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The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space

Eva Lövbrand a, Malin Mobjörk b, Rickard Söder b

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2020.100051

Abstract

The Anthropocene is described as a dangerous and unpredictable era in which fossil-fueled ways of life undermine the planetary systems on which human societies depend. It speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks where neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways. In this paper we examine how debates on the Anthropocene unfold in global politics and how they challenge core assumptions in International Relations. Through a structured analysis of 52 peer-reviewed journal articles, we identify three Anthropocene discourses that speak of new environmental realities for global politics. These are referred to as the endangered world, the entangled world, and the extractivist world. While each discourse describes an increasingly interconnected and fragile world in which conventional binaries such as inside/outside, North/South and us/them can no longer be taken for granted, disagreement prevails over what needs to be secured and by whom.

1. Introduction

A new concept has entered the lexicon – the Anthropocene. The term was coined at the turn of the millennium to describe the profound and accelerating human imprint on the global environment (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Rising global temperatures, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans and irreversible species loss are some of the examples used to illustrate the dramatic shifts in the Earth’s biosphere caused by modern industrial civilization (IPCC, 2018). In contrast to the Holocene – the past 12 000 years of relative climate stability – the Anthropocene has been described as a dangerous and unpredictable era when fossil-fueled ways of life are undermining the planetary life-support systems upon which human societies depend (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2018). It refers to a new phase in planetary history, we are told, when humanity has become a major force of nature that is changing the dynamics and functioning of Earth itself.

The proposition that we now live in a world entirely of our own making is uncomfortable and perplexing. It suggests a fundamental and dangerous rupture in the Earth’s trajectory that calls for new ways of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature, ourselves and our collective existence (C. Hamilton, 2017; Scranton, 2015). By tying the fate of humanity to the fate of our planet, the Anthropocene concept has invited intense interdisciplinary conversations across scholarly fields as varied as Earth system science, geology, history, philosophy, and sociology (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019; Hamilton et al., 2015; Steffen et al., 2011). In recent years the Anthropocene has also arrived at the study of global politics and prompted critical debates about some of the core assumptions upon which International Relations (IR) rest (Simangan, 2020). Harrington (2016, p. 493) describes the Anthropocene as a watershed moment for a discipline that found its voice in the midst of the Cold War when apocalyptic visions of nuclear war were commonplace. It is a concept that speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks in which neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways (Dalby, 2009). In a time when modern technology, trade and consumerism is disrupting the planet’s life-upholding systems in unprecedented ways, a growing IR scholarship is searching for a new security language that brings our changing climate, melting glaciers and polluted oceans to the forefront of global affairs (Burke et al., 2016; Harrington, 2016).

In this paper we trace how these Anthropocene debates are unfolding in the study of IR and ask how they may reconfigure Earth as political space. Just as geographical knowledge for long has been used by great powers to naturalize the exercise of power and control over distant places and people (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015), we examine how IR scholars now are drawing upon environmental knowledge to rethink nature as a stable ground for such global politics. While the profound material implications of a transformed global environment are central to this rethinking, we will in this paper primarily focus on the representational politics of contemporary Anthropocene debates. Informed by the critical geopolitics of scholars such as Gearoid O Tuathail (1996), John Agnew (1998) and Simon Dalby (2009), we approach the Anthropocene as a discursive event that is actively involved in the (re)writing of space for global politics. We thus ask how this new era in planetary history is staged as a geo-political drama. How is the Anthropocene written spatially and geographically? What risks and security concerns does it render visible? Who and what is endangered on this global scene? How are friends and enemies construed? What kinds of policy responses are deemed appropriate to meet the dangers of a transformed global environment?

Our study is based on a literature review of 52 peer-reviewed journal articles found in the database PROQUEST using the search words ‘Anthropocene’, ‘security’, ‘geopolitics’ and ‘politics’. The search was made in titles, abstracts and keywords of articles published during 2010–2018, and produced 143 results. As a first step, all articles were extracted into Excel and the abstracts were analyzed in view of how the Anthropocene is presented as a political problem. As a second step, we limited our sample to the articles that explicitly engage with the Anthropocene concept and its implications for global politics. These 52 articles were subject to thorough content analysis and sorted according to the analytical questions outlined above (for full list of articles, see appendix). From this analysis we identified reoccurring ontological claims, analytical themes and political concerns around which IR debates on the Anthropocene currently seem to circle. We used these categories to outline the contours of three discourses that we here call 1) the endangered world; 2) the entangled world and; 3) the extractivist world. In the following we present these discourses and compare how they stage our transforming Earth as political space. Although the Anthropocene debates drawn upon in this paper play out at the margins of mainstream IR,1 we find that they are actively confronting some of the spatial assumptions, meanings and orders upon which the latter rest. When engaging with the self-imposed dangers of a radically climate changed world, all three discourses project a world that is more interconnected and fragile than ever before and in which conventional binaries such as inside/outside, North/South, us/them no longer can be taken for granted. However, disagreement prevails over what needs to be secured and by whom in view of this new environmental reality.

2. The geopolitical imagination: imposing order and meaning on space

We live in confusing and troubled times. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful end to Cold War rivalry, scholars and practitioners of global politics are again searching for a language that describes how the world works and what challenges global politics face. The 1990s often signify the triumph of liberal democracy and new political possibilities arising from multilateral cooperation and free trade (Hewson and Sinclair, 1999). In the aftermath of the Cold War, economic globalization and transnational flows of information, finance and people effectively unsettled the geopolitical map and challenged binary conceptions of political space such as East and West, modern and backward (Ó Tuathail, 1998). In the new world of global flows, networks and relations, the spellbinding ‘big picture’ of geopolitics seemed decidedly out of fashion and place (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998). Instead global governance gained ground as a novel frame for understanding the character of global life (Latham, 1999). As outlined by James Rosenau in the first volume of the journal Global Governance, this new language signified an academic and political search for order, coherence and continuity in a time of disorder, contradiction and change. “To anticipate the prospects for global governance in the decades ahead”, Rosenau (1995, p. 13) suggested, “is to look for authorities that are obscure, boundaries that are in flux, and systems of rule that are emergent. And it is to experience hope embedded in despair.”

The rise of global environmental consciousness and governance belongs to this rethinking of global politics at the end of the 20th Century. Responding to a growing sense of ecological interdependence and urgency, state and non-state actors have since the mid-1990s engaged in a wide array of cooperative strategies and institutionalized forms of global governance. From the burgeoning field of global environmental governance studies, we have learned that these multilateral rule-systems today cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and public-private divides and hereby link actors and places in ways that defy conventional understandings of IR (Biermann, 2014; Bulkeley et al., 2014). In this new world of collaborative, networked and transnational forms of environmental governance, global politics no longer appears to be defined by international anarchy or the hierarchical authority of the state (Stripple and Bulkeley, 2013). As outlined by Biermann and Pattberg (2008) global life is instead characterized by new types of agency and actors, new mechanisms of governance that go beyond traditional forms of state led treaty-based regimes, and an increased segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and functional spheres.

While this largely liberal story of global politics has gained a powerful grip on the study of IR, we have recently experienced a revival of geopolitical thought and foreign policy practice. In response to the disorientation and identity crisis following the end of the Cold War, many foreign policy elites are again mobilizing allegedly objective geographical criteria to fix the role of the nation-state in world affairs and to keep ‘the Other’ out (Guzzini, 2012, p. 3). The new geographies of danger presented by melting glaciers, rising sea levels and more extreme weather feed into this re-territorialization of global affairs (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015) and have given rise to a new security language that accounts for the risks of climate-induced instability, conflict and displacement (Scheffran et al., 2012; van Baalen and Mobjörk, 2018). While some work in this field draws upon the human security concept to examine how climate change may multiply existing vulnerabilities and threaten the livelihood of the poor (O’Brien et al., 2010), the scaling up of climate fear has also given new energy to realist scripts of international relations and state-centric security frames (Brzoska, 2012).

In the following we draw upon critical geopolitics to examine how the Anthropocene concept is mobilized in this struggle to (re)define global space in view of new environmental realities. Critical geopolitics is a sub-discipline to political geography that emerged during the 1980s to liberate geographical knowledge from the imperial geopolitics of domination (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015, p. 5). It is a scholarship that invites us to consider how certain “spatializations of identity, nationhood and danger manifest themselves across the landscape of states and how certain political, social and physical geographies in turn enframe and incite certain conceptual, moral and/or aesthetic understandings of self and other, security and danger, proximity and distance, indifference and responsibility” (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998, p. 4). Hence, rather approaching the world as politically given, critical geopolitics critically interrogates the forms of knowledge and imaginations that underpin international politics and the cultural myths of the sovereign state (Agnew, 1998). A central assumption informing work in this field is that geographical representations of the world are far from innocent. As argued by Ó Tuathail (1996, p. 7), geographical knowledge constitutes a form of geo-power that is actively involved in the production, ordering and management of territorial space. Conscious and inspired by these insights, we here examine what forms of environmental knowledge that contemporary IR debates on the Anthropocene draw upon, and how they stage the future of world politics. In these unfolding debates we identify three discourses that we call the endangered world, the entangled world, and the extractivist world.

2.1. The endangered world: securing the future habitability of the planet

The endangered world is a discourse that draws energy from Earth system science and its proposition that humanity at the end of the 20th Century has become an Earth shaping agent that now rivals some of the great forces of nature (Brondizio et al., 2016; Steffen et al., 2011). The Anthropocene here marks a shift from the stable Holocene era within which human civilizations have developed and thrived. As outlined by Steffen et al. (2011), the ‘great acceleration’ in human population, economic exchange, technological development, material consumption and international mobility following the end of World War II has left an unprecedented imprint on the global environment and fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship to Earth. By degrading the planet’s ecological systems and eroding its capacity to absorb our wastes, humanity has dangerously disrupted the Earth system and pushed the planet into a more hostile state from which we cannot easily return (Pereira and Freitas, 2017; Steffen et al., 2011).

The endangered world presents a global scene where new environmental threats and dangers are causing socio-economic turbulence and gradually altering the geopolitical map. In the Arctic, for instance, Young (2012) finds that the interacting forces of climate change and globalization are transforming environments at unprecedented rates and opening up the region to outside forces. Non-linear shifts in sea ice and thawing permafrost have unleashed mounting interest in the region’s natural resources and invited Great Powers to enhance their commercial shipping, fossil fuel extraction and industrial fishing (Young, 2012). Similarly, Willcox (2016) outlines how climate change is posing a grave external threat to the self-determination of atoll island peoples in the Pacific region. As sea level rises and storms increase in frequency, states such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives are facing loss of habitable territory and relocation of entire populations (Willcox, 2016). In other parts of the world climate change is triggering vector-borne diseases, freshwater shortage, crop failure and food scarcity (Floyd, 2015). While these threats are most pressing in already fragile regions, they are multi-scalar, interconnected, and transboundary in nature and may therefore cause human insecurity and political instability in areas distant from their origin (Hommel and Murphy, 2013; DeFries et al., 2012; Pereira, 2015).

The endangered world is a discourse that challenges the modern spatialization of the world into a system of states with unquestionable political boundaries and mutually hostile armed camps (Agnew, 1998). As outlined by Pereira and Freitas (2017), many of the human-produced dangers of climate change have no parallel in history and work in complex, uncertain and unpredictable ways. The dangers are often diffuse, indirect and transnational and hereby make the world more interconnected and interdependent than ever imagined by IR. While this discourse recognizes that climate change may endanger the territories and populations of particular states, it is the global biosphere that is the primary referent object of security. The entire life-support system of the planet is under threat and the role of global politics is to regain control for the sake of human wellbeing and security (Floyd, 2015). As noted by Steffen at al. (2011, p. 749) the planetary nature of the challenge is unique and demands a global-scale response that transcends national boundaries and cultural divides. In order to avoid that large parts of the human population and modern society as a whole will collapse, humanity has to rise to the challenge and become a responsible steward of our own life-support system (Steffen et al., 2011). Geographical imbalances in human suffering and vulnerability form part of this new story for global politics (Biermann et al., 2016; Da Costa Ferreira and Barbi, 2016; O’Brien, 2011). However, in the endangered world it is the aggregated human effect on the Earth system that is the primary object of concern.

The endangered world draws energy from a long line of liberal institutionalist thinking to foster responsible Earth system stewardship. In order to gain control over the unfolding sustainability crisis and effectively govern the Anthropocene, this discourse insists that the world needs strong global institutions that can balance competing national interests and facilitate coordinated policy responses (Da Costa Ferreira and Barbi, 2016; Young, 2012). Hence, the liberal democratic order organized around the United Nations and its various treaty-regimes remains central to the vision of global politics advanced here. However, given the complex and dispersed nature of 21st century challenges, international policy responses need to rest upon multi-level governance approaches that respond to the varied role of people and places in causation and effect of global environmental changes (Biermann et al., 2016; Steffen et al., 2011). In order to build links across local, national and global scales, effective governance in the Anthropocene also hinges on integrated scientific assessments of critical Earth system processes and scenario planning that anticipates the systemic risks and security implications of ecosystem change (Hommel and Murphy, 2013; Steffen et al., 2011). As outlined by Dumaine and Mintzer (2015) traditional security thinking makes little analytical sense in a world bound together by complex, non-linear and closely coupled environmental risks. In the Anthropocene security analysts must move beyond the assumption that the main purpose of defense is to secure the nation against external, state-based, mainly military threats. In order to respond to the dangers of a radically transformed global environment, states need to cultivate a shared view about common threats and improve collective capacities for early warning, rapid response, and disaster mitigation (Dumaine and Mintzer, 2015).

2.2. The entangled world: securing peaceful co-existence

In parallel to the science-driven and liberal institutionalist imagination informing the endangered world, the Anthropocene has also given energy to a post-humanist IR discourse that confronts the grand narratives of modernity and the forms of global politics they give rise to. Similar to the endangered world, this parallel discourse describes the Anthropocene as a complex and unpredictable era when human and natural processes have become deeply intertwined. However, the Anthropocene is here not approached as a problem that can be reversed, resolved or governed (Johnson and Morehouse, 2014). As outlined by Harrington (2016, p. 481) it instead reflects a new reality where humans, nonhumans, things, and materials co-exist in complex relations of life and non-life. In this entangled universe, the Cartesian separation between nature and culture has broken down and the world as conceived by modernity has ended. Dualistic understandings of the active, progressive and morally countable human (subject) and the passive and static externality of nature (object) are replaced by much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable networks of relations (Fagan, 2017). In a world marked by melting ice caps, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans, accelerating deforestation, degraded agricultural lands and dramatic species loss, human activity and nature are so enmeshed that they are existentially indistinguishable. A complex but singular “social nature” is now the new planetary real, claim Burke et al. (2016, p. 510).

