Australia's sustainable energy transition: The disjointed politics of decarbonisation

•Renewable energy technologies have shown limited growth in Australia.•Recent changes in the climate policy regime have failed to institutionalize.•A failure to integrate climate and energy goals has led to ad hoc and contradictory policy pathways.•This has constrained Australia's sustainable low-carbon energy progress.

This paper considers Australia's climate and energy policies over the period 1988-2013 and assesses the degree to which these two policy domains have co-evolved to define Australia's low carbon energy trajectory. It finds that climate policy and energy policy have largely been dissociated from one another. This failure of policy coordination and integration has been caused in part by attempts to reconcile clashing and competing neoliberal and weak ecological modernization discourses, and is reflected in the diverging goals and paths of each policy domain. The inability of Australian governments to define and articulate a coherent narrative around a low-carbon energy future has consequently constrained Australia's sustainable energy transition and led to contradictory and disjointed outcomes.