The Socio-scientific Construction of Global Climate Crisis

This article adapts and applies a securitisation framework to produce an analytical explanation for the heightened geopolitical status of climate change over the past decade, as demonstrated by the breakthrough Paris Agreement of 2015. Rather than speech acts invoking security, the focus of this analysis is on the socio-scientific discourse of global climate crisis that emerged in the several year period leading to the 2009 COP 15 conference in Copenhagen. Two types of experts—contributory and interactional—are identified as the essential and interdependent actors that engaged in ‘crisification’, a novel crisis-based perspective on political agenda setting, in which climate crisis served as a primary discursive device employed by prominent advocates of urgent action. Contributory experts, that is, authoritative climate scientists and their institutions, together with interactional experts—non-scientist social actors who appropriated and mediated scientific data and knowledge in framing climate change as a global crisis—constituted an extended epistemic community of climate advocates. Through an array of speech acts, this extended community effectively co-constructed a convincing climate crisis discourse that consisted of quantitative data artefacts based on CO₂ concentration and global mean temperature, and qualitative invocations of existential threat to human civilisation, which contributed to the ascent of climate change on the global political agenda. In proposing crisification as a complement to securitisation, the article offers a theoretical innovation that facilitates constructivist analysis of issues framed as crises, including geopolitical problems in certain non-military sectors where crisis is a favoured label for perceived threats to core values.     

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

ABSTRACT

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank’s Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.     

Happiness and relational goods: well-being and interpersonal relations in the economic sphere

The present paper provides an introduction to this special issue devoted to Happiness and Relational Goods. We start by presenting a few concepts that have recently appeared in the economic literature with the aim of capturing some of the peculiarities of personalised interactions. We claim that these concepts can be subsumed fairly well under the concept of ‘relational goods’. We then review the recent empirical literature on happiness and relational goods. Finally, we briefly introduce the papers contained in this special issue by outlining their respective contributions.     

Aviation and Climate Change: Practising Green Governmentality across the North-South Divide

This article seeks to re-understand climate change in terms of its constitutive state practices. Existing analyses tend to frame climate change as a security discourse, or as a manner of green governmentality normalising the uneven relations between the Global North and South, but seldom is the practical process realising climate change’s logics delineated. Using aviation as an example, this article traces how climate change, as discourse, contingently takes shape through three episodes in aviation’s environmental evolution: a) an initial period of conceptual experimentation and consolidation (1992–2005); b) a major policy break catalysed by the EU ETS that destabilised previous discursive formations (2005–2012); and c) diplomatic attempts to re-gain international consensus following the EU ETS’s extension to aviation (2012–present). These practices will be charted across numerous spaces, including supra-national forums, national governments, technical bodies, consulting agencies, and political summits. By elucidating this geopolitical praxis across the North-South divide, I demonstrate how climate change cannot simply be reduced to a rationality in green governmentality, but must be understood as an outcome of strategic practices among differently positioned states.     

GHG Targets as Insurance Against Catastrophic Climate Damages

The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks 1 . A critical issue in climate change economics is the specification of the so‐called “damages function” and its interaction with the unknown uncertainty of catastrophic outcomes. This paper asks how much we might be misled by our economic assessment of climate change when we employ a conventional quadratic damages function and/or a thin‐tailed probability distribution for extreme temperatures. The paper gives some numerical examples of the indirect value of various greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration targets as insurance against catastrophic climate change temperatures and damages. These numerical exercises suggest that we might be underestimating considerably the welfare losses from uncertainty by using a quadratic damages function and/or a thin‐tailed temperature distribution. In these examples, the primary reason for keeping GHG levels down is to insure against high‐temperature catastrophic climate risks.     

Social security and consumer spending in an international cross section

This paper expands the base of empirical evidence on the social security aggregate private saving issue by examining the behavior of consumer expenditure in 16 industrialized countries over the 1951–60 period. The results are mixed in that time series movements of social security exhibit a positive relation to consumer spending, while the cross-sectional variations reveal a negative association. Our overall conclusion is that the cross-country evidence provides neither empirical support for the hypothesis that social security depresses private saving nor an empirical refutation of that hypothesis. We argue that this indeterminacy of results applies also to previous studies of U.S. time series and to analyses of household cross sections in the U.S.     

