Johannes Stripple

My Space: governing individuals' carbon emissions

This paper examines the recent growth in projects designed to enable individuals to ‘do their bit’ in the struggle to limit climate change. It discusses them in relation to a long-standing critique of trends towards individualisation amongst environmentalists. It suggests that this critique misses the complex way that subjects are produced by these practices and proposes to analyse subjectification in relation to climate change through the lens of governmentality. The paper then proceeds to examine five specific sorts of practice: carbon footprinting; carbon offsetting; carbon dieting; Carbon Reduction Action Groups; and Personal Carbon Allowances. By drawing on the concept of governmentality we show how contemporary forms of carbon government work through calculative practices that simultaneously totalise (aggregating social practices, overall greenhouse gas emissions) and individualise (producing reflexive subjects actively managing their greenhouse gas practices).

Making climate change governable: accounting for carbon as sinks, credits and personal budgets

This article explores how climate governance is accomplished in practical terms. To that end we develop an ‘analytics of carbon accounting’ that draws attention to the calculative practices that turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance. Carbon accounting as a rationality of government is primarily concerned with the ways in which carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated; but the concept also alludes to questions about (political) accountability in relation to emissions of greenhouse gases. The paper outlines three different regimes of carbon accounting – ‘the national carbon sink’, ‘the carbon credit’ and ‘the personal carbon budget’ – to illustrate how stocks and flows of carbon are constructed as administrative domains amenable to certain forms of political and economic rationality, such as government regulation, market exchanges and self-governance by responsible individual subjects.

Governing the Climate: New Approaches to Rationality, Power and Politics

Climate change is an issue that transcends and exceeds formal political and geographical boundaries. Social scientists are increasingly studying how effective policies on climate change can be enacted at the global level, ‘beyond the state’. Such perspectives take into account governance mechanisms with public, hybrid and private sources of authority. Studies are raising questions about the ways state authority is constituted and practised in the climate arena and about the implications for how we understand the potential and limits for addressing the climate problem. This book focuses on the rationalities and practices by which a carbon-constrained world is represented, categorized and ordered. This book will enable investigations into a range of sites (e.g. the body, home, shopping centre, fi rm, city, forests, streets, international bureaucracies, fi nancial fl ows, migrants and refugees) where subjectivities around climate change and carbon are formed and contested. Despite a growing interest in this area of work, the fi eld remains fragmented and diffuse. This edited collection brings together the leading scholarship in the fi eld to cast new light on the question of how, why and with what implications climate governance is taking place. It is the fi rst volume to collect this body of scholarship, and provides a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the fi eld of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.

Attitudes to personal carbon allowances: political trust, fairness and ideology

The idea of personal carbon allowances (PCAs) was presented by the UK Environment Secretary, David Miliband, in 2006. Although no nation state is seriously developing proposals for them, they have been discussed within academia, NGOs and policy-making circles. PCAs can be seen as a logical extension of emissions trading schemes, which has so far only applied at the firm level, to individuals. The purpose of this article is to analyse some critical aspects of the publics support for a PCA scheme. In particular, the focus is on the relationship between peoples attitudes to a PCA scheme and their trust in politicians, its perceived fairness, and its underlying ideology, respectively. The relationship between peoples attitudes towards an increase in the current carbon tax rate and their attitudes towards an implementation of a PCA scheme is analysed. The study is based on a mail questionnaire sent out to a random, representative sample in Sweden.

Carbon Market Governance beyond the Public-Private Divide

An assessment of policy options for future global climate governance, written by a team of leading experts from the European Union and developing countries. Global climate governance is at a crossroads. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was merely a first step, and its core commitments expire in 2012. This book addresses three questions which will be central to any new climate agreement. What is the most effective overall legal and institutional architecture for successful and equitable climate politics? What role should non-state actors play, including multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, public-private partnerships and market mechanisms in general? How can we deal with the growing challenge of adapting our existing institutions to a substantially warmer world? This important resource offers policy practitioners in-depth qualitative and quantitative assessments of the costs and benefits of various policy options, and also offers academics from wide-ranging disciplines insight into innovative interdisciplinary approaches towards international climate negotiations.

