Making the Climate Malleable? “Weak” and “Strong” Governance Objects and the Transformation of International Climate Politics

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.