Making Sense of Climate Policy I

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

The phrase "the science and politics of global warming" correctly hints at the way science and politics are mixed together, but do such ‘mixology epistemologies’ prevent us from arguing that in some cases climate policy was more sensitive to politics than to science? If science and politics are inseparably blurred, does that mean we cannot investigate (at a National level?) some kind of spectrum of sensitivity and insensitivity? This panel invites reflections on a spectrum of sensitivity and insensitivity, using (as the empirical illustrations) national stories about climate change policymaking and/or efforts to establish science-policy interfaces (at various levels of governance and activism). Put provocatively, are we limited to being critics of linear-models of science-policy interfaces; limited to reminding people the boundaries are more blurry than they think? To what extent can or should we, as social critics, be sensitive to the ways climate change policy might be more sensitive (or insensitive) to knowledge or to politics? The question of sensitive and insensitive appears central, for instance, to some grand narrative debates in the climate research field: has global policy about climate change failed because of the hubris and linear-model approach of scientists (see Howe’s ‘Behind the Curve’ (2014)), or because of the savvy manufacturing of doubt by industrial-political interests (see Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ (2014))? In what way might national-level climate policy be more sensitive to science or to politics in nationally variable ways? Can some kind of 'politics of the sensitive' thus reveal what nationally-relevant insensitivities are built into climate regimes?

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Darrin Durant, University of Melbourne

Individual Presentations

• The Construction of Climate Change Narratives - Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University - History of Science

• Beyond Climate Science-Policy Consensus? Lay Public Sense-Making of 2°C Future in Japanese Focus Groups - Shinichiro Asayama, Waseda University; Midori Aoyagi, National Institute for Environmental Studies; MASAHIRO SUGIYAMA; Atsushi Ishii, Tohoku University

• Actor Integrity in the Australian Climate-Energy Debate - Darrin Durant, University of Melbourne