Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how fear structures anticipatory knowledge within climate governance. It shows how emotional infrastructures of anticipation transform uncertainty into control, reproducing the present and constraining the plural futures political ecology strives to imagine.

Presentation long abstract

This paper tells a story from within the emotional infrastructures of global climate governance. Drawing on political ecology, Science and Technology Studies, and ethnographic research in and around International Organizations (the World Bank, UNDP, Global Environmental Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Green Climate Fund), it examines how fear of risk, uncertainty, and reputational loss has become a central affect organizing environmental knowledge-making.

International Organizations increasingly seek to govern the future through anticipatory knowledge, notably via Social and Environmental Safeguards (SES). While presented as tools for justice and prevention, these safeguards operate as assemblages of anticipatory knowledge: complex networks of experts, documents, norms, and affects that render uncertain futures governable. Yet, rather than enabling transformation, they generate anticipatory inertia. The fear of harm, failure, or conflict sustains procedural control, codifies compliance, and narrows epistemic space for Indigenous and alternative knowledges.

By bringing political ecology into dialogue with emotional and anticipatory governance, this paper argues that climate governance is not only technocratic but affectively driven. Fear stabilizes bureaucratic order, while care and moral responsibility are mobilized to justify control. Revealing these affective dynamics helps us understand why transformative change stalls—and how reclaiming emotional reflexivity could reopen pathways toward more plural and abundant futures.