Policy without politics? Climate politics in Jordan: an understudied field
Abstract
Jordan has built an expanding architecture of climate commitments, strategies, reporting instruments, and institutional arrangements, yet the political processes through which these are translated into domestic governance remain thinly analyzed in the peer-reviewed literature. This article maps the literature on climate change in Jordan to examine what the field explains and neglects. Drawing on a systematic mapping review of studies published between 1998 and 2025, it distinguishes research substantively addressing climate change in Jordan from the narrower subset treating political and governance mechanisms as central to explanation. The review identifies 75 studies, but only 8 analyze authority, distribution, coordination, contestation, or implementation politics as causal dynamics. This imbalance indicates uneven scholarly visibility into climate politics, not the amount or intensity of political bargaining in practice. Jordan is treated as a strategically selected, theory-building case in which a disciplinary imbalance intersects with severe resource scarcity, dependence on external finance, concentrated executive authority, and fragmented implementation. Building on depoliticization scholarship, the article introduces aid-embedded climate depoliticization as a conceptual proposition. It proposes that, where external finance and reporting architectures interact with concentrated political brokerage and fragmented implementation, policy thickening may develop alongside uneven visibility of political processes, including bargaining over priorities, distribution, and accountability. It then develops a mechanism-centered research agenda around distributional allocation, bureaucratic implementation, framing and depoliticization, transnational finance, and multi-level authority. The agenda specifies researchable mechanisms, evidence needs, and applications for decision-making to build a cumulative field of climate politics in Jordan with value for comparable governance settings.