This project deepens our understanding of the construction of international climate law on loss and damage: it focuses on how international agreements are made and how they are undone later in the policy process. Conventional theories of international relations and international law that focus on negotiation outcomes miss important parts of the story of how objects of international law like loss and damage are socially constructed. The project addresses the question of how we are governing the irrevocable consequences of climate change on two different levels, First, the project traces the messy process of reaching political agreements within the UN climate change negotiations and the considerable and often thwarted efforts to put those agreements into practice. By taking a closer look over a broader time horizon, this project has revealed that processes of international law development and institution building may create visible symbols of action, but have ultimately achieved little when it comes to helping the most vulnerable countries tackle climate-related loss and damage on the ground. Going beyond a focus on the high politics of the climate negotiations and accounts focused on national interests or institutions alone this project has shown how these different actors have sought to instantiate their particular interpretation of loss and damage not only through overt contestation but also more subtly through the performance of the mundane, bureaucratic practices of international diplomacy. The methodological approach developed as part of this project is alive to the ways in which entanglements with the material world – unruly weather, human bodies, the nature of political spaces and changing technologies – can influence legal and political outcomes. It draws on insights from science and technology studies (STS), political geography and climate anthropology about the vibrancy of matter, the role of the non-human and the co-production of ideas.
The second stream examines the approaches being taken by national governments: those that are most immediately tasked with responding to the climate emergency. The project has shown how enormously their responses vary and explores why some countries are leaders and others are laggards in developing loss and damage policies. "Governing Climate Change Loss and Damage: The National Turn" (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), one of the project’s key outputs, will be the first book-length treatment of how loss and damage policy and politics works at the national level. The project has focused specifically on countries in the Global South that are on the frontline of climate change impacts. Through seven original empirical case studies, we show that some countries pursue the establishment of L&D-relevant policies and programs more proactively and explicitly than others. This book makes clear that it is not always those that face the most severe and existential impacts that take national policy action on loss and damage. Drawing on existing theoretical accounts in the study of climate policy, this book shows what countries are doing (and not doing) to address loss and damage. It highlights policy innovations in sectors from fisheries to finance; identifies new institutional linkages that allow countries to better address issues such as climate-related internal displacement and shows how different forms of knowledge – from local and lived experience to historic disaster data – can supplement a lack of systematic information in policy-making processes. It also draws attention to the role of ideas in climate policy-making, showing how some states’ desires to cultivate a particular national identity - as an “emerging economy” or as a “green economy leader” - in the international sphere or the pursuit of specific development paradigms affects the way and the extent to which they engage with loss and damage policy making. The project advances understanding of how policy-makers across sectors conceptualise loss and damage, identifies the barriers in policy-making across countries and traces the wide range of policies that are being deployed to grapple with different types of climate impacts. In doing so, the project has begun to show the way to more effective governance of loss and damage now and in the future.