The entangled world is a discourse that draws upon the Anthropocene to destabilize and radically rethink the conceptual frameworks that underpin contemporary global politics. It confronts a state-centric world obsessed with bargaining, power and interests with the monumental risks, threats, and physical effects of a transformed global environment (Burke et al., 2016; Harrington, 2016). In a time when industrialized and profit-driven human societies are dangerously enmeshed with the biosphere, national security based on keeping ‘the Other’ out is failing the reality of the planet and portraying the wrong world picture. The magnitude and reach of contemporary environmental risks mean that “the Other is always already inside, so bound up with us in a common process that it no longer makes sense to speak of inside and outside” (Burke et al., 2016, p. 502). The dawning of the age of the human hereby challenges modern understandings of security at the most fundamental level. In the entangled world, the idea that we can secure humanity against external threats is precisely the problem that needs to be overcome (Chandler, 2018, p. 10). In the words of Hamilton (2017b, p. 586, italics in original), “(i)f humans are nature, and the Anthropocene demands the securing of humanity (and all life) from the unpredictable planetary conditions “we” are “making”, then the aim of security ultimately becomes that of securing oneself from oneself “.

The entangled world is as much a philosophical event as an environmental one that challenges modern conceptions of who we are as humans and how we relate to the world around us. Humans are conceived simultaneously as central and all-powerful, and fragmented and insignificant (Fagan, 2017). By reaching into deep geological time, the human-induced ecological crisis offers a new cosmological origin and ending story that alters today’s basic presuppositions of what the Earth and the ‘human condition’ are (Hamilton, 2018, p. 391). “Even in the study of deep time and geological shifts, we cannot escape ourselves” (Harrington, 2016, p. 479). Faced with humanity’s overwhelming Earth-shaping powers we appear adrift, claim Johnson and Morehouse (2014, p. 442), “alienated not only from a world that refuses to submit to long-held conceptual frameworks, but also alienated from ourselves in relation to this strange and allegedly destructive thing called ‘humanity’“. The entangled world hereby forces IR into an uncomfortable place where many of the discipline’s organizing categories break down: the logics of inclusion and exclusion; the idea of agency and a unified human subject; and the imagination of an intelligible world as a whole (Fagan, 2017, p. 294). In face of the ontological shift brought about by the Anthropocene, IR is called upon to rethink the narrow anthropocentric, state-led, economistic boundaries that solidify the bygone age of the Holocene (Harrington, 2016, p. 480).

The entangled world presents a global scene of complex interconnections and interdependencies that cut across conventional geographical and temporal scales and species boundaries. Security cannot be achieved by resolute actions grounded in expression of power targeting ‘external’ threats, but only by re-embedding modern humanity in the multi-species world that we now are remaking. As argued by Burke et al. (2016, p. 502) we cannot survive without accepting the cosmopolitan and enmeshed nature of this world. In a world of entangled relations security comes from being more connected, not less (ibid). Against this backdrop McClanahan and Brisman (2015) find proposals from the US security establishment to wage war on climate change deeply problematic. Militaristic assertions that we can win the fight against climate change reproduce the modern understanding of nature as exterior that we so desperately need to transcend. What the world needs is instead a new global political project that makes peace with Earth and hereby secures mutual co-existence (Burke et al., 2016; McClanahan and Brisman, 2015). Such a project is by necessity post-human, claim Cudworth and Hobden (2013). In order to move beyond human centrism and domination we must recognize that social and political life always is bound up with non-human beings and things. In the Anthropocene the environment is not ‘out there’, but always ‘with’ and ‘in here’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013, p. 654). To end human-caused extinctions, prevent dangerous climate change, save the oceans, support vulnerable multi-species populations, and restore social justice, the entangled world therefore demands a ‘worldly politics’ that brings our multi-species interrelations to the foreground of global affairs (Burke et al., 2016).

2.3. The extractivist world: securing socio-ecological justice in capitalist ruins

The third IR discourse found in our sample pulls Anthropocene debates in a more neo-Marxist direction. Here we are also confronted with a world in radical transformation defined by unprecedented ecological destruction and insecurity. However, the Anthropocene is not primarily understood as geological marker of time or the symptom of anthropocentric modernity. In the extractivist world the center of concern is instead the global capitalist system and the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expansion, accumulation and extraction. As outlined by Sassen (2016, p. 90) the development of capitalism has, since its origins, been marked by violence, destruction, and appropriation. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossilized carbon, industrialized economies have long done damage to the biosphere and people living on the edges of the Western world. However, the past three decades of petroleum-powered economic globalization have reorganized human-nature relations on the largest possible scale. The extraordinary growth in industrial production, commodity markets, technological innovation and consumerism is now remaking the entire ecological context for humanity. The global ecological crisis must therefore be understood as a problem of production, claims Dalby (2014, p. 7). Making things now also means remaking ecologies and reconstructing the very geo of global politics.

The extractivist world presents a highly unstable, uncertain and risky political landscape in which the speed and scale of destruction has ruined the biosphere’s capacity to recover. As argued by Stubblefield (2018, p. 15) “capitalism does not merely produce commodities and (re)shape nature, but feasts upon and produces death—as it consumes the fossilized energy of the dead buried for millennia; as it inevitably kills cultures, ecosystems, humans, and non-human animals”. Degraded lands, polluted waters, destroyed livelihoods, and massive species extinction are therefore the dark signatures of the Anthropocene. The widespread production of devastated life spaces suggests that it is the process of expanding capital, and not humanity as such, that is at odds with nature (Stubblefield, 2018). As noted by Dalby (2017) human insecurity is now a matter relating to the global economy, its economic entitlements, and the technological systems in which those are enmeshed. While granting the rich unfettered access to resources and goods, the capitalist order increases the stress of those already at risk and hereby perpetuates landscapes of structural vulnerability and social injustice (Ribot, 2014). Waves of pain and suffering are now hitting people living on the edges of capitalist society and forcing vulnerable communities to give up their dead lands and join a growing urban precariat of “warehoused, displaced and trafficked laboring bodies” (Sassen, 2016, p. 90).

The extractivist world is a discourse that breaks with universalized stories of our contemporary ecological crisis. Although no one is immune to the terraforming effects of carboniferous capitalism, this discourse forefronts the diversity of human relations with nature and the political systems under which these relations emerge (Stubblefield, 2018). Rather than presenting the Anthropocene as the aggregated effect of an undifferentiated humanity, the extractivist world directs blame and liability and hereby links ecological damage to social organization and stratification (Ribot, 2014). In the extractivist world the climate stressors that arch through the sky are by no means natural. They are produced by a global political economy that requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of vulnerable people and ecosystems (Daggett, 2018; Ribot, 2014). While this fossil-fueled capitalist system is the real danger in the Anthropocene, it is forcefully protected by powerful economic and political elites. As proposed by Daggett (2018), fossil capitalism catalyzes the liberal democratic freedoms enjoyed by Western middle classes and fuels the energy-intensive and consumption-heavy lifestyles that extend across the planet. Concerns about climate change threaten these liberal consumer lifestyles and the white patriarchal orders that profit from them. This ‘catastrophic convergence’ between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile liberal and patriarchal order, argues Daggett (2018), explains the rise of authoritarian movements marked by racism, misogyny, and climate denial in many Western states.

In the extractivist world the dangerous transformations of the global biosphere are symptoms of a political economy that commodifies and exploits environments and people. Serious efforts to come to terms with the damage done must therefore break with marketized solutions such as emissions trading or carbon offsetting and search for security beyond the circuits of capital. Everything else would be to accept, or even facilitate, the awaiting crises, claims Stubblefield (2018). As argued by Dalby (2013, p. 45), the rich industrial proportion of humanity has taken the fate of Earth into its own hands and is now determining what kinds of lives that get to be lived. Grasping the totality of material transformations is the pressing priority for anyone who thinks seriously about the future of humanity and our political arrangements. Rather than fiddling at the edges of carboniferous capitalism, security in the Anthropocene thus entails rapid social change that makes decarbonization of the global economy possible (Dalby, 2014). To break capital’s hold over life, argue Swyngedouw and Ernston (2018), we need to move beyond the depoliticized language of Earth system science and post-human philosophy and confront the contradictions of capitalist eco-modernization head on. In the extractivist world, technological fixes such as nuclear energy, carbon dioxide removal techniques or large-scale expansion of renewable energy technologies will not save us from the unfolding ecological crisis. Political renewal and security are instead sought in transformative social movements and local experimentation with less material-intensive and more just socio-ecological relations and ways of life (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018).

3. Rewriting Earth as political space

The Anthropocene is a troubling concept for troubled times. It speaks of a complex, interconnected and unstable world marked by globalized and manufactured risks that now are threatening the very life-upholding systems upon which human civilizations rest. In contrast to the hopeful and reassuring concept of sustainable development that has guided international environmental cooperation since the early 1990s, the Anthropocene is wedded into a language of fear and sorrow in view of irreparable loss of Arctic ice sheets, mass species extinction, acidified oceans and degraded lands. It confronts us with the dangers of a transformed global environment and the apparent failure of the modern state-system to offer effective and peaceful responses to the same. While this new vocabulary has gained widespread circulation in recent years, the Anthropocene remains a contested and ambiguous formulation that points in many different political directions (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019). Since first introduced in Earth system science circles in the late 1990s, the concept has stirred heated interdisciplinary debate and been challenged, rejected and reworked by an expanding scholarship.

In this paper we have traced how the Anthropocene is interpreted and acted upon in the study of international relations. When navigating through our sample of 52 journal articles we found growing alarm in view of the self-imposed threats and security implications of a radically climate changed world, and mounting frustration with the failure of traditional IR theories and concepts to make analytical sense of the same. However, we also found important differences in the interpretations of the Anthropocene, with significant implications for the future of world politics. In the discourse that we call the endangered world the entire life-support system of the planet is under threat and the role of world politics is to regain control for the sake of human wellbeing and security. Rather than directing blame, this discourse is concerned with the aggregated human effects on the Earth system and the possibility of bringing the planet back to a safe Holocene-like state. In the endangered world, integrated scientific assessments and international policy coordination are the means for responsible Earth system stewardship and governance. In order to gain control over the unfolding sustainability crisis and hereby secure the future of modern civilization, this discourse insists that the world needs strong global institutions that can balance competing national interests and facilitate coordinated policy responses.

In the entangled world, by contrast, the idea that we can effectively govern the Anthropocene and hereby secure humanity against external threats is precisely the problem that needs to be overcome. In this discourse the modern spatializations of the world into nature and culture, subject and object, inside and outside are replaced by much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable networks of interrelations. In order to secure peaceful co-existence in the multi-species world that we now are re-making, the entangled world insists that we recognize modern civilization as a philosophical and political dead-end and search for a worldly politics that extends beyond human centrism and domination. The Anthropocene here becomes an invitation to rethink our institutions, commitments and rules and to forge new forms of cooperation built upon participation, solidarity and justice beyond the state and indeed the human (Burke et al., 2016, 507). While the entangled world is a discourse that seeks to break free from state-centric forms of global governance, the search for political alternatives remains unfinished and includes liberal institutionalist ideas of cosmopolitan democracy as well as bottom-up politics of subversion and resistance (Chandler et al., 2018).

The final Anthropocene discourse presented in this paper centers around the global capitalist system and the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expansion, accumulation and extraction. In the extractivist world degraded lands, polluted waters, destroyed livelihoods, and massive species extinction are the dark signatures of a fossil-fueled political economy that grants the rich unfettered access to resources and goods at the expense of vulnerable people and environments. In order to address the damage done and hereby secure socio-ecological justice, this discourse calls for transformative politics that breaks with technical fixes and marketized solutions and searches for political renewal in grassroots experiments and social movements operating beyond the circuits of capital.

The results from this discursive cartography are by no means ubiquitous. The geopolitical discourses emerging from our material are heterogeneous, partly overlapping and thus difficult to neatly separate. The articles analyzed here draw inspiration from a long heritage of liberal institutionalist, post-humanist and neo-Marxist thinking, and often combine these intellectual resources in intricate ways to make sense of our problem-ridden Earth. While the articles included in our study offer competing stories of Anthropocene endangerment and security, they all present a new scene for global politics. The damage done to the global biosphere is of such magnitude, we are told, that nature no longer functions as a stable and passive ground for the human drama that we can rely on. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossilized carbon, modern industrial society has pushed many ecosystems beyond their Holocene comfort zones and hereby altered the material context or the very geo of global politics. This new world of humanity’s own making effectively unsettles the geographical assumptions and ‘rules of the game’ that underpin familiar scripts of international relations (both realist and liberal). In the articles reviewed here we learn about non-linear, transboundary and closely coupled risks that now are travelling across the planet and linking states, people and environments in complex, unexpected and potentially dangerous ways. In this highly interconnected and risky world, neither state-centric representations of global space nor traditional security thinking make analytical or political sense. The traditional geopolitical categories of inside and outside, domestic and foreign, friends and foe are deeply questioned, along with conceptions of state, security and sovereignty. In the Anthropocene the political boundaries that constituted the Holocene world are eroding, we are told, and our transformed global environment now plays an integral and active part of the global drama.

Where this rethinking of global politics will lead us is too early to tell. IR debates on the Anthropocene are still unfolding and contain a broad mix of dystopian scenarios, social critique, novel ethical claims and challenging ontological propositions. So far, the discourses outlined here are found at the margins of the IR literature, and primarily seem to involve a Northern environmental scholarship. While the grand philosophical gestures and structural critique found in these debates may frustrate those who are interested in developing policy solutions to the environmental challenges of our times, we note that the Anthropocene is a travelling concept that already is beginning to shape policy thinking and practice. In Angela Merkel’s speech to the Munich security conference in 2019, the profound traces of humankind on Earth’s biological systems was staged as a major threat that requires new security responses (Merkel, 2019). Merkel’s speech was not the first time the Anthropocene concept entered policy debates, but likely the most recognized. Two additional policy sites where the Anthropocene concept now circulates include the Planetary Security Conference in the Hague, hosted by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop knowledge and policies on climate-induced security risks (Chin and Kingham, 2016, p. 3), and the Centre for Climate and Security, a non-partisan security institute based in Washington DC (Werrell and Femia, 2017). Exactly how the Anthropocene vocabulary will influence direct frameworks, policies and decisions is of course difficult to tell, and given that the concept is debated, it will probably take time before its practical implications become clear. However, by challenging existing frameworks of thinking, we expect that the discursive scene of the Anthropocene will leave important marks on the study and practice of international relations in the years to come.

