An anti-geoeconomics of climate change

Abstract

This essay develops a critique of emerging narratives on the geoeconomics of climate change. In recent years a growing policy agenda on climate change that can be listed under the rubric of geoeconomics has emerged in the literature. This scholarship is characterised by persistent imaginaries that articulate geopolitical fears and geoeconomic hopes over nature and society. The key argument mobilised in this discourse is that ecological shifts raise considerable threats, some of which are geopolitical in nature. At the same time, they also represent tremendous geoeconomic opportunities for businesses in terms of new industries such as in the area of the energy transition. Analysing dominant narratives and providing examples from the photovoltaic industry, this essay develops an anti-geoeconomics of climate change that links the sites of production to those of reproduction and aims to reverse the order between the positions of power where climate change is discussed and the places where it is embodied and lived.

This essay develops a critique of emerging policy research on the geoeconomics of climate change (Goldthau, 2021; Sabyrbekov et al., 2023). This scholarship is animated by fears in relation to ecological shifts, but also hopes for economic opportunities in terms of new ‘green’ industries. Critically analysing this discourse and providing examples of the photovoltaic industry, this essay develops the concept of anti-geoeconomics. Through this grammar it expands the notion of anti-geopolitics to the sphere of the economic to shed light on the everyday acts that aim to resist and rework geoeconomics projects from below.

Although the term originally appeared in earlier texts, anti-geopolitics is notably associated with the work of Routledge (2003), who suggested that this concept identifies those counter-hegemonic struggles ‘emanating from subaltern (i.e. dominated) positions within society that challenge the military, political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the state and its elites’ (p. 236). Anti-geopolitics is understood, therefore, as a type of critical geopolitics that not only deconstructs dominant discourses, bringing to light those actors and agencies involved in ‘moving things on the map’ from above but also looks at how hegemonic projects are reworked and resisted from below (Koopman, 2011: 275). It is interested in the people ‘on the map’ (Koopman, 2011: 275, emphasis in original), who, through their mundane practices, challenge the idea that the community’s and elite’s interests are one and the same, resisting coercive powers in domestic and foreign policy (Routledge, 2003). In a similar manner, anti-geoeconomics is defined here as a particular critique of geoeconomics (Mallin and Sidaway, 2024a,b) that deconstructs dominant discourse (Mamadouh, 2024) and focuses on those actors and practices that through their mundane practices, resist and rework hegemonic geoeconomics projects (Szadziewski, 2024).

In developing this concept, the essay brings literature on anti-geopolitics in conversation with Matthew Sparke’s critique of Edward Luttwak’s conception of geoeconomics. In his 1990s paper, Luttwak famously argued that a ‘logics of conflicts, governed by apparent contradictions and the coincidence of opposites’ had come to animate the system of interstate rivalry of the post-cold War era, geoeconomics replacing geopolitics in the crafting of the new world order (Luttwak, 1990: 18). Luttwak’s ‘realist, historicist, and state-centric’ argument failed to recognise, according to Sparke, that geopolitics and geoeconomics ‘are better understood as geostrategic discourses’ rather than distinct historical phases of interstate policy (Sparke, 2007: 339–340 emphasis in original). In this perspective, the dialectics of geopolitics and geoeconomics generate persistent imaginaries of hope and fear that ‘frame, script and spectacularize possible spatial connectivity, links and flows among place, across scales and over distance’ (Sum, 2019: 529). Building upon this tension, this essay explores the dialectics of fear and hope in relation to nature and how imaginaries of war and peace are related to the geopolitics and geoeconomics of climate change (Hakala, 2019). It shows that imaginaries are mobilised by dominant groups as a way to impose a particular fix to the climate crisis, one that is based on the traditional forces of production (Barca, 2020).

Within this context, narratives suggest that the creation of green value chains generates novel interdependencies between states, changing interests and actor constellations, and intense technological and geoeconomic rivalries (Van de Graaf et al., 2020: 3). As such, while countries incorporate geostrategic concerns over climate change within their economic and foreign policy agendas, official narratives resonate with new emerging risks (Dalby, 2022). These relate to the control of resource flows, the advancement of existing technologies and the production of new ones, with developing countries often emerging as key players in this transition (Blondeel et al., 2021), thereby purportedly demonstrating a significant reorienting of power. In this discourse, geopolitical fears are thus often connected with geoeconomic hopes.

