IR,climate politics,and change: opportunities for productive engagement?

Abstract

‘Change’ or ‘transformation’ are longstanding preoccupations of both International Relations (IR) and global climate change politics scholarship. Yet, the two fields largely occupy independent axiological, epistemological, normative, and ontological spaces that have led to misunderstandings, mutual criticisms, and a lack of serious engagement on these questions. The result is missed opportunities to transform IR, misdiagnoses of political dynamics of climate change, and, perversely, the limited influence of political analysis on wider climate change scholarship. This article identifies understandings of change and transformation relevant to both fields and introduces a productive epistemological and ontological shift for analyzing and normatively engaging with change in the face of uncertainty. It then introduces practical research strategies for policy-relevant and forward-looking scholarship that moves from explaining change to identifying causal logics and dynamic processes that can reinforce (or undermine) change and transformation. It concludes with illustrative analyzes of trajectories and possible limits of two macro policy changes with transformative potential: the 1.5-degree Celsius aspirational target in the Paris Agreement, and the proliferation of ‘net zero’ policies around the world.

Introduction

Within the social sciences, the study of climate change politics is bifurcated. International Relations (IR) scholars studying climate change apply or build upon extant theories and approaches borrowed from mainstream political science, often treating climate change as another ‘case’ of international politics. In contrast, Global Climate Change Politics (GCCP) scholars view climate change as a fundamentally unique political problem and have developed their own theories, approaches, methodologies, and field-specific conventions. This bifurcation extends to questions of ‘change’ and ‘transformation’, which have long preoccupied both IR and GCCP scholars. Yet, they explore these questions in parallel rather than in concert – largely occupying independent axiological, epistemological, normative, and ontological spaces. This tendency has led to misunderstandings, mutual criticisms, and a lack of serious engagement between camps.

Some scholars lament the marginalization of climate change politics within IR and International Political Economy scholarship. ¹ Others argue that IR’s core assumptions make the discipline fundamentally unable to address the political questions that climate change raises. ² For IR, ‘change’ scholarship typically seeks to explain shifts in power, institutional arrangements, or of systems and orders. Climate change politics scholars focus on identifying, analyzing, and acting on socio-economic and related transformations required to address or live with climate change, implicating questions of equity. justice, and power. These works typically proffer alternative conceptualizations that re-center IR within the Anthropocene or ‘Planetary Politics’. ³ Transformations, these GPPC scholars argue, are needed in global politics and practice and the epistemology of IR.

Some IR scholarship now, too, acknowledges the existential danger of climate change. However, as will be shown below, direct engagement remains lacking because current categories and research practices of IR scholarship largely bracket out the kind of transformations that, axiomatically, motivate non-IR research on climate politics. The result is missed opportunities to transform both fields and misdiagnoses of the political dynamics of climate change.

Here, I explore opportunities for productive engagement. Drawing on recent provocations in IR that challenge its epistemological foundation in the face of accelerating global challenges, as well as work on the politics of transformation in response to climate change, I identify elements of a post-Newtonian epistemology and relational ontology that can advance understandings and analyses of change in both fields. From these foundations, I develop research strategies for analyzing and normatively engaging with change in the face of uncertainty. I argue that explicitly incorporating a post-Newtonian epistemology and relational ontology into climate change politics and governance research is imperative, given the human and planetary stakes involved. I also propose ways of doing so.

This article proceeds as follows. First, I identify social change as a core constitutive underpinning of change and transformation in both fields. Second, I make the case for axiological, epistemological, and ontological positions equipped to analyze and address transformations relevant to climate change and other contemporary global challenges. Third, I propose policy relevant and forward-looking research strategies that move from explaining change to identifying causal logics and dynamic processes that can catalyze, reinforce, or undermine transformation. Finally, to illustrate these arguments in action, I examine the politics of target setting in the 2015 Paris Agreement that produced significant global policy change and the transformative potential, politics, and risk of false change of ‘net zero’ policies.

What is change – what is changing?

In IR, ‘change’ research mainly focuses on explaining large, historical shifts of political structures (e.g. the rise and fall of great powers), units or configurations of actors (e.g. of states or other political actors and identities), global orders, or of institutions and norms. Whereas such historical changes may have broad implications for climate politics, they are less relevant for what Thomas Hale calls ‘long problems’, characterized by generational temporal gaps between cause and effect but that require immediate transformative action to address. ⁴ Whereas Hale identifies several global long problems – for example, the management of new technologies like artificial intelligence or gene editing – I focus on climate change, his paradigmatic example and the theme of this special issue.

