Volume 32, May 2015, Pages 165–174
Beyond ‘deniers’ and ‘believers’: Towards a map of the politics of climate change
Highlights
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- Categories in climate politics debate are hangovers from climate science debates.
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- Existing frameworks in climate politology are critically reviewed.
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- A new map of climate politics beyond the scientific debate is offered.
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- Two dimensions are proposed: wicked/tame problem and individual/collective solutions.
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- Aims to defuse politicisation of science and re-politicise climate policy choices.
Abstract
The
politics of climate change is not concerned solely with rival
scientific claims about global warming but also with how best to govern
the climate. Despite this, categories in climate politics remain caught
up in the concepts of the ‘science wars’, rarely progressing far beyond
the denier/believer-dichotomy. This article aims to nudge climate
politics beyond the polarized scientific debates while also
counteracting the de-politicisation that comes from assuming scientific
claims lead directly to certain policies. First existing typologies of
climate political positions are reviewed. Diverse contributions make up
an emerging field of ‘climate politology’ but these tend to reduce
climate politics either to views on the science or to products of
cultural world-views. Drawing on policy analysis literature, a new
approach is outlined, where problem-definitions and solution-framings
provide the coordinates for a two-dimensional grid. The degree to which
climate change is considered a ‘wicked’ problem on the one hand, and
individualist or collectivist ways of understanding political agency on
the other, provide a map of climate political positions beyond
‘believers’ vs ‘deniers’.
Keywords
- Climate change;
- Discourse;
- Systems theory;
- Wicked problems;
- Cultural theory;
- Problem-definition
1. Introduction
With
its origins in climate science, the issue of climate change has often
been considered in ‘narrowly technical and reductionistic terms’ (Demeritt, 2001,
p. 312). Until the mid 2000s western media typically reported it ‘as an
evenly balanced debate between apparently expert groups who were
“believers” or “deniers”’ (Boykoff and Smith, 2010, p. 5)
in ‘the science’. This dichotomy, although it never reflected the
complexity of the debate, coexists increasingly awkwardly with a much
wider debate about what to do about climate change and how to engineer
major organisational and societal changes. One observer even suggests
that the denier–believer debate is being replaced by a debate about
policy: ‘politicians who flatly reject climate science are now being
replaced by climate policy sceptics’ (Hickman, 2013).
Though ‘denialism’ persists, a great debate on how to govern the
climate – what measures to use, precisely what goal to have, how to deal
with effects of climate change and which policy instruments to choose –
has long been in train. The global climate is not just a scientific
object but also a governance-object (Corry, 2010 and Corry, 2013).
Despite
this, the vocabulary used to identify climate political stances still
rarely goes far beyond ‘sceptic’ and ‘believer’—categories rooted in the
debate about the veracity of scientific claims. Introductions to global
warming usually side-step the politics, refer to those ‘skeptical’ or
‘supportive’ of the idea that humans are to blame (e.g. Maslin, 2008, p. 35) or only briefly touch on the ‘politics of greenhouse’ (Pittlock, 2009,
p. 270). Policy literature typically covers physical climatology,
economics and sometimes institutions, without elaborating on how
ideologies or political dynamics might influence preferences and choices
(e.g. Helm and Hepburn, 2009, Richardson et al., 2011, Stern, 2007 and IPCC, 2001). Studies of public opinion on climate change similarly track attitudes to global warming (e.g. Brechin, 2010) but focus mainly on whether scientific claims are believed and how seriously global warming is viewed (see also Leiserowitz et al., 2006 and Whitmarsh, 2011).
More rare is survey data gauging support for specific policies such as
taxation on energy and other forms of possible government action on
climate change (Leiserowitz, 2006 and Nisbet and Myers, 2007).
One report suggested a six-fold division between the alarmed,
concerned, cautious, disengaged doubtful and dismissive segments of
American society (Maibach et al., 2009).
