Abstract
In this chapter I reflect on the aspiration for climate governance from the perspective of knowledge and its relationship with different understandings of agency and democracy. I first offer a short historical perspective on the changing relationship between knowledge and culture in the context of enduring human attempts to bring order to the disorderliness of climate. I next consider the implications for climate governance of the dominant contemporary understanding of climate, namely as a physically interconnected global system. This form of knowledge elevates atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and global surface air temperature as primary objects of political control and claims to render climate governable. I then reflect on forms of democracy that are either assumed or erased through these dominant processes of knowledge-making, arguing that institutionalised programmes of global change research pay insufficient attention to the difficulties of resolving enduring differences in citizen beliefs and values. Finally, I consider alternative frames of thought and action which do not place knowledge, least of all integrated knowledge, as the driver of climate governance and which suggest that global climate might not be a governable object.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Research Handbook on Climate Governance |
| Editors | Karin Backstrand, Eva Lovbrand |
| Publisher | Edward Elgar, Pub |
| Pages | 555–565 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2015 |