References

Appendix: Full list of reviewed journal articles

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Of sand and stone: Thick time, cyclicality, and Anthropocene poetics in ‘Nomadland’

December 11, 2023/in Autumn 2023_#Cycles

by Gert Jan Harkema

The tiny moment of the past grows and opens onto a horizon, at once mobile and uniform in tone, of one or several years… She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things. – Annie Ernaux, The Years

Midway through Nomadland,[1] Chloé Zhao’s critically acclaimed 2020 feature where we follow the van-dwelling nomadism of Fern (Frances McDorman) through the seasons of work, life, and capitalism, we watch her on a guided tour through the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. ‘This is gonna be really exciting,’ her tour guide Dave (David Strathairn) – a friend to become romantic interest, tells his listeners. ‘Rub two stones together. And you see what happens as they start to get like sand.’ Fern, meanwhile, wanders off deep into the iconic sandstone landscape. The camera captures her, restlessly wandering, twisting and turning, as if she searches for something hidden in these rocky formations that were the result of deposits 75 million years ago, followed by 500,000 years of erosion. She searches until her friend Dave whistles and shouts from a distance, asking Fern if she found anything interesting. ‘Rocks!’ is Fern’s sole reply.  She climbs up and sees the guide as a sole individual contemplating the mountains and a group of tourists regrouping in a following shot.

This scene illustrates Fern’s relation to others, and to the natural surroundings that are so pivotal to the film’s aesthetics. In Nomadland, we feel Fern’s turmoil and trauma through her entanglement with the landscape. A widow who lost both her husband and her place of belonging, we travel with Fern on her nomadic existence through landscapes of melancholy, despair, and hope. She reconnects with people, and leaves them. Or she is left by them. She is half in a group, half on her own; halfway between rebuilding her life while her body (and her van) is deteriorating. Half sand and half stone, somewhere in a cyclicality between the past, a present, and a potential future. Fern’s experience through different cyclical processes of deterioration and resurgence resonate with the deep time temporalities of erosion and uplift.

Fig. 1: Fern surrounded by a sandstone environment in Nomadland.

The landscapes and natural surroundings, together with the human bodies and non-human objects on screen contribute to an aesthetics that contain different temporal dynamics. These natural and anthropogenic landscapes do not just function as setting or scenic background to the narrative. Rather, they appear as temporalised landscapes in which bodies operate and which, in turn, impact Fern’s whole being. Nomadland enacts what it means to perceive what Tim Ingold calls the temporality of the landscape, entailing an embodied engagement with the landscape as ‘an act of remembrance, and remembering not so much a matter of calling up an internal image stored in the mind as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’.[2] The rock formations and canyons that Fern’s wanderings are situated in are marked by the cyclical dimension of deep time. They move in a temporal width that is far removed from the lifespan of human and non-human animals. Moreover, as temporalised landscapes, these natural environments of forests, sand, and stone appear in stark contrast to the yearly cycles of the seasons, the short-term exhaustion of consumption and consumerism that signify the imagery of the film.

It is in the entanglement with the different cyclical processes of erosion and resurgence that human time and geological time meet in Nomadland. Fern’s personal narrative signifies how the capitalist cyclicality of production and consumption that is essential to the Anthropocene ends up in the exhaustion of the natural and human environment. The infrastructure that used to support her falls away as the village of Empire, a US Gypsum company town, is closed and after her husband dies from sickness. Thereby the film invites an ecocritical reading that takes into account the appearance of various cyclical dimensions and temporalities in landscapes, bodies, and objects.

Despite its independent financing and its use of non-actors in supporting roles, Nomadland became a modest success with audiences in the US while it became an international success with audiences worldwide.[3] Chloé Zhao received the Academy Award for Best Director as well as Best Picture (together with the other producers, including McDormand), and Frances McDormand was praised for her performances as she received the Academy Award for Best Actress. Meanwhile the film was well-received with critics, as it was appreciated as an accessible ‘empathetic, immersive journey’ and ‘achingly beautiful and sad, a profound work of empathy’.[4] The film’s narration is fairly straightforward with a strict chronological narrative structure that is devoid of any flashbacks or flash-forwards. The film’s drama is not organised around moments of crisis, conflict, or resolution; Nomadland rather constitutes an ambient, atmospheric form of drama.

We travel with Fern in her van to different locations in the American West and Midwest. Essentially a road movie drawing on iconography from the Western genre, it is a film about loss, grief, hardship, and reinvention. Critics and scholars were early to recognise the film’s critique of late capitalism while scholarly debates have centered around the representation of precarity and gender, American landscapes and nationalism, and the neoliberal dystopia in Nomadland.[5] With its narrative of a woman living in rural poverty depicting an experience of nomadic precarity, the film has also been placed within the genre of the rural noir, following films like: Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008), Winter’s Bone(Granik, 2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012), and Zhao’s own Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015).[6]

Drawing on the notion of Anthropocene poetics, ‘thick time’, and sacrifice zones, this paper, in turn, seeks to enrich that debate by presenting an ecocinematic reading of the film by taking into account how in Nomadland different forms and ranges of time and cyclicity are imagined and critiqued. Ranging from capitalist hypercyclicity, yearly seasons, animal and object lifecycles, and human lifespans to the cyclical perspective on deep time, the film presents a range of cyclical rhythms and circular motifs. The film’s critical potential thereby reaches beyond environmental concerns into a more existential ecological perspective, as it is found not just in Fern’s spatial wanderings through the sublime natural and cultural landscapes, but also in her exploration and physical engagement with these different forms of cyclical rhythms.

Following the film’s existential ecological perspective, I suggest looking at Nomadland in terms of Anthropocene poetics. Through a temporal multiplicity and a ‘thickening of time’ Fern’s human, corporeal being gets ingrained into geological time, the natural time of seasons, and the time of non-human beings and objects. Fern’s character thereby becomes, in Stacy Alaimo’s words, an ‘immersed enmeshed subject’.[7] The film presents a performance of transcorporeality as it figures how humans are materially enmeshed both spatially and temporally with the physical world. Decentering ‘the human’, Nomadland thereby invites a cinematic Anthropocenic thinking and imagining. It thereby potentially performs a figuration of nomadic subjectivity which, to follow Rosi Braidotti, entails ‘a politically informed image of thought that evokes or expresses an alternative vision of subjectivity’.[8] And, more specifically, that nomadic figuration entails a subject envisioning that is nonunitary and multilayered, and ‘defined by motion in a complex manner that is densely material’.[9]  Nomadland, in this sense, is an expression of nomadic thought in the Anthropocene. It is defined by forms of spatiotemporal materiality, multilayeredness, transgression, and ‘thickness’. This paper opens with a discussion on Anthropocene poetics and thick time before moving to an analysis of the different circular temporal dimensions of geological time or deep time – and the time of stones, in relation to human and natural time.

Anthropocene poetics and the thickening of time

In his work on ecocritical poetry, literary scholar David Farrier conceptualises Anthropocene poetics as a set of recurring forms that allow for an Anthropocenic thinking and imagining through poetic structures.[10] Central to this is the concern that in today’s world, humans act in the present upon layers of deep pasts and deep futures, and that thereby both the past and the future co-exist in the present. The Anthropocene entails, as is widely known by now, how humans are embroiled and depending on deep pasts through the use of fossil fuels, while our involvement in the earth creates a geological time of ‘the human’. To follow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s convergence thesis, the Anthropocene concerns the entanglement of human and natural histories.[11] As a critical concept it forces us to rethink time and humankind’s position within the geosphere. The Anthropocene challenges the nature/culture divide by presenting us a hybrid crash between historical scales.[12] Or, as Ben Dibley states, the Anthropocene ‘is the crease of time… the appellation for the folding of radically different temporal scales: the deep time of geology and the rather shorter history of capital’.[13] This contrasting entanglement between deep pasts and capital’s short history forms the exhaustion of resources that characterises our late-capitalist era. As Chakrabarty states, it remains a challenge for the arts and the humanities to think and imagine together, in one picture, the tens of millions of years of geological timescales and the incredibly smaller scales of human and world history.[14]

Anthropocene poetics, in turn, seeks to refocus our attention on the radically different temporal scales that we are intimately involved in. Farrier describes: ‘Anthropocene poetics is, in part, a matter of intersecting orders of difference – fast and slow, great and small, deep and shallow time interacting in and through human action to shape the world that also, in turn, shapes us’.[15] Farrier identifies three subcategories, or three recurring forms or structures in Anthropocene poetics: a poetics of thick time, a poetics of sacrifice zones, and a poetics of kin-making.

Through the thickening of time, Anthropocene poetics entails ‘the capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to “thicken” the present with an awareness of other times and places’.[16] Thickening time means creating poetic forms and structures through which the different temporal scales, and thereby the different forms of cyclical time, are experienced in the Anthropocene. It enacts a double presence of geological time or deep time, human time and, in turn, humankind’s involvement in deep time, creating a sublime or uncanny contrast of the temporal dimensions of our being.[17] These forms allow us ‘to imagine the complexity and richness of our enfolding with deep-time processes and explore the sensuous and uncanny aspects of how deep time is experienced in the present’.[18]

The notion of thick time originates from the work of Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. In their effort to reimagine and reframe climate change from a material feminist perspective, they point to ‘the fleshy, damp immediacy of our own embodied existences’ as a way ‘to understand that the weather and the climate are not phenomena “in” which we live at all – where climate would be some natural backdrop to our separate human dramas – but are rather of us, in us, through us’.[19] Thereby they follow Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality as the ‘enmeshment of the flesh with place’ while expanding this with a temporal perspective.[20] The thickening of time thereby addresses how the past and the future are coexisting in the present inside and outside the human body. Temporality of the human, from a material perspective, reaches before and beyond human life.

It is thus, in Neimanis and Loewen Walker’s words, ‘a transcoporeal stretching between present, future, and past, that foregrounds a nonchronological durationality’.[21] It is the recognition of the present as uneven and multivalent. This is a transcorporeal temporality that, ‘rather than a linear, spatialized one, is necessary to show how singularities (whether a blade of grass, a human, a slab of marble, or a drop of rain) are all constituted by a tick time of contractions, retentions, and expectations of multiple kinds’.[22] Thick time thereby builds upon Deleuze’s sense of the present, as an instant that is thick with the past, ‘a retention of all past experiences in its making of meaning’ and, more particularly, Karan Barad’s notion of ‘spacetimemattering’ as iterative practices in which the past and the future are reworked in phenomena.[23]Such phenomena, then, are human and nonhuman objects. As a poetics for re-imagining and decentering humankind’s position in an Anthropocene world, thick time invites us to think of humans as enmeshed in space and time. It is about our embeddedness in deep time and deep futures while, at the same time, recognising that we make a lasting impact on the deep time of the earth as well as the near past and future of nonhuman nature. An ‘enfolding in geologic intimacy’, as Farrier describes, the thickening of time is about experiencing the ‘geologic becoming’ that we share with non-human organisms and objects.[24]

Nomadic structures from a sacrifice zone

Nomadland is in many ways a film about time and space, and our material becoming in this world-in-formation. As addressed above, it is a road movie that borrows iconography from the Western genre presenting a disillusioned version of the American frontier.[25] Depicting a typical rural noir narrative, the film chronicles the life of Fern and her struggles to engage in meaningful relations with friends and family after losing both her husband and her place of belonging. Thereby it is also set in the itinerant tradition in American independent cinema (from The Grapes of Wrath [Ford, 1940] to Wendy and Lucy [Reichardt, 2008] and American Honey [Arnold, 2016]), where ‘outsiders on the road’ present dystopic critiques of the American Dream.[26]

However, as a tale that figures an exhaustion of subjectivity, and in which the physical and mental states of the character are played out in open, empty spaces, Nomadland also stands in a long tradition of postwar European art cinema. Fern’s wandering through the sandstone formations, for example, mimics iconic scenes from Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) where Claudia (Monica Vitti) searches the cliffs after Anna’s (Lea Massari) sudden disappearance. In both instances the dehumanised landscapes signify the extension of the characters’ physical and mental states. There is no distinction between inside and outside, and between objective and subjective, as the landscape and the characters’ bodies are all that we have. In his theorisation on the time-image, Deleuze describes these moments as ‘emptied spaces that might be seen as having absorbed characters and actions’.[27] Like Nomadland, Antonioni’s films are about what comes ‘after’. That is, it is about what comes after the action or after the event. We do not see the dismantling of Fern’s home, nor do we see the disappearance of Anna. The character does not necessarily stir the action, she ‘records rather than reacts’.[28] The camera, in turn, advances autonomously, it has a body on its own through which it registers and moves. In Nomadland, for example, the camera is actually seated in the passenger’s seat of the van, and occasionally it floats around the car. It never takes up Fern’s point of view, but we rather see, move, and travel alongside her. It is the banal and the everyday through which characters like Fern in Nomadland and Claudia in L’Avventura – but also Vittoria (Monica Vitti) in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse – work their way. In the recurring form of the trip/ballad [bal(l)ade] the character is always journeying and meandering. Yet, as Deleuze concludes, despite the physical movement it is time that is out of joint, it is time that becomes the object of presentation. The body in space-time that becomes the ‘developer [révélateur] of time, it shows time through its tirednesses and waitings’.[29]

The narrative of the film is characterised by cyclical movements of departure and return. Its imagery and framing is charged with temporal dimensions belonging to deep time, human time, and Anthropocene time. Nomadland opens with Fern’s final departure from her former hometown as she sells the remainder of her belongings to a friend and rides into the desert. In the opening shots, the viewer is informed about the rapid, six-month dismantling of Empire, Nevada, a US Gypsum company town that was almost completely abandoned and closed after the company mines were dismantled. In better days, the town had its own elementary schools, its own stores, a small airport, and even a golf course. In short, it was a town that people organised their social lives around.

