Roundtable: The ‘Climatization’ of Global Governance

Abstract

Climate change has come to constitute a major issue in global politics that intersects with and shapes many other governance domains, and profoundly affects wider patterns of social and economic life. Moreover, global climate governance is no longer restricted to multilateral negotiations under the UN Climate Convention. It increasingly extends beyond or outside the international climate regime by climatizing other sectors of global politics. The concept of climatization points to a powerful yet uneven process of extension, translation and social coordination, in which climate change increasingly becomes the frame of reference through which other policy issues and forms of global activism are mediated and hierarchized. In our recent work, we have explored different aspects of this process and examined its wider implications for global politics. Contributions gathered in a collective volume(Aykut et al., 2017) and a dedicated special issue (International Politics, 2021) display the wide variety of actors, issues and governance domains concerned by this process. They also permit to better characterize the climatization process, by identifying its origins and driving forces, by sketching the contours of an emergent climate logic, and by systematizing observations on the effects of the extension of the climate policy realm. This roundtable aims to further explore the heuristic value of the concept of climatization to understand contemporary transformations of global society, its power relations, governance arrangements, knowledge practices and scale making activities. Speakers will discuss the notion of climatization in relation to their area of study, reflect on the ways in which it could shed new light on their objects and open new avenues for research, but also point to needs for clarification and potential blind spots of such a perspective. The discussion will bring together scholars working directly on the climate arena, and scholars whose research focuses on related issues, such as standardization and risk, biodiversity governance, or energy politics. This will allow us to further specify how a climatization lens can renew analyses of policymaking, international administration and transnational activism in global climate governance, but also how it can be productively used to examine how the importation of climate frames, actors and practices affects and transforms other areas of global governance. Bringing together junior and senior scholars with different research interests and theoretical backgrounds, the roundtable thereby intends to initiate a lively debate on the ways in which the climate crisis transforms global politics. Doing so, we also hope to contribute to building the appropriate conceptual tools to understand this process of transformation and engage with it productively.