Judith Tsouvalis

Beyond Counting Climate Consensus

ABSTRACT Several studies have been using quantified consensus within climate science as an argument to foster climate policy. Recent efforts to communicate such scientific consensus attained a high public profile but it is doubtful if they can be regarded successful. We argue that repeated efforts to shore up the scientific consensus on minimalist claims such as “humans cause global warming” are distractions from more urgent matters of knowledge, values, policy framing and public engagement. Such efforts to force policy progress through communicating scientific consensus misunderstand the relationship between scientific knowledge, publics and policymakers. More important is to focus on genuinely controversial issues within climate policy debates where expertise might play a facilitating role. Mobilizing expertise in policy debates calls for judgment, context and attention to diversity, rather than deferring to formal quantifications of narrowly scientific claims.

Latour’s object-orientated politics for a post-political age

What, for Latour, does politics mean? Or, to be more precise, what being for Latour is political – who or what is his political subject? To try and answer these questions, this article compares two strands of thinking concerned with the nature of politics and the political: Latour’s Dingpolitik or object-orientated politics and post-foundational political writings on the post-political condition. Both Latour and critics of the post-political condition hold that the excluded and suppressed come back to haunt their suppressors, shattering illusions of Modernity and neoliberal, cosmopolitan ideals. In both accounts, the excluded hold the key to political change. However, while post-political discourse relies heavily on an abstract, universalized, absent human subject as the agent of emancipatory political change, for Latour the excluded that undermine Modernity’s dichotomous constitution are the multiple beings and things that bring reality forth – concrete, variously entangled, translated and translating, m...

On the political nature of cyanobacteria: intra-active collective politics in Loweswater, the English Lake District

How can the politics of nature be envisioned for an age conscious of the complexity, contingency, and relationality of the world? What new practices are required to do justice to the recognition that the potential to act, shape, and change emerging worlds lies within complex epistemological and ontological relations? This paper describes an interdisciplinary study conducted between 2007 and 2010 in Loweswater, the English Lake District, that addressed these questions. Here, for three years, a ‘new collective’ as described by Latour emerged that carried out its own epistemological and ontological experiments: the Loweswater Care Project (LCP). The LCP was shaped by ideas about ‘new collectives’ and the commitment to understanding material ‘intra-action’ in situ. This inspired an appreciation of the radical relationality of people and things, and an approach to doing politics with things that we term ‘intra-active collective politics’. In this paper we highlight the consequences of this approach for knowing, but also for action and ‘management’. The research and the experimental forum of the LCP lie at a crossroads between the preoccupations of environmental management (particularly catchment management), the concerns of science and technology studies, and posthumanist thinking.

Committing to Place: The Potential of Open Collaborations for Trusted Environmental Governance

Conventional modes of environmental governance, which typically exclude those stakeholders that are most directly linked to the specific place, frequently fail to have the desired impact. Using the example of lake water management in Loweswater, a small hamlet within the English Lake District, we consider the ways in which new “collectives” for local, bottom-up governance of water bodies can reframe problems in ways which both bind lay and professional people to place, and also recast the meaning of “solutions” in thought-provoking ways.

A Reply to Cook and Oreskes on Climate Science Consensus Messaging

In their replies to our paper (Pearce et al., 2017), both Cook (2017) and Oreskes (2017) agree with our central point: that deliberating and mobilizing policy responses to climate change requires t...