The Higher Research Seminar: ‘Making things malleable? Weak and strong governance objects, technologies of control, and the transformation of climate change as a problem‘ - Professor Olaf Corry, University of Leeds

Olaf Corry, University of Leeds

‘Making things malleable? Weak and strong governance objects, technologies of control, and the transformation of climate change as a problem‘

Professor Corry is an internationally acclaimed expert on international theory, global climate politics, technology and security politics, and social movements. Please see his webpage for a detailed bio and list of publications: https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/politics/staff/1330/prof-olaf-corry

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 rendered governable, but only in terms of not being perturbed in relation to a baseline or 'natural' condition, while strongly governable objects, I propose, are construed as malleable along multiple dimensions, the telos of governing them no longer tied to a naturalised baseline. 

The weak/strong distinction is applied to examine constitutive 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, and a "design approach" to geoengineering adds 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. Could 'the climate' become redefined as part of 'the economy' or a security tool?

The Department’s Higher Research Seminar Series | Department of Political Science (lu.se)