Now, set in snow and abandoned, the town has become a disposable place, a sacrifice zone where exhaustion of the resources has finished. As ‘shadow places of the consumer self’, sacrifice zones are spaces of mass simplification: the world is divided into productive places filled with resources, and emptied locations of waste.[30] These are inherently relational sites that signify the capitalist world-ecology. The sacrifice zone is the final place in a chain of extraction, production, consumption, and waste. Moreover, as Ryan Juskus remarks, the sacrifice zone has an almost religious connotation: between life and death, certain designated spaces with all the human and nonhuman lives that are lived in these places, are sacrificed as if it were for the ‘greater good’.[31] Fern’s nomadism is the direct result of this sacrifice.

Fern’s circular travels start when she packs up her van with stuff from a storage space. Throughout the film, we see her travelling from one workplace to another. Fern joins Amazon’s ‘CamperForce’, a program aimed to attract the ‘nomadic retiree army’ as a workforce during the holiday season.[32] After a visit to the Rubber Tramp Rendevouz, a social camp for beginning van dwellers, she works in the spring and summer as a host at a campsite near the Badlands National Park in South Dakota before she is employed at the Wall Drug restaurant. Subsequently she takes a job at the beet harvest in Nebraska before she joins Amazon with its CamperForce again. In between, Fern stays at Dave’s place in California where she tries unsuccessfully to settle in. Afterwards, she travels to her sister’s place in California, before she returns in the final scene to Empire.

Fig. 2: Production map provided to sound engineer Sergio Díaz by Chloé Zhao. Source: https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/creating-the-soundscape-for-nomadland.

Fern’s nomadism is circular. She visits the workplaces as seasonally assembled contact points, gateways on a recurring trajectory. This circular nomadic trajectory has an annual repetition as Fern follows the seasons that, in this case, are not just given by nature but by the capitalist cycles of production and consumption. It follows peripheral places remote from the permanent settlement in the cities and suburbs. Amazon’s gigantic warehouse is a stowaway late-capitalist consumerism. The Badlands campsite and the Wall Drug restaurant are places where tourists pass through but never stay. These peripheral places appear in stark contrast to the Denver suburbs where her sister lives.

Fern is a tribe of one, performing what Édouard Glissant calls circular nomadism. Circular nomadism is contrasted to arrowlike or invader nomadism. After a territory is exhausted, the group of people moves further, producing tracks of familiar places.[33] The survival of the group, as Glissant explains, depends upon their recognition of the circularity, both of their travels and of the land or forests. Yet in the view of history, circular nomadism could be considered ‘endogenous and without a future’.[34] There is no growth and no conquest. ‘“Stationary process”, a station as process’, as Deleuze and Guattari write in their treatise on nomadology.[35] Circularity, in this sense, means conserving and maintaining oneself, making the periphery into the temporary center. The film’s circular nomadism is marked by this process of regeneration. Following Deleuze and Gauttari, this is a nomadism that is profoundly defined by deterritorialisation. There are familiar paths and places and recurring points. But there is no reterritorialisation, there is no new belonging, no ownership and no fixed center of existence or identity.

However, whereas the nomad in Deleuze and Gauttari’s political figuration is dispersed in open or smooth space, the emptied space of Fern’s nomadic travels is striated by forces of capitalist production and consumption.[36] Travelling from one temporary job to another, her life is organised around the conservation of bare life in the face of erosion and exhaustion. We see her working and maintaining, from one point to another, through fatigue and waiting. The filmic landscapes, meanwhile, are striated by roads, railroads, unity poles, camper parks, and production plants. In the smooth-striated space of nomadism, Fern’s gender as a woman, and particularly as a childless middle-aged white formerly middle-class widow, is of course crucial. Her (circular) nomadic subjectivity is socially structured by all these elements. It is this position that allows her a locality and a trajectory as long as there is still some productivity and mobility left in her. Subsequently, the communal element of circular nomadism in late capitalism is constantly renegotiated as Fern befriends and teams up with others, or as she has to leave after the work is done.

This circular nomadism is depicted by altering landscapes and changing weather conditions. After Fern leaves Empire in the snow, she suffers some cold and harsh conditions during and after the holiday season job at Amazon. There is a spring in Arizona, and a summer season in North Dakota, and a stormy autumn at the cliffs of Point Arena in California. Through meteorological displays of the seasons the film develops its rhythm of travels and returns. This is played out in a dichotomy of distant, contemplative long shots of open spaces of lands and skies, and visceral close-ups of bodies, hands, faces, and skin. A combination of montage and duration, accompanied with ambient soundscapes of rain, wind, and thunder, and Einaudi’s atmospheric soundtrack, renders time as a tangible force. Time and movement are presented as a ‘dwelling in the weather-world’ in which the changing conditions of the world become part of our own existence.[37] The weathered landscapes that accompany Fern’s travels, and the recurring images of transit and return open up the film’s poetic dimensions to engage critically with the exhausting rhythms of capitalism and the Anthropocene.[38]

A poetics of thick time

The weathered landscapes that structure the narrative of circular nomadism in Nomadland initiate a thickening of time in several directions, ranging from deep or geological time to human time and the ecological life-cycles of animals and nonhuman nature. Erosion and regeneration appear as recurring motifs in these Anthropocene poetics. Probably the film’s most evident temporal layer is human time. In Nomadland human time is organised around shared experiences of loss, grief, trauma, recovering, and reproduction. Fern, as mentioned, has lost her husband as well as her place of belonging. Swankie (Charlene Swankie), who Fern befriends at the van dwellers meetup in the dessert, faces death herself as she suffers from cancer. Eventually passing away, she is collectively mourned at the Rubber Tramp Rendevouz the following year. Bob Wells, the real-life van-dwelling guru behind the Rendevouz, commemorates his son’s suicide. Bob’s quiet depiction of grief, taken from his real-life experience as a non-actor, reinforces this moment as a point of emotional gravity.

Through the collective sharing of grief, death is presented as existentially part of human life. Concurrently, birth and the arrival of new life adds to these melancholic dimensions in Nomadland. This is most evidently represented by Dave reconnecting with his children with the birth of his grandchild. By way of this interplay of life and death, the human life cycle forms an object of contemplation for the film. At the same time, Dave’s family life is contrasted to Fern’s nomadic subject position as a childless widow. The trauma of life and death shows that whereas all humans share in the experience of a human time, there is a different social location and a trajectory depending on subject positions like gender, class, age, and economic productive potential.

The life cycle of non-human animals appears in Nomadland in arrangement with that of humans. The film thereby presents a thickened image of human time existing concurrently with nonhuman life cycles. The connection between life and death is visualised explicitly through the crosscutting of a shot of living ducks on Dave’s farm which is immediately followed by a close-up of a cooked turkey on the table. Swankie’s death from cancer is heralded by her last video in which she recorded an endless amount of eggshells floating around a swallows colony. Fern, meanwhile, on her way through the woods, recognises herself in a wandering lone buffalo, or she contemplates life watching birds at the cliffs. The reassuring suggestion in this interplay of human and nonhuman life versus death is that all life on earth is involved in circular ecologies reaching beyond individuality.

Drawing on the work of environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren, David Farrier describes this as a poetics of kinship located in the Anthropocene aesthetics. This kinship is about recognising, in the face of exhaustion and extinction, the human and nonhuman other as beings with whom we share our existence as temporal beings. Human and nonhuman animals share an existence and interdependence in what Van Dooren conceptualises as ‘flight ways’. Any individual being is ‘a single knot in an emergent lineage’.[39] Van Dooren continues:

What is tied together is not ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ as abstract horizons, but as real embodied generations – ancestors and descendants – in rich but imperfect relationships of inheritance, nourishment, and care. These are knots of time in time – what Debora Bird Rose has called ‘knots of embodied time’.[40]

The alignment of human and nonhuman cycles of life and death, of Swankie’s passing away with the swallow’s breeding and birth, and the different intergenerational connections about nurture, care, death, and new life, then, needs to be read as an enactment of this embodied time – of ‘knots of time in time’. Meanwhile, in terms of the thickening of time and the multiplicity of temporal dimensions, this lineage of knots of embodied time also functions as a stretching of time into the future, reaching beyond the lifetime perspective of Fern and her friends; and thereby inviting the audience to imagine an existence embedded in time’s pastness and futures.

The landscapes in Nomadland present a temporal multiplicity that also reaches far beyond human and natural life cycles. The natural landscapes play a fundamental role to the poetic film form by contrasting a temporal scale of deep time to the short life cycles of human and nonhuman animals. In its cinematic form these open spaces are presented as ‘intentional landscapes’ that invite the viewer not just to interpret them but also to engage with the temporalised affective environment as a medium that we live in.[41] The long takes with slow (forward) camera movement emphasise duration.

By way of Fern’s engagement with the environment and its open spaces, the film invites what Timothy Ingold calls a ‘dwelling perspective’. This is a mode of remembrance and of ‘engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’.[42] In a montage of distant landscape imagery together with close-ups of Fern’s tactile engagement with the environment, the film stresses the materiality of the landscape as a place where the past and the present meet. Through this nomadic dwelling in forests and desserts, the different temporal layers of the past surface in a dynamic interrelation with the present.

Through these landscapes, human time gets interrelated to geological dimensions of time. These scenes appear as landscapes modeled by millions of years of cyclical processes of erosion, tectonic uplift, and regeneration. This deep time circularity then presents a dynamic parallel between humans, nonhuman nature, and geological earthy formations. In Nomadland we travel from the desert and the Petrified Forest in Arizona to age-old redwoods and green forests in San Bernadino; and we move with Fern to cliffs of Point Arena in Northern California to the Badlands in South Dakota. These are iconic landscapes filled with rocks, mountains, cliffs, oceans, canyons, and woods from ancient times. These landscapes that are the object of Fern’s contemplation and embodied engagement are geological terrains caught in the endless cyclical motions of erosion, deposition, and uplift. Dwelling in these temporalised landscapes seems to affirm James Hutton’s eighteenth-century discovery of deep time. That is, the earth as a machine with ‘no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end’.[43]

The South Dakota Badlands sandstone scenery that features prominently in Nomadland presents such a deep time perspective. As a landscape that is forever caught in slow motion, it exposes different geological layers, also known as strata, from between 75 million and 500,000 years ago. These strata are resurfacing due to erosion by the water of the river, the wind and air, and due to the upward movements of the earth and its forces and tectonic drifts. It is filled with what is known as angular unconformities. These unconformities mark temporal gaps between different rock units from different eras. Throughout the film we see Fern walking through, or dwelling in, these open spaces where she touches and feels the rocky formations from other times. It presents a tactile engagement with deep time’s cyclical presence in the present.

Sand, stone, and stars

As a poetics of thick time, Nomadland contrasts the deep time natural environments to the landscapes of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocenic formations graphically match geological sites. The locations of capital production are repeatedly shot as if they were natural scenes. In a shot at the beet harvest, for example, we see Fern contemplating in solitude next to what looks like a mountain of beets (Fig. 3). In a similar vein, the Amazon warehouse look corresponds to a canyon (Fig. 4); and the empty and abandoned gypsum mine in Empire now stands in the landscape as a solid rock formation (Fig. 5). Yet what is striking, of course, is that these locations all have a particular (seasonal or abandoned) temporality to them that is completely different from the natural landscapes of the Badlands and the Petrified Forest in Arizona.

Fig. 3: Beet harvest in Nebraska.

Fig. 4: Amazon warehouse as a canyon.

Fig. 5: The US Gypsum mine as rock formation.

In these poetics of thick time, stones and rocks appear throughout the film as material mediations between human time and deep time. Stones, rocks, and pebbles are omnipresent in the film. The hardness of stone often appears in relation to the softness of human bodies and skins. Fern, for example, briefly works at a stone and mineral store in Arizona; and we see her repeatedly touching and brushing collection rocks. Her love for stones is shared by her friend Swankie, who turns out to be an avid stone and mineral collector. When Swankie passes, the van dwellers throw stones into a fire in a memorial service. Like the temporal landscapes from deep time, this involvement with stones affirms Fern’s being in time and a being of time.

Fig. 6: Physical entanglements with stone.

Stone has a temporality far beyond that of humans; its duration is inhuman, as Jeffrey Cohen writes in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Every stone or every rock is the product of a trajectory through time and space. Stones have their own time, forever in motion they are ‘products of ongoing and restless forces that effloresce into enduring forms, worlds wrought with stone’.[44] Through Fern we recognise this restlessness of rocks in the film. Shaped by geological dimensions of time beyond human imagination, the stones in Nomadland are found, picked up, collected, shared, and then deserted. At the same time, the longevity of these stones contrasts to the short-term nature of the experience of touching them through our hands. Reaching into a past far beyond all human existence, and likely surviving the human species, they speak to another dimension of time. As Cohen writes:

Because of its exceptional durability, stone is time’s most tangible conveyor. Stone hurts, and not just because rocks so easily become hurled weapons. Geologic scale diminishes the human. Yet expansive diversity of strata, some jolted into unconformity through gyred forces and tectonic drift, is almost impossible to comprehend without arrangement along a human calendar.[45]

For most people, as Cohen concludes, the potential alien intimacy that stones present us, the intimacy of a haptic and embodied involvement with a time beyond human time, will remain unnoticed. Yet in her existential crisis of grief and exhaustion, it is this intimacy with other temporal dimensions that Fern seeks.

The intimacy with different temporal dimensions is presumably most explicitly discussed where the film relates human corporeality to cosmic cycles of matter and time. During their work stay at the Badlands campsite, Fern and Dave go star watching. The local guide explains:

Straight up overhead, that’s the star Vega. But it’s 24 lightyears away. What that means is that the light that you’re looking at left Vega in 1987. And it just got here.

The physical and embodied persistence of the past in the present is highlighted when the amateur astronomer continues to note that:

Stars blow up and they shoot plasma and atoms out into space. Sometimes these land on earth. [They] nurse the soil, and they become part of you. So take your right hand, and look at a star. There are atoms from stars that blew up eons ago on this planet, and now they’re in your hand.

This cosmic romanticism is followed by a hard cut to a shot where we see Fern’s hand in close-up cleaning ketchup at the restaurant where she works. Thus the film sets up a poetic relation of stardust between distant cosmic pasts and a present, visceral, and romantic experience of stargazing. But the romanticism and melancholy of that realisation is cut short by swiftly moving to the harsh reality of physical labor for production and consumption in the present.