China's indigenous innovation approach: the emergence of Chinese innovation theory?

Theory-driven and theory-based studies on innovation in China are relatively scarce. Most innovation studies about Chinese business are based on Chinese policy and government programmes and their results. This special issue of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management explores China's indigenous innovation strategy and suggests a research agenda that focuses on Chinese innovation theory building that incorporates China's efforts to move towards an innovation-based economy. Currently, China is developing its indigenous innovation capabilities (The Chinese term is 自主创新, pronounced zizhu chuangxin). We suggest that innovation studies of Chinese business could focus on these indigenous innovation ambitions. In addition to this, it could adopt, and be embedded in a Chinese theory of innovation instead of a traditional Western-centric theory of innovation. Our proposition is that to better understand Chinese indigenous innovation, a new paradigm of Chinese innovation should be developed. We therefore present a research agenda that can be a starting point for the development of such a theory, and present seven papers in this special issue that give content to this idea. Obviously no theory will have a monopoly on exploring Chinese innovation phenomena, but it is interesting to add a Chinese-centric view into the Western-centric scholarly view. We hope that will be one of the contributions of this special issue on innovation in China.     

Interpreting the Crisis,Envisioning the Future

ABSTRACT

What role do the historic identity tropes associated with being an island play in the foreign policy of contemporary Britain? To answer this underexplored question, this article utilises theories of critical geopolitics and ontological security to analyse a series of recent parliamentary debates and reveals the continuing importance of geopolitics to British foreign policy. This entails a conceptualisation of the role that discourses of island geopolitics played in the British Empire, giving rise to a set of tropes that I call island identity. Many studies emphasise the enduring pragmatism of British foreign policy; by contrast, my framework allows a foregrounding of how foreign policy-makers seek ontological security through the use of the established discursive tropes of island identity which establish Britain in subject positions of geopolitical relevance relative to novel contexts. The case studies focus in particular on globalisation and the EU –two issues of particular relevance, especially since the Brexit vote. This article allows a deeper understanding of both by contextualising them within British traditions of geopolitical discourse.     

Neoliberal and neostructuralist perspectives on labour flexibility,poverty and inequality: A critical appraisal

Numerous recent reports by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and international organisations have focused on so-called ‘climate refugees’. This article examines the turn from a discourse of ‘climate refugees’, in which organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of ‘climate migration’, in which organisations promote migration as a strategy of adaptation. Its focus is the promotion of climate migration management, and it explores the trend of these discourses through two sections. First, it provides an empirical account of the two discourses, emphasising the differentiation between them. It then focuses on the discourse of climate migration, its origins, extent and content, and the associated practices of ‘migration management’. The second part argues that the turn to the promotion of ‘climate migration’ should be understood as a way to manage the insecurity created by climate change. However, international organisations enacts this management within the forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the framework of governance. Therefore, the promotion of ‘climate migration’ as a strategy of adaptation to climate change is located within the tendencies of neoliberalism and the reconfiguration of southern states' sovereignty through governance.     

What’s at Stake in Securitising Climate Change? Towards a Differentiated Approach

Climate change has been successfully represented as a security concern to such an extent that it is firmly established on the political agenda, even though the implementation of concrete policies is disputed. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to better trace the process of securitising climate change and assess its normative implications. We establish a typology of six climate security discourses on the basis of two dimensions: three levels of referent objects and two logics of securitisation, one that corresponds to the original Copenhagen School framework and one where the threat takes the form of the invocation of risk. We find that there are significant differences in the relative importance of the resulting climate security discourses in Germany and the US, but that normatively, all discourses come with their own problems, which calls for more detailed scrutiny and assessment of climate security discourses and their political effects.     

