Short Abstract:

The roundtable explores how the STS scholarship might address the politics of climate emergency. Is this still “anticipating” and “preparing” or just coping with what already happened and bound to happen? What is the political performativity of “emergency” in climate politics?

Long Abstract:

Over the last 15 years, STS scholars developed a broad inquiry into the governmental management of emergencies based on a rich analysis of techniques of “anticipatory governance” such as preparedness, preemption, and precaution. This work largely addressed the governmental response to irruptive events such as the 9/11 attacks and global pandemics. Anticipatory governance in general and techniques of preparedness in particular, are clearly central to the way that climate futures are taking shape. Yet the forms of futurity that are already unfolding around climate change introduce temporal trajectories and agentic forces that are quite different from those identified in the literature on anticipation and preparedness so far for at least for reasons.

1. Climate change is not an irruptive event but a long-term process; there is no prospect of return to the status quo ante but the need for a substantial transformation of societies and their infrastructures. 2. Many effects of climate change are – in contrast to other emergencies – not uncertain but inevitable since they are caused by a materially sedimented past of carbon emissions. 3. The governing of climate disasters not only entails preparing but also strategies to reverse intolerable degrees of heating and repair damages. 4. Governing of climate disasters more and more takes the form of an adaptive coping rather than a prudent planning.

The roundtable brings together interdisciplinary scholars to discuss how the debate on emergency governance can be conceptually, methodologically, and empirically advanced and refined to analyze the governance of climate emergency “beyond anticipation and preparedness.”