A transcorporeal stretching of time, or the body as a sacrifice zone

In the film’s Anthropocene poetics the different cyclical dimensions of deep time, cosmic time, and human and nonhuman time is put in relation with the short cycles of capitalist consumption and production. In its narrative of circular nomadism and its political figuration of nomadism, the film puts these multiple scales within one larger frame of reference. The film does not explicitly problematise these relations; it seems to have a modest environmental agenda. Yet through its poetics of thick time, it presents an image of thought on how these different cyclical movements operate on each other. And it proposes an existential ecological critique by outlining how the cyclical short term nature of production and consumption in capitalism, systems that used to support Fern’s individual social life, now exhaust both the earth and its people. Thereby both human and nonhuman beings share in the experience of erosion.

As a figuration of nomadic subjectivity in the Anthropocene, Fern can be seen as the main contact point between these different temporal dimensions. Slowly, the cyclicality of human life wears down on her as well as on the individuals around her. This exhaustion is both physical and mental; and, above all, it is an embodied experience. Throughout the film we see Fern’s body getting older. The movement, the seasons, the work, the people that came into her life and the ones who left, the weather with its sun, rain, cold, and wind all had their impact. It is Fern’s female body that is the site of human time, and of the exhaustion of work, travel, and engagement. We see her body repeatedly in (extreme) close-up, when it rests, or washing the dust off of it when she showers. Left on her own, at the periphery of society, with no children or family to nurture, and outside the loop of social reproduction and capitalist consumption, we can theorise Fern’s body as a sacrifice zone in itself. Up to a certain extent, this seems like a voluntary solitude. Fern is repeatedly asked to rejoin the social life of friends and family, and to settle for a ‘normal’ life or ‘the good life’, most notably on her visit to her sister in the Colorado suburbs. Yet she seems to turn to nature in order to embrace her own position as a temporal being.

Fig. 7: Nomadland.

Fig. 8: Nomadland.

Despite her antisocial and seemingly detached appearance throughout most of the film, Fern’s body is anything but closed off from the physical and social environments surrounding her. It is open in its rhythms and sensibilities, and it is entangled with the surrounding more-than-human worlds and temporalities. It is this shared resonance of different temporal scales that forms the poetics of Nomadland as the ‘transcorporeal stretching of thick time’.[46] Here, trans-corporeality, as Stacy Alaimo writes, entails a ‘literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature… [marking] the time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from “nature” or “environment”’.[47] As Alaimo stresses, ‘trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them’.[48] The physical environments have affected Fern, and Fern’s existence affects the environment. She shares in the world. First in the form of Empire, the abandoned ‘sacrifice zone’, but also elements and the seasons. Fern’s body and subjectivity therefore is figured as transcorporeally enmeshed with the physical spaces of Anthropocene exhaustion.

Nomadland performs precisely how Fern’s transcorporeal being is involved with a temporal frame that is thick and marked by dynamic cyclical movements. Neimanis and Loewen describe this as ‘weathering’, a way of reimaging the body as an archive of the conditions of the world that is stored within the body, and that constitutes the body. A transcorporeal temporality, then, is one of duration, ‘constituted by a tick time of contractions, retentions, and expectations of multiple kinds’.[49] This embodied involvement with the world is also, to repeat Van Dooren’s words, an involvement in ‘knots of embodied time (…) in and of time’.[50] Or, as Neimanis and Loewen Walker point out, transcorporeality also involves a temporal ‘entanglement with a dynamic system of forces and flows.’[51]

Throughout the film we see that Fern gets reinscribed into nature, and into its geological temporalities of deep time and nonhuman time. There are moments in the film when Fern almost becomes part of the landscape, when she turns into a rock herself. Floating in the river, her body appears as a natural object from a different temporal dimension. Nomadland draws upon familiar imagery of the natural sublime reaching back to nineteenth century Romanticism. But different from the subjects in these paintings, Fern is not threatened by it nor is she situated (morally or ethically) above or outside nature. On the contrary, she floats in a stream of water, or at another time almost disappears into the landscape.

Fern’s nomadic subjectivity is in terms of transcorporeality presented as a body journeying through time and space that has become the site of exhaustion. And her body is involved in other cyclical temporalities beyond that of her own.Conceptualising Fern’s being as an embodied sacrifice zone, it is the lack of expectations that marks her trajectory. Devoid of a plan or a prospect, any future seems missing. This transcorporeal stretching is multidirectional. Humans are affected by their environments, and non-human environments are fundamentally changed by human presence. In Anthropocene times, our involvement with the natural and geologic world reaches far beyond the human lifespan. This is a capitalist-driven exhaustion in which both humans, non-humans, and the environment share.

The decentering of ‘the human’, I would argue, is the political figuration of nomadic subjectivity in Nomadland. As a form of ecocinema, the film enables an image of thought that presents us a transcorporeal and material subject position. Rather than celebrating the mobility, freedom, and individualism that so often accompanies the road movie genre, it allows for a conceptualisation of subjectivity that is stretched in temporality and transgresses the individual human body. And, moreover, we can read Fern as a performance of a nonlinear and nonunitary vision of the subject, that is not essentially defined but constantly ‘weathers’ in the world.[52]

Fig. 9: Nomadland, final scene.

Conclusion

Nomadland, I argue, allows for an ecocinematic image of thought about our temporal being in the Anthropocene. It does so by presenting a figuration of nomadic subjectivity in a dynamic framework of different temporalities, resulting in a cinematic poetics of thick time. The cyclical multiplicity in Nomadland occurs through an affective enmeshment of deep time, human time, and many layers in-between. Through an interplay of distant, contemplative, slow-moving scenery shots and intimate close-ups of an embodied engagement with social and natural environments, Fern is situated as a subject within a world-in-formation. The film also critically acknowledges being as enmeshed with our spatial and temporal environment. Nomadism in Nomadland is figured as the end stage of late-capitalism; an endless exhaustive journey.

At the end of the film Fern returns to Empire once more. The film thus ends at the beginning. Searching for her lost life, recollecting her memories, she wanders through the emptied streets and along the gypsum mine. Devoid of social life, these places now appear as ruins that have become part of the natural landscape. The narrative closure is remarkable here. Putting this scene in conversation with the closing shot of John Ford’s western The Searchers, Tjalling Valdés Olmos describes this as Zhao’s way to envision ‘the US West as a hinterland determinately haunted by the afterlives of the frontier’.[53] It is the afterlife of production, the shadow place of geological and human exhaustion. For a brief moment, it seems as if Fern contemplates staying in this sacrifice zone. This is a place where she might belong, where her husband and her social life once was. Wandering at the outskirts of society it mirrors where she is socially situated. Yet, Fern pauses and steps out of this human-house frame, and walks into nature. We see one more shot of her on the road, following her van along the snowy landscape of Nevada. Bereft of home and belonging, there is no end to her nomadic journeying.

Author

Gert Jan Harkema is lecturer in film studies at the Department of Media Studies at University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on relational aesthetics of precarity and on aesthetic experience in film history.

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_____. ‘De desillusie van de frontieridylle’, Armada 2, 75, 2022: 10-11.

Van Dooren, T. Flight ways: Life and loss at the edge of extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Wilkinson, A. ‘Nomadland turns American iconography inside out’, Vox.com, 19 February 2021: https://www.vox.com/22289457/nomadland-review-zhao-mcdormand-streaming-hulu.

Williston, B. ‘The Sublime Anthropocene’, Environmental Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 2, Fall 2016: 155-174.

[1] I would like to thank Toni Pape for his productive comments on an early version of this paper, and a big thank you to the organisers and participants of the annual ASCA workshop for their feedback. Last, I would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

[2] Ingold 2000 (orig. in 1989), p. 189.

[3] ‘Nomadland – Box Office’, The Numbers, Nash International Services: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Nomadland#tab=box-office(accessed on 30 August 2023).

[4] Holmes et. al. 2021; Wilkinson 2021.

[5] Dymussaga Miraviori 2022; Lindemann 2022; Grønstadt 2022; Rieser & Rieser 2022.

[6] Rieser & Rieser 2022.

[7] Alaimo 2016, p. 157.

[8] Braidotti 2011a, p. 22.

[9] Braidotti 2011b, pp. 3-4.

[10] Farrier 2019.

[11] Chakrabarty 2009.

[12] Williston 2015, p. 163.

[13] Dibley 2012, as cited in Farrier 2019, p. 7.

[14] Chakrabarty 2018.

[15] Farrier 2019, p. 52.

[16] Ibid., p. 9.

[17] Williston 2016.

[18] Farrier 2019, p. 9.

[19] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 559.

[20] Alaimo 2016, p. 157.

[21] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 561.

[22] Ibid., p. 571.

[23] Ibid., p. 570; Barad 2007.

[24] Farrier 2019, pp. 47-48.

[25] Valdés Olmos 2022.

[26] Rieser & Rieser 2022, p. 1n1; Grønstadt 2022.

[27] Deleuze 1989 (orig. in 1985), p. 7. I would like to thank the reviewer for bringing this connection to my attention.

[28] Ibid., p. 3.

[29] Ibid., p. xi.

[30] Val Plumwood as cited in Farrier 2019, p. 52.

[31] Juskus 2023, p. 16.

[32] Brudel 2017.

[33] Glissant 1997 (orig. in 1990), pp. 12-13.

[34] Ibid., p. 12.

[35] Deleuze & Gauttari 1987, p. 381.

[36] Lysen & Pisters, 2012.

[37] Ingold 2011, p. 115.

[38] See P. A. Sitney 1993.

[39] Van Dooren 2014, p. 27.

[40] Ibid., pp. 27-28.

[41] Lefebvre 2011, pp. 65-66; Berleant 2005.

[42] Ingold 2000 (orig. in 1989), p. 189.

[43] As cited in Gould 1987, p. 63.

[44] Cohen 2015, p. 107.

[45] Ibid., p. 79.

[46] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 561.

[47] Alaimo 2008, p. 238.

[48] Ibid., p. 435.

[49] Ibid., p. 571.

[50] Van Dooren 2014, p. 28.

[51] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 565.

[52] Braidotti 2011b, p. 3.

[53] Valdés Olmos 2024, p. 174.Tags:American cinema, Anthropocene, ecocinema, geology, nomadism, transcorporeality

Uncategorized

Comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene: a research agenda for green transition

Jeremy Green

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT

Climate change and broader Anthropogenic environmental risks pose existential threats to humanity. Human-driven environmental change has come to be understood through the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. Anthropocene risks demonstrate that existing fossil-fuel intensive and growth-oriented capitalist development are unsustainable. The urgent need to transition towards greener forms of development is widely recognised. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition, yet it typifies a wider disconnect between political economy and environment. This article seeks to understand and transcend that disconnect. Developing a critical genealogy of CPE’s post-war emergence, the article examines CPE’s paradigmatic evolution and fitness for grappling with the Anthropocene. It argues that dominant theoretical paradigms (Varieties of Capitalism and Growth Models approaches) are grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Economic growth is uncritically elevated as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy objective for capitalist development. These characteristics limit the capacity to engage with green transition. Embedding CPE within ecological considerations, the article selectively repurposes the field’s existing conceptual insights to develop hypotheses concerning comparative capitalisms and green transition in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS

Anthropocene, Comparative Political Economy, green transition, growth models, paradigms

Climate change poses existential threats to humanity. Our current trajectory risks a ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario in which feedback loops within the Earth System trigger runaway warming and ecosystemic breakdown, heralding a planetary pathway inhospitable to human life. This scenario is possible even if the Paris Agreement target for keeping global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius is met (Steffen et al. 2018). Without large-scale efforts to rapidly decarbonise economies and promote environmentally sustainable practices, we face the possibility of civilisational collapse (Wallace-Wells 2019, Paterson 2020).

An expanding body of interdisciplinary scholarship comprehends this unique situation through the concept of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch in which human societies are primary drivers of climatic transformation (Steffen et al. 2011). More than a pseudonym for global warming, the Anthropocene represents a broader range of changing Earth System dynamics bearing the mark of human agency. Environmental consequences range from collapsing biodiversity prompted by industrial agriculture and rapid urbanisation, to the exhaustion of global fisheries and the reorientation of the Earth’s water, nitrogen, and phosphate cycles (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, p. 4).

Existing patterns of growth-oriented and fossil-fuel intensive human economic activity are unsustainable (Gough 2017, Raworth 2017). The need for a green transition towards a decarbonised and environmentally sustainable economy now has broad support. But the objects, actors, and goals of this transition remain ambiguous (Newell, Paterson & Craig 2020, p. 1). Comparative Political Economy (CPE) with its attentiveness to comparative institutional responses to common challenges and holistic theorisation of capitalism, should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition. Yet CPE typifies the wider disconnect between political economy and ecological concerns, with climate change a troubling ‘blindspot’ (Paterson 2020). Even while environmental constraints on economic development become dangerously apparent, CPE remains silent on the ecological modalities of comparative capitalisms.

In this article, I critically interrogate CPE’s disciplinary foundations to assess its fitness for studying capitalism in the Anthropocene. Recognising the value of a comparative approach to green transition, I ask – how should we study comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene? I argue that CPE’s theoretical foundations and research agenda limit its capacity to engage environmental issues. Ontologically and epistemologically, CPE is grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Tracing the field’s post-war development, I show how this dualism is embodied by CPE’s elevation of economic growth as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy goal for capitalist development. The contemporary rise of the ‘Growth Models’ approach entrenches these disabling commitments at a time of heightened environmental crisis. These qualities render the field ill-equipped to grapple with the Anthropocene. Studying capitalism comparatively is, though, vitally important to guiding green transition. We need awareness of how institutional, sectoral, and holistic transformations within and between political economies can function in mutually beneficial and reinforcing ways. I propose that, despite the field’s unecological assumptions and uncritical entanglements with growth, existing analytical insights from comparative capitalism literature contain promising foundations and partial truths that can be environmentally embedded and productively reoriented to engage with green transition.1 This requires leveraging transdisciplinary insights, from ecological economics to Earth System governance, to retool CPE for the Anthropocene. It necessitates an approach to the comparative evaluation of political economies that prioritises issues of energy, emissions, and environmental impact.

