Climatising the World? The New Climate Governance and the Transformation of Global Politics

Abstract

The Paris agreement adopted in December 2015 indicates a fundamental shift: it redefines climate governance, in its content, functioning, and effects on other domains of global politics and on wider patterns of social and economic life. Yet the existing literature does not fully capture this critical evolution, both as a long-term process and a significant break with established governance arrangements. Articles dedicated to the Paris agreement mostly address the conference and the post-Paris process through a legal or classical international relations lens, focussing on the formal outcomes of the conference and the implementation of its legal dispositions. To complement these analyses, this panel provides a forum for innovative perspectives drawing on political sociology and ethnographic methods, which foregrounds actors, practices and discourses. The papers conceptualise governance not primarily in terms of steering and authoritative rule making, but as an ongoing, multi-faceted and sometimes unruly process of social coordination through norms and practices, discourses and the creation of networks. Indeed, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change extends 'beyond' or 'outside' the climate regime through the individual or combined action of regional, national and local actors and organisations, and public or private carbon markets and offset schemes. Conversely, climate conferences include a growing number of issues – development, energy, forests, migration and security, etc. – and increasingly attract numerous actors from very different backgrounds. This points to a two-way shift in global politics that culminated in Paris: on the one hand, we witness a “globalisation of the climate problem” through the inclusion of new issues and actors into the climate regime; on the other hand, we observe a (partial, selective and fragile) “climatisation of the world”, whereby actors frame particular issues that were formerly unrelated to the climate regime through a 'climatic lens'. These evolutions pose formidable challenges to established scholarly approaches to global environmental governance, which have historically centred on the notion of “regime”. To respond to these, contributions to the panel place strong emphasis on processes (rather than structures), multiple actors (rather than just states), practices (rather than legally binding rules) and discourses (instead of formal institutions). They consider the boundaries of climate governance not as fixed, but as constantly negotiated and enacted by the actors involved. Yet, “climatisation” is also a highly uneven and ambiguous process, involving frictions, resistances and paradoxes. Together and through a variety of actors and sectors analysed, papers will demonstrate the selectivity and partiality that characterises the inclusion of new issues in climate governance. Based on the climate case, the panel intends to draw attention on the multiple ways in which different domains of global politics connect, interact and influence each other. It considers power relations within these modes of interaction and reflects on the role of knowledge, symbolic and material capital and positionality to capture the dual process of globalisation (of the climate issue) and climatisation (of global politics). The aim is thus to contribute to a deeper understanding of current transformations not only of climate governance, but of global politics more broadly.