to collectively craft climate solutions, especially focusing on citizenry’s active engagement. Deeper theoretical elaboration on the interface between governance and psychology is needed, particularly from an ecological and systemic perspective.

1. Introduction

As attested by the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change represents a serious threat to the planet, since it is stirring the loss of biodiversity, the degradation of ecosystems and endangering millions of people’s lives [1]. Moreover, it is widely recognised that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions, together with regional forcings, associated with changes in land cover and land use or aerosol emissions, have led to an increase in extreme weather events, especially for temperature extremes, precipitations and droughts [2]. It follows the compelling obligation for transformative change involving at the same time different spheres of transformation regarding practical solutions, subjective values and behaviours, and larger sociotechnical systems [3,4].

Anthropogenic climate change has also been framed as a wicked problem, since its roots and possible solutions link together energy and technology issues, political, social economical, normative factors, along with human behaviours, values and culture; its evolution is uncertain; it requires urgent adaptative replies and long-term political decisions; and centralised governance systems have proved to be inadequate [5,6]. The multiplicity of ways of knowing and imagining our relationship with the world involved in climate debates lead to ontological pluralism, which requires new scientific and policy paradigms, epistemologies and methods to be developed [6,7,8]. The tension pervading this constellation of framings and imaginaries of climate change entails the pluralisation of possibilities and entry points to deal with this radically uncertain scenario, moving across different scales, from the official definition of the problem by global science and international bodies to the situated, contradictory experience of everyday life [8]. The coexistence of legitimate and competitive understandings of reality asks for an interdisciplinary approach to the production of knowledge aimed at finding conceptual and empirical bridges between natural sciences, social sciences and humanities [9,10].

Given the widely documented impacts of climate change on individuals and communities and the urgency to carry out a thorough social transformation [1,3], as well as the call for interdisciplinarity in the production of climate knowledge [10], psychology could play a vital role in the interdisciplinary and intersectoral endeavour to address such challenges [11].

Notably, psychological research in the domain of environmental and clinical psychology has delved into the psychosocial impacts of climate change on both individuals and communities. These effects have been classified as direct, indirect, systemic [12], acute and chronic [13], with studies focusing on figuring out the main pathological or resilient trajectories in the aftermath of a natural disaster [14]. Recently, an attempt has been made to overcome the restricted reference to the disaster–trauma couple [15], framing climate change as an existential threat that challenges one’s sense of meaning and psychological flourishing [16,17], from which the need to focus on its chronic and cumulative implications on emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing, such as ecoanxiety [18] and solastalgia [19,20]. This is particularly relevant for young people, whose climate-related emotion and mental health impacts are starting to receive due consideration, e.g., [21].

Environmental and social psychologists have also extensively explored the scope of values, attitudes and behaviours concerning climate change. Transformative change, indeed, asks for a simultaneous adjustment of social structures, political processes, individual habits and worldviews [3,4].

A significant body of psychological literature has attempted to find social, cognitive and motivational factors influencing public opinions, perceptions and attitudes towards climate change, such as climate skepticism [22] or conspiracy theories [23,24]. Personal values, cultural worldviews, political affiliations and ideologies have been listed among the most relevant variables [25]. In particular, the issue of political polarisation has reached a great deal of consideration, for it is meant to impede the effective enactment of climate policies and behaviour change [26].

Another important factor is the psychological distance, which, according to construal-level theory (CLT) [27], encompasses a temporal, social, geographical dimension and the uncertainty related to the occurrence of future events, which are all implicated in the phenomenology of climate change, often perceived as far from one’s experience and abstract in nature [28]. Nevertheless, the relationship between psychological distance and mitigation/adaptation behaviour appeared to be complex and inconsistent throughout different contexts, and nuanced by several modulating factors; hence, the multifaced and situation-specific nature of this construct must be recognised [29,30,31].

From an application point of view, this literature has mainly reported the most effective communicative strategies and how to best frame climate-related messages tailored to the audience’s values and worldviews to boost public engagement and action, e.g., [22,32,33].

While attitudes and values are important, the so-called value/attitude-behaviour gap, i.e., the fact that accurate knowledge of climate change severity and the agreement with the urgency of taking action often does not translate into a consistent change in lifestyle [34,35], has implied a further relevant research question for psychologists and behavioural scientists: why, then, do people not act? A series of cognitive, affective and social barriers have been identified [36], and different explicative and predictive theories have been employed.

According to the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) [37], in addition to attitudes, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms are also presented as the most significant factors affecting the intention to engage in a behaviour. This framework has been applied with respect to many climate-related actions, such as the interest in installing a solar photovoltaic system [38] and intentions to commit to saving energy and reducing carbon emissions [39,40].

Another widely used paradigm is the value–belief–norm (VBN) theory [41], which puts more emphasis on personal values and their role in shaping attitudes and behaviours. For instance, people’s energy-saving behaviours were more likely when people felt a moral obligation to protect the environment [42].

In the field of adaptation, one important framework, derived from the Protection Motivation Theory, e.g., [43], is the socio-cognitive Model of Private Proactive Adaptation to Climate Change (MPPACC) [44]. It identifies risk perception and perceived adaptive capacity as key components shaping individuals’ and household’s adaptative behaviour, while at the same time integrating the role of cognitive heuristics and other socio-cognitive factors. However, as argued by Van Valkengoed and Steg, other variables not included in the MPPACC or in its theoretical extensions may significantly influence adaptation: place attachment, trust in government, knowledge of climate change and adaptation, and perceived responsibility [45]. According to a 2019 meta-analysis by the same authors, adaptive behaviours were more strongly associated with negative affect, descriptive norms, perceived self-efficacy and outcome efficacy. Previous experience and knowledge were weakly related to adaptation [46].

