Governing the Climate: New Approaches to Rationality, Power and Politics
Language: English
Pages: 289
ISBN: 1107046262
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.
(2011). Homo Clima: Climate Man and Productive Power – Government through Climate Change as Bioaesthetic Frame. Doctoral thesis at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Available at: http://urn.kb.se/ resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-34285. Sprinz, D. and U. Luterbacher (2001). ed. International Relations and Global Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stephan, B. (2012). Bringing Discourse to the Market: The Commodification of Avoided Deforestation. Environmental Politics 21(4),
cost of the upgrade is conditioned by the relatively high price of the car), the availability heuristic (when behaviour is guided by the available information on the basis that its accessibility equates to its quality and relevance) and the validity heuristic (when the arbitrary patterning of events is interpreted as a sign of underlying trends) (Kahneman et al. 1982). What is most relevant about the work of Kahneman and Tversky for this chapter, and the broader Behaviour Change Agenda today, is
greenhouse gases. Through the use of an onboard computer and a Universal Serial Bus flash drive, the eco-Drive provides 106 Whitehead, Jones and Pykett driving-style analysis, statistics breakdowns of carbon dioxide produced and automatic prompts concerning how to ecologically regulate driving patterns. Eco-Drive has an online community (the Fiat Ecoville) of some sixty-thousand participants able to compare statistics and engage in various eco-competitions. In its use of automatic prompts,
Smart meters and RTDs introduce a new field of visibility into homes, enabling householders to ‘see’ their energy use and therefore perform new kinds of calculation about which kinds of usage are desirable or otherwise, and thus to introduce new forms of self-government of their energy use and carbon emissions (cf. Wilhite and Ling 1995). Whilst this rather simplistic linear, information-deficit model of behaviour change has been widely criticized (e.g. Burgess et al. 2003; Shove 2010), previous
operationalization, on one hand, and the economic markets materializing it, on the other. The BEG has to cross the gap and survive a fundamental change of rationalities because the public good of political actors shifts to the private profit of market agents as the main criteria for calculations and motivation of agency. The great challenge is to make BEG jump over the gap, that is to guarantee that the actors operating according to the market rationale produce the initial targets and intended