I begin by tracing the ontological and epistemological significance of the Anthropocene for the social sciences. In the second section, I explore entanglements between CPE’s post-war emergence and the parallel rise of the economic growth paradigm, demonstrating how anthropogenic environmental threats challenge growth’s continued viability and desirability and question its status within dominant theoretical approaches. The third section evaluates the field’s paradigmatic shift from Varieties of Capitalism to the Growth Models approach, highlighting the field’s thematic narrowing and environmental silences, while revealing the continuity of growth-affirming and unecological assumptions. In the fourth section, I outline alternative hypotheses to guide CPE research into green transition. I conclude by calling for CPE to decentre growth analytically and normatively.

Anthropocene ontology and the nature/society dualism

The Anthropocene is premised on a transformative ontological claim – human societies and activities should be understood as highly interactive drivers of a ‘complex, adaptive Earth System’ (Steffen et al. 2018, p. 8526).2 This claim, supported by abundant empirical evidence linking socio-economic processes with environmental degradation, centres human agency within causal processes shaping the Earth System (Dryzek 2016, p. 940). How exactly human agency is imbricated within these processes is, nonetheless, sharply contested. Critics of the prevailing Anthropocene discourse have argued that it naturalises humanity’s destructive ecological imprint through a species-level analysis that elides sharply differentiated degrees of responsibility attached to sociologically and geographically distinctive social forces (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 63, Moore 2017, 2018). Despite disagreements over exactly who bears responsibility for generating anthropogenic environmental risks, there is broad acceptance that destructive interdependencies between human societies and the Earth System disrupt modernist ontological and analytical binaries between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 62–3, Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, Moore 2017, Kelly 2019, p. 1).

Accepting the ontological premise of the Anthropocene means recognising that human institutions depend upon the regulative stability of ecosystemic and biogeophysical foundations. This has significant implications for the social sciences. Many social science disciplines emerged during a period of rapid European economic development in which humans appeared unconstrained by ecological limits (Moore 2017, p. 596). Sociology, for example, was profoundly shaped by the historical coincidence between its disciplinary emergence and accelerated economic development (Catton & Dunlap 1980, p. 24). This led to the construction of social theories premised, often unconsciously, on an idea of ‘human exemptionalism’ that represented human societies as, ‘exempt from ecological constraints’. Modern economic thought has been similarly anchored in a cornucopian postulate of infinitely exploitable natural resources and limitless ecological horizons, framed geographically through their representation as new frontiers to be harnessed for economic expansion (Jonsson 2014).3

Unecological suppositions within modern social sciences leave extant paradigms ill-equipped to respond to the Anthropocene. We need critical genealogies that interrogate paradigmatic foundations of contemporary approaches, opening new paths of enquiry. Scholars have called for the development of new ‘environmental humanities’ and a shift from social to ‘socio-ecological systems’, recognising social relations’ deep entanglement and co-constitutive relationship with biophysical processes (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, Moore 2017, p. 598, Dryzek 2016, p. 941). A disconnect remains between Anthropocene scholarship highlighting the nature/society separation underpinning modern social sciences, and the orientation of prevailing paradigms.

Within economics and political economy, dominant paradigms continue to treat economy and environment as causally dissociated. This is true of CPE. Threats posed by climate instability and ecological deterioration are increasingly apparent, and their political salience has risen dramatically, yet the field’s recent evolution has not kept pace. CPE has moved from a focus on ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VOC) to a concern with ‘Growth Models’. The Growth Models approach transcends the supply-side preoccupations of VOC, rebooting Keynesian-Kaleckian macroeconomics to identify institutional drivers of aggregate demand across distinctive national economies (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016). But it continues to treat ‘demand’, ‘growth’ and the ‘economy’ as neutral analytical categories, conceptually uncontroversial and independent from environmental contexts. Both VOC and GM approaches overlook the relevance of energy sources and sectors to comparative capitalism. This despite the existence of longstanding traditions of ecological economics that reckon with the perils of fossil-intensive growth within a finite global ecosystem (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1974, Costanza et al. 2015). What explains this disconnect between Anthropocene environmental threats, the widely recognised need for green economic transition, and CPE’s narrowing around an unecological problematique of national pathways to economic growth? The following section explores the parallel rise of the economic growth paradigm and the post-war emergence of CPE. I argue that CPE’s rise was conditioned by the emergence of economic growth as a hegemonic developmental framing, becoming increasingly focussed on understanding national pathways to maximising economic growth. This leaves the field unable to critically interrogate the idea of growth itself, along with its deeper analytical foundations.

CPE and the problem of growth

Contemporary ‘ecopolitical’ discourses of green transition diverge over the viability of reconciling growth with environmental sustainability (Buch-Hansen & Carstensen 2021, p. 2). Dominant green growth discourses, supported by institutions such as the World Bank, stress capitalism’s compatibility with sustainability, suggesting that stronger environmental protections can enhance growth (Jacobs 2012, Meckling & Allan 2020, p. 436). De-growth and post-growth perspectives, conversely, argue that continued economic growth and environmental stability are most likely irreconcilable and the growth paradigm itself is an obstacle to an ecologically restorative political economy (Kallis, et al. 2018, Hickel 2020). Despite their breadth and disagreements, prevailing green transition discourses entail consideration of the environmental and energy dimensions of economic growth beyond that provided by dominant CPE approaches.4 These approaches treat growth as an objective, environmentally independent, and largely uncontested comparative metric. Questions of energy, emissions, and resource intensity hardly register. A brief genealogy of the field’s post-war development helps explain the schism between emerging discourses of green transition, historical traditions of ecological economics, and CPE.

The post-war emergence of CPE as a distinctive subfield coincided with the consolidation of economic growth as a hegemonic development goal. The growth paradigm can be understood as an institutionalised way of thinking that represents economic growth as ‘necessary, good, and imperative’ (Kallis et al. 2018, p. 294). Its history is deeply entangled with the rise of the ‘economy’ as an object of analysis. Early foundations date to the birth of political economy from the eighteenth century in France and Britain. As part of the broader fracturing of the natural and social sciences, liberal political economists conceived the economy as a distinctive and self-regulating sphere with independent governing principles (Kallis et al. 2018, 294, Tellmann 2018, p. 3).

It was during the 1930s and 1940s, though, that the modern notion of the economy as a geographically bounded, self-reproductive system crystallised. The formation of a new statistical construct to measure total national economic output, Gross Domestic Production (GDP), played a central role. Pioneering work on the measurement of national income, led by Simon Kuznets’s efforts in the US and the work of Colin Clark, Richard Stone and Keynes’s within the UK during the 1930s and 1940s, shaped the emergence of GDP as a new statistical imaginary that constructed the modern economy as a measurable and governable entity (Desrosières 1998, p. 172, Coyle 2015, p. 12–7, Schmelzer 2016, p. 81–92). These measurements did not account for the depletion of energy resources nor other environmental damage caused by economic expansion (Mitchell 2011, p. 124, 140, Schmelzer 2016, p. 100). By the 1950s economic growth, indicated by increasingly sophisticated techniques of national income accounting, had emerged as a policy goal. A transnational network of Western economic practitioners worked through international organisations to internationalise national income accounts and standardise the primacy of growth (Schmelzer 2016, p. 94).

Growth’s prevalence as a political-economic aspiration underlay the emergence of CPE after WWII. Disciplinary histories trace the post-war revitalisation of CPE to a common source – Andrew Shonfield’s 1965 magnus opus, Modern Capitalism. Shonfield’s comparative study of economic development in the UK, France, Germany and the US, became a touchstone for subsequent generations of scholarship (Hall & Soskice 2001, Clift 2014, p. 7, Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176, Menz 2017, p. 38). The book persuasively applied the comparative method. Shonfield anchored his investigation into a range of contemporary themes, from planning to full employment, within appreciation of the specific institutional foundations identifiable across capitalist states (Clift 2014, p. 7).

Intellectual histories of CPE usefully establish common points of origin. But these accounts tend to naturalise an important feature of Shonfield’s study – its preoccupation with the drivers, metrics, and possible futures of economic growth. Modern Capitalism is a book shaped by the dominance of growth. Shonfield set out to understand how the stagnation of the Depression-era had been overcome via the sustained economic growth of the post-war period. It was this context of the ‘high prosperity and rapid growth of post-war capitalism’ within the West that motivated Shonfield’s investigation (Shonfield 1965, p. 4–19). He argued that three key factors helped explain the period of unprecedented prosperity during the 1950s and 60s. Firstly, that economic growth ‘has been much steadier than in the past’. Secondly, production had expanded rapidly over the period. Finally, the benefits of the ‘new prosperity’ generated by the growth of economic output had been ‘very widely diffused’ (Shonfield 1965, p. 61–2). This explanatory framework bore all the hallmarks of the growth paradigm’s newfound hegemony. Shonfield sought to explain the overall prosperity of the West, understood as the fruits of economic growth, by arguing that growth had been more stable, rapid, and evenly distributed.

National economic statistics helped bring comparative representation of discreet economic units into being, heightening the empirical and conceptual possibilities of CPE. The interlocking origins of CPE and the growth paradigm had important normative implications too. Shonfield’s study carries the imprint of a liberal cornucopian optimism that conjures visions of unending progress and unlimited resource frontiers. He optimistically opines that ‘continuing prosperity and uninterrupted growth on the scale of recent years are possible in the future’, and suggests that, ‘the underlying conditions in the second half of the twentieth century are more favourable than at any time in the history of capitalism’ (Shonfield 1965, p. 63–4).

Shonfield’s work was critical to the emergence of CPE, reviving the comparative method and identifying core themes of post-war capitalism. Viewed from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, though, this growthist optimism rests on an ontological nature/society dualism that dangerously disguises ecological harms incumbent to capitalist development. The rise of the ‘Modern Capitalism’ that Shonfield celebrated was linked, causally and chronologically, to unprecedented intensification of environmental deterioration. Economic growth was central to this process (McNeill & Engelke 2016, p. 132–54, Dryzek & Pickering 2018, p. 13). Three quarters of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere occurred post-1945. The number of motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million. The volume of annual plastic production increased from 1 million tons in 1945 to almost 300 million by 2015. Production of nitrogen synthesisers, predominantly for use in agricultural fertilisers, increased from 4 million tons to over 85 million tons across the same period (McNeill & Engelke 2016, p. 4). Earth Scientists refer to this period as the ‘Great Acceleration’ – a concept that captures the ‘holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System, encompassing far more than climate change’ (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 82). From the 1950s, there is clear evidence of major shifts in the condition of the Earth System exceeding the normal range of variability of the Holocene, and driven by human socio-economic activity (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 93–4).

The Anthropocene prompts a critical re-evaluation of the drivers of growth and prosperity. It raises grave doubts over the viability of present and future economic growth if we are to respond to and contain multiple, intersecting, environmental threats. While orthodox economic thought elevated growth to an uncontested status, a shadow tradition of ecological thinking, stressing finitude, entropy, and waste, developed alongside (Boulding 1966, Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1974). Ecological economists have long acknowledged the biophysical dimensions of economic growth (Gowdy & Erickson 2005, p. 218). Economic processes involve the conversion of energy and natural resources into ‘goods, services and waste’ (Kallis et al. 2018, p. 292). This has important implications for addressing the leading edge of Anthropocene environmental instability – rapid global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions. There are firm grounds for scepticism concerning the prospects of decoupling economic growth from resource use and, critically, carbon emissions. Even when efficiency gains are made, their impact in lowering costs within a market-based system tends to lead to ever higher consumption of finite resources and associated increases of environmentally damaging pollution (Kallis, et al. 2018, p. 292).

Green growth arguments have gained currency in policy discussions (Meckling & Allan 2020, p. 436).5 These arguments rest on optimistic outlooks for the possibility of ‘decoupling’ growth from both carbon emissions and wider resource use (Jackson 2017, p. 87). There is some evidence to support claims for ‘relative decoupling’, whereby the emissions or material intensity of economic output declines relative to the rate of economic growth, signalling an improvement in efficiency. But meeting the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees warming, in the context of continued economic growth, requires ‘absolute decoupling’ with regard to carbon emissions – an absolute decline in emissions while economic output continues to rise. There is no historical evidence of absolute decoupling on this scale (Jackson 2017, p. 84–90). Hickel and Kallis’ literature survey (2019, p. 1) finds that absolute decoupling of growth from carbon emissions is, ‘highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5C or 2C’ (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 1). Evidence suggests that although absolute decoupling of carbon emissions from economic output is possible (and underway in some countries) it is very unlikely to occur fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement targets within a context of continued economic growth. The problem, the authors conclude, is growth itself. Growth leads to increased demand for energy, making the transition to renewable energy harder and leading to increased emissions from changing land use and industrial processes (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 12). Whatever our view on the viability or otherwise of green growth, the nexus between energy and emissions concerns needs to be given much greater prominence in assessing comparative capitalisms.

Environmental anxieties surrounding economic growth are not new. From Malthusian predictions about population in the eighteenth century to the ‘Limits to Growth’ report in the 1970s, concerns about pressures on finite natural resources and fragile ecosystems have shadowed confident prognoses of economic progress (Jonsson 2014, p. 14, Dryzek 2016, p. 939). Scientific evidence and understanding surrounding the ecological impacts of economic growth is stronger than ever. Why, then, has CPE moved further away from a critical appraisal of the prospects for capitalism and growth over recent years? To understand this paradox, I argue, we need to understand disciplinary patterns of knowledge production within CPE.

From VOC to Growth Models

CPE has evolved in response to major transformations within the global economy (Clift 2014, p. 7, Baccaro and Pontusson 2016, p. 176). Accelerated economic globalisation in the 1990s inspired the emergence of Hall and Soskice’s (2001) influential ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VOC) framework, exploring possibilities for continued national economic diversity in a context of heightened international competition. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, a contending framework emerged. The ‘Growth Models’ (GM) perspective pioneered by Baccaro and Pontusson (2016, 2020) addresses VOC’s limitations by highlighting neglected issues of inequality and distributional struggle. It has inspired a large volume of supportive scholarship (Perez & Matsaganis 2018, Amable et al. 2019, Bohle & Regan 2021, Rothstein 2021, Schedelik et al. 2021, Stockhammer 2021).

What are the core claims of these two approaches? I begin with VOC. Hall and Soskice introduced VOC in the early 2000s, during the high-water mark of globalisation. They rejected the premise that globalisation would drive comparative institutional convergence, seeking to demonstrate how distinctive forms of comparative advantage could be maintained. Hall and Soskice displaced CPE’s traditional focus on the state and positioned firms as the pivotal agents. Rational firms encounter specific ‘coordination problems’, with their capacity to deliver economic goods ultimately dependent on effective coordination with a diverse institutional actors, from employers’ associations to trade unions. Identifying five core spheres within which firms must overcome coordination problems, Hall and Soskice developed an influential twofold typology of ‘liberal market economies’ (LMEs) and ‘coordinated market economies’ (CMEs). Firms within each typology rely upon different mechanisms to secure effective coordination (Hall and Soskice 2001, p. 1–8).

