Introductory description

Climate change poses a significant challenge to traditional assumptions about global political governance. Issues of power, justice, and the failures of existing economic and political models are at the root of the climate challenge. In this introductory module we look beyond technological solutions to examine underlying political, economic and ethical dynamics, posing difficult questions that often challenge mainstream assumptions about how to tackle climate change. We draw on different perspectives and methodologies, including political theory, international relations, and political economy. Weekly topics are arranged around 9 key ideas central to debates about the politics of climate change, such as Justice and Mitigation; Can Capitalism Cope with Climate Change?; Global Climate Governance; Unsustainable Consumption; Carbon Offsetting; Justice and Adaptation; Security Narratives in the Politicisation of Climate Change; The Geopolitics of Sustainable Energy Transformations; How Climate Change Challenges Current Political & Social Orthodoxies; The Anthropocene; Colonialism, Race and Indigenous Perspectives; Loss and Damage; Geoengineering.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

The 9 topics covered in any particular year will depend on staff availability but will always include an appropriate mix of topics to cover a range of areas and methodological perspectives on climate politics. Example topics include:

Justice and Mitigation

Policies designed to mitigate climate change can create benefits but also burdens and harms. What is the fairest way of distributing these burdens and benefits? What role, if any, should historical responsibility play? What other values should inform the transition to a sustainable world?

Can Capitalism Cope with Climate Change?

Many mainstream economists argue that governments can address climate change by implementing policies such as carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, regulations, and investing in clean energy. Some, however, argue that these are not enough and that the root driver of climate change is capitalism (Fraser 2021, 2022; O'Connor 1998; Foster et al 2010; Saito 2023). Are the critics right? Or can there be a green capitalism?

Global Climate Governance

Climate change is a global problem that requires a global response. In this lecture, we will find out that climate governance has in fact become global and includes various non-state actors with innovative governance solutions. However, the current system is also very fragmented, lacks accountability, and largely ignores actors from the Global South.

Can Carbon Offsetting help to solve the Climate Crisis?

Carbon Offsetting allows individuals and organisations to purchase ‘carbon credits’ in order to balance out their own carbon emissions. Offsetting is increasingly widely used and makes a significant contribution to the net zero commitments of various organisations. Yet offsetting raises a number of practical and ethical concerns. How reliable are the estimates of emissions reductions or sequestered carbon used to value offsets? Do offsets disincentivise individuals and organisations from making direct cuts to high-carbon activities? Under what conditions is it ethical to pay others to avoid potentially harmful activities rather than avoid them oneself?

Justice and Adaptation

In the face of worsening climate impacts, societies are taking steps to adapt to climate change, for example by building sea walls, planting new crops, and rethinking water security. Interventions in support of climate adaptation raise significant ethical questions, in the light of the unequal distribution of climate impacts and adaptive capacity. What ethical principles should guide governments and other organisations in making decisions about how to prioritise and implement adaptation interventions?

The Geopolitics of Sustainable Energy Transformations

The global energy system is undergoing considerable changes - largely in the development and application of renewable and electricity storage technologies - designed to reduce emissions in this high-emitting global sector. Although these changes are insufficient, they still have significant implications. This lecture will touch on geopolitical implications and ask key questions such as: What pressures do new energy technologies place on global resources? How are the benefits and costs of energy transformations split between countries and groups within society? Will there be less geopolitical conflict in a world dominated by renewable energy?

Colonialism, Race and Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Politics

Climate change is often understood in planetary terms - as a universal, global threat to the human race. This lecture explores what happens if we try instead to disaggregate and critically investigate causes, effects, and marginalizations in order to understand the politics of universal models. How has colonialism led to the current climate crisis and how can we still see colonial logics operating in proposed political solutions? What alternatives are there to dominant ways of thinking about our relationship with the environment?

Loss and Damage

Climate change losses and damages can be seen as the adverse effects of global climate change that remain after any measures of mitigation and adaptation have been undertaken. But what are the main types of loss and damage? And through what institutions, policies and principles should these losses and damages be addressed?