In front of these branches of psychological research, some criticism has been raised. It primarily concerns the prevalence of individualistic and linear models of behaviour change, which tend to neglect the specific junction of socioecological relationships characterising every particular situation and the emergent properties of ecological systems that linear causality cannot grasp [47]. With respect to climate change, most of the empirical research and theoretical models developed by psychology refer to individual short-term actions of adaptation and mitigation, while collective, political actions and context-specific processes have been almost entirely neglected [48,49]. Regarding the mitigation goals, psychologists have mainly explored consumer behaviour and choices [50]. The interventions most in line with this background are those based on incentives, feedback, choice architecture and strategic communication [51,52]. Yet, as has recently been highlighted, people could limit their environmental impact through the plurality and intersection of the social roles they assume in everyday life, not only as consumers but also as members of organisations, producers and citizens with the capacity to influence policies, alongside organisational and social norms of production and consumption [47,49,53].

In a systematic review of social psychology publications, Tam and collaborators denounced a scarcity of research related to psychosocial processes that occur between people and within various groups, e.g., the evolution of social norms, values and representations over time [54]. It follows a claim to expand the focus beyond the individual level of analysis, taking into consideration collective impactful responses, such as political and organisational actions [32,49].

Moreover, the understudied domain of community resilience in the face of climate change impacts pushes further towards the need to place psychosocial analysis at the meso or community level, where transdisciplinary approaches and patterns of collaboration/experimentation with citizens could promote preparedness and adaptive capacity in the population, for example, by co-designing climate change action plans at the local level [55].

Having highlighted a lack of psychological investigation on the meso level of analysis—that of sociopolitical processes and community action—and the prevalence of narrow-focus research compared to systems-looking research [56,57], we chose to locate our systematic literature review on a governance ground, which allows us to explore the contributions psychology has offered in this area and to what extent it has elaborated the interdependence between processes at the micro, meso and macro level of analysis within an interdisciplinary endeavour.

Environmental and climate-related matters, indeed, entail a multiplicity of interests, values and perspectives, hence the need to broaden the scope of stakeholders involved in the scientific and political processes [7], including international bodies, national and local governments, the private sector, NGOs and civil society. Addressing these challenges is therefore a collective endeavour towards a deep societal transformation that implies well-coordinated deliberations and actions, connecting different sociopolitical sectors, levels and timeframes, and therefore a governance framework [58,59,60]. In this study, we adopt a wide conceptualisation of governance as it is defined by the IPCC, that is “the structures, processes and actions through which private and public actors interact to address societal goals. This includes formal and informal institutions and the associated norms, rules, laws and procedures for deciding, managing, implementing and monitoring policies and measures at any geographic or political scale, from global to local” [1] (p. 12). Moreover, we take into due consideration the analytical framework by Lange and colleagues, which distinguishes three dimensions of governance, namely polity (the structural aspect comprising institutions, norms and procedural settings), policy (the substantial aspect comprising strategies, action plans and tools) and politics (the processual sphere dealing with interactions between all actors involved) [59]. Finally, we want to stress the need to highlight the processual dimension of governance, which displays a kinship with the notion of co-production. This polysemic construct [61] has been introduced separately in the fields of political sciences and public administration [62], and of Science and Technology Studies (STS) [63]. It refers to iterative and participatory processes involving a multiplicity of actors and skills in producing practical and context-specific knowledge, favouring at the same time the acquisition of capacities and the development of collaborative networks [64]. This line of inquiry outlines a path toward the democratization of knowledge and expertise as it has been developed within the so-called “participatory turn” in governance systems [65] and in the post-normal science paradigm [7], both within the STS scholarship.

Regarding climate change, governance lies primarily in the international bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) [66] and the Paris Agreement [67,68]. However, according to Lange and colleagues, the debate around governance emerges as an alternative or a wider perspective on the task of governing, since it is well recognised that contemporary societal issues are too complex and pervasive to be managed by governments, as the only legitimate actors [59]. Moreover, from recognising the failure of national and international bodies in reaching mitigation goals [58,59,60], as well as the inadequacy of international agreements alone to make the difference without consistent actions across different arenas and levels [69], decentralised and multiscale approaches to governance, beyond institutional channels of the UNFCCC, have become increasingly prominent [68]. This paradigm shift has introduced novel arrangements of governing with a non-hierarchic, polycentric, networked approach, emphasising shared responsibility of multiple actors and partnerships across different levels and domains [59,60]. In this vein, the notion of climate change experiments has been used in reference to collaborative platforms, especially in urban settings, where actors from the public, private sector, scholars and citizens seek to co-produce innovative solutions to tackle local problems, in turn producing reconfigurations of regulatory frameworks, institutional systems and urban political practices [70,71,72].

In this regard, some entry points for psychology are suggested by a recent report of the American Psychological Association (APA) aiming at tracing wider scopes of research and action for psychological practitioners in addressing the climate crisis [11]. In particular, the paper refers to the policy realm and to the engagement with both institutions and civil society groups as a privileged area for psychologists to bring their expertise, fostering citizen’s active involvement and facilitating processes of deliberation among stakeholders, beyond choice architecture [11,73]. Supporting climate policymaking and planning in collaboration with institutional bodies, stakeholders and citizens has been identified as a desired psychologists’ task [11,55,74], while at the same time, reporting a lack of research in this domain [55].

Overall, we believe that psychologists should contribute to climate challenges through the wide array of conceptual and intervention tools of their discipline, not only in the domain of mental well-being but also concerning knowledge of human behaviour and attitudes, group dynamics and decision-making processes at every level of analysis and in their mutual interplays. The societal challenge of climate change and the need to address it under a governance viewpoint may also push psychology practitioners to advance and revise their theoretical and conceptual frameworks. We would like to contribute to trace avenues for psychology as a meta-perspective on interdisciplinary and intersectoral debates, deepening its capacity to navigate problematic intergroup dynamics, and to showcase the plurality of mental models, the incompatibilities between epistemologies and the possibilities of common constructions of actionable knowledge. For these reasons, we expect that a systematic review about the relationship between climate change governance and psychology will provide sound and helpful insights to the scientific community and society as a whole.

