Presentation short abstract

This presentation investigates the conventions of the science-policy interface, outlining a regime of environmental politics so well-established that nearly all actors adhere to its script, to the detriment of convincing climate action.

Presentation long abstract

The urgency of political action to halt environmental degradation and safeguard against anthropogenic climate change is widely acknowledged. This urgency stems from dire projections of environmental scientists. A key part in providing such projections with credibility and political legitimacy are various science-policy interface arrangements, which influence both the ways in which knowledge is produced and the ways in which political actors respond to environmental crises. As such, as it is crucially important to understand the ways in which the science-policy interface is configured, how it shapes knowledge, and what its constraints are. Although processes of negotiation and calibration between scientific knowledge and policy demands are widely recognized, in-depth understanding of the ‘script’ that the science-policy interface follows remains absent. In this contribution, we investigate the implicit rules of the science-policy interface, outlining a regime of regime of environmental politics so well-established that nearly all actors adhere to its script, sometime full-heartedly (when they are asked to take up high-status positions), often implicitly or unknowingly. Drawing on the literature on the co-production of knowledge and Foucauldian studies of governmentality, we investigate this script of the science-policy interface as a technology of governance.

Presentation short abstract

This contribution explores the role of monitoring evaluation and learning in the production of knowledge about adaptation finance. It reveals how the Green Climate Fund’s results framework extends the Fund’s authority via promissory knowledge claims which in turn sustain the Paris climate regime.

Presentation long abstract

Whilst the allocation and quantity of climate adaptation finance are widely scrutinized, less attention is paid to the role of this money in broader climate politics. I ask how the Green Climate Fund (GCF), orchestrates inputs via its results management framework, how this knowledge is processed and then used strategically by the Fund Secretariat. Critical scholarship draws attention to how monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) shapes how adaptation projects are designed and implemented and the type of knowledge produced about impact. I build on this by combining thinking from science and technology studies about knowledge production with Foucauldian ideas about how knowledge is used in governance. I show how the GCF results management framework monitors and manages implementation to make diverse and disparate information about projects into a coherent and commensurate portfolio. I demonstrate how the Fund’s results processes incentivise projects to be designed for approval, rather than implementation, and how this has conditioned consultants to mirror the Fund’s requirements, rather than responding to vulnerability and adaptation need. My results demonstrate how the GCF Secretariat gains credibility and political authority via promissory claims about its results, whilst cautioning about the risk of a legitimacy crisis should these be discredited. This work makes a theoretical contribution about how MEL underlies powerful claims about adaptation. This facilitates strategic communication by the GCF about its achievements. At the same time, this contribution makes visible the deontological attitude of adaptation finance and the important role of this in the governance of climate change.

Presentation short abstract

This article examines the discourses that sought to render multilateral finance for Loss and Damage (L&D) governable. We demonstrate how a neoliberal problematization structures the new Fund for responding to L&D, mobilizing technologies of agency that are to empower recipients and activate donors.

Presentation long abstract

In 2023, the Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the UNFCCC in Dubai celebrated the successful operationalization of new funding arrangements (FA), including a fund to address Loss and Damage from climate change (L&D). As the financial means of the Fund are still “tiny like a mosquito”, there are concerns about the inadequacy of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD). Our paper asks: Which discourse coalitions have competed in the operationalization of the Fund and FA, and with which implications for the Fund’s governing logic? We use Hajer’s (1995) argumentative discourse analysis to explore how finance for L&D is rendered governable through each discourse. The dataset includes party submissions to the negotiations on the fund, transcripts of three transitional committee meetings, and interviews with negotiators. The heuristic for coding was inspired by Dean’s (2010) analytics of government framework. We have identified four discourse coalitions: (1) optimizing, (2) additional voluntary support, (3) scaling finance to needs, and (4) historical responsibility. Our paper reveals a mismatch between the Fund’s biopolitical mandate and its operationalization. We unmask a neoliberal problematization with neoliberal technologies of agency at play: The Fund is to empower recipients and donors, mainly by optimizing existing financial mechanisms. We conclude that the FRLD has been emptied of its radical potential for climate justice. It has instead been domesticated as part of the Paris Cli-Mentality (Steig and Oels 2025).

Presentation short abstract

This paper proposes that we think of the Amazon region not merely as a geographic territory to be preserved or defended, but as a dynamic transterritorial space where power operates in new ways. It studies the transformations of neoliberal forms of rule in the Amazonian region.

Presentation long abstract

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the understanding of the Amazon has undergone profound transformations. The region is, now presented both as a complex problem and a vital planetary solution and geopolitical significance. This paper proposes that we think of the Amazon region not merely as a geographic territory to be preserved or defended, but as a dynamic transterritorial space where power operates in new ways. Informed by authors from the Global South, studying the transformations of neoliberal forms of rule, we examine how Amazonian region is being governmentalized. The paper details how transnational flows of actors and governmental technologies can suppress differences that operate outside the programmatic axis of neoliberal rationality, limiting the potential for diverse voices and practices. to shape life in the forest out of the climentality. Ultimately, this approach demonstrates how a twofold route is being pursued, with the government settling in the Amazon and simultaneously governing the climate regime.

