Does the climate need consensus? The politics of climate change revisited

In this paper, I interrogate the relationship between two seemingly separated themes playing an increasingly influential role in climate change related scholarship: a constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to climate science (Wynne, Demeritt, Edwards) on the one hand and the debate in political theory on the depoliticization of the public sphere (Mouffe, Rancière) on the other. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, I argue how they could be tied together in order to provide an enriched understanding of climate denial: rather than being a cause of dysfunctional climate politics, it constitutes a symptomatic outburst of the political in a completely depoliticised landscape. Moreover, this diagnosis points to what I believe is a fundamental flaw in the science-policy architecture of climate change: in attempting to translate the universal validity of science into the contours of an inclusive, consensual negotiation model, the constitutive role of exclusion in the emergence of scientific objectivity is overlooked. This eventually allows me to argue that the issue of climate change, rather than being a problem of translating scientific matters of fact into political matters of concern, constitutes first and foremost a political struggle over what to be concerned about.

Jaar van publicatie:2013