Geoengineering

The limitations of policies of mitigation and adaptation have encouraged some states to explore the option of geoengineering to enhance the response to global climate change. Widely understood as ‘the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change’ (Royal Society), geoengineering has generated significant critique amongst environmentalists and theorists both in terms of its high risk of failure and for the way it will alter the functioning of natural environmental systems even it proves successful in addressing climate change.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an advanced knowledge of political issues around climate change, and arguments for and against different policies in response to climate change, for example to promote adaptation and mitigation, and ascertain their strengths and weaknesses
• Have the ability to apply the theories and arguments analysed in the module to some central questions about climate politics facing contemporary societies.
• Demonstrate enhanced key skills such as written communication skills, problem solving, and information technology skills.
• Construct and substantiate a comprehensive and sophisticated argument

Indicative reading list

Megan Blomfield (2019) Global Justice, Natural Resources, and Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Simon Caney (2010) ‘Climate Change and the Duties of the Advantaged’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy vol.13 no.1, pp.203-228.
Elizabeth Cripps (2013) Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Edward A. Page (2012) 'Give it up for Climate Change: a Defence of the Beneficiary Pays Principle’, International Theory vol.4 no.2, pp.300-330.
Henry Shue (2021) The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to slow Climate Change Right Now (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Nancy Fraser (2021) 'Climates of Capital: For a trans-environmental eco-socialism,' New Left Review vol.127, pp.94-127.
Nancy Fraser (2022) Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (London: Verso Books).
James O'Connor (1998) Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York and London: Guildford Press), especially chapter 8.
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York (2010) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press).
Kohei Saito (2023) Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger (2020) ‘Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, not Collective Action, characterizes the Politics of Climate Change, Global Environmental Politics vol.20 no.4, pp.4-27.
Jeff D. Colgan, Jessica F. Green, Thomas N. Hale (2021) ‘Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change’, International Organization vol.75 Special Issue 2 ‘Challenges to the Liberal International Order: International Organization at 75’, pp.586-610.
Nick Estes (2019) Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London and New York: Verso).
Jennifer Hadden (2015) Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Matto Mildenberger (2020) Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press).
Peter Newell (2021) Power Shift: The global political economy of energy transitions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Matthew Paterson (2007) Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Leah Cardamore Stokes (2020) Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (New York: Oxford University Press).
Vogler J. (2012) ‘Studying the global commons: governance without politics?’ In Peter Dauvergne (ed) Handbook of Global Environmental Politics, 2nd edition. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 172-182.
Araral, E. (2014). Ostrom, Hardin and the commons: A critical appreciation and a revisionist view. Environmental Science & Policy, 36, 11-23.
Stevenson, H. (2017) – ‘Transnational Governance Experiments Climate Change’ in Stevenson, H. Global environmental politics: Problems, policy and practice. Cambridge University Press.
Michael Maniates. 2002. ‘Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?’ Global Environmental Politics 1(3): 31-52.
Peter Dauvergne. 2010. ‘The Problem of Consumption’, Global Environmental Politics 10(2): 1-10.
Ken Peattie (2010) ‘Green Consumption: Behavior and Norms’, Annual Review of Environmental Resources 35: 195–228.
J. Broome. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World. London: W. W. Norton and Co.; 2012.
K. Hyams and T. Fawcett, ‘The Ethics of Carbon Offsetting’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 4 (2013): 91-98
Thales A. P. West, Jan Börner, Erin O. Sills, and Andreas Kontoleon, ‘Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon’, PNAS 117 (39) (2020): 24188-24194
M. Byskov, K. Hyams, P. Satyal, I. Anguelovski, L. Benjamin, S. Blackburn, M. Borie, S. Caney, E. Chu, G. Edwards, K. Fourie, A. Fraser, C. Heyward, H. Jeans, C. McQuistan, J. Paavola, E. Page, M. Pelling, S. Priest, K. Swiderska, M. Tarazona, T. Thornton, J. Twigg & A. Venn ‘An Agenda for Ethics and Justice in Climate Adaptation’, Climate and Development, 13 (2021): 1-9
D. Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007
M. Pelling, Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
BENNETT, J. . 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things . London: Duke University Press.
CLARK, N., AND B. SZERSZYNSKI . 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences . Cambridge: Polity Press.
HAMILTON, S. 2018. “The Measure of all Things? The Anthropocene as a Global Biopolitics of Carbon.”European Journal of International Relations 24 (1): 33–57.
Haraway, D. (2015). 'Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin,' Vol. 6, Environmental Humanities159–165.
Moore, J. W. (2017). The capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594–630.