Long problems are especially hard to address for several reasons: the imperative for short-term change must overcome strong incentives to delay action; decision-making and policy developments to address them occur in complex and uncertain environments; and the requirement to act on future – sometimes voiceless – interests. The result in this case is that change will come too late to avoid dangerous climate change, especially for the most vulnerable: ‘time is running out’ and the problem becomes harder and more expensive to address the longer we wait. ⁵

These characteristics of climate change pose a particular challenge for IR scholarship as typically done. Unlike many other long-term ‘wicked’ problems like poverty or health care provision, the response of natural systems to human activity is both uncertain and irreversible. These relations drive the ‘time’ dimension, making it difficult if not impossible to ‘come back’ to the problem repeatedly as significant harm becomes baked in. ⁶ Other features of climate change identified in the literature include its complexity, scope, and entanglement with other crises. ⁷ Some of these features also apply to other emerging long problems, especially those plausibly posing anthropogenic existential threats like AI or nuclear war, ⁸ that might benefit from a reorientation of IR along the lines proposed below. This is not to diminish the challenge or significance of other problems such as conventional wars or financial crises, but to suggest that long problems like climate change are paradigmatic of the need for a reorientation of IR to address transformation and to which the insights here might be beneficially applied.

Within the GCCP literature, there is no shortage of climate change scholars focused on the politics of change and transformation. ⁹ However, while broadly engaging with political economy debates on innovation or capitalism’s ‘contradictory relationship to climate change’, ¹⁰ this literature rarely engages IR change scholarship directly. Thus, the problem is not a lack of climate politics or policy scholarship – which have long filled the pages of highly cited journals like Environmental Politics, Climate Policy, Global Environmental Politics, and several policy journals. Rather, it is the poverty of IR scholarship that climate change scholars perceive as relevant to the transformations that concern them, namely of economic and social relations and practices required to move toward, ideally, just decarbonized ‘systems’. ¹¹ Notably, the word ‘transformation’ does not even appear in Hale and Green’s review aimed at ‘reversing’ IR’s ‘marginalization’ of climate change research, nor does any discussion of the question of political ‘change’.

This neglect has unintended consequences within the IR discipline for climate change scholars who wish to be read in the field: scholarship on climate change must engage with IR on the discipline’s terms, rather than on terms that seek to transform the field. Climate change becomes a ‘case’ of cooperation, collective action, or negotiation; ¹² changing institutional arrangements; ¹³ or the interplay of actors or contestation. ¹⁴ Thus, when environmentally focused IR scholars address change, the dependent variable is more likely to be about change in international political structures, institutions, or systems than about the implications or consequences for climate change, the environment, or those affected by such changes. The best of this work may contribute to our understanding of international politics, but the result is a missed opportunity to find common ground on understanding, analyzing, and addressing change relevant to both fields.

The IR scholarship on climate change also treats concerns about justice as ‘critical’ or ‘normative’, thus outside the scope of analyses of change. The effect is to either mask the moral commitments that underpin their analyses and explanatory work or to ignore questions about desirable versus undesirable change, empowerment, displacement, or domination, among other normative underpinnings and consequences of change. In contrast, these normative questions and consequences are often central to analyses of change in climate politics scholarship. ¹⁵ For example, an explosion of recent work on ‘just transition’ examines whether necessary transformations require it to avoid backlash as well as the risk of transformation being normatively unpalatable. ¹⁶

Three of the best recent studies that ostensibly speak to both fields illustrate the potential and limits of engagement when IR questions drive the agenda. While these authors make significant contributions to the study of climate change politics and IR, these works do less to bring IR into conversation with concerns of climate politics scholars; their focus on change largely brackets the societal shifts, technological changes, or reconfigurations of power or practices that interest most climate politics scholars.

First, Robert Falkner’s Environmentalism and International Society makes a major contribution to English School (ES) scholarship by demonstrating how ‘environmental stewardship’ has become a primary institution of international society. ¹⁷ It thus contributes to an important research agenda in IR on long-term institutional and normative change of international orders. It also highlights how environmentalism interacts with other fundamental norms and institutions of international society, and implications of those interactions for changing roles and responsibilities of state and transnational actors. Falkner thereby foregrounds questions central to the ES agenda on change in international society. Doing so comes at a cost: the book stops short of analyzing the ‘environmental stewardship’ norm’s practical transformative potential. Falkner’s study grapples with the core IR question of whether environmentalism can be accommodated within a stable order of other primary institutions but is silent on whether such accommodation is compatible with addressing climate change.

Second, directly hoping to address this missing link to transformation, Kathryn Sikkink’s recent foray into climate change scholarship argues that norms could be the needed bridge across the two fields because of the transformative potential of norm cascades. ¹⁸ Her analysis too, however, runs up against the limits of IR’s current epistemology. Specifically, she argues that anti-fossil fuel norms can drive support for climate policies like renewable energy by shifting rational calculations of political parties of which policies to support, catalyzing change. ¹⁹ However, her modified norm-life cycle model is designed to explain norm adoption by identifying conditions for a cascade. Thus, the dependent variable is adoption or diffusion of a norm. She does not consider the catalytic impacts of norms, analyze their transformative potential, or consider the politics thereby activated, including contestation or backlash that could also result. ²⁰

Notably, both Falkner and Sikkink acknowledge the limitation of their analytic lenses for assessing transformative potential. In Sikkink’s case, she brackets scientific and normative arguments over what kind of transformation is needed or desirable, which leaves assessments of the causal impact of norms on desirable transformation outside of her model. In so doing, she takes for granted that anti-fossil fuel norms are better equipped than anti-capitalist (or ‘post growth’) norms to combat climate change, in part because she only considers the effects of norms on existing (as opposed to evolving) social structures. ²¹ These two moves truncate an analysis of transformation; there is no analytic reason to assume that social structures will be stable and durable. As I will argue below, a dynamic and relational analysis would be open to the opposite conclusion on the effects of particular norms.