2. Aim and Rationale of the Study

In line with the considerations above, this systematic review aims to find out the important contribution psychology has offered to the governance of climate change, tracing a synthesis of the literature and finding critical issues, gaps of knowledge and promising pathways for future research and practice.

Our work aligns with the call to ‘Enlarge the range of settings and partnerships in which psychology practitioners address climate change’ [11] (p. 7), a challenge based on a governance frame, since it asks psychologists to proceed beyond the study of individual factors influencing behaviours, and to embrace multilevel, multisectoral and multidisciplinary perspectives to foster climate resilience and advancing transformative change, and thus to develop the capacity to dialogue with policymakers, citizens, scholars and experts from different scientific fields.

From these considerations, we ask the following three specific research questions, which underpin the rationale of our enquiry:

• To what extent, under which fields, and how have psychological literature and climate governance issues met?
• How does psychology dialogue with other disciplines on a climate governance terrain?
• Which main psychological concepts, models and theories have been applied in the climate governance field?

By focusing on these questions, the paper aims to provide an overview of the literature intersecting climate change governance and psychology concerning the temporal and spatial distribution of the studies, and of the implemented research designs and methods; to illustrate both the different levels and types of governance and the various disciplinary fields where psychological stances have been integrated; to identify, categorise and critically consider specific psychological concepts theories and models that have been used in the different climate governance sectors; and, finally, to discuss possible roles for psychology practitioners and scholars in the field of climate governance.

3. Materials and Methods

This study performs a systematic review of the literature, a research design aimed at tracing the state of the art on a specific issue, scanning a copious corpus of scientific literature and synthesizing the extracted information according to a rigorous and reproducible method. To identify the papers included in the systematic review, we followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology, a series of evidence-based guidelines to rigorously conduct systematic reviews and meta-analysis [75,76]. It followed three different phases, as illustrated in Figure 1: identification, screening and inclusion.

3.1. Search Strategy

Two electronic databases were chosen as information sources for record identification: APA PsycInfo (EBSCOhost), as it is the leading database in the field of behavioral sciences and psychology, and Scopus for its interdisciplinary nature, its reliability and because it covers a wider set of scientific journals compared to Web of Science, particularly for recent publications [77,78]. Thus, in line with our research objectives, we were able to draw on both the purely psychological literature and interdisciplinary sources.

Table 1. The two-step search strategy.

	First Step	Second Step
Scopus	Search query: TITLE-ABS-KEY (“climate change” AND governance)	Search query: TITLE-ABS-KEY (“climate change” AND “governance” AND “psycholog*”)
	Identified records: 8002 (journal articles in English)	Identified records: 79 (journal articles in English)
PsycInfo	Search query: AB “climate change” AND AB governance	Search query: AB “climate change” AND AB governance AND AB psycholog*
	Identified records: 69 (journal articles in English)	Identified records: 6 (journal articles in English)

Note. The asterisk (*) stands for truncation.

summarises the two-step process we followed to obtain the final search query, together with the identified records.

We narrowed our search to journal articles published in English, adding a language and source-type filter to both databases. No limitations were set regarding the timeline or the study area in order to intercept the largest number of records to be screened. We are also aware that the nineties represent a natural time threshold for scientific publications on climate change, as since then the issue started to acquire social relevance with the first IPCC Assessment Report published in 1990 and the first Conference of the Parties (COP1) held in Berlin in 1995, and that the scientific debate on climate governance in terms of publications started to rise from the first years of the twenty-first century. Therefore, we expected a gradual increase in records from this point in time. Finally, we created an e-mail alert function in both databases to track future articles that meet the selection criteria.

Remarkedly, we noticed how the records sharply decreased when adding the keyword ‘psychology*’. This is the first example of relevant information revealing that just a small portion of research in the burgeoning field of climate-related governance has adopted a psychological lens or implemented psychological considerations.

Both the choice of consulted databases and that of the keywords making up the search query were important to establish the representativeness of the selected documentary sample. We argue that the two selected databases granted a high degree of representativeness with respect to the literature produced in the interdisciplinary domain of climate change governance embracing a psychological stance. However, many important studies may have not been included because of the general character of the chosen keywords, which refer to the macrodomain of psychology and governance and not to specific theories and approaches developed within these domains (see Section 6).

3.2. Eligibility Criteria

Records identified through database searches were assessed based on the following inclusion criteria:

• The articles had to investigate climate-related issues, i.e., climate change had to play a clear role in the genesis of the problems under scrutiny;
• The issue had to be addressed within a governance framework, according to the IPCC’s definition of governance (see Section 1);
• Reference to psychological theories, models or factors had to be present.
• Publication exclusion was therefore based on one or more of the following reasons:
• The issues under scrutiny did not originate from climate change;
• There was a lack of a governance framework;
• No psychological perspective or concepts were present, or just an extremely vague and cursor reference to non-specified psychological factors was cited;
• The record was a short and general summary or commentary.

3.3. Process of Research Selection

The systematic review with the identification phase started on February 2023. In this first phase, we obtained 85 records (79 from Scopus and 6 from PsycInfo). The research team consisted of one professor, one researcher and a PhD student, all with extensive training in social psychology. After removing duplicates, we obtained 80 records to be screened.

The second phase consisted of screening the previously identified records based on reading titles and abstracts and selecting relevant papers. From this point on, no records were excluded by the authors because we preferred to perform a deeper reading of the full texts before making a definitive inclusion/exclusion. However, two articles could not be retrieved due to a lack of access. One publication from the e-mail alert function was selected for inclusion in the eligibility evaluation. Each of these articles was recorded in a Microsoft^® Excel^® (version number 2308) spreadsheet, ordered alphabetically by author, which included information relating to the title, year of publication, country, authors, journal, methods of data collection, units of analysis and key findings. Other information has been extracted, such as the paradigm used and role of the participants, i.e., citizens, policymakers, stakeholders, practitioners and scholars—which was useful in establishing the degree to which a governance framework and a psychological perspective were present in each record, therefore verifying adherence to the eligibility criteria. The Microsoft^® Excel^® spreadsheet was shared with the research team for cross-referencing and research quality purposes.