Importantly, both types of economy could prosper under conditions of advanced globalisation, confounding expectations of cross-national convergence. This claim is underpinned by the notion of ‘institutional complementarities’ – whereby the presence of one institution increases the returns from/efficiency of another. Institutional complementarities lead to patterns of institutional clustering in response to the competitive pressures of international trade. Nations with specific forms of coordination in some spheres of the economy, ‘should tend to develop complementary practices in other spheres as well’ (Hall and Soskice 2001, p. 17). Complementarities generate self-reinforcing positive feedback loops incentivising further institutional alignment.

VOC dominated CPE from the early 2000s. Despite various critiques, VOC’s agenda-setting status endured. More recently, though, the paradigmatic centrality of VOC has been loosened. Scholarship has emerged utilising a new ‘Growth Models’ framework for comparative capitalism. The landmark contribution is Baccaro and Pontusson’s (2016) article, ‘Rethinking Comparative Political Economy’. They respond to a perceived fracturing of CPE scholarship during the post-crisis period – a division between those positing a common regressive developmental trajectory and others who claim that diversity endures. They seek to transcend this apparent division through greater sensitivity to both commonalities and differences between advanced capitalist economies (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176)

Baccaro and Pontusson deploy a Post-Keynesian/Kaleckian macroeconomic perspective that emphasises the importance of different sources of aggregate demand, particularly exports and household consumption, as determinants of capitalist variation. Distinguishing between export-led and consumption-led models of growth, they associate each model with distinctive implications for inequality and distributive conflict. These growth models are both ‘more numerous’ and ‘more unstable’ than the VOC typologies. Emphasising the conditioning impetus of the post-Fordist period, they distinguish their view from the more deeply rooted institutional equilibria posited by VOC, hinting at greater (regulation school-inspired) sensitivity to transformations in capitalist production regimes (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 175-6, 186).

Exploring four cases, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the UK, they construct their model on observations of a cross-cutting post-Fordist decline of wage-led growth and an associated distributional shift in favour of capital and ‘high-income households’ (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 198). This presents a common puzzle for these economies – how can the ‘faltering wage driver’ of aggregate demand be replaced? How can economic growth be maintained in a context of secular wage decline? The divergent pathways of response to this common problem are the comparative crux for establishing patterns of continuity and variation across the cases. Germany, Sweden and the UK represent three different ‘solutions’ to the problem of how to generate post-Fordist growth, while Italy’s experiences of ‘sluggish growth’ and ‘overall stagnation’ cast it as a deviant failing case (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176).

GM scholarship offers valuable correctives to VOC’s deficiencies. VOC’s technocratic and depoliticised representation of capitalism has been charged with ignoring crises and class struggles (Streeck 2010, Bruff 2011). GM literature counters VOC’s understatement of class and inequality through greater attentiveness to distributional dynamics. It also challenges the hallmark VOC distinction between LMEs and CMEs, which has been criticised for overlooking the unevenness of institutional development, neglecting the contingent and politically constructed nature of pressures for ‘convergence’ emerging from globalisation, and reifying ideal types into actually existing forms of capitalism (Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010, p. 186–8, Hay 2004, p. 242–3, Hay 2020, p. 307). By contrast, GM scholarship highlights substantial degrees of variation within archetypal LMEs and CMEs across comparative variables such as inequality growth and household indebtedness (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 178–84).

The timing and content of this nascent theoretical shift from VOC to GM reflects both CPE’s sensitivity to changing structural conditions within global capitalism and the selectiveness of that sensitivity. The success of the GM perspective is attributable to VOC’s failure to depict actually existing capitalism. Post-2007/8, VOC’s depoliticised, supply-side vision of institutional dynamics no longer resonates with advanced capitalist economies characterised by rising inequality, divisive legitimation crises, and large-scale macroeconomic intervention. The GM approach substantively incorporates these themes. Simultaneously, though, it evades a critical question facing contemporary capitalism – how can advanced economies implement rapid and large-scale green political-economic transition in response to anthropogenic environmental instability? Despite the urgent need for decarbonisation, the GM approach continues VOC’s exclusion of energy, emissions, and environmental profiles from its typological representations. While opening to broader macroeconomic traditions, GM literature reproduces VOC’s neglect of ecological economics and green economic thought.

What explains this selective engagement with contemporary themes in global capitalism? Why are some traditions of economic thought leveraged while others are ignored? What determines issue hierarchies in the construction of theory? Social science paradigms shape future research patterns by identifying theoretically significant facts, creating a hierarchy of research questions, and determining appropriate forms of evidence (Geddes 2003, p. 7). Academic disciplines are highly networked communities guided by specific rules about ‘admissible’ work, norms about how research should be conducted and results presented, and frequently, ‘a clear sense of where disciplinary boundaries reside’ (Rosamond 2007, p. 235). These insights render CPE’s neglect of anthropogenic environmental threats intelligible. Despite notable differences between VOC and the GM perspective, foundational theoretical continuities hamper the field’s potential to engage green transition. Core background assumptions underpin CPE’s paradigmatic development. These assumptions delimit specific parameters about what constitutes a legitimate object of enquiry, permissible dimensions of comparative analysis, appropriate methods, and plausible assumptions regarding capitalism.

Two foundational continuities, defined in Figure 1 below as first order theoretical assumptions, situate both VOC and the Growth Models perspective within the growth-affirming lineage of CPE post-Shonfield. Firstly, at the ontological level, both perspectives maintain a nature/society dualism that represents capitalism as a bounded an internally self-reproductive system independent of environmental entanglements. Capitalism is understood to be exogenous to environmental considerations, with the analysis of how capitalist institutions change over time isolated from consideration of Earth System dynamics. These unecological assumptions are not confined to CPE. They form an often unconscious background to the majority of the social sciences (Catton & Dunlap 1980, p. 23). Holocene conditions of relative Earth System stability ensured that political and economic institutions could assume the continued stable presence of the ecological systems that support human society (Dryzek 2016, p. 938). Secondly, in a normative/analytical sense, GDP growth functions positively as a guiding aspiration and primary axis of comparative differentiation for evaluating capitalism.

Figure 1. Comparative capitalisms and the Anthropocence.

These assumptions shape the primary research questions and understanding of capitalist development. VOC asks which economic policies can enhance economic performance, focusing on increased institutional efficiency geared towards ‘higher rates of growth’ as an explicit objective (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 2). GM literature relies on a normative/analytical binary between ‘successful’ and ‘failing’ growth strategies. Institutional characteristics of national economies are considered with regard to their propensity to threaten or unbalance economic growth (Baccaro & Benassi 2017, p. 85–6). Italy is considered as a deviant case due to its inability to secure high levels of growth (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176). GDP is elevated as the dominant comparative metric and normative standard for evaluating economic development. Ecologically embedded indicators of capitalist development – central to ecological economics – are excluded. This prohibits recognition of potentially positive environmental and social impacts of displacing growth’s centrality.

Regarding second order foundations, the VOC approach identifies rational firms as primary agents. The economy is viewed as a sphere within which, ‘multiple actors develop competencies by devising better ways of coordinating their endeavours’ (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 45). This neglects the environmental foundations of economic activity. From the firm to the macro-economic scale, specific assumptions about ‘efficiency’ and ‘complementarity’ are constructed outside of environmental considerations of energy intensity, waste, or emissions (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 17, 32, Soskice 2007, p. 89, Iversen, Soskice & Hope 2016, p. 171). A Ricardian premise of efficient national economic responses to international trade competition, via comparative institutional advantage, naturalises unecological assumptions about economic efficiency by ignoring the environmental preconditions and consequences of trade and specialisation. In rare instances where the VOC framework has been mobilised to engage issues of climate change adaptation comparatively, its unecological foundations are left unquestioned (Mikler 2011, Mikler & Harrison 2012).

GM literature assumes a more macroeconomic vantage point and centres distributional struggles between social forces. The governing macroeconomic assumptions of CPE are shifted from a New Keynesian (VOC) to a Post-Keynesian (GM) axis. This move enhances recognition of aggregate demand’s impact on long-term productive potential, increases awareness of class power as a distributional determinant, and enables more optimistic views on the scope for, ‘growth-enhancing policy interventions’ (Baccaro & Pontusson 2020, p. 17–22). But it too treats core analytical categories such as consumption, demand, income and production as environmentally disembedded. It posits a set of logical macroeconomic interrelations independent of environmental context or consequences and fails to consider ecological constraints on aggregate demand management (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 182).

Ultimately, the principal disagreement between the two perspectives is fairly minor. It centres on the prospects for macroeconomic intervention to positively enhance long-term wage growth and employment. VOC’s New Keynesian origins lead to a more pessimistic reading, while the GM perspective leverages Post-Keynesian/Kaleckian insights to generate more auspicious conclusions. In reaching these contrasting conclusions, both theories explicitly draw inspiration from strands of twentieth century macroeconomic theory. Mainstream economic theory, from neoclassical to Keynesian, has systematically excluded ecological costs of economic activity, conceptualising the economy as an extra-natural system divorced from ecological foundations (Mitchell 2011, p. 136–41). The rise of Keynesian economic thought, a common lineage for both approaches, is causally imbricated with the Great Acceleration. Keynesian assumptions about the capacity to boost demand and attain full employment through increasing economic output discount the ecological foundations of capitalism (Mann & Wainwright 2018, p. 243–4). Energy and emissions considerations do not feature as constraints on the prospects for growth. This common theoretical inheritance severely limits the capacity of contemporary CPE to think ecologically about political economy. Ecological economics and Earth Systems scholarship provide more fertile transdisciplinary resources for CPE to engage with green transition.

Problematising CPE’s environmental silences is not sufficient to develop a comparative research agenda for green transition. Nor should we entirely discount achievements of prevailing approaches, which have been highly productive for understanding comparative capitalisms. Instead, we should consider how existing analytical insights might be repurposed to equip CPE for the Anthropocene. This requires reviewing additional conceptual deficiencies characteristic of the field. Firstly, concerning institutional dynamics, scholars have challenged VOC’s narrow, rational-functionalist, understanding of institutions that reduces the motivations of institutional development to efficiency gains, squeezing out the role of political struggles, accidental/unintended outcomes, and cultural or ideational causes (Watson 2003, p. 232, Hay 2004, p. Streeck 2010, p. 27, Clift 2014, p. 101–13). VOC has further been criticised for relying on a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model that understates incremental institutional development (Streeck & Thelen 2005). Secondly, VOC’s methodological nationalism produces a truncated sense of the spatio-temporal parameters of capitalist development that reifies national territorial boundaries, obscures the unevenness of economic development, and occludes the relevance of different scalar determinants of institutional transformation (Peck & Theodore 2007, p. 738–40, Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010, p. 187–8). Shallow historical contextualisation neglects longer-term developmental dynamics, including sources of crisis and instability, as well as the formative impact of deep-rooted historical antecedents such as distinctive trajectories of industrialisation (Jessop 2014, p. 48, Coates 2014, p. 173). Thirdly, critics have questioned VOC’s rationalist firm-centred ontology and a related down-playing of the importance of state capacity. Assuming rational firms exaggerates functional, utility maximising motives, and disregards cultural and contingent determinations of institutional development (Hay 2005, p. 111). By examining the firm-centred micro-foundations of capitalism, VOC offers an underdeveloped sense of macro-political structures (Hancké et al. 2007, p. 14–6). Finally, VOC has downplayed the importance of sectoral differences, determinants, and comparisons within and across states (Hay 2005, p. 110, Crouch, Schröeder & Voelzkow 2009, p. 656–7).

Owing to the field’s paradigmatic convergence around an increasingly demarcated research agenda, some of these limitations shape the GM perspective too. Conceptually, GM’s spatio-temporal coordinates are comparably narrow. The approach shares VOC’s methodological nationalism, treating coherent macro-economic models within territorial states as privileged units of analysis. GM’s scalar deficiencies render it similarly inattentive to subnational unevenness (Clift & McDaniel 2021, p. 2). In terms of historicising capitalism, Baccaro and Pontusson (2016, p. 176, 2020, p. 24) posit the post-Fordist transition of the 1970s, and the resultant decline of wage-led growth, as a common stimulus prompting divergent comparative responses. But the heavy reliance on macro-economic theory, with its ahistorical ontological foundations, ensures little attention is paid to the historicity of institutions.

Yet GM scholarship also transcends conceptual weaknesses of VOC to provide firmer foundations for engaging green transition. Regarding institutional dynamics, Baccaro and Pontusson draw on the ‘power resource tradition’ to foreground how competing social blocs and electoral coalitions shape institutional outcomes. A Gramscian conception of political hegemony gives greater scope for ideational determinants of institutional change too (Baccaro & Pontusson 2019, p. 1–3). Enhanced attentiveness to sectoral components of growth models provides clues for how we might examine green transition comparatively. Departing from VOC’s firm-centric foundations, Baccaro and Pontusson construct a broader ontology grounded in distributional struggles between distinctive socio-economic coalitions and sectoral interests.6 This enables a stronger foundation for considering the variety of actors that might shape green transition.

Despite their environmental elisions, then, CPE perspectives contain partial foundations for a comparative approach towards green transition. Existing scholarship often focuses narrowly on carbon markets (Newell & Paterson 2010, Bryant 2019), or the agency of particular actors (Wright & Nyberg 2015), without assessing comparative institutional variation and continuity. Literature on socio-technical transitions shares CPE’s institutionalist ontology and emphasis on path dependency, but lacks a wider macro understanding of comparative political-economic dynamics (Unruh 2000, Lockwood et al. 2017).

A CPE approach enables comparative assessment of national economic profiles, institutions, and sectors to inform specific pathways for green transition. Policy interventions required for green transition vary with the institutional characteristics, sectoral composition, and supply/demand drivers within political economies. For example, export-led (Germany) and consumption-driven (UK) economic models will likely have distinctive modalities of environmental impact. Understanding trade and payments interdependencies between countries, linked to comparative specialisation, enhances possibilities for mutually reinforcing and coordinated green transitions. Identifying comparative drivers of environmental harms can differentiate between multi-scalar clusters of institutions that produce negative environmental effects, and those that generate ecologically restorative prosperity. Comparative modelling could facilitate policies that identify and promote ecological complementarities – whereby the existence of one green institution/sector increases the ecological benefits available from another – between institutions and sectors. For example, enhancing sustainable, local non-meat agricultural production and promoting vegetarian offerings within the hospitality sector.