Third, Michael Manulak’s study of ‘temporal focal points’ – such as salient major events like UN environmental summits – helps explain major institutional changes in environmental global governance. ²² Manulak argues that these focal points create expectations of institutional change, motivate the search for knowledge about solutions to environmental problems, and generate momentum to overcome ‘coordination dilemmas’ that disincentivize first movers even when change is optimal. Manulak’s contribution to theories of institutional change and explanations of institutional innovation to address environmental problems – such as the creation of the UN Environment Programme following the 1972 UN Summit on the Human Environment or new institutions resulting from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit – are important. However, here again, the book contributes to a question framed by IR theory. It is emblematic of the IR of climate change literature’s focus on institutional change as a dependent variable and as a case of collective action or coordination. Whereas GPPC scholars should not dismiss the value of explaining institutional change, answering whether or how such change affects the problem of climate change or transforms relevant practices and systems is beyond the scope of Manulak’s theory.

Social change as a common underpinning

Despite differences in analytic focus the review of these three works highlights, GCCP and IR scholars share an understanding that what constitutes change that matters is social and relational. In IR, continuity becomes change when the identities and practices of actors take new forms, when patterns of behavior emerge not previously comprehensible, or when prevailing formal and informal rules seem no longer to apply or are replaced by alternatives. To take an obvious example, debates about ‘change’ at the end of the cold war were animated much more by whether the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled a shift in world order, expectations of more peaceful interaction, or the ‘triumph’ and diffusion of liberalism than the material fact of a new balance of power. More recent literature preoccupied with change explores shifts in global order, whether focused on changes in the units and authority relations, primary institutions as described by the English School, or in or of the Liberal International Order (LIO). ²³

GCCP scholarship has also gradually shifted from a primary focus on collective action or cooperation, actors, and governance arrangements toward research on transitions and transformations in systems, practices, or economic and social relations. It is especially interested in transformation toward (or away from) decarbonized ‘systems’, ²⁴ including their justice implications. Shifts in technology or emissions may be important to study; more significant are the changes they produce or accompany in core practices, relations, and social patterns. The electric car and related mobility technologies, for example, have been around for decades and renewable technologies are widely available, but transformative change is understood as shifts in practices around mobility, finance, or energy investment, production and consumption that enable and support reconfiguration of markets, and sociocultural norms. ²⁵ Recognizing this common focus on social change is a first step to improve engagement across these literatures.

Axiology, epistemology and ontology

While the two fields share a concern with social change, the difference between them is their axiological stance: what researchers ‘value’ in terms of the goals of research and their own position within the research. Axiology is rarely explicitly acknowledged but can be a ‘critical issue’ that informs the questions, goals, and purposes of research. ²⁶

Explicitly acknowledging an axiological position helps ‘to see the embeddedness of ethics within, not external to’ the research in particular fields. ²⁷ Most climate change politics researchers implicitly value change as necessary and normatively ‘good’. However, for most IR scholars, the field’s ontological and epistemological positions limit their value commitment to the choice of research questions, such as why climate change is or is not being addressed or the conditions for outcomes like climate action or cooperation. Acknowledging an axiological position beyond the choice of questions sits uncomfortably with many IR scholars because of their commitment to a neo-positivist epistemology rooted in objectivism.

However, once questions of transformation are involved, value-propositions necessarily become more central because ends are not given. Researching transformation requires an axiological stance that critically reflects on the normative implications of pathways being chosen. It follows that justice, equity, and inclusion are often central to the analytic work of GCCP researchers. The axiological stance of many climate change researchers also includes an imperative to intervene, or at least for their research to inform interventions, a position associated with ‘critical theory’. An axiological position committed to transforming social relations is uncomfortable for non-critical theory IR scholars. Whereas they might be motivated to identify generalizable findings that could influence society via public policy, IR scholars generally resist explicitly incorporating into their research normative values or arguments that might interact with and influence just transitions or preferred futures.