In the third phase, we went through the retrieved articles, reading the full text and assessing eligibility. The final selection encompassed 52 studies. Finally, they were coded in six conceptual and methodological features: (a) the study area (when available), (b) the research design and methods, (c) the subject areas of the scientific journals provided by Scopus, (d) the type and level of governance considered, (e) the main objectives and results, (f) and the specific psychological constructs and theories used. This last feature was coded in a separate Microsoft^® Excel^® spreadsheet where, for every article, we registered a list of psychological theories, concepts and frameworks and indicated whether they adopted a markedly psychological or integrated perspective. Through repeated comparisons, we extracted three thematic clusters with different specific psychological foci, i.e., (1) determinants of pro-environmental behaviours, (2) people’s perceptions and views and (3) group-based processes.

4. Results

4.1. Timeline and Study Area

Figure 2 shows the temporal distribution of the studies included in the systematic review according to the year of publication. The year 2023 reports the records published until May 31. The graph reveals a novel and increasing study argument, as the trend has been growing overall in recent years, and notably, all articles except one were published from 2010 onwards. The maximum production results in eight records published in 2022.

As illustrated in Figure 3, the study area is the country where empirical studies were carried out, as well as the geographical focus of conceptual articles and reviews when reported. Six studies utilise a multifocal approach, with data collected from different countries. One of is the studies includes experimental research from the UK with a replication study in India [79], three are comparative case studies [80,81,82], one is a qualitative longitudinal ethnography of six UNFCCC conferences in four different countries [83], and another one gathered qualitative data from five EU countries [84]. Two studies focus on the European Union, in particular regarding EU climate regulation and policy [85,86].

4.2. Research Designs and Methods

Figure 4 classifies the research designs of the included articles. The numbers in square brackets of this figure, as well as of the following figures and tables, identify the individual bibliographic references. Out of the 52 selected studies, 31 (59.62%) are empirical, as they involve the collection and analysis of qualitative or quantitative data, while 21 (40.38%) are non-empirical. The empirical articles include case studies and comparative case studies (17, 32.69%), surveys (8, 15.38%), website analysis, ethnography, interviews, focus groups and website analysis (4, 7.69%), and experimental designs (2, 3.85%). The non-empirical articles include commentaries (3, 5.77%), literature reviews (11, 21.15%) and theoretical articles (7, 13.46%), the latter two sometimes matched with the analysis of case studies, development of theoretical frameworks and suggestions for policymakers.

As depicted in Figure 5, out of the 31 empirical studies, 15 (48.39%) use qualitative methods, 13 (41.94%) use qualitative methods, and 3 (9.68%) use a mixed-method approach.

4.3. Disciplinary Fields

Virtually all of the included articles are interdisciplinary. Using the subject area classification of scientific journals in Scopus, we found that almost all the published journals are registered under additional subjects. Interestingly, 4 papers were published in psychology journals; 36 (69.23%) in an environmental science-labelled journal, with two prevalent sub-categories: environmental science: management, monitoring, policy and law (17) and environmental science: global and planetary change (14); and 29 (55.77%) were published in journals classified under the social sciences, with markedly prevalent sub-categories, i.e., geography, planning and development (21). Moreover, 19 (36.54%) are published in journals classified both under the environmental science and the social sciences subject areas.

4.4. Governance Level and Type

Table 2. Governance level of the articles included in the systematic review.

Governance Level		n (%)	References	Subtotal
Single-level Perspective	Local National Organizational International	14 (26.92%) 3 (5.77%) 3 (5.77%) 4 (7.69%)	[80,81,82,87,88,91,92,95,96,97,98,99,100,115] [102,108,118] [105,106,112] [79,83,109,116]	24 (46.15%)
Two-level Perspective	Local/National National/International	13 (25%) 4 (7.69%)	[84,89,93,94,101,104,107,111,114,119,121,126] [86,110,123,128]	17 (32.69%)
Multilevel Perspective		11 (21.15%)	[85,90,113,116,117,120,122,124,127,129,130]	11 (21.15%)
Total				52 (100%)

categorises the included articles according to the level of analysis. Notably, a consistent portion of studies indicate a governance declination at the local scale by echoing the well-established need to place climate planning and interventions in context and reflect the local dimension of climate impacts interacting with particular socioecological configurations and vulnerabilities [1]. Regarding the two-level perspective articles, 13 (25%) elaborate on the local/national nexus, integrating policy considerations at a national level and insights on local responses. Moreover, 11 (21.15%) adopt a clear multilevel perspective spanning from the local to the global, usually highlighting the reciprocal influences between multiple levels of analysis, namely how local dynamics play a part in the reception and enactment of policies and how wide governance paradigms scaffold community climate actions, e.g., [117,120].

As illustrated in

Table 3. Governance scope of the articles included in the systematic review.

Governance Scope	n (%)	References	Main Challenges
Adaptation	29 (55.78%)	[81,82,87,88,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,99,101,102,103,104,107,113,114,115,116,117,119,121,122,123,124,126,130]	Disaster preparedness Risk governance Local vulnerability Adaptation policies and planning Development of adaptive capacities Knowledge co-production about risks and viable solutions
New Governance Structures, Processes and Tools	18 (34.61%)	[79,83,85,106,110,112,113,114,116,117,118,120,123,125,127,128,129,130]	New climate governance strategies and solutions Decision-making and relational dynamics in climate negotiations Organizational transformations toward sustainability Responses to legal innovation
Mitigation	17 (32.69%)	[80,84,86,90,99,102,105,107,109,111,113,116,117,120,123,129,130]	Mitigation and energy policies Sustainable production and consumption Mitigation-related collective action
Natural Resources and Ecosystems Conservation	12 (23.08%)	[85,89,98,100,103,107,108,113,116,121,122,130]	Ecosystem restoration Forest governance Water management Environmental stewardship

