Workshop Confronting Manageability Paradigm/Climate Change

Notes and Remarks on the Session "Climate Change" (CC)

Notes and connotations from Ingmar

Re discussion:

I have not made sense of the discussion in large degrees. It was partially quite difficult for me to focus on what I perceived as technocratic/management talk:

• Science: How is CC measured? What is CC?
• Management: How can CC be tackled.

Anyway, we touched several issues, which I deem relevant for using CC as a case to make explicit forms of critique.:

• Actors:
  • Who is causing CC?
  • How is the discourse "CC" shaped?
  • How can actors change their lifestyle? Why do actors delegate power away to other actors?
• Consequences: which scenarios can we imagine? Connection to questions of utopia. "With or against the system"/Revolution?
• Analysis: What role does capitalism play in constructing and construing CC/"CC"? Who has "interests" in CC exist?

All these latter issues seem addressable in the framing of "social order". How is social order maintained, how does disorder occur, how can we change social configurations? Helpful to engage with this might be theories like those developed by Bourdieu or named as Actor-network Theory, Regulation school, Anarchism.... who knows? :)

Sebastian's Comments

Climate change and emissions, is change possible?

Sebastian's comment:

Two opposing ideas for or against manageability: - No, we cannot manage it, only influence or open the box of Pandora (using fossil fuels especially oil, melting permafrost in Siberia releasing methan) - Yes we can do manage it, regarding to the big changes that happened in one or two generations

But what level of development do we want to enjoy? Do we have to accept going back to a technological level 200 years ago?

• Other issues raised:
  • Political realities, election period, corporate,
  • Diana arguments against falling back in the quality and technology lifestyle.
  • We have to adapt to the condition.
  • There has to be an environmental institution, like the WTO just for the ecology trying to solve environmental problems.

Hannah's Comments

"Doing critical analysis"

Aiming at a critical analysis of such a phenomenon like climate change, I would like to put forward a more critical reflection of our own role, and where we, as researchers, derive our knowledge from. The workshop discussions had a strong normative connotation, which usually characterises political debate, but not scientific argueing.

A possible topic for future discussions could be to deconstruct the concept of climate change and to ask what kind of functions the concept fulfills in our society today. Of course, we should check the scientific evidence for the phenomenon, and from there, ask some more critical questions. There have been some useful ideas such as comparing the climate change concept with the sustainability paradigm, and the rise and fall of the concept's popularity.

Asking for the social functions of the concept fits neatly into Ingmar's comments above, for instance where he asks how social order is maintained.