An axiological stance that normatively values transformation requires a commensurate epistemology and ontology. Despite an overlapping motivation with GCCP scholars to identify and analyze patterns and causal processes to produce the necessary social and political change to address climate change, dominant epistemologies and ontologies in IR are ill-equipped. When examining change, IR scholarship generally focuses on entities, processes, and outcomes that are tractable in ‘the Newtonian world’. ²⁸ This world ontologically assumes a closed, controllable system governed by law-like or probabilistic relationships among distinct entities. Epistemologically, research in the Newtonian world focuses on mid-range theory development that operates as if it can discover discrete causes of effects, ideally governed by covering laws. In sum, a world of predictability and control.

A recent article in IO ²⁹ that has garnered some attention in the IR literature nicely demonstrates these tensions and limits for scholars trying to bridge these positions. The authors put forward a dynamic potentially transformative theory: that revaluation of material assets of firms/investor/governments owing to climate change and policies to address it will lead to ‘existential’ distributional conflicts among economic actors (e.g. firms, professions, or even communities) with political consequences. These struggles are ‘existential’ because losers face possible extinction depending on how climate change shifts the value of material assets.

On the one hand, the article acknowledges that environmental and social change will have transformative effects of assets (say, of an investment in coal versus wind power or of property in a climate vulnerable community) and we need to analyze such changes and their entanglements with the politics of human survival. On the other hand, its mode of analysis is entirely focused on changes in the material value of economic assets that empower or disempower asset holders. In so doing, it brackets the underlying social change driving the transformation of those asset values, and the transformations that might result. It thereby exposes the limits of speaking and doing Newtonian IR in the face of what it calls ‘existential politics’.

Arguably, the transformations driving those changes are only legible relationally, by studying the social relations and understandings of societies and governments that interact with a changing climate. These interactions transform ‘extracting concessions [from these asset holders or, conversely, from governments] – an issue of distribution – to ensuring survival’. Under such circumstances, behaviors and understandings flip, as actors see ‘the writing on the wall’ and adjust their preferences, and the stakes, accordingly, increasing obstructionism to climate policies if the values to their assets are threatened and, thereby, contentious politics. Hence, whereas the article focuses on material variables – the assets and power of asset holders – power shifts and ‘change’ results because the dynamic interplay of norms, practices, and relations have changed. The authors acknowledge their theory’s materialist scaffolding requires the addition of ‘ideational variables’ to explain the changes in asset values and the resulting climate politics. However, this analytic solution still operates in a world of individualized or fixed entities (e.g. asset holders) interacting in a set of predictable relations that arguably cannot fully account for these dynamics, which are better understood relationally.

Alternative epistemological orientations are especially needed when the axiological concern is anticipating or catalyzing a future that likely will not resemble the past. This position is challenging for IR, a field traditionally concerned with threats to order or preserving it. For example, the current obsession in IR with threats to the Liberal International Order follows a long tradition of scholarship motivated by worry that change brings instability, conflict, war, and disharmony. In contrast, GCCP scholarship is mostly concerned with disrupting and transforming the past. This puts climate change politics scholarship fundamentally at odds with the goals of IR as a discipline.

Even critical IR scholarship focused on challenging the existing order often seeks to address ‘how institutions can remain resilient within an environment characterized by change and contestation’ – as does a recent volume on ‘rebooting’ the English School. ³⁰ On the one hand, Flockhart and Paikin’s volume explicitly embraces a relational ontology, ‘to better understand the radical relationality, plurality and complexity of global life’ in an environment of ‘rapid and far-reaching processes of change in technology, climate, demography, science, [and] modes of production and communication, which together have produced a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous’. ³¹ On the other hand, Flockhart’s position that human beings are ‘psychologically wired to prefer stability over change’ means her work on change is motivated by a worry to maintain what Emanuel Adler calls ‘meta-stability’, where deep social structures of values and identities remain relatively fixed – despite institutional response to accelerating forces of change. ³² Such a view of change does not go far enough for climate scholars who want to foreground transformation.

Whereas IR’s overriding concern is preserving the system, climate change scholarship is motivated by an imperative to disrupt and transform it. Climate politics scholarship aims to anticipate and support change because the current system is neither sustainable nor just. But what transformation looks like is largely open. While ‘decarbonization’, ‘just transition’, and ‘transformation’ provide heuristic guides for social change, GCCP research self-consciously refuses to develop a detailed picture of what these futures will look like. Indeed, critical scholars have resisted the ‘management’ of transformation to protect against reproducing the current system and its incumbent interests. ³³ Meanwhile, the necessity of transformative social change is supported by the weak historical record, of ‘decoupling’ economic output from environmental impacts – at least at the rate necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. ³⁴ Thus, calls for a ‘just transition’ are premised on ‘disrupting dominant distributions of economic and political power’ where ‘the overall development pathway is up for negotiation’. ³⁵

Complementing this orientation to change, scholars have noted that interventions to produce desirable changes are unlikely to be found in discrete variables or single policies, such as a price on carbon. ³⁶ Even the most productive interventions will interact with complex and open systems, simultaneously enabling multiple pathways and interactions unlikely to be predictable (i.e. in a post-Newtonian world). Metaphors consistent with post-Newtonian epistemologies or relational ontologies, such as ‘ecosystems of transformation’ ³⁷ or the ‘global fractal’ system of carbon lock in, capture the interdependent, self-similar systems where interventions of policies or practices create conditions for transformational shifts. ³⁸ Such metaphors invoke dynamic and open systems, and demand analyses to be sensitive to interdependencies, complexity, and positive and negative or self-undermining feedbacks and interactions. Change is unlikely to be engineered or conditions for change discovered with easily manipulable single shot interventions or timeless variables.