, four governance scopes or connotations were identified based on the studies’ main thematic focus in addressing the challenges of climate change, namely (1) climate change adaptation, (2) new governance structures, processes and tools, (3) mitigation and (4) natural resources and ecosystem conservation. This spectrum displays how psychological contributions, although limited in number, have been implemented in a wide array of climate-related problems under the governance umbrella. There is an overriding focus on the adaptation challenges, with 29 (55.78%) records addressing issues of risk, vulnerability and disaster preparedness. Interestingly, we notice that within a governance and policy frame, the psychological literature dealing with climate change is mostly developed in the field of adaptation, unlike what emerges from the general psychological literature, where mitigation-related issues have garnered the most attention [54,131]. Furthermore, the well-represented category New Governance Structures, Processes and Tools conveys a thriving meta-reflection on the mandatory rearrangement of governance systems, and with it of the individual, political, institutional practices in front of a plethora of climate issues.

4.5. Psychological Factors, Models and Theories

Regarding the role of psychology, we first need to distinguish between two categories of selected publications: those adopting a markedly psychological perspective on governance issues, with a well-defined theoretical and conceptual ground, and articles where different psychological concepts and theories are integrated into a broader interdisciplinary discourse or just mentioned as relevant factors. The latter group, with 37 (71.15%) records, is wider than the former and heterogeneous with respect to the role played by psychology in this cross-disciplinary exchange, and regarding the other scientific sectors in dialogue, in some records, psychology is called into question to bring an essential complementary perspective, e.g., [83,106,115,118]; in other cases, its theoretical analysis is depicted as partial and lacking a wide, contextual overview, so that other disciplines and epistemologies must fill this knowledge gap, e.g., [92,113,119].

The main identified psychological theories and frameworks are the following: TPB [37]; the MPPACC [44]; construal-level theory, e.g., [27]; theory of social representations [132,133]; the social norm paradigm from the theory of normative conduct [134]; and decision-making theories, e.g., [135].

We have built three principal thematic clusters with three different psychological foci: (1) determinants of pro-environmental behaviours, (2) people’s perceptions and views and (3) group-based processes. These clusters are not monolithic categories; rather, they constitute a heuristic pattern to illustrate commonalities and differences across the selected literature. In fact, some studies with a wider, integrated perspective can be categorised into more than one cluster, e.g., [130].

4.5.1. Cluster 1: Determinants of Pro-Environmental Behaviors

The first cluster collects studies aiming to find barriers and drivers to pro-environmental and protective behaviours—mostly determinants of adaptive and conservation practices, but also of social vulnerability and of engagement in collective climate action.

With a specific focus on the challenges of adapting to climate change, the more applied framework is the socio-cognitive Model of Private Proactive Adaptation to Climate Change (MPPACC) [44] about households and individual adaptive behaviour. Some of its elements have been integrated into the so-called Adaptive Capacity Wheel (ACW) [136]. This model was first developed in the field of governance and political sciences to assess the characteristics of institutions supporting society’s adaptive capacities [136], and then it was extended with the inclusion of important psychological dimensions derived from the MPPACC, namely adaptation motivation and adaptation belief [93,94].

Several studies in this category, spanning from risk governance to natural resource conservation, adopt a more comprehensive perspective by combining some insights from the MPPACC, TPB and other psychological constructs with social, structural, organisational and sociodemographic factors to build a context-specific, problem-driven framework. For example, Lee and colleagues used a structural equation model on questionnaire data from a high-climate vulnerable context to figure out the causal bonds between perceived risk, place attachment, climate change attitudes, and mitigation/adaptation-related intentions, and arranged their results in a locally specific conceptual model [99]. Some psychological dimensions have also been taken into consideration with the purpose of displaying the dynamics of disaster vulnerability in Brunei [126], and in a disaster risk-prone food system in Papua New Guinea [88].

Two studies on Canadian forest governance also considered psychological factors, such as cognitive heuristics, self-efficacy, risk perception, beliefs and values, among a wide spectrum of barriers and drivers to explain different levels of engagement in conservation and adaptation practices [107,121]. Similarly, Eriksson’s investigation on gender differences in private forest management found some explanations on a sociopsychological level (regarding forest values, threat appraisal, and response efficacy), together with structural disparities between men and women and differences in their level of involvement [103].

Many of these records focus mainly on cognitive factors, yet some important exceptions emerge. Gottwald and Stedman followed the sense of place theory [137] as a broad frame to uncover the links between the meanings, emotions and values related to place and the intention to engage in environmental stewardship initiatives. Interestingly, place relations and values were the factors most strongly related to willingness to environmental protection, while personal capacities, like motivation and attitudes, did not have a significant effect [98]. Another example concerns the factors predicting public engagement in restorative initiatives; overcoming rational decision-making theories such as the TPB, the authors provided a broader picture of the engagement determinants, covering emotional and relational factors as well [89].

Generally speaking, the studies included in this cluster are mostly focused on individual-level psychological factors. In particular, Hamilton and colleagues explored the process of individual adaptation to climate change in a wildfire-prone context and advanced their own framework, where psychological and social factors (risk perception, perceived response efficacy, perceived self-efficacy, self-responsibility, negative affect and social interaction) played a central mediating role between the condition of wildfire risk and the subjective response observed [115]. Spash warned against the intrinsic pitfalls of regulatory and financial tools to counteract greenhouse gas emissions (emission trading and carbon permits), to the extent that these external measures colliding with psychological processing at the individual level (misrepresentation of one’s emissions and cognitive dissonance) could discourage intrinsic motivation and self-normativity [129]. Liu and colleagues attempted to sketch a psychological understanding of sustainability in the field of corporate environmental management; drawing from the proactive behaviour theory, e.g., [138], they identified relevant motivational antecedents of environmental managers’ proactive behaviour (specifically, role breath self-efficacy and self-responsibility), which, mediated by some relevant contextual factors, facilitated sustainable development in firms [105].