Youatt, R. (2014).' Interspecies relations, international relations: Rethinking anthropocentric politics'. Millennium, 43(1), 207–223.
Yusoff, K (2023) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.
Mirzoeff, N. (2018). It's not the Anthropocene, it's the white supremacy scene. Or, the geological color line. In R. Grusin (Ed.). After extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Whyte, K. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning: Nature and Space,
1(1–2), 224–242.
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. The New Centennial Review,
3(3), 257–337.
Boyd, E. et al (2021) ‘Loss and damage from climate change: A new climate justice agenda’, One Earth 4: 1365-70.
Burkett, M. (2014) ‘Loss and Damage’, Climate Law 4: 199-30.
Dow, K. et al (2013) ‘Limits to adaptation’, Nature Climate Change 3: 305-7.
Duus-Otterström, G. and S.C Jagers (2012) ‘Identifying burdens of coping with climate change: A typology of the duties of climate justice’, Global Environmental Change 23(1): 746-53.
Farber, D. (2008a) ‘Basic Compensation for Victims of Climate Change’, Environmental Law Reporter 38: 10521-10529.
Huq, S. et al (2013) ‘Loss and damage’, Nature Climate Change 3: 947-9.
James, R. et al (20134) ‘Characterizing Loss and Damage’, Nature Climate Change 4: 938-9.
Mechler, R. et al (2020) ‘Loss and Damage and limits to adaptation: recent IPCC insights and implications for climate science and policy’, Sustainability Science 15: 1245-51.
Page, E.A. and Heyward, J.C. (2016) ‘Compensating for Climate Change Loss and Damage’, Political Studies, DOI: 10.1177/0032321716647401.
Adelman, S. (2017) ‘Geoengineering: rights, risks and ethics’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 8(1): 119-38.
Gardiner, S. and C. McKinnon (2019) ‘The Justice and Legitimacy of geoengineering’, CRISPP 23(5): 557-63 (introduction to Special Issue on geoengineering).
Gardiner, S., Mckinnon, C. and Fragniere, A. (2020) The Ethics of “Geoengineering” the Global Climate: Justice, Legitimacy and Governance. London: Routledge.
Hourdequin, M. (2018) ‘Geoengineering Justice: The rRoel of Recognition;’, Science, Technology and Human Vlaues 44(3): 448-77.
Hourdequin, M. (2020) Climate Change, Climate Engineering, and the ‘Global Poor’: What Does Justice Require? London: Routledge.
Mclaren, DP (2018) ‘Whose climate and whose ethics? Conceptions of justice in solar geoengineering modelling’, Energy Research & Social Science 44: 209-21.
Preston, C.J. (2016) Climate justice and geoengineering: Ethics and policy in the atmospheric anthropocene. Rowman and Littlefield.
Bank, Guri (2010) ‘Energy security and climate change concerns: Triggers for energy policy change in the United States?’, Energy Policy 38: 4, 1645-1653
Dupont, Claire (2019) ‘The EU’s collective securitisation of climate change’, West European Politics 42:2, 369-390
Dyer, Hugh (2017) ‘Security politics and climate change’, in Olaf Corry and Hayley Sevenson (eds.) Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics. Routledge.
Hughes, Hannah (2018) ‘Environmental Security’, in Gabriela Kutting (ed.) Global Environmental Politics: Concepts, Theories and Case Studies. Taylor & Francis e-book.
Methmann, Chris; Rothe, Delf (2012) ‘Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse in global climate politics’, Security Dialogue 43:4
Blondeel, M. et al (2022) 'The Geopolitics of Energy System Transformation: a Review', Geography Compass 15:7
Bridge, G., S. Bouzarovski, M. Bradshaw and N. Eyre. 2013. Geographies of Energy Transition: Space, Place and The Low-Carbon Economy. Energy Policy 53:331-340
Criekemans, D. 2018. Geopolitics of the renewable energy game and its potential impact upon global power relations. In The geopolitics of renewables, ed. D. Scholten, 37–74. Cham: Springer Nature
Overland, I. (2019) The geopolitics of renewable energy: Debunking four emerging myths. Energy Research & Social Science 49: 36-40
Scholten, D.; Bazilian, M.; Overland, I.; Westphal, K. (2020) ‘The geopolitics of renewables: New board, new game’, Energy Policy 138:111059
Brisbois, M-C. 2020. Decentralised energy, decentralised accountability? Lessons on how to govern decentralised electricity transitions from multi-level natural resource governance. Global Transitions 2:16-25
Colgan, D. et al (2021) ‘Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change’, International Organization vol.75
Meckling, J.; Allen, B. (2020) 'The evolution of ideas in global climate policy', Nature Climate Change
Newell, P. (2021) Power Shift: The global political economy of energy transitions. Cambridge University Press.
Paterson, M. (2007) Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy. Cambridge University Press

Interdisciplinary

The module is focussed on politics approaches, including political theory, political economy, and international relations, but also includes elements from other disciplines including geography, climate science, and sociology.

International

The module looks at global impacts of climate change as well as global efforts to coordinate a response to climate change.

Subject specific skills

Develop an advanced knowledge of the political and ethical debates that shape decisions about climate change at the level of governments, organisations, and individuals.
Understand some of the controversies around political responses to climate change including challenges to widely endorsed assumptions about how to respond.
Develop knowledge of, and engage critically with, a range of different political approaches to climate change.

Transferable skills

Develop enhanced key skills such as written communication skills, problem solving, and information technology skills.
Construct and substantiate a comprehensive and sophisticated argument