A post-Newtonian epistemological and relational ontological shift

There are already epistemological and ontological shifts underway in some corners of the IR and policy literature to facilitate this kind of work. I focus on one epistemological shift: ‘forward looking’ or ‘anticipatory’ scholarship to develop transformational pathways to address climate change. This work draws especially on historical institutionalism and related political processes to identify and leverage sources and conditions of disruption and change. This kind of reasoning is already common in the GCCP scholarship, ³⁹ however in this subsection I show these shifts are an important point of contact for addressing uncertainty in both IR and GCCP.

This convergence begins with a (re)discovering of uncertainty in IR. For example, books like Peter Katzenstein’s Uncertainty and its Discontents ⁴⁰ revived attention to the problems we identified in ‘God Gave Physics the Easy Problems’ of doing social science in an unpredictable world. ⁴¹ Namely, many contemporary problems in global politics exhibit ‘radical uncertainty’, not just ‘known unknowns’ or ‘operational uncertainty’ where more knowledge and science might help uncover or model ‘risk’. Instead, scholars must grapple with contingency, complexity, unknown unknowns, and historical developments that cannot be anticipated, from technological innovation to polycrises. In turn, uncertainty reconfigures political landscapes, much like climate scientists and social scientists have argued that poorly understood tipping points, cascading feedback loops, complexity and interactions with social and political systems means conditions to address climate change and its effects shift over time.

Similarly, Burrows and Gnad identify an acceleration of forces in contemporary politics that create a world that is ‘uncertain, complex, and ambiguous’. ⁴² The Covid-19 pandemic and its many unanticipated political and social effects and trajectories; the unexpected resurgence of wars of territorial gain; recurring yet repeatedly unexpected and differently configured financial crises; and ‘long problems’ like climate change are just some of the problems and changes that highlight the uncertainty that many have long recognized as a feature of social change. These insights suggest that both IR and climate change scholars are increasingly grappling with at least some similar change dynamics.

The relational approach of Milja Kurki, who proposes a ‘relational cosmology’, is perhaps the most radical response. ⁴³ At its most basic, a relational cosmology is one in which the world unfolds not as separable agents, objects, or backgrounds, but in the processes of enmeshment. In this cosmology, ‘we can and should explore new or different ways of thinking and practicing science, politics, and also questions around agency’. ⁴⁴ A relational cosmology is valuable for opening space for different worldviews and to see agency as ‘distributed’ or ‘hybrid’. By recognizing the uncertainty and contingency in human-nature enmeshments, relational cosmology also demands that we are humble about interventions. ⁴⁵ Scholars are unlikely to develop a set of reproducible management strategies, key levers or ingredients of change, or even an ‘abstract ethics’ to justify it, she argues. Thus, in addition to a shift in ontology, it demands a post-Newtonian epistemology.

Such an approach poses a fundamental epistemological and ontological challenge to extant IR and GCCP scholars. However, it may also leave those engaging with challenges like climate change unsatisfied if left without a practical path forward. As Michaels et al. argue, ‘an important caution is not to have intellectual humility legitimate failing to act in the face of uncertainty’. ⁴⁶ Given the moral imperative to act on climate change, and in responsible ways, it is not sufficient to simply acknowledge uncertainty and how different world views may shape our responses to it.

GCCP scholars have already anticipated many of the responses that follow from the logical implications of these ontological moves now being rediscovered in IR. For example, with some irony, one approach Katzenstein endorses in his advocacy for a post-Newtonian IR is to focus on ‘experimentation’, which climate change politics scholars have been practicing for more than a decade. He references Albert O Hirschman as follows: ‘he believed in the importance of path-dependent change, small steps, local contexts, unintended consequences, and adaptive learning. Above all, he prized experimentalism and improvisation as practices, along with slow reform-mongering that creates the possibility for substantial change’. ⁴⁷ Katzenstein may as well have been citing Matthew Hoffmann, whose 2011 book and subsequent work with collaborators examined transnational and other climate change policy ‘experiments’, ⁴⁸ or other work in the field on adaptive governance. ⁴⁹ Building on this work, several studies are examining processes of change that climate change experiments catalyze. They focus, for example, on scaling and entrenchment of governance experiments and initiatives. They draw especially on the logic of anticipatory policy and flip path dependency on its head through ‘forward reasoning’, projecting causal mechanisms and processes in these literatures into the future to identify plausible pathways and logics of change. ⁵⁰