Only a few records in this cluster [118,120], which are also classified under the third cluster (group-based processes), adopt a markedly collective action lens, moving from framing climate change as a collective action problem to individual behaviours embedded in the context of power relations and sociopolitical dynamics. In this regard, Raymond and colleagues integrated political science research on norm-based governance with insights from scholarship in psychology and behaviour change. They precisely explained how social norms can influence individual behaviour and proposed some governance strategies to boost climate action and pro-environmental habits [118]. Moreover, with a holistic approach to sustainable university development, Baker-Shelley and collaborators explained how psychology can provide useful insights at the micro, meso and macro level to address, together with other disciplines, the issue of organisational transformation towards sustainability and foster co-creation governance [112].

4.5.2. Cluster 2: People’s Perceptions and Views

The second cluster highlights perceptions, attitudes and views of people regarding climate issues and related governance solutions and explores the influence of these perceptions on the achievement of broad behaviour change in society. From the results, important suggestions for policymakers can be derived, since every successful implementation plan needs to recognise the substantial role of public perception [82,102,117]. Regarding this, in their comprehensive review, Nishant and colleagues stated that a psychological and sociological lens is mandatory to understand citizens’ responses to artificial intelligence-assisted environmental and sustainability governance strategies, which are perceived as culturally appropriate and legitimate [116]. Taking seriously the concerns of people, even (and especially) when they sound irrational, like in the case of conspiracy theories of climate control, is a crucial step toward the democratisation of the debate around viable solutions in the field of climate-related innovation [109].

Factors influencing acceptability and preference of national climate policies at a local level have been identified, such as perceived control over relocation measures [101], hypocrisy, i.e., inconsistency between attitudes and behaviours [111], motivation and ability to process information [104], as well as knowledge of the addressed issue [108].

Social and psychological factors, such as issue fatigue, distrust, cognitive barriers and politisation, intertwine with motivations leading to scepticism, contrarianism and denial of climate change science and governance [117,128]. On a global scale, according to Dennison and Turnbull-Dugarte, the popular support for international governance solutions may not be compromised by populist attitudes [79]. The relation between global- and local-level processes, namely between local perceptions of risk and global trends of action and thought, seem to be decisive to understand the evolution of institutional arrangements and governance frames, which imply the participation of new stakeholders in the policy cycle [122]. Similarly, Gössling and Cohen explained how transport taboos, intended as the perceived violation of shared values and norms of a neoliberal, carbon-dependent paradigm, function as affective and cognitive barriers to the implementation of transport policies [86]. Fischer and colleagues showed that people’s general views of humankind (alias, folk psychologies) influenced attitudes toward a wide range of governance approaches [84]. In a similar vein, historical narratives, memories and intergroup relations grounded in the colonial past have been found to play an important role in shaping people’s imaginaries and attitudes toward the deployment of energy infrastructures [90].

Following social representation theory [132,133], Fischer and colleagues showed that the socially shared understanding of governance among local actors influenced how they interfaced with practices and structural conditions promoting the possibility for societal transformation [80]. Drawing from the same theoretical frame, Castro and Mouro advanced a social psychology of legal innovation in the field of environmental governance, especially by explaining how people respond to normative change and translate new laws into lived and situated practices [85]. A similar need to incorporate psychological insights into governance and legal frameworks was raised by Craig and collaborators. They pointed at psychological processes underpinning the public acceptance of adaptive governance arrangements, including the perception of legitimacy and trust, to find the proper, situated stability–flexibility balance [114]. In the context of corporate environmental management, Liu and colleagues investigated the role of stakeholders’ green organization identity—that is, the inner understanding and interpretative lens on green organization—as a possible mediator in the relation between environmental regulation and effective business sustainable practices [106].

Few articles focus on local actors’ perceptions of climate change impacts, collective local knowledge and experience and their influence on the different steps of local adaptation processes, indicating as a priority the incorporation of these perceptions in effective adaptation planning, to leverage and foster local adaptive capacity [87,91,96,97,102]. Group discussions and workshops with stakeholders, implementing visual methods, have been found to be useful to reduce the psychological distance and establish a connection with place-specific representations, collective memories and bolstering emotional engagement [82,87].

4.5.3. Cluster 3: Group-Based Processes

The third cluster, which, with twelve records, is the smallest, explicitly refers to psychological group dynamics, i.e., cognitive, affective and relational processes in public, participatory and institutional fora. In particular, the studies in question refer to mental health care in risk governance systems [124]; policymaking and planning in the field of climate governance [113], especially with respect to transnational climate negotiations [83,110,123,125,127]; social norm-based governance strategies [118]; public engagement in collective action [120]; and collaboration with stakeholders and residents to build climate resilience [81,82].

Attention was from time to time placed on interdependence between individual and community processes in risk prevention [124]; pitfalls in group dynamics interfering with decision-making desirable outcomes, such as polarisation, confirmation bias and groupthink [123]; social influence [118]; role of relational and affective dynamics like social identity, solidarity, collective emotions, efficacy and inspiration in shaping both international deliberations and local climate action [110,120,125,127]; motivating factors, psychological impacts and coping strategies of young people in dealing with asymmetrical power relations that mark their participation in international climate meetings [83]; psychological distance, collective memory, and social engagement in participatory adaptation planning [82]; alternative ways of knowledge production, fostering collective imagination and design of creative solutions to the uncertain scenarios of climate change [81].

While the representation of political decision-makers’ rationality as bounded and biased leads to the suggestion to nudge states, as well as individuals, to incentivise the imperative transition, otherwise hampered by the pitfalls of counterproductive collective dynamics [123], the acknowledgement of human cognition as inherently embedded and situated in a cultural–political context asks for new models to conceptualise deliberative practices highlighting the sense-making potential and agency of shared narratives [113].

Overall, an emphasis emerges on more-than-rational elements, e.g., relational, emotional, discursive, imaginative and creative processes, e.g., [81,110,113,127], pointing towards a vaster conceptualisation of rationality in context, which demands new sensibilities and ways of learning to be developed [81,113].