Presentation short abstract

The Paris Agreements first Global Stocktake (GST) expanded access but reproduced hidden power asymmetries. This research reveals how participation, knowledge, and influence were unevenly distributed and outlines reforms for more inclusive future stocktakes.

Presentation long abstract

The Global Stocktake (GST) is the Paris Agreement’s central mechanism for assessing collective progress and is mandated to operate “in the light of equity” with broad participation. While the first GST (GST-1) was widely portrayed as inclusive, little systematic analysis has examined how inclusivity was constructed and practiced. This article evaluates GST-1 through a power-sensitive framework that conceptualises participation across visible, hidden, and invisible dimensions. Based on participant observation across GST phases, 26 semi-structured interviews and document analysis of Party and non-Party stakeholder submissions on the learnings of GST-1, the study traces both discursive understandings of inclusivity and the structural conditions shaping actors’ ability to influence the process.

Findings show that the Technical Dialogue of the first GST expanded formal access—through world cafés, roundtables, and diverse inputs—yet longstanding power asymmetries persisted. Visa barriers, funding constraints, delegation size, and linguistic disadvantages limited meaningful engagement for many actors from the Majority world. Epistemic hierarchies privileged scientific and technocratic expertise, constraining the recognition of Indigenous, local, and experiential knowledge despite its procedural endorsement. In the political phase, agenda-setting dynamics and informal bargaining further reduced the influence of low-power stakeholders.

The article argues that procedural equity in the GST cannot be equated with broad participation alone; it requires confronting the power relations that shape whose knowledge and preferences meaningfully enter deliberation and outcomes. It concludes by outlining reforms for future GST cycles, including stronger support for developing-country participation, broader epistemic inclusion, and improved linkage between technical deliberation and political decision-making.

Presentation short abstract

Climate litigation is reshaping climate governance as courts reinterpret state obligations, expand accountability mechanisms, and challenge regulatory backsliding. This paper critically examines the growing juridification of climate governance and its emancipatory potential and its limitations.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how climate litigation and constitutional climate governance are—or are not—reshaping the modalities of power, expertise, and accountability that constitute climate governmentality in the Paris Era. Drawing on recent empirical and doctrinal developments, as well as the Brazilian Supreme Court’s landmark judgments on the Climate Fund (PSB et al. v. Brazil), the paper argues that law has increasingly become a central technology through which climate governance is exercised, contested, and recalibrated. The rapid expansion of climate litigation in Brazil, including systemic actions and the dominance of public prosecutors as claimants, illustrates how judicial processes function as mechanisms of oversight, policy correction, and counter-mobilization against regulatory dismantling. At the international level, recent advisory opinions issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) frame climate harms as violations of human rights and state obligations, thereby transforming normative expectations around mitigation, adaptation, and intergenerational justice. Courts are redefining the boundaries of state discretion, reshaping separation-of-powers dynamics, and reasserting environmental protection as a constitutional imperative. Yet they also expose tensions inherent to climate governmentality: technocratic dependence on expertise, uneven access to justice, and the reproduction of exclusions within legal processes. By analyzing these dynamics, the paper offers a renewed critical perspective on how climate governance is being juridified, politicized, and reconfigured across contested power–knowledge assemblages.

Presentation short abstract

Sea Level Rise (SLR) is a growing concern in inter- and transnational fora. Dominant problematisations of SLR limit the solution space for adaptation to technocratic management and risk foreclosing alternative climate futures for coastal cities and regions.

Presentation long abstract

Sea level rise (SLR) is increasingly reframed as a global political problem, no longer confined to local adaptation needs or the existential struggles of atoll nations. Recent UN debates and the creation of the Ocean Rise & Coastal Resilience Coalition (ORCRC) mark the institutionalisation of SLR within global and transnational climate governance. This article asks how SLR is rendered governable as an object of global politics, and how this global problematisation reshapes the solution space for local adaptation efforts. Adopting a poststructuralist governmentality framework and focusing on the ORCRC, I trace the rationalities, visibilities, technologies of governing, and subject positions inherent to the emerging global governing of SLR. Through a globalised vision of (coastal) resilience, this governmentality privileges the rollout of transnational knowledge infrastructures, embeds adaptation in cost-benefit logics, and opens coastal cities for private investment through financial instruments. SLR is framed simultaneously as an existential threat and as a risk to the blue economy. Economistic calculations of viability normalise ‘managed retreat’ as inevitable and reframe vulnerabilities as a chance for transformation. The emerging SLR governmentality could discipline coastal cities and regions towards neoliberal adaptation pathways, reinforce colonial hierarchies of knowledge production and obscure alternative imaginaries of coastal futures.

