An emerging governmentality of climate change loss and damage

Abstract

Loss and damage is the “third pillar” of international climate governance alongside mitigation and adaptation. When mitigation and adaptation fail, losses and damages occur. Scholars have been reacting to international political discourse centred around governing actual or potential severe losses and damages from climate change. Large gaps exist in relation to understanding the underlying power dimensions, rationalities, knowledges, and technologies of loss and damage governance and science. We draw from a Foucauldian-inspired governmentality framework to argue there is an emerging governmentality of loss and damage. We find, among other things, that root causes of loss and damage are being obscured, Western knowledge and technocratic interventions are centred, and there are colonial presupposed subjectivities of Global South victims of climate change, which are being contested by people bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. We propose future directions for critical research on climate change loss and damage.

Turning climate justice into practice? Channeling loss and damage funding through national social protection systems in climate‐vulnerable countries

“…While this responsibility is, at least to a degree, reflected in the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR‐RC) principle, also enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, it is yet to be matched in practice as international conventions stop short of outlining clear financing mechanisms. Policy mechanisms like the WIM lack the political capacity to pursue accountability and provide pathways for elaborate governance of L&D (Boyd et al, 2021; Carty & Walsh, 2022; Jackson et al, 2023). While there is general recognition from stakeholders and negotiators from highly climate‐vulnerable countries that feasible approaches to L&D financing and distribution mechanisms should not attempt to attribute strict liability, culpability and compensation for loss and damage, a centerpiece of the climate justice agenda is the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP), either targeted at major private corporations, pollution‐intense industries (e.g., fossil fuel), or individual countries (Pill, 2022).…”

“…Climate justice deliberations constantly pronounce social, economic, political, and environmental factors as root causes of vulnerability. Climate justice proponents argue against an overemphasis on the purely scientific dimensions of climate change, focusing on technocratic, complex, typically insurance‐based interventions that are not adapted to the many unique circumstances in climate‐vulnerable countries of the Global South (Jackson et al, 2023). Central to this is the acknowledgement that simply restoring the status quo before climate‐related loss and damage occurred is insufficient as socioeconomic vulnerabilities remain unchallenged and thus unchanged (Boda et al, 2021).…”

“…Thirdly, there has been an increasing emergence and consolidation of a climate justice agenda (Boyd et al, 2021) demanding, among other things, the protection of the rights of the most vulnerable to climate change (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014), coinciding with the steering away of the L&D discourse from an almost exclusive focus on “technocratic and neoliberal governmentalities so ubiquitous in mitigation and adaptation”. From a climate diplomacy point of view, authors such as Jackson et al (2023) hinted that any further neglection of the topic would result in a serious loss of credibility of global climate policymaking, particularly in the eyes of the civil society.…”

Risks, Ethics and Justice in the governance of positive tipping points

“…Refocusing mitigation attention to high-emitting groups, countries and sectors highlights the need for interventions and policy measures that attempt to shift the current consumption patterns of the wealthy and the actions of large private corporations (Newell, 2021;Kenner, 2019;Wiedmann et al, 2020;Rammelt et al, 2023) and the infrastructures of high-impact sectors such as food (reducing meat and dairy consumption) and energy production (switching to non-fossil fuel based energy), transport (reducing car use and air travel) and housing that, combined, comprise about 75% of total carbon footprints (Newell et al, 2021). Furthermore, this view also highlights the need for substantial financial transfers from the Global North to the Global South to help build climate resilience, to compensate for irreparable losses due to climate change, and to offset the costs of mitigation efforts (Jackson et al, 2023). Without such measures, efforts to address Earth System tipping points risk reinforcing unequal power dynamics and current inequities.…”

Disaster reparations? Rethinking disaster recovery through the politics of affect

“…But reparations has also featured in discourses about nation‐states making amends for warfare (Eng, 2011; Lu, 2015). Further still, reparations has more recently functioned as a place‐holder for attempts to formulate restitution to Southern hemisphere countries enduring environmental damage resulting from centuries of natural resource extraction caused mostly by elite minorities whose wealth derives from centuries of colonialism (Jackson et al, 2023; Sheller, 2020; Taiwo, 2022).…”