5. Discussion

5.1. An Overview of the Study

The literature in which psychology encounters climate change governance is quite limited compared to the number of records concerning climate change and governance (see also Table 1). Remarkably, only one selected publication explicitly addresses the mental health outcomes of climate change on both individuals and communities [109], while the others handle the sphere of decision-making processes, individual and collective behaviours. Thus, when considering a governance perspective, psychological well-being appears to have received little attention compared to other areas of psychological relevance (such as decision-making and adaptive behaviours). We do not yet believe that, even when dealing with governance issues, psychological distress originated from climate change ought to be considered as an inherent part of human experience, which could hinder or promote the effectiveness of climate governance initiatives. In line with this remark, Stanley and colleagues, drawing from Australian survey data, found that emotions of eco-anger and depression encouraged participation in collective climate action, while anxiety was less adaptive [139]. Conversely, proper climate policies and inclusive political processes can produce community and individual co-benefits, including positive mental health outcomes [56].

Overall, from this review, an openness towards disciplinary integration and multisectoral approaches to climate governance emerges (see Section 4.3). Most of the selected records adopt an integrative perspective. Even when there is a marked psychological frame, it is included into a broader interdisciplinary discourse, with the psychological gaze encountering a diversified spectrum of scientific fields (political and social sciences, ecology and environmental sciences, planning and management, law and justice studies, economics and business), and helping to obtain a nuanced, not merely technical, human-centred and experience-grounded understanding of governance processes within the social sciences and humanities [9]. However, sometimes, this trend pays the price for conceptual vagueness and lack of theoretical specificity, since the need to also take into consideration general psychological factors is often advanced without further clarification(see Section 4.5).

5.2. Governance between Policy and Politics

Despite the increasing emphasis posed on the need to advance polycentric and networked governance, and novel forms of collective experimentations [60,72], only a few articles in our final synthesis (mostly included in the third cluster) clearly focus on the processual, dynamic and relational dimension of governance, i.e., the sphere of politics, in the analytical framework by Lange and colleagues, by which the authors mean the interactive process among a wide range of political actors within both institutional arenas and through informal organisations [59,69].

The majority of the selected records, instead, deal with the policy sphere of governance that concerns strategies, regulations and action plans. Particularly, complementing political and social sciences perspectives with psychological insights, this literature targets the public response to already framed policies and measures providing decision-makers and other practitioners with important suggestions for tailoring appropriate and effective policy tools, management plans and communication, which are expected to meet the compliance of the public, e.g., [81,83,86].

On the one hand, these publications point to the importance of considering the way climate change impacts and institutional measures are processed, signified and enacted by situated subjectivities through the mediation of discursive cultural frames and trends (see Section 4.5.2). Regarding this psychological domain, we can detect a variegated spectrum of terms: perceptions, acceptability, views, understandings and representations. While acceptance conveys a passive, agency and responsibility-limited attitude, and perceptions are generally cited and rarely framed into a theoretically articulated discourse, representations refer to a more complex psychological relationship and social construction of shared meanings entangled with memories, identities and practices; they display a more creative and dynamic function by acting as transformative and prefigurative vectors [89,100,101].

On the other hand, our finding testify how governance has been mostly conceptualised as a pool of already established policies with which citizens can agree or disagree, or as a process of diagnosis, deliberation and planning that is the exclusive prerogative of institutional market actors and practitioners. With Fischer and colleagues, we claim that “governance as such—beyond the study of attitudes towards specific policy tools such as taxes—receives little attention in environmental psychology” [80] (p. 2).

However, some important exceptions from our review must be highlighted: environmental stewardship, as a horizontal network process of adaptation and ecosystem protection where citizens have an active role [98]; collaborative development of local adaptation strategies [81,82,91], conceptualisation of universities as multilevel and multisectoral networks and hubs for co-creation toward sustainability [112]; mental health care integration in intersectoral multilevel governance models to tackle systemic risks [124]; challenges of deliberative processes involving a plurality of interested actors with divergent views and concerns [113,123]; youth participation in UNFCCC international meetings [83]; emotional, social and collective dynamics underpinning governance function and intergroup conflicts within international climate negotiations [110,125,127]. Moreover, mitigation-related community initiatives lead by grassroot local groups have been investigated both under a social representation framework [80], and under a collective action lens within the opportunity structure of networked climate governance [120]. Finally, among the roles of psychologists confronted with the climate crisis, Whomsley mentioned the tasks of facilitating adaptation for individuals and communities, especially for those marginalised from decision-making processes, assisting good governance and leadership, and navigating intergroup conflict and violence generated by climate change [130].

While the necessity to engage the local people and to address residents’ adaptive capacities in the interface with institutions has often been risen, e.g., [91,92], notably, a very limited number of selected studies actively involved stakeholders and citizens in a process of knowledge co-production [81,82].

Despite these examples, we argue that psychology could play a deeper role in these political arenas. Indeed, we report a scarcity of psychological research, and an almost total absence of empirical studies, on the process of crafting climate policies, decision-making, participative assessment and planning centered on the collective dynamics of action and learning, which could promote the multilevel transformations required to navigate the climate crisis. We are with Tam and colleagues [54] in reporting a lack of investigation on truly dynamic processes like the change in representations, practices and socioecological relations, even when some relational factors, such as social norms, and outputs as collective action are chosen as the privileged focus. Psychologists should deepen their investigation into the processes of knowledge co-production at the interface of policy and research, helping to navigate the confusing reality of climate change [56].

5.3. Toward an Ecological Perspective

Psychological contribution on climate change-related governance mostly throws light on processes and capacities at the individual level of analysis, adding a human and experience-based account to institutional, legal and technical features of governance frames, and considering determinants of decision and personal adaptation, which has been vastly neglected in the general climate change policy literature [115,140]. In this regard, psychological dynamics take a fundamental mediating position in the pathway leading to climate action in different contexts and scales: between environmental regulations and their embodiment in concrete practices, e.g., [85,105]; between the experience and knowledge of a risk situation and the effective adaptive action taken [115].