Presentation short abstract

I explore how water models construct futures that shape governable subjects in the Magdalena River, applying a “governmentality of the future” lens. Data gaps and “exclusion‑through‑consensus” shape this governmentality, allowing water modellers to downplay the livelihood loss of rooted communities.

Presentation long abstract

While we know that water models are political and re-shaped by their context, they continue to be used in water management as tools to examine the future. As futures become an increasingly contested object of water governance, it is crucial to critically examine how water models contribute to the creation of knowledgeable objects—such as the future—to produce governable subjects. I situate this endeavour in the Zapatosa Wetland of the Lower Magdalena River, where an ecohydraulic modelling project was initiated by the Colombian state and the World Bank. I examine this through a ‘governmentality of the future’ lens, building on the notions of environmental governmentality, hydrocracies and naturalisation of time, along with empirical material collected between 2022 and 2024. I describe how the Colombian state and the World Bank enact the governmentality of the future, opting for greater control over the people through control of the Magdalena River, with disastrous consequences for rooted river futures. I demonstrate that the lack of data has entered the governmentality of the future, as well as a politics of "exclusion-through-consensus". The Colombian state and international banks utilise the governmentality of the future through the disposition of hydrocracies (water modellers) that steer knowledge gaps towards the “incomplete” knowledge of futures. As a result, water modellers digitally downplay threats to riverside communities, such as pollution, water grabbing and loss of livelihood, thereby delegitimising their rooted futures.

Presentation short abstract

This article examines the apocalyptic climate imaginary as a biopolitical formation that organises life and shapes how futures are imagined and governed. Building on Foucault and Lemke, we trace three orientations —avoidance, preparation, and endurance—through which collapse is lived and contested.

Presentation long abstract

This article examines the apocalyptic climate imaginary as a biopolitical formation. Rather than a singular rupture, climate collapse appears as a chronic, uneven condition shaping how futures are imagined and governed. Building on Foucault and Lemke, we analyze how this imaginary organizes life through knowledge regimes, hierarchies of worth, and subject formation. We trace three overlapping orientations—avoidance, preparation, and endurance—through which collapse is lived and contested. These strategies reveal how responsibility is redistributed, survival is differentially secured, and new practices of care and resistance emerge. The apocalyptic climate imaginary thus functions as both governance and site of struggle.

Presentation short abstract

Focusing on how people working in the primary sector in Galicia (Spain) experience variegated climate impacts, this paper elaborates a post-Foucaultian approach to the analysis of what people do, can do and reject to do with the notion of climate change on the face of multiple environmental changes

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is now an everyday experience. Yet, quite often, it remains epistemologically elusive when we try to track it down while doing fieldwork on everyday climate change encounters. Why is it so obvious for some people to connect the experience of ongoing and accelerated environmental changes with the idea of global warming , while it is unclear, confusing or even goes without mention for many other people undergoing the very same changes? In this paper, I analyse how people working in the primary sector in Galicia (NW Spain) come across a changing environment and the way the notion of climate change enters discourses and practices about encounters, vulnerabilities, limits, actions and consequences. Building on long term discussions of the notion of environmentality and the issue of (environmental) subject formation, my aim is to elaborate a post-Foucaultian approach to the way people start to think of themselves and their own actions and experiences in terms of climate change. I suggest that a phenomenological elaboration of the term “climate subject” opens up very productive possibilities for the analysis of what people do, can do and reject to do with the notion of climate change on the face of multiple ̶ some of them extreme and devastating, some of them subtle and even temporary benign— environmental changes.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the interface between climate storytelling and corporate governmentality. Focusing on the role of non-state actors in Paris era climate governance, I investigate how initiatives I term 'corporate environmental pacts' use storytelling in the governance of their stakeholders.

Presentation long abstract

There is burgeoning environmental social science interest in how radical imaginaries might chart new modes of being beyond ecocidal, capitalist and colonial structures. This scholarship increasingly carves out a compelling role for storytelling in cultivating emancipatory, utopian visions of the future. Taking this impulse in a new direction, I investigate efforts by business to conduct the conduct of stakeholders through their own techniques of storytelling.

This research is part of a broader project studying a specific type of non-state actor, which I term ‘corporate environmental pacts’. Pacts are initiatives that encourage business members to ‘take action’ to address environmental crises, certify those actions, market those actions and build virtual communities. I investigate two pacts – 1% for the Planet and The Climate Pledge. An ‘analytics of government’ discourse analysis was conducted on interviews held with pact actors and all online content produced by the two pacts.

I argue that pact storytelling techniques can help address the underexplored interface between storytelling and governmentality scholarship. These initiatives explicitly tell climate and environmental stories, attempting to bolster the role played by business in the narratives of sustainability transitions. Specifically, I examine the discourses and rationalities used in pact storytelling practices employed in documentaries they produce, creatives they fund, and narratives disseminated through social media and blogs. I find that the visions of the environment and future projected by pacts are a crucial part of how they seek to intervene on the conduct of stakeholders such as businesses, non-profits, investors and consumers.