Narrating climate futures: shared socioeconomic pathways and literary fiction

In parallel with five new scientific scenarios of alternative societal developments (shared socioeconomic pathways, SSPs), a wide range of literary representations of a future world in which climate change comes to matter have emerged in the last decade. Both kinds of narrative are important forms of “world-making.” This article initiates a conversation between science and literature through situating, relating, and comparing contemporary climate change fiction to the five SSPs. A parallel reading of the SSPs and the novels provides the means to make links between larger societal trends and personal accounts of climate change. The article shows how literary fiction creates engagement with climate change through particular accounts of agency and focalized perspectives in a different way than how the factors important to challenges of mitigation and adaptation are narrated in the SSPs. Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate futures become close and personal rather than distant and abstract.

Governing the Climate: Bringing Governmentality to the Study of Global Climate Governance

Since the 1990s when global governance emerged as a new and powerful research agenda, scholars have sought to understand the changing role of the state in a time of globalization (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992; Cerny 2010). By drawing attention to the rise of hybrid, nonhierarchical and network-like modes of governing on the global stage, global governance studies have taught us that the state is no longer the sole, or even the principal, source of authority in the international system. As nonstate actors have taken on an increasing number of governance functions in world politics, the sources and institutional locus of authority have changed (Cutler, Haufler and Porter 1999; Hall and Biersteker 2002). The field of global climate governance is no exception. In a time when United Nations (UN) negotiations on a future climate deal have lost momentum, students of international relations have turned their attention to the multiple ways transnational actors and networks such as environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Wapner 1996; Betsill and Corell 2008), corporations (Levy and Egan 2003; Newell and Paterson 2010) and city networks (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003) contribute to public rule-setting and steering. Rather than approaching the state as the only actor with purpose and power, the growing field of climate governance studies has sought to establish a broader conception of politics that captures the richness and complexity of climate governance ‘beyond the international regime’ (Okereke, Bulkeley and Schroeder 2009; Bernstein et al. 2010; Hoffmann 2011).

Foucault and critical policy studies

This chapter explores what kinds of critical policy studies may transpire from Michel Foucault’s nominalist engagement with traditional political concepts such as power, government and the state. We argue that Foucault’s work paves the way for a decentred form of policy analysis that asks how we govern and are governed in micro-settings including at the level of the individual subject. The focus on the ‘how of governing’ stems from a rejection of any a priori understanding of the distribution of power or location of government, and arises instead from an interest in, and awareness of, the historically situated practices, rationalities and identities by which governing operates. Viewed in this manner, Foucault-inspired policy studies neither offer us a substantive theory about the forces that shape public policy, nor does it tell us what constitutes public policy (e.g. actors, interests, structures). The role of the analyst is instead to critically interrogate how these political spaces come about, how power operates through them, and, ultimately, how they could be different.

From climate skeptic to climate cynic

ABSTRACT Whilst we know quite a bit about organized forms of climate skepticism, very few studies focus on how disorganized climate skeptics seek an underdog position to speak truth to power. Hence, we investigate frank speech as updated ancient forms of truth-telling ‘parrhesia’, in two Swedish empirical sources that strongly question the climate change consensus. The first is a digital space for free speech, and the second a focus group of climate skeptics. Tracing ‘epistemic skepticism’ and ‘response skepticism’, we inquire into the attempts to counter scientific expertise and the different ways to refuse to act in accordance with officially sanctioned advice. We analyze the details of climate cynic truth-telling in relation to truth-telling as provocation, as ethical practice and as exhibition of a specific aim. We explore how the climate skeptic turns into a climate cynic, and discuss how alternative truth construction forms an anti-climate ethical selfhood. We end by problematizing how parrhesia is linked to ethical relativism, and argue that the recognition of climate cynicism facilitates our understanding of how conflicting political realities about climate change are produced.