Corry, O. orcid.org/0000-0002-7249-0913 (Cover date: July 2024) Making the climate malleable? ‘Weak’ and ‘strong’ governance objects and the transformation of international climate politics. Global Studies Quarterly, 4 (3). ksae062. ISSN 2634-3797
Abstract
Object-oriented theories have been used to understand how the climate and other entities like “the economy” have been produced as discrete, malleable and politically salient “governance objects.” These have structuring effects not only on policy debates but also on entire polities and the international system. However, a failure to distinguish between different kinds of governance objects has obscured their fundamentally different political implications. This article revises earlier definitions and develops a novel distinction between “weakly” and “strongly” malleable governance objects. The former are governable only in terms of not being perturbed in relation to a baseline condition, while “strongly governable” objects are construed as malleable along multiple dimensions, the telos of governing them no longer a given. The weak/strong distinction is applied to elicit implications of four climate strategies: mitigation, adaptation, and prospective “geoengineering” techniques of carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification that would deliberately alter the climate. Increasingly billed as risky but necessary, given the fraught politics of mitigation, geoengineering is shown to potentially transform the climate from weak to more strongly governable object. This could “untether” climate governance from the aim of remaining close to a pre-industrial climate, with a "design approach" to geoengineering adding layers of politicization, potentially increasing the fractiousness of global climate politics. However the analysis also highlights possible new routes to depoliticization of the climate, were it to be retethered—potentially to security imperatives or economic indicators. Analysis of governance objects requires much greater attention to types of malleability and politicization.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Sep 2024 09:02 |
Last Modified: | 10 Oct 2024 14:51 |
Published Version: | https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/4/3/ksae06... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/isagsq/ksae062 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:216851 |