GCCP scholarship can also learn from IR work on uncertainty. For example, the anticipatory governance literature is sometimes insensitive to the epistemological and ontological challenges that motivated it. Policy-facing work that considers future trajectories or institutional responses to ‘solve’ climate change often begins from its desired ends (e.g. net zero, a particular price on carbon, adoption of some set of technologies). In doing so, it can import deductive logics and static assumptions, aiming to identify the ‘correct’ institutional responses or conditions that ostensibly lead to some kinds of change over others, thereby failing to consider contingencies, reversals, or politics. Similarly, work on scenarios and other foresight exercises can exhibit a false sense of certainty about transformations and the future, especially if this work assumes ‘stationarity – that is, stable relations between cause and effect across periods’. ⁵¹ Drivers of political conflict, consumption, employment or migration, or their relationships with changing natural systems, may not hold in the future.

Well-designed scenario exercises with good data can be helpful in embracing contingency and uncertainty or in providing warnings when we’re on undesirable trajectories. They are less helpful for identifying how to catalyze the politics of change needed. The following section proposes some strategies in response to these limitations.

From explaining to catalyzing change: processes and politics

In this section, I focus on practical research strategies consistent with the axiological, epistemological, and ontological positions elaborated above. Specifically, I propose strategies to research transformation while embracing uncertainty. For climate change politics scholarship, this means work that attempts to identify causal logics or dynamic processes that can reinforce or undermine change and transformation.

One such approach is to investigate how to harness path dependent processes to lock in transformation toward just decarbonization. Another is to consider how to catalyze political processes of coalition building, capacity building, and normative change to disrupt carbon lock-in. ⁵² Instead of viewing these processes as conditions for change, they can be treated, following a ‘forward reasoning’ and post-Newtonian epistemological position, as dynamic and able to create positive or reinforcing feedbacks (or, conversely, undermining feedbacks), scaling, or catalytic change, including across subsystems. ⁵³

The substantive focus for such research might be a suite of policies or interventions to change an energy system (e.g. renewable energy policies and investments, phasing out coal, smart grids), shift incentives in the market through disclosure or a carbon market, or target a city or other jurisdiction to change practices and investments, toward decarbonization. To take just one example, Germany’s energy transition policy, Energiewende, produced positive feedbacks by creating strong market signals of increased demand for renewable energy, backed by legislation, and coalitions of support as benefits from employment growth and large players in the energy market became incentivized. Meanwhile, the diffusion of feed-in tariff programs followed, owing to emulation from 2 to 69 jurisdictions between 1990 and 2013. Later, contingent events like the war in Ukraine starting in 2022 led to modifications and criticisms as it put pressure on Germany’s energy supplies, but still had the effect of increasing support for renewables, providing strong evidence of entrenched normative change. ⁵⁴

However, turning away from Newtonian social science requires that we do not fetishize policy stability; the corollary is that ‘politicization’ must be accounted for and normatively engaged. ⁵⁵ Climate change scholarship that yearns for control is tempting, but control is only possible in a Newtonian world. Research is also showing that many interventions designed to catalyze or entrench decarbonization get ‘stuck’ in ways that may entrench a particular intervention short of what is needed for transformation (e.g. a shift from coal to natural gas as a ‘cleaner’ bridge fuel that gets entrenched, or carbon disclosure for companies in the belief transparency will lead to change, which instead becomes an end in itself without catalyzing commitments to cut emissions). This pattern means some interventions can unintentionally limit further change. Many energy transition policies – shifting to bridge fuels, supporting hybrid technologies, or even renewable policies that pay insufficient attention to local control or broader justice concerns – can thus create self-undermining feedbacks and counter coalitions, or can have unintended negative consequences for equity or democracy. ⁵⁶

Thus, a key goal of research going forward is to identity the political dynamics that reinforce just, low-carbon transformation, while allowing and/or encouraging politics that disrupt carbon lock in, unjust/unequal hierarchies, and extractive systems. Stability and change must work in tandem in this regard – and anticipatory policy design or governance must be sensitive to that. Normatively, we may naively over-estimate our ability to identify the requirements of just transformations and undervalue the importance of politicization and disruption in defining and motivating practices of just transition required to address the climate crisis. The goal is less about developing a theory of change than to encourage research strategies that are open to it. It also means a practical and humble research strategy of monitoring unfolding trajectories over time, recognizing the role of politicization and multiple agencies, uncertainty, and complexity. This too resonates with recent interventions in IR theory. To quote Flockhart again: ‘Recognizing change as both an emergent phenomenon involving a myriad of intentional and habitual actions, unintended consequences, random events and the many intra-and inter-actions that change us requires a relational and holistic approach that can encompass the multiplicity of global life’. ⁵⁷

Two brief illustrations demonstrate how the stability/politicization tension can play out and how the general approach to research proposed here can reveal dynamics and limits of transformation: the entrenchment of the 1.5-degree Celsius aspirational goal in the Paris Agreement and the uncertainty of the transformation pathway of ‘net zero’ policies. These examples are schematic owing to space constraints. They aim simply to demonstrate the benefits of the general research orientation and strategies to analyze transformation, not to apply a full-fledged theory.

