When place shapes attitudes: explaining rural discontent with climate policies

The green transition is producing new lines of political conflict across Europe, with rural areas emerging as focal points of resistance. Yet existing accounts, focused on individual economic costs, struggle to explain the form and territorial concentration of discontent. This paper argues that place is the missing variable in accounts of climate opposition, with rural discontent reflecting both the structural conditions that concentrate decarbonisation costs in rural territories and cultural narratives that shape how policies are understood and resisted. Using a mixed-methods design in France, it draws on geo-coded survey data to identify territorial patterns of policy support associated with structural vulnerabilities, such as employment structure or material constraints. It then turns to 53 in-depth interviews conducted in three distinct rural regions to examine how residents understand and contest policies. The analysis reveals two interrelated forms of place-based grievance: perceptions of unfair material burdens, and misalignments between climate policies and rural identities and forms of belonging. The study contributes to research on climate politics and political behaviour by demonstrating how structural inequalities and cultural meaning-making processes jointly shape discontent, hereby shedding light on the territorial roots of emerging political conflicts in contemporary Europe.