Her thesis studies the appearance of ‘geoengineering’ in the political discussion on climate change. The term describes a set of ideas on how to stabilize global temperature by intervening into the Earth’s natural systems at large scales, for example by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflecting incoming sunlight. Ideas like these were subject to a strong taboo in the scientific community until the mid-2000s. Yet within a decade, they have become a subject discussed in international climate politics.
The thesis uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study the causal mechanisms by which geoengineering could become an object of governance, describing how the activities of a relatively small network of actors shaped the political debate on this topic.
The Emergent Politics of Geoengineering