Change and the politics of the 1.5 degree target

It took many years to entrench the 2-degree Celsius above ‘pre-industrial’ levels target as a referent for international agreements and domestic policy. By the time of the 2009 Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (COP 15), the 2-degree target was portrayed to policy makers and the public as grounded in science to imbue the target with legitimacy. However, this framing also had the effect of making this goal appear outside of politics – even as many policymakers, scientists, and civil society actors close to these processes understood it to be a political target, rooted in choices about acceptable global risk.

Politicization, however, kept debate open – with important consequences. The 2009 Copenhagen Accord stated that Parties would give ‘consideration’ to strengthening the target to 1.5-degrees. The 2015 Paris Agreement further entrenched an aspirational goal of 1.5 degrees. ⁵⁸ Entrenchment of 1.5-degrees had significant consequences in practice, including prompting the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the prospects of achieving 1.5 degrees and the implications of overshoot. ⁵⁹ Even more importantly, it ensured political debate would continue, rather than merely settling for the 2-degree target, which was the initial preference of most Northern governments. Politicization arguably enabled and energized change by increasing the sense of urgency, elevating the importance of benchmarks for progress, and mobilizing new actors.

While I can only sketch the story of how the 1.5-degree target became entrenched, ⁶⁰ this illustration is instructive for demonstrating what a relational, post-Newtonian analysis can reveal. The dynamics of the processes that led to the 1.5-degree target are arguably more understandable through a relational ontology that foregrounds horizontal and distributed agency. It draws attention to how political debates upended power dynamics in negotiations, as well as how the relationship between changing effects and understandings of climate change interacted with the politics of negotiations to propel change dynamics.

The alliance of small island states (AOSIS) in the early days of climate negotiations wanted the focus to be on preventing damage, especially sea level rise. Pragmatically, however, AOSIS shifted its position to temperature targets to align with the global North’s focus on global climate risk. This position, initially of a doubling of CO₂, is where the 2-degree target came from. Later, the rationale of the target became reinforced because it aligned with a mid-range risk scenario in terms of emission projections and sea level rise. The EU adopted this thinking in the1990s. However, AOSIS members increasingly understood that 2 degrees would not be safe for low lying countries, and that they needed to shift the discourse from global risks to a guardrail that accounted for what they viewed as an existential threat to the most vulnerable. ⁶¹ While science mattered, an analysis that focused mainly on science or expertise as a driver of change – easily legible in a Newtonian epistemology familiar to IR scholars – misses most of the story. AOSIS’s position and the resulting politicization of the temperature goal can only be understood relationally in terms of the experience and understandings of their societies and diplomats in relation to climate change. These arguments around vulnerability and justice legitimated the shift in discourse, including the 2008 AOSIS campaign, ‘1.5 to Stay Alive’. Notably, the target has little to do with feasibility – surveys and initiatives of leading climate scientists consistently find the target unrealistic. ⁶²

However, these shifting relationships and understandings of justice underpinned the new focal point around which AOSIS governments engaged in coalition building, including with Inuit communities in the arctic, coalitions of civil society groups, and eventually with support from over 100 countries. Through this political process of normalization and coalition building, AOSIS negotiators succeeded in getting the initial reference – though not without pushback from India and China – into the Copenhagen Accord (article 12). That initial change also enabled the IPCC, which was not supposed to be policy prescriptive, to focus more attention on the impacts to low lying countries at 1.5 degrees.

At COP 21 in Paris, negotiations on the temperature goal became linked to policies on loss and damage – the idea that the effects of climate change beyond what can be adapted to ought to be compensated – with the aim of including a strong liability mechanism for failures to stay within the target. However, the 1.5-degree target only succeeded by de-linking them in the agreement. While the politics was messy and required compromise, it established an important reframing of the temperature goal and opened the door to a reframing of loss and damage.

The former, especially, has had several effects. It has cemented a justice-based frame, allowing a normative focal point facilitating ongoing coalitions of climate and justice-based NGOs as well as entrenching the aspirational goal from which states will have difficulty backing away. ⁶³ By reframing the boundary of what ‘safe’ climate change requires, it also generates political demand for a wide range of socioeconomic practices and economic and industrial policies since the difference in temperature goals from 2 to 1.5 degrees has enormous implications for the transformation required in terms of the needed speed and comprehensiveness of change. That shift is, arguably, a major driver of the rapid social change underway.

Uncertainty and transformation in the politics of net zero

A second example even more forcefully illustrates the importance of forward reasoning and relational ontology in researching change in the face of uncertainty: the proliferation of ‘net zero’ commitments.

