Abstract
More and more international organisations are starting to incorporate climate protection as an important policy goal. Strikingly, most institutions only rephrase existing activities in the terms of climate protection instead of changing them, although there are tensions and contradictions between short-term economic and long-term environmental goals. The aim of this article is to explore the logic of climate mainstreaming and explain the paradoxical result of such a consistent inconsistency. It employs a poststructuralist approach that combines elements of governmentality and discourse theory. Analysing discourses of the WTO, IMF, World Bank and OECD, it argues that the global governmentality of climate protection is built on four discursive pillars — globalism, scientism, an ethics of growth and efficiency — that make climate protection function as an empty signifier; that is, they make it possible to integrate climate protection into the global hegemonic order without changing the basic social structures of the world economy. International organisations can claim to be in favour of climate protection and stick to business as usual at the same time. This claim is backed up by an interpretive discourse analysis of 31 texts of the respective organisations.
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