Julia Trombetta (Delft University of Technology)

The term "climate security" has gained popularity over the last few years. It merges discourses about environmental security and energy security, and like these discourses, it divides scholars and practitioners about the opportunity of using the term. One of the main reasons of this divide is the debate about "securitization" which has focused on the opportunity and implications of applying a fixed, antagonist security logic based on Schmitt's understanding of the political, to a variety of issues, including the environment and energy.

For this reason, - instead of focusing on the implication of securitizing climate change adopting a fixed, antagonistic security logic for environmental governance - this paper explores the implication of applying environmental language and concepts to security and how the process, in turn, affects environmental governance.

The paper uses Foucault's considerations on the concepts of environment and of security "dispositif". First, the concept of environment for Foucault is the notion which supports ideas of circulation and causality and the paper outlines how this understanding is embedded in contemporary environmental discourses but it has been marginalised in the security debate. Second, the concept of environment defines a field of intervention in which individuals are turned into a population; in this perspective the conceptualization of a global environmental problem seems to suggest the possibility of generating a global population to be governed. Third, for Foucault security dispositifs organise and conceptualise a specific environment. The question then becomes how the call for new security dispositifs prompted by the climate security and the conceptualization of a global environment affect global governance. 

Julia Trombetta (Delft University of Technology)

M.J.Trombetta@tudelft.nl

Elspeth Oppermann (Lancaster University)

While research continues to debate how to conceptualize human security and adaptation to climate change, conceptualizations of adaptation are already being codified in policy and practice by a range of governmental and non-governmental institutions, with enormous implications for the discourse of adaptation at a wider societal level. This paper seeks to unpick the codification as played out through the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) which has discursive reverberations not only through British society but also internationally. It demonstrates that in the UKCIP's discourse of adaptation, the account of risk management establishes a dominant rational techno-scientific framing that assumes fore-knowledge and fore-planning. This obscures a subsidiary framing that speaks the language of systems and complexity thinking, but this is not developed into a related account of adaptation. The conceptual tensions between these frames are especially clear in the way particular accounts of uncertainty are integrated (or not) into the discourse of adaptation, and what is understood to constitute 'capacity' to adapt. The paper will argue that the rational techno-scientific framing limits the possibilities of understanding adaptation more substantively in terms of the internal connectivity and flexibility that enable adaptive capacity. It also notes that the UKCIP account helps to disconnect the concept of 'adaptation' from the wider discussion of 'resilience' in UK discourse, contributing to the fragmented nature of the overall government response to climate change.  

Elspeth Oppermann (Lancaster University)

e.oppermann@me.com

Eva Lövbrand (Linköping University) and Johannes Stripple (Lund University)

To measure, report and verify (MRV) flows of carbon has become an integral part of global climate governance. Since the Bali Action Plan was adopted in December 2007, the credibility of a future climate treaty has hinged on the development of an appropriate MRV regime that guarantees effective greenhouse gas mitigation efforts in the post 2012 era. Although the MRV concept per se is a fairly recent innovation in climate politics, this paper argues that it can be traced back to a whole series of techniques and practices that have been developed and refined throughout the UN negotiations on climate change. Ever since the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, states have been asked to keep track of their national sources and sinks of greenhouse gases (GHG) and to regularly report their results according to a standardised set of guidelines developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Through the rise of carbon markets such as the EU ETS and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol, this national GHG accounting has been complemented by new ways of measuring, reporting and verifying site-specific flows of carbon. Although closely associated with climate governance, many of these MRV practices have been developed in expert domains that typically appear too technical and specialised to be considered political. However, following Foucauldian governmentality studies this paper seeks to broaden the understanding of politics and government to include the many ways in which technical artefacts and practices shape the field of possible action for groups and individuals. As argued by Miller and Rose (2008), governing a sphere requires that it can be represented and depicted in a way that can enter the sphere of conscious political calculation. Hence, only when studying the many MRV practices that have given rise to particular ways of 'seeing' and 'knowing' the climate is it possible, we argue, to fully understand how the climate has been constructed as an administrative domain amendable to certain forms of political and economic rationality. We begin our analysis by conceptualising MRV techniques as a political practice that orders and reconfigures the climate as political space. As a second step we exemplify our argument by outlining the technologies of government that have established 'the national carbon sink' and 'the global carbon economy' as two thinkable administrative domains in international climate politics.

Eva Lövbrand (Linköping University) and Johannes Stripple (Lund University)

eva.lovbrand@liu.se, johannes.stripple@svet.lu.se

Chris Methmann (University of Hamburg)

More and more international organizations and institutions ranging from the World Trade Organization to the Convention on Biological Diversity are starting to incorporate climate protection as an important policy goal. Strikingly, most institutions only rephrase existing activities in the terms of climate protection instead of changing them. For example, the WTO depicts climate change and free trade as complementary goals, while the CBD focuses on the link between a high biodiversity and a stable climate. This 'consistent inconsistency' points to the contentious nature of the very meaning of climate protection. The aim of this paper is to explore the logic of 'climate mainstreaming' and explain the paradoxical result of such a 'consistent inconsistency'. Departing from rationalist and global governance literature, this paper employs a poststructuralist approach that combines elements of governmentality and discourse theory. Drawing on the case of global economic governance it shows that mainstreaming follows from the underlying governmental discourses structuring the governance of climate protection across different policy arenas. It argues that it is the dominant framing of climate change in the terms of an 'advanced liberal government' that allows for merging a wide array of heterogeneous and partly contradictory practices into a unified discourse. 'Climate protection' becomes an 'empty signifier', and this makes consistent inconsistency possible. This allows for the hegemonic integration of climate change issues into dominant discursive structures of world politics. This claim is backed up by a discourse analysis of World Bank, World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund discourses on climate change.

Chris Methmann (University of Hamburg)

chris.methmann@uni-hamburg.de