The goal of ‘net zero’ is arguably now the ‘organizing principle’ of climate politics. ⁶⁴ It comes from the Paris Agreement Article 4’s stated aim, albeit with several caveats, to ‘achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century’. ⁶⁵ As of July 2024, 150 countries, 272 cities, and more than half of the 2000 largest companies in the world, accounting for 88% of global emissions and 89% of the world’s population, have net zero policies or targets. ⁶⁶

In the Newtonian world of IR, the analysis could stop here. The diffusion and adoption of net zero is plausibly explained as a successful norm-cascade, along the lines scholars like Kathryn Sikkink have proposed. Viewed in this way, norm cascades appear to solve political conflicts by simultaneously promoting climate action while shifting rational calculations that foster a left-right consensus on ways to strive for the Paris target.

However, that epistemological position truncates a relational analysis of not only the transformative potential of net zero, but also the political contestation it has produced. Similarly, Newtonian analysis cannot acknowledge uncertainties that become apparent when foregrounding path dependencies potentially created by the broad-based coalition that supports these policies. One such unintended path may be created because net zero policies can, ironically, entrench ongoing fossil fuel extraction and production, as we see prominently in cases like Canada’s ‘pathways alliance’ of oil sands producers who support net zero. ⁶⁷ The reason is that this policy framing can support large investments in carbon capture technologies, still unproven at scale, that effectively (or explicitly) subsidize ongoing and increasing extraction. The resulting broad-based coalition may undermine timely and necessary decarbonization efforts to achieve climate goals.

A net zero policy framing can also support decarbonization in some locations that export costs and social and ecological harms elsewhere, such as unsustainable land use changes (from potentially massive reliance on offsets), ecologically and socially harmful extraction, or economic pressures that will exacerbate inequalities and reinforce continued carbon lock in. Absent politicization to shift the balance of policies toward decarbonization, net zero can also lead to ‘mitigation deterrence’, resulting in significant overshoot of temperature targets and little attention to other negative sustainability impacts. ⁶⁸ Even ‘successful’ implementation that creates winners and losers can provoke backlash or obstruction from opponents of climate action who can politicize these policies, as is already evident in some jurisdictions where there is mobilization of anti-climate populists against ‘net zero’. ⁶⁹

More generally, empirical and conceptual reviews of net zero policies and early implementation note a lack of attention to, and need for, politicization if these policies are to lead to just transformations toward climate goals. ⁷⁰

Conclusion

While the politics and multiple agencies at play in these short vignettes are messy, their immediate lessons are illustrative: scholarship must be attentive to relationality, recursivity and feedbacks in enabling, constraining and catalyzing change and transformation. In the case of the 1.5-degree target, dynamic and relational politics affected the way science is done and understood. This was, in part, because political mobilization and coalition-building was mixed and interpreted with the knowledge and lived experiences of multiple actors, in their shifting relationships to each other and the climate. ⁷¹ The institutional and normative developments that followed in turn have influenced the politics and coalition building going forward, and ultimately the entire ecosystem of global climate policy and practice. In contrast, IR tends to focus on big moments of change and crisis or specific outcomes like treaty design as opposed to agreement making, political struggles, and relational politics. In so doing, IR scholarship often misses recursivity, feedback mechanisms, and how small changes in norms and practices can have large, though sometimes unanticipated, effects on politics and practices going forward.

Identifying conditions for big changes can be useful. However, change is always in relation to shifting background conditions and practices, which especially matters in long problems like climate change. Embracing the resultant uncertainty may sit uncomfortably with IR scholars, and it requires attention to the normative implications of trajectories that may result. Returning to the example of the intersection of norms and asset revaluation, different notions of justice and experiences of climate change could drive policy and rational calculations of asset holders in different directions. GCCP researchers can still benefit from more positivist research that identifies conditions under which some values prevail over others. However, both IR and GCCP researchers will benefit from not prematurely taking some values off the table in their analysis. For example, just like staying within a 1.5 degrees temperature increase seems unrealistic, but was adopted anyway, Sikkink’s position that support for ‘post-growth’ is ‘unlikely to mobilize a far-reaching coalition capable of generating a norm cascade’ ⁷² cannot be assumed. It must be studied relationally to be open to how changing experiences and relationships of the climate, assets, capitalism, and survival play out.

Finally, maintaining a focus on normative goals and ethical commitments to just transformations requires an examination of political interventions that can create and reproduce transformation into the future, and a heavy dose of humility. Whereas embracing uncertainty and still choosing to intervene is ultimately a political choice for scholarship, Katzenstein’s call for a rethinking of the ontological and epistemological foundations of IR is, arguably, similarly animated by such normative imperatives. Regardless of one’s axiological stance, given many of the most important global challenges we face – climate change, the ‘polycrisis’, AI and other major technology changes – will require or provoke large scale transformations, the shifts in research orientation proposed here are not only useful, but also may be necessary for IR’s continued relevance.