Format/Structure

Double panel, building on an accepted special issue (all papers still work in progress), with some SI contributions, plural perspectives welcome

Long Abstract

Climate governmentality studies in the tradition of Michel Foucault have drawn critical attention to the systems of thought, fields of knowledge, and expert practices that make climate change visible and operable as a domain of political intervention. By shifting focus from “who” to “how” questions, work in this field has advanced new perspectives on the forms and operations of power in global climate governance (Steig & Oels 2025).

Building on an upcoming special issue in Global Environmental Politics (to be launched in August 2026), this panel asks: What political rationalities and discursive formations underpin global climate politics in the Paris era? How can they be de-naturalised and re-politicised in order to open up pathways for alternative climate futures?

While the Paris Agreement is often celebrated as a turning point for global climate politics, the climate governmentality literature sheds light on the continuity of a neoliberal mode of governing since the Kyoto era. It suggests that the Paris climate regime constantly reinvents itself to legitimise its continued existence without challenging the underlying political rationalities and knowledge regimes. Discourses of temporary ‘overshoot’, the rise of negative emissions technologies, and the turn towards nature-based solutions are only some examples. The climate governmentality literature argues that the ‘Paris cli-mentality’ produces political capture and fosters politics of delay, distraction and injustice. Transformative claims are deflected, structural drivers of climate change remain untouched, and political failure is normalised.

In this decisive moment for global climate politics and governance, we see the need for a critical-interpretive research agenda that makes the peculiarities and effects of the Paris cli-mentality ‘strange’ (Li 2008). We invite contributions from diverse disciplines and sites that call these dispersed power-knowledge assemblages into question and ask what alternative futures, knowledge claims, and relationships with ourselves, others, and our warming world are possible.

This Panel has 10 pending paper proposals.
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