The Multiplicity of Metrics in Climate Change Mitigation Targets, Efforts, and Actions

• In Event: How Do STS Studies Translate Numbers: Economics, Markets Value/Valuation and Policy

Abstract

Climate change is commonly characterized as a problem of numbers. The key issue can be portrayed as one of gigatonnes, degrees, dollars, citizens, kilowatts, and so on, depending on how one wishes to frame the problem. Likewise, when governments, industries, social movements, and others construct targets and action plans for climate change mitigation they inherently foreground particular numbers and metrics. This paper examines the role of these numbers and metrics in climate change mitigation and their use in mitigation targets and action plans through the concept of multiplicity. The mobilization of particular numbers and metrics arises from – but is also the source of – competing political commitments, values, and interests. Using selected cases of national mitigation targets and Nationally Determined Contributions I demonstrate how recognizing and articulating the diversity and incommensurability of metrics through which climate change mitigation is construed offers an entry point to better understand the existing terrain of climate politics and alternative futures. In climate change, and in other domains, multiplicity can be unbundled through both quantitative and qualitative distinctions, measures, and metrics. These individual distinctions, however, seldom remain distinct for long; rather, they are combined with other distinctions to form metrics that are multiplicities of a different kind. This presents what I conclude is a fundamental paradox of governing through metrics: simplification is complicated, and the singular can rapidly become exponential.

Author

• Mark H Cooper, University of California, Davis