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When do governments act to decarbonize their economies? Political elites formulate and implement policies that shape the trajectory of global carbon emissions, but the incentives driving them are not well understood. In this dissertation, I investigate ruling elite incentives to embrace low-carbon growth in the face of political competition, hydropower shocks, and constituent resistance. Drawing upon a diverse methodological toolkit—including formal theory, a natural experiment, surveys, and elite interviews—I present three papers that challenge several popular ideas in the study of climate politics. My first paper, “Low Carbon for the Short Term,” advances the thesis that short time horizons are sometimes beneficial (and long time horizons sometimes deleterious) for climate action, using more than 135 elite interviews in India and Indonesia. My second paper (co-authored with Anthony Calacino, Ishana Ratan, and Aaditee Kudrimoti), “When the River Runs Dry,” finds that hydrostress— a type of climate shock and an energy shock—motivates renewable energy policy adoption but not implementation. Combining a natural experiment with a cross-national survey and hundreds of elite interviews in Colombia, Brazil, Nepal, and Laos, we argue that state capacity, elite incentives, and retrospective accountability failures likely account for this gap. My final paper, “What Do We Learn from Green Backlash,” uses a formal model to show that insulating policymakers from political accountability may undermine, rather than facilitate, decarbonization. Together, these papers contribute to an emerging research program on the politics of climate change in developing democracies.