However, the exclusive focus on individual variables and processes brings with it the risk of atomising the person and overlooking the situated and relational nature of the human action and underlying psychological processes [92,122], as well as the reciprocal influence between structural condition and human agency [47,48,50,53]. For this reason, in our review, the mainstream psychological perspective has sometimes been portrayed as inadequate or lacking when dealing with the complex dynamics of governance systems, e.g., [92,109,119].

Despite several endeavours to tailor context-specific models, most frameworks remain strictly deterministic in nature. In line with previous works concerning behaviour change in the field of sustainability [141,142], we document a prevalence of one-way causal models seeking to find the determinants of public perception, e.g., [102], pro-environmental and adaptive behaviour, e.g., [95,100,110], public engagement [89], or causes of local vulnerability [88]. These frameworks are more useful for short-term intentional behavioural modification than for fostering long-term cascading societal transformations and grasping emergent phenomena like the development of governance capacity [68,141,142,143,144].

A viable pathway towards a more relational and ecological account of human behaviour could derive from some developments and applications of the social norm paradigm and from reflections on collective identity, memory, social representations and group-based emotions, e.g., [120,125], yet avoid treating the context as a collection of additional given variables in the causal chain. Shifting the focus is not sufficient; a structurally different theoretical underpinning is needed [50,143], namely, an advancement for psychological theories that are sharply ecological in nature [144].

Among the selected records, an attempt to overcome this one-way, static view has been made, conceptualising individual adaptation as a dynamic and iterative process [115] and advancing some socioecological systemic frameworks of disaster-related mental health characterised by the interdependence between levels [124]. Another example lies in the integrative, holistic approaches to climate action and governance, which embrace the multiple sphere of transformation, spanning the macro, meso and micro level, where the subjectivities involved co-evolve along with the structure in which they are embedded, and multiple entry points for interventions can be identified [3,112]. We argue that, within these frameworks, psychology could play a deeper role in planning and facilitating interventions to leverage inner dimensions such as individual and shared values, worldviews, and to enhance cognitive, relational and emotional capacities for all social actors, at the same time addressing mental health impacts and advancing system change [4,142].

The usual psychological perspective could then be reversed, to the extent that, instead of searching for determinants of behaviour, the question may become how taking an active part in a climate protection experience could pave the way to transformative processes influencing habits, values and worldviews—i.e., the same psychological factors that are depicted as barriers in the mainstream models [48,141,145].

6. Limitations

Our work has some limitations. In particular, the selection of keywords composing the search query used to identify records may have left out an important number of studies that could have met the inclusion criteria. In fact, many abstracts and titles, while not citing the word ‘governance’, may refer to more specific and emergent forms of governance, such as interparliamentary initiatives, energy communities, citizen assemblies, nature-based solutions, etc. Similarly, some psychologically informed research may not have been intercepted, insofar as even though the word “psychology” or derivatives may not be present, the title, abstract and keywords might contain specific psychological constructs and theories such as collective identity, social representations, decision-making, construal-level theory, and so on. Other scholars may map the literature at the junction between climate governance and psychology using a wider spectrum of specific keywords related to the two superordinate constructs of interest.

Furthermore, limitations arise from language and source-type filters, which could have implied the omission of interesting non-English works and other types of publications with relevant insights.

Moreover, we preferred to adopt a wide definition of governance without pre-emptively limiting the investigation to a specific level or area of governance. While, on the one hand, this choice made it possible to offer a broad overview of the literature; on the other, it resulted in scarce sectoral depth and completeness. Future studies may explore a particular type or level of governance and the related psychological applications, taking an in-depth look either at international relations, organisational dynamics or local initiatives on climate adaptation, mitigation or natural resource conservation.

Finally, the process of coding and analysis could have been biased by the authors’ scientific background and experience. Acknowledging that the researcher’s perspective cannot be dismissed, we tried to maintain a rigorous, systematic analytical posture and repeatedly confront the emerging results. However, further attempts to map this recent and increasing literature from divergent and multiple standpoints are particularly desirable.

7. Conclusions

This systematic review attempted to map the scientific literature about the governance of climate issues, integrating psychological insights with a particular focus on the roles performed by psychological scholarship and on the way it is positioned in a wider interdisciplinary dialogue about climate governance.

To summarise, our study provides the following relevant results:

• A relative scarcity of research takes a psychological perspective with respect to the large pool of studies related to the governance of climate change, yet with the few identified studies covering a wide spectrum of climate governance issues spanning different domains and scales.
• A marked interdisciplinary engagement for psychology in the field of climate governance is substantiated by a deep integration with social sciences and environmental sciences’ stances. Similarly, we note a lack of theoretical specificity and depth of the proposed psychological approaches.
• There is a limited portion of research about the processual and relational dimension of governance, and an emphasis on people’s reaction to already established environmental policies, without considering the active engagement of citizenry in the process of policy crafting or in other examples of networked, collaborative forms of governance involving citizens and stakeholders in climate experimentation.
• There is an abundance of studies whose specific psychological contribution consists of investigating the drivers and barriers of different types of pro-environmental behaviours (first cluster), focusing on intra-individual cognitive factors, and a scarcity of context-grounded approaches emphasising the qualifying intergroup, political and social dimension of governance challenges.

We push psychologists to continue pursuing interdisciplinary collaborations with other practitioners, policymakers, civil society groups and stakeholders to collectively craft climate solutions, especially regarding civic participation and citizenry’s active engagement. We also encourage scholars to advance deeper theoretical elaborations of the interface between governance and psychology, embracing a truly ecological imprint that takes into consideration psychosocial processes at different scales of analysis, spanning the individual, the community and the institutional level, to foster the coevolution of subjectivities and systems. We finally state that climate change challenges offer a good test bench for governance experimentation and theoretical development.