Climatic impacts across agricultural crop yield distributions: An application of quantile regression on rice crops in Andhra Pradesh,India

Climatic impact on agricultural production is a serious concern, as it is directly linked to food security and poverty. Whereas there are empirical studies that examine this issue with parametric approaches focusing on the “mean” level of variables, few studies have addressed climatic impacts in general settings. Given this paucity, we characterize the impacts on crop yield distributions with a non-parametric approach. We examine the case of rice yield in Andhra Pradesh, India, an important state producing rice as a main crop but reported to be vulnerable to climate change. Employing 34 years of data, we apply quantile regressions to untangle the climatic impacts across the quantiles of rice yield, finding three main results. First, substantial heterogeneity in the impacts of climatic variables can be found across the yield distribution. Second, the direction of the climatic impacts on rice yield highly depends on agro-climatic zones. Third, seasonal climatic impacts on rice yield are significant. More specifically, a monsoon-dependent crop is more sensitive to temperature and precipitation, whereas a winter crop remains largely resilient to changes in the levels of climate variables. These findings clarify the idiosyncratic climatic impacts on agriculture in India, and call for location- and season-specific adaptation policies.     

Royal Dutch/Shell

Climate change will affect security of individuals and populations as well as the security of states. The article reviews evidence on the scope and nature of the climate change challenge; reviews how these impacts manifest themselves in insecurity at diverse scales; and examines evidence on the political economy of adaptation responses to these impacts. I argue that climate security has been framed in public and policy debate over climate change such that climate change impacts are a threat to nation states in terms of their interests, their economies and their borders. This framing crowds out, subverts and constrains framing in terms of human-well being. I suggest that human security provides a broader and more encompassing notion of climate security than that focussed on security of states. Here, climate security focuses on the idea of freedom from harm and fear of individuals and communities and the capability to adapt to any imposed harm. From that human security perspective, the central analytical issues become those of vulnerability, adaptation and justice.     

Tabloid realism and the revival of American security culture

At a time when notions like globalisation and cultural fragmentation are being used to describe the changing nature of international politics, a persistently conservative discourse of national security (re)surfaces in foreign policy literatures. The purpose of this essay is to analyse this ‘new’ discourse and sketch out some of its ideological intents. Referred to as ‘tabloid realism’, this discourse can be found in texts authored by American scholars such as Robert Kaplan, Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Tabloid realism is a discourse of geopolitics which resists the idea that territorial sovereignty and national security are currently being transformed. Imitating the narrative style of tabloid publications, tabloid realists seek to grab the attention of the public by providing highly sensationalistic and overtly panic-stricken representations of international affairs. By proliferating fear-inducing images of current realities and preparing for a soon to be anarchical future, tabloid realists hope to conservatively re-anchor the state to stabilising visions of national security, geographical borders, and economic interests.     

Backcasting for sustainability: Introduction to the special issue

In this introductory paper we introduce the special issue on “Backcasting for Sustainability”. We present briefly a historical background, and position backcasting in the wider context of future studies, in which it can be related to “normative forecasting” and normative scenarios. We reflect on the diversity and variety of backcasting studies and experiments, as presented in the ten papers for this special issue. After summarizing the papers we formulate a future research agenda.     

Climate Response Uncertainty and the Benefits of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions

Some recent research suggests that uncertainty about the response of the climate system to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations can have a disproportionately large influence on benefits estimates for climate change policies, potentially even dominating the effect of the discount rate. In this paper we conduct a series of numerical simulation experiments to investigate the quantitative significance of climate response uncertainty for economic assessments of climate change. First we characterize climate uncertainty by constructing two probability density functions—a Bayesian model-averaged and a Bayesian updated version—based on a combination of uncertainty ranges for climate sensitivity reported in the scientific literature. Next we estimate the willingness to pay of a representative agent for a range of emissions reduction policies using two simplified economic models. Our results illustrate the potential for large risk premiums in benefits estimates as suggested by the recent theoretical work on climate response uncertainty, and they show that the size and even the sign of the risk premium may depend crucially on how the posterior distribution describing the overall climate sensitivity uncertainty is constructed and on the specific shape of the damage function.     

