Two Decades of Climate Governmentality Studies
Introduction
Florian Steig, Eva Lövbrand, Angela Oels, Jonathan Barnes, Diana Eriksson Lagerqvist, Marie Fischer, Jennifer Gabrys, Aarti Gupta, Maarten Hajer, Phoebe Hamilton Jones, Maria Jernnäs, Cecilia Oliveira, Jeroen Oomen, Johannes Stripple, The Show Must Go On? Revisiting the Script of International Climate Cooperation Ten Years After Paris. Global Environmental Politics 2026; 26 (3): 1–23.
https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP.e.783
Abstract
This special issue reflects on the state and direction of global climate governance ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Informed by Michel Foucault’s political thought and the wider field of climate governmentality studies that his work has inspired, we trace the power/knowledge regimes, political rationalities, and many practical tools and techniques that make climate change thinkable and knowable as a political problem. In this introduction, we draw upon the contributions to this special issue to examine how the Paris climate regime reinvents itself to maintain legitimacy amid geopolitical rivalry, rising anti-climate populism, and accelerating climate crises. We identify four practices that work to stabilize this governmental regime by promising future improvements, governmentalizing new frontiers, normalizing overshoot and climate disaster, and funneling climate expertise. We conclude by reflecting on the role and responsibility of global environmental politics scholarship in upholding, resisting, or rewriting the script of international climate cooperation.
Keywords
Climate politics, Paris Agreement, governmentality, Foucault, discourse, overshoot
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