S7 Ep36: Climate Change Politics in Developing Countries

A river dries up. The soil turns salty. A harvest fails. Farmers across the developing world feel climate change constantly and personally, they rarely blame their government, or demand action.

Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) is one of three authors of a new review of the politics of climate change in the developing world. He tells Tim Phillips that almost all of the existing research on this topic is focused on rich countries, even though the developing world faces the worst of the damage,  and has the least capacity to absorb it, because in those countries the link between climate change and political action is more explicit.

Political solutions are needed: developing country income losses could run 60% higher than losses in wealthy countries, and climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty within a decade. Grossman's review turns up a paradox in the public opinion data. Concern runs high even where formal climate literacy is low, because people experience the crisis through a failed harvest or a dried up well, not a scientific chart. This disconnect isn't neutral, because vulnerability isn't simply inherited. It is produced, by decisions about who owns land, whose villages get seawalls, and whose voice counts when climate money is handed out.

The research behind this episode:

Grossman, Guy, Audrey Sacks, and Alice Xu. 2026. "The Politics of Climate Change in the Developing World." Annual Review of Political Science 29: 101-126.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Guy Grossman. 2026. "Climate Change Politics in Developing Countries." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

About the guest

Guy Grossman is the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded and co-directs Penn's Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab), and his research spans governance, forced displacement, political accountability, and conflict processes across the developing world, with a particular regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Research cited in this episode

Extreme poverty projections. World Bank economists Bramka Arga Jafino, Stephane Hallegatte, Julie Rozenberg, and Brian Walsh estimate that climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030; the wide range reflects uncertainty over which emissions and development pathway the world follows. Read the working paper.

Afrobarometer. A long running, pan African survey network covering more than 30 countries. Grossman's review draws on it to show that only around four in ten respondents identify human activity as the main cause of climate change, even as concern about its effects runs far higher.