Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CCLAD (The Politics of Climate Change Loss and Damage)
Période du rapport: 2022-11-01 au 2024-04-30
This project took the idea that climate change is going to be the end – for some lives and livelihoods; homes and homelands; practices and material artefacts; species; and ways of being and knowing – as its starting point. Floods, wildfires, hurricanes, spreading deserts, melting permafrost, rising seas and other effects of climate change are transforming the planet we know. We are facing unprecedented losses of plant and animal species and their habitats because of climate change. The degradation of land and water is driving fundamental societal and political shifts as well: the physical disappearance of some states in the foreseeable future raises questions about what sovereignty without territory will mean; mass movements of people in the aftermath of disasters push us to grapple with what a “climate refugee” is owed; the loss of livelihoods and the undermining of a wide range of human rights will shape the very foundations of what human dignity means on a changing planet.
The losses caused by climate change are both catastrophic and commonplace. Many losses can still be avoided; others can no longer be prevented. This raises urgent questions about how the international community is responding to the adverse effects of climate change. What is being done to address the fact that we have already lost so much, and are on track to lose so much more?
The aims of this project were three-fold:
- To understand how climate change loss and damage is being governed at the international and the national level.
- To advance theoretical understandings of global climate politics by analysing global governance through a sociological lens that draws on the practice turn and the new materialism.
- To develop a novel methodological approach that pays due attention to the everyday politics of global climate diplomacy.
Through a series of publications, books and academic and policy practitioner engagements we have made important empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions.
The losses caused by climate change are both catastrophic and commonplace. Many losses can still be avoided; others can no longer be prevented. This raises urgent questions about how the international community is responding to the adverse effects of climate change. What is being done to address the fact that we have already lost so much, and are on track to lose so much more?
The aims of this project were three-fold:
- To understand how climate change loss and damage is being governed at the international and the national level.
- To advance theoretical understandings of global climate politics by analysing global governance through a sociological lens that draws on the practice turn and the new materialism.
- To develop a novel methodological approach that pays due attention to the everyday politics of global climate diplomacy.
Through a series of publications, books and academic and policy practitioner engagements we have made important empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions.
The CCLAD team have undertaken more than 150 interviews, observed and participated in six rounds of climate change negotiations and engaged with countless practitioners from the UNFCCC to UNEP to the FAO and UNDRR. We have developed a deep understanding of the politics of climate change loss and damage in the UNFCCC and beyond at the international level and have learned about what countries across the Global South are doing (and not doing) to address climate related losses. The team has published a dozen articles in high-ranking, peer-reviewed journals including Global Environmental Change, Nature Climate Change and Climate Policy and guest edited a special issue in Global Environmental Politics published in 2023. Three members of the project team won the Environmental Politics Best Article Prize in 2021 for one of their country case studies. The project team is also publishing two books in 2025: Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage (University of Chicago Press) and Governing Climate Change Loss and Damage: The National Turn (Cambridge University Press) drawing on the project’s findings.
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.
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.