Consider this: in 2022, the World Economic Forum at Davos hosted a roundtable titled ‘The Geoeconomics of Climate Change’ introduced by a brief video featuring scenes of extreme weather events: hurricanes, droughts, floods (World Economic Forum, 2022). In the video, these images are spaced out with brief pleas from experts and high-profile personalities such as Al Gore. The narrative generates a sense of apprehension, with climate change posing an existential threat. Scenes of an indistinct multitude marching over a shanty bridge are accompanied by a voice-over saying:

climate change is impacting food security as well as political stability in many nations around the world. Five years ago, there were 80 million people marching towards starvation. That number jumped to 135 million. What caused the jump? It was manmade conflict like in Ukraine, compounded with climate shocks.

Images of tanks and recordings of bombings follow to associate Malthusian anxieties of resource depletion and food scarcity with the menace of war. In the video, the juxtaposition with the Ukrainian conflict recasts climate change as a geopolitical threat, articulating it with imaginaries of dangers, enemies and concerns over territorial, political and military power. However, this tension is resolved through the production of an impressive geoeconomics of hope. Representatives from the UN Climate Action and Finance Department, the World Trade Organisation and the investment company Blackrock follow up to reassure the public that there is hope. We can address climate change through technology. The key question is ‘how to finance this technology’ (World Economic Forum, 2022). Recordings of stock charts, factories, bio-labs, solar panels and wind turbines suddenly replace images of conflicts.

The video represents a striking articulation of geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses. Ecological and social threats are balanced with confidence in a neoliberal economic vision. The forces of the market, technology, finance, industrial progress, can blow war between humans, war with nature away. As Barca (2020) puts it, the dominant storyline on the Anthropocene includes ecological concerns, often in the language of externalities, but does not distance itself from the celebration of industrial capitalism; a conception of modernity that ‘considers the forces of production [. . .] as the key driver of human progress and well-being’ (p. 1). Climate change is understood as an unintended consequence of development. The solutions are technical: new inventions, new machines, new industries, that is, the forces of production. This storyline is associated with a peculiar conception of the subjects outside of it, portrayed as vulnerable, anti-modern, useless; communities lacking knowledge, energy or the capacity to cope and adapt (Barnett, 2020); susceptible to harm. Yet this narrative excludes the climate agency (Lawreniuk, 2021) of the many subjects, both human and non-human, who through their mundane practices contribute to keeping the world alive.

Take for example the photovoltaic industry, that is, solar panel production, and how different agencies are inscribed in this geoeconomic project (Dunford et al., 2013; Smith, 2013). Increasing energy demands and commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have driven the growth of photovoltaic in recent decades. With a total cumulative installed capacity of more than a thousand gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2022 (IEA, 2023), this sector is one of the most established renewable energy technologies today, praised as a key solution to the climate crisis. Solar panels, it is argued, contribute to climate change mitigation, decreasing the use of fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gasses (Resch, 2007). However, investigative reports have demonstrated that these phenomenal achievements are realised by extracting significant value from living labour, with major solar module manufacturers sourcing components produced in facilities implementing forced labour practices (Murphy et al., 2022).

A variety of actors are inscribed in this project, from the bodies of workers subjected to forms of illicit labour in photovoltaic factories to the exploited territories where resources are extracted (Inverardi-Ferri, 2021). Yet agents who escape these conditions exist: the informal traders who bring solar energy to marginalised areas or the waste recyclers who salvage value from end-of-life modules (Inverardi-Ferri, 2018). In many countries of the Global South, off-grid photovoltaic products have been available for decades. Solar modules are assembled from components of different brands, origins and qualities, adapting what is available to provide flexible, functional and low-cost solutions to people in rural and urban areas (Balls, 2020). These actions in the earthly world contribute to mitigating the effects of climate change from below, generating an anti-geoeconomics at the intimate scale of the everyday (Smith, 2012), reorienting imaginaries (Lawreniuk, 2020; Routledge, 2003) and reversing the order between the positions of power where climate change is discussed and the sites where it is embodied and lived.