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COST Event report: International Workshop on Governing the Global Climate Polity
International Workshop on Governing the Global Climate Polity: Rationality, Power and Practice
Lund University, Lund, 19-20 August 2011
Workshop organizers: Johannes Stripple, Lund University, and Harriet Bulkeley, Durham University
The workshop was organised in two longer plenary talks and four substantial panels with 22 briefer presentations. The panels were entitled ‘Making the climate problem, creating the polity?’, ‘Climate, risk and security’, ‘Governing forests as carbon’, ‘Consumers, community and the conduct of everyday life’.
In exploring the emerging landscape of climate governance, we found that similar sorts of rationalities and techniques are currently being deployed across diverse spheres of authority in the global climate polity. For example, carbon accounting is now commonly used as a means of constituting flows of carbon as objects to be governed, while climate risks and impacts also provide the basis for new rationalities and techniques through which ‘emergency programmes’ of government can be constituted. Emergent forms of techno-governmentality seem to be increasingly established and legitimised throughout the global climate polity, which raise the question about the possibility, and place, for democratic politics in a warming world. Finally, and resonating with advanced liberal government, multiple authorities and agencies are undertaking strategies of activation (e.g. smart energy meters) and responsibilization (e.g. as environmental champions) in order to enable individuals (as free and autonomous citizens and consumers) to govern their own emissions in a variety of locales (e.g. firms, households).
The workshop was made possible through generous funding by the EU COST Action IS0802 “Transformation of Global Environmental Governance” and BECC (Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate — BECC), a strategic research area at Lund University.
The workshop report can be downloaded below.