A Return to ‘Civilisational Geopolitics’ in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era

The prevalence of the discourse of ideological geopolitics during the Cold War meant that both Turkey and the EU belonged to the West by virtue of their ideological orientation. In the absence of this prevalent geopolitical discourse, both the EU and Turkey have spent the 1990s trying to locate themselves geographically. Drawing on the literature on critical approaches to political geography and international relations, this article seeks to answer the question of whether the EU's post-Cold War security discourse on the Mediterranean in general and on relations with Turkey in particular point to a return to the earlier discourse of civilisational geopolitics. The article also presents a reading of Turkish policy makers’ attempts to resist EU's representation of Turkey in ‘non-Europe’ (as with the ‘Middle East’ or the ‘Mediterranean’) as boundary-producing practices which have served to underline the boundaries between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’.     

Pricing rules and Arrow–Debreu ambiguous valuation

This paper considers pricing rules of single-period securities markets with finitely many states. Our main result characterizes those pricing rules C that are super-replication prices of a frictionless and arbitrage-free incomplete asset structure with a bond. This characterization relies on the equivalence between the sets of frictionless securities and securities priced by C. The former captures securities without bid-ask spreads, while the second captures the class of securities where, if some of its delivers is replaced by a higher payoff, then the resulting security is characterized by a higher value priced by C. We also analyze the special case of pricing rules associated with securities markets admitting a structure of basic assets paying one in some event and nothing otherwise. In this case, we show that the pricing rule can be characterized in terms of capacities. This Arrow–Debreu ambiguous state price can be viewed as a generalization for incomplete markets of Arrow–Debreu state price valuation. Also, some interesting cases are given by pricing rules determined by an integral w.r.t. a risk-neutral capacity. For instance, incomplete markets of Arrow securities and a bond are revealed by a Choquet integral w.r.t. a special risk-neutral capacity.     

Environmental Policy Theory Given Bounded Rationality and Other-regarding Preferences

Established environmental policy theory is based on the assumption of homo economicus. This means that people are seen as fully rational and acting in a self-regarding manner. In line with this, economics emphasizes efficient policy solutions and the associated advantages of price incentives. Behavioral economics offers alternative, more realistic views on individual behavior. In this paper we investigate opportunities to integrate bounded rationality and other-regarding preferences into environmental policy theory to arrive at recommendations for more effective policies. For this purpose, we will address decisions made under risk and uncertainty, intertemporal choice, decision heuristics, other-regarding preferences, heterogeneity, evolutionary selection of behaviors, and the role of happiness. Three aspects of environmental policy are considered in detail, namely sustainable consumption, environmental valuation and policy design. We pay special attention to the role of non-pecuniary, informative instruments and illustrate the implications for climate policy.     

Adam Smith on the subordination of wage-earners in the commercial society

Abstract

Adam Smith's discourse on wage labour is both original for its time and complex. While Smith indisputably considered the substitution of serfdom by wage labour as an improvement in both opulence and independence, we argue that he nevertheless saw the wage relationship as one founded on subordination. We then cast light on the material factors and symbolic mechanisms which, in his writings, explain how and why the worker agrees to this subordination. Finally, we endeavour to show that Smith's praise for the system of natural liberty as well as his repeated criticisms of merchants and capital owners aimed to transcend this issue.     

Investment climate,outward orientation and manufacturing firm productivity: new empirical evidence

Drawing on the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we revisit the link between firm-level investment climate and productive performance for a panel of enterprises surveyed twice in time in 70 developing countries and 11 manufacturing industries. We take advantage of the time dimension available for an increasing number of countries to tackle the endogeneity issue stressed in previous studies. We also use pertinent econometric techniques to address other biases inherent in the data (e.g.measurement errors, missing observations and multicollinearity). Our results reinforce previous findings by validating, with a larger than usual sample of countries and industries, the importance of a larger set of environment variables. We show that infrastructure quality, information & communication technologies, skills and experience of the labour force, cost of and access to financing, security and political stability, competition and government relation contribute to firms’ and countries’ performances gap. The empirical analysis also illustrates that firms which choose an outward orientation have higher productivity level. Nevertheless, outward oriented enterprises are more sensitive to investment climate limitations. These findings have important policy implications by showing which dimensions of the business environment, in which industry, could help manufacturing firms to be more competitive in the present context of increasing globalization.