Making ‘Climate Futures’: Power, Knowledge and Technologies

Abstract

Our critical geopolitical analysis in the book has shown thus far that a number of ‘climate futures’ are competing with one another for greater salience, legitimacy and authority. Each seems bent upon proving its ‘presence’ by canvassing itself as more effective in countering ‘global emergency’, while claiming at the same time the high moral ground. Our key argument in this chapter is that discursively speaking, the idea of ‘Climate Change’, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it demands and deserves serious policy planning and effective action, is being slowly but surely turned into a site of shadow boxing where a variety of actors, institutions and agencies are implanting their own maps of meaning on spaces (terrestrial, oceanic, atmospheric) that they perceive as the most ‘strategic’, in pursuit of their respective geopolitical and geoeconomic agendas. Mike Hulme (2009: 340– 341) is quite persuasive in his astute observation that it could be most revealing to

examine climate change as an idea of the imagination rather than a problem to be solved. By approaching climate change as an idea to be mobilized to fulfill a variety of tasks, (the pursuit of profit, national security, human security, climate justice etc.) perhaps we can see what climate change can do for us rather what we seek to do, despairingly, for (or to) climate.