Short Abstract

This panel explores how climate governance, through adaptation and Loss and Damage, reflects deep epistemic inequalities. It asks how knowledge, power, and justice intersect, and how reimagining governance as an epistemic project can advance plural and transformative climate futures.

Description

As the Loss and Damage (L&D) agenda becomes institutionalised within global climate governance, it exposes deep tensions between justice and technocracy, autonomy and dependency. The establishment of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage represents a historic success for Global South advocacy, yet its embedding in existing development and financial architectures risks reproducing old hierarchies of knowledge and authority.

This panel positions L&D as a lens to interrogate the epistemic dimensions of climate governance. It explores how adaptation and L&D, originally envisioned as transformative responses to the limits of mitigation, have become shaped by overlapping discourses of development. These framings often privilege technocratic expertise over local and experiential knowledge, depoliticising the struggles for justice and reparation that originally animated them.

We invite contributions that critically engage with:

- The institutional and epistemic entanglements of climate finance mechanisms;

- Knowledge dependencies and geopolitical asymmetries in climate policy;

- Community-led or Indigenous approaches challenging dominant paradigms;

- Theoretical interventions on decoloniality, epistemic justice, and autonomy.

By reframing climate governance as both a political and epistemic project, the panel seeks to bridge debates in development studies, political ecology, and decolonial theory. It calls for rethinking how knowledge is produced, legitimised, and contested in shaping just and plural climate futures.

This Panel has 15 pending paper proposals.
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