However, this amounts to a more detailed breakdown of the same
sceptic–believer continuum, reacting to ‘the science’. Similarly, media
studies have looked at how the media frame climate change, e.g. through
rival ‘scientific uncertainty’ and ‘climate crisis’-framings (Nisbet, 2009)
that also revolve around trust in scientific claims. Others have
examined how such framings of climate science play into familiar
political cleavages, e.g. between Republicans and Democrats in the US (Boykoff, 2011, McCright and Dunlap, 2011a and Jenkins, 2011).
The
politics surrounding the practice of climate science has not been
ignored. Science and Technology Studies examines the ‘scientisation’ of
climate politics (Demeritt, 2001, Van der Sluijs et al., 1998 and Van der Sluijs et al., 2010)
as well as the politicisation of climate science including the role of
right wing groups and US-based think tanks contesting scientific claims (Oreskes and Conway, 2010 and Hoggan, 2009, see also McCright and Dunlap, 2011b).
International Relations scholars have offered typologies of different
diplomatic stances, e.g. being ‘leaders, pushers and laggards’ in
relation to a global agreement (Andresen and Agrawala, 2002), have analysed the role of actors such as the EU (e.g. Oberthür and Kelly, 2008 and Bäckstrand and Elgström, 2013)
or pointed to factors determining state stances. How do global
political economy and national interests affect which states and
non-state actors group together behind certain policies (e.g. Newell, 2006, p. 166)? Stripple and Bulkeley (2013)
have expanded the purview of the study of international climate
politics by collating analyses of governmental techniques designed to
govern carbon and populations through regimes of knowledge and Corry (2013) argues that the emergence of the global climate as a governable object has a structuring effect on world politics as a whole.
Nevertheless,
despite an ever-widening field, more often than not climate political
reporting and analysis is strangely reticent on the variety of positions
and the structure of political debate relating to governing climate
change (exceptions are covered below). While the denier–believer debate
still has serious political implications (see O’Neill and Boykoff, 2010 and Hoffman, 2011),
reducing the politics of climate change to this obscures some important
issues and leads to a contradiction. On the one hand understanding the
politics of climate change with the compass of the scientific debate
imports the polarisations of the ‘science wars’ to the policy arena. For
some groups, climate change policies are ‘invented by self-interested
and unpatriotic scientists and activists’ (McCarthy, 2013,
p. 23). At the same time a post-political framing conceals the politics
involved, casting climate policy as a ‘global humanitarian cause’ that
somehow flows logically from ‘the science’ (Swyngedouw, 2010,
p. 217). The paradox of consensus politics coexisting with science wars
could thus be two sides of the same coin: ‘the political nature of
matters of concern is disavowed to the extent that the facts in
themselves are elevated, through a short-circuiting procedure, on to the
terrain of the political’ (Swyngedouw, 2010, p. 217, see also Machin, 2013).
This
reflects a wider tendency in environmental political commentary to
underestimate the ‘ideological and social theoretical underpinnings of
the environmental debate’ (Manno, 2004, p. 156).
For Hulme ‘disagreements about climate change are as likely to reveal
conflicts within and between societies about the ideologies that we
carry and promote, as they are to be rooted in contrary readings of the
scientific evidence’ (Hulme, 2009,
p. 33) and eck argued that ‘climate politics is precisely not about
climate but about transforming the basic concepts and institutions of
(...) industrial, nation-state modernity’ (Beck, 2010, p. 356). Yet categories and shorthands originating in the science debate continue to signpost positions on climate politics.
This article responds to this problem in three steps. In Section 2
we review existing typologies of positions in the politics of climate
change. We ask what categories they offer and identify the key questions
they organize their accounts of climate politics around. Bringing these
together depicts the emerging field of ‘climate politiology’ and its
key challenges. Section 3
prepares the ground for a new map of climate policy positions,
indentifying two dimensions relating to problem-definition and
solution-framing: how ‘wicked’ the problem is viewed, and the degree to
which individualistic/holistic perspectives underpin
solution-definitions. A final section briefly assesses the new map in
terms of what it tells us about the limits and focus of the existing
typologies, what aspects of the politics of climate change have been
overlooked by the sceptic–believer dichotomy and how the simultaneous
politicisation of science and de-politicisation of policy can be
challenged.