As I show in the research hypotheses below, theoretical insights from existing perspectives can be leveraged directly, or productively inverted, to equip CPE to engage with green transition. These hypotheses attempt to illuminate a path beyond the nature/society dualism within CPE and, correspondingly, to decentre the analytical primacy of growth while maintaining valuable insights from CPE scholarship to examine ecologically embedded variables.

Studying comparative capitalism in the Anthropocene

Capitalism in the Anthropocene no longer operates within Holocene conditions of benign climatic stability. Socio-economic institutions must be conceptualised in relation to a broad set of ‘Anthropocene risks’ related to different forms of environmental instability. They emerge from human-driven (anthropogenic) processes, demonstrate interactive patterns of global socio-ecological connectivity, and display ‘complex, cross-scale relationships’ (Keys, et al. 2019, p. 668). Acknowledging these risks has important implications for CPE, which situates institutional analysis at the core of its intellectual agenda (Clift 2014, p. 16). It makes sense, therefore, to begin our hypotheses with a consideration of institutional dynamics.

Hypothesis 1: Pathologically path dependent institutions drive environmental instability and face greater pressures for transformation

CPE emphasises path dependent institutional development (Clift 2014, p. 101–6).7 Within VOC, feedback mechanisms arising from ‘institutional complementarities’ shape path dependent development towards typological termini (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 1, 17, Soskice 2007, p. 89, Iversen, Soskice & Hope 2016, p. 164). GM scholarship shares a conviction in path dependency (exemplified by two prevailing post-Fordist growth models), but views institutional development as more politically contingent. Path dependency is central to the political economy of green transition but must be properly integrated with environmental dynamics.

Path dependent processes of self-reproduction allow powerful institutions, from fossil-fuel companies to state agencies, to reassert dominance and propagate environmentally damaging behaviours. Dominant institutions maintain growth’s hegemony despite destructive environmental consequences. Dryzek and Pickering (2018, p. 23) describe these processes as ‘pathological path dependency’ – disconnecting human institutions from Earth System dynamics by privileging economic imperatives over ecological awareness. Such processes do not reflect a benign logic of environmentally neutral and efficient capitalist development as envisaged by VOC. They are ecologically embedded and dangerously disrupt Earth System dynamics (Dryzek 2016, p. 937, Dryzek & Pickering 2018, p. 23). Recognising pathological path dependency disrupts the nature/society dualism by highlighting the ecological foundations of institutions. Pathological path dependency is a critical comparative variable with material and ideational determinants. The institutional embeddedness of the growth paradigm itself is a pathologically path dependent force and an object for comparative evaluation.8

As scholarship on ‘carbon lock-in’ demonstrates (Unruh 2000, Seto et al. 2016) dominant capitalist institutions, social practices, and technologies are embedded in and (re)productive of environmentally damaging logics. CPE can connect these insights to a holistic, critical, assessment of comparative capitalism. Pathologically path dependent institutions, firms, sectors and economic discourses, those that are most carbon-dependent and environmentally damaging, will face greater transformative pressures and more contested institutional trajectories. National capitalisms with stronger environmental political coalitions and lesser dependency on pathologically path dependent energy sources, sectors, and accumulation strategies will likely respond more quickly and effectively to Anthropocene challenges.

Hypothesis 2: The Anthropocene stretches spatio-temporal determinants of capitalist development

The Anthropocene transforms spatio-temporal parameters of capitalist development. Temporally, the Anthropocene stretches diachronic determinants of institutional change (Malm 2016, p. 26). Imperatives for institutional change are determined by responses to historically rooted Earth Systems shifts and an anticipatory approach grounded in longer-term assessments of future environmental trajectories. Once effects of global warming, natural resource depletion, and ecosystemic exhaustion impinge radically on the functioning of capitalist institutions it will be too late for ameliorative action (Jackson 2017, p. 16). Goals for institutional development are increasingly shaped by scientific consensus (exemplified by IPCC reports) grounded in a broader temporal framing than typical calculations of business leaders, investors, and politicians. Concretely, temporal elongation manifests as comparatively distinctive time-frames and strategies for decarbonisation and infrastructural transformation, exemplified by national plans for reaching ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions.9 These tendencies will likely generate common but differentiated movements towards extensive future-oriented and state-directed developmental goals across national capitalisms.

Temporal reconfigurations are linked to variegated spatial dynamics. Anthropocene risks are shaped by global socio-ecological connections and multi-scalar relationships (Keys et al., p. 2019). Responding to these threats also has multi-scalar dimensions. Scholarship on technological transitions demonstrates the multiple levels of infrastructural and social change involved in decarbonisation (Geels 2002, 2014). Politically, responses to Anthropocene risks are increasingly articulated through multiple, interdependent, governance scales evidenced by the emergence of ‘transnational climate change governance’ (Bulkeley et al. 2014). Globally, UN climate conferences increasingly shape national economic policies around green transition. At regional and national scales, discussions of Green New Deals emphasise supranational and state capacities in pursuit of decarbonisation and wider sustainability goals. These scales are also increasingly interwoven. A genuinely multi-scalar approach to CPE, rather than exclusive prioritisation of the national, is required to engage with the different levels of agency involved in the political economy of green transition.

Hypothesis 3: States (not firms) are the pivotal actors in the political economy of green transition

The emergence of VOC displaced the state’s centrality from CPE. GM scholarship has restored Keynesian convictions in effective state intervention (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 178). Both approaches understate state capacity as a comparative variable. Green transition relies heavily on the political power, coordinative capacity, and infrastructural reach of states (Johnstone & Newell 2018, p. 72–3).10 Although interactions among multiple actors are involved in green transition, from corporations to social movements and individual consumers, these actors will likely pivot around attempts to contest legal, regulatory, and fiscal conditions underpinned by sovereign state authority. The urgency, scale, and complexity of activity required to effectively decarbonise and reorient economies within the prescribed time-frames requires the authority and coordinating capacity of states. This is exemplified by different proposals for Green New Deals, all of which rely on the fiscal, monetary, and legal-regulatory capacities of states to enact rapid transition away from fossil-fuel intensive economic models. Globally, inter-state bargaining within climate negotiations increasingly establishes (aspirational) parameters for national economic development.

State capacity is a critical determinant of comparative pathways towards green transition. Pre-existing modalities of state intervention are likely to condition national responses to environmental challenges. For example, the tradition of ‘Treasury Control’ within the UK has thwarted green developmental initiatives and propagated the dominant financial accumulation regime (Craig 2020). States are also pivotal sites for the political contestation of environmental issues by distinctive social forces and to the embedding of environmental concerns within public, legal, and regulatory institutions. Historically distinctive models of state authority facilitate differential degrees and forms of engagement with environmental movements (Dryzek et al. 2003). Growth Models’ Gramscian-inspired rediscovery of links between economic models, political coalitions, and legitimation strategies opens paths towards a more politicised understanding of the state that recognises the importance of environmental politics.

Hypothesis 4: Sectoral compositions and characteristics shape modalities of environmental damage and condition trajectories of green transition

Sectoral characteristics of national capitalisms are critical to producing (and ameliorating) Anthropocene risks. In aggregate, national capitalisms have distinctive environmental impacts dependent upon their sectoral make-up and specialisation within the global division of labour. For example, export-oriented economies characterised by strong manufacturing sectors are likely to have different energy and resource requirements, as well as waste and emissions implications, than consumption-led and services dominated economies. Industrial economies tend to have higher raw materials usage and physical imports compared to the lower material footprints of service economies (EU 2016).

At the level of analytically modelling comparative economies, GM’s focus on the sectoral and geographical orientation (export-led vs consumption-led) of demand drivers should be integrated with comparative environmental indicators. Measurements more commonly employed by ecological economics, such as Domestic Materials Consumption and Total Resource Consumption, should be central to CPE. This would facilitate understanding of which sectors must be contracted, or usefully expanded, in pursuit of ecological stability. Sectors may have disproportionately large environmental impacts relative to their contribution to growth, making them more salient for comparative analysis.11 Encouraging ecological complementarities between sectors can promote environmentally beneficial development.

Some sectors matter more than others. The absence of energy considerations from the typologies developed by VOC and GM literature signifies CPE’s environmental neglect. Whether or not different national capitalisms are powered by coal, oil, nuclear or renewables is a crucial variable for understanding patterns of cross-national continuity and difference in the political economy of green transition. For example, Germany has committed to much less ambitious targets for coal phase-out than the UK, due to the greater power of coal unions and companies (along with supportive energy-intensive sectors benefiting from low energy prices), as well as greater employment in the coal sector (Brauers, Oei & Walk 2020). Petrostates and those dominated by the coal industry are particularly significant, producing disproportionate CO2 emissions relative to GDP.12 Recognising that economic size alone does not accord with the importance of a national economy for green transition deprivileges GDP’s ordering of national economies’ analytical importance.

Given the vast investment requirements of green transition and the power of finance, financial sector characteristics are critical. The reluctance of powerful asset managers to endorse environmental shareholder resolutions suggests that considerable political mobilisation is required to harness the commanding heights of finance for green transition (Buller & Braun 2021). Agricultural orientations are significant. Environmental harms and emissions produced by the ‘industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’ point to the significance of livestock farming and meat consumption in environmental degradation (Weis 2013, p. 66). In large meat producing countries such as Brazil and the US, curbing these sectors is critical. National strategies and timeframes for green transition will be shaped by the environmental modalities of leading sectors, the relative power of social forces that standing to lose/benefit from curbing environmentally damaging sectors, and the relationship between energy sectors and the wider economy.

Conclusion

The arrival of the Anthropocene profoundly unsettles the modern social sciences. Theories grounded in the nature/society dualism are unsuited to reckoning with proliferating environmental risks and destructive interdependencies between socio-economic institutions and Earth Systems dynamics. Across the social sciences, critical genealogies of incumbent paradigms and new interdisciplinary perspectives are required to equip scholars for our rapidly changing environmental context. CPE has both an important responsibility for engaging in this project and much to offer if it does. Given the causal complicity of fossil-fuel capitalism in the making of the Anthropocene, and the centrality of economic transformation to ameliorating its effects, those of us who take capitalism as our object of study have a special responsibility to engage these issues. In a more concretely institutional sense, scholars of CPE have much to offer as a framework for understanding, evaluating, and guiding comparative pathways of green transition.

In this article, I have begun a critical genealogy of CPE’s modern development with the intention of appraising and encouraging the field’s capacity to engage substantively with the challenge of green transition. Retracing the field’s historical development, I argued that CPE’s post-war emergence alongside the crystallisation of growth’s hegemony instilled scholarship with an assumption of the environmental neutrality of economic development and an uncritical disposition towards growth. Appraising the more recent emergence of VOC and Growth Models approaches, I examined CPE’s paradoxical narrowing around an uncritical orientation to growth maximisation despite mounting environmental threats and heightened awareness of the links between capitalism and climate. In the penultimate section, I developed provisional hypotheses intended to tentatively recalibrate CPE scholarship towards fuller engagement with environmental issues. These hypotheses need to be evaluated through comparative empirical assessments of diverse national plans and pathways towards green transition.

I have made the case that ‘climate issues’ are not simply another empirical domain to be incorporated into existing CPE approaches, but rather require reconsideration of our approach to studying comparative capitalisms. I finish by calling for CPE to rediscover the conjunctural sensitivity and responsiveness that is a hallmark of the field, rather than succumbing to forms of intellectual path dependency that limit its analytical horizons and practical applications. Recognising capitalism’s environmental embeddedness requires rethinking theoretical foundations and decentring CPE’s preoccupations with economic growth. What we might establish as a comparative analytical metric and normative goal in place of growth, or whether indeed we should seek a direct substitute for GDP’s role, remains an open question requiring further consideration by scholars of CPE.

Notes

1.

Karl Polanyi’s (1944) concept of embeddedness offers a promising ontological foundation for this effort.

2.

Earth Systems science understands the Earth as a holistic complex system that contains subsystems, such as the atmosphere and biosphere, that are ‘pervaded and connected by constant flows of matter and energy, in immense feedback loops’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016).

3.

Jonsson (2014, p. 2) also draws attention to a shadow history of economic thought that recognises ecological ‘limits’.

4.

A recent ‘state of the art’ CPE contribution to the journal Socio-Economic Review makes only one, footnoted, reference to climate or environmental issues in its synopsis of ‘New approaches to political economy’ (Amable et al, 2019).

5.

Green growth perspectives range from Green Keynesian emphases on green investment’s employment-enhancing potential to Schumpeterian convictions in a new clean energy revolution (Jacobs, 2012, Meckling & Allan, 2020).

6.

Much like VOC, though, there is still a functionalist sense that Growth Models call forth their own self-reproduction (Clift & McDaniel, 2021, p. 6).

7.

Path dependency refers to the declining reversibility of institutional trajectories over time. It is driven by ‘positive feedback’ – the self-reinforcing nature of specific institutional arrangements (Pierson, 2004, p. 18).

8.

Contributions of ideational or discursive political economy, identifying how goals and policy framings for comparative economic development are socially constructed, are particularly salient here (Clift, 2014, Hay, 2016, Schmidt, 2008).

9.

Linear notions of temporal development are also likely to be disrupted by the triggering of potential ‘tipping points’ prompting disruptive step changes in Earth Systems dynamics (Spratt & Dunlop, 2018, Steffen et al., 2018, Keys et al., 2019).

10.

The state’s importance to green transition has been recognised within long-standing debates over the characteristics of the ‘green state’ and the ‘environmental state’ (Paterson, 2016).

11.

Food and drink, for example, have large environmental impacts across the value chain (European Commission, 2019, p. 5).

12.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and Russia all feature in the top ten carbon emitting countries due to their large oil, gas, and coal industries, despite not figuring in the ten largest economies in the world (climatetrade.com).

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Anthropocene, Uncategorized

Prospective technology assessment in the Anthropocene: A transition toward a culture of sustainability

Martin Möller and Rainer Grießhammer

https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196221095700

Abstract

In the Anthropocene, humankind has become a quasi-geological force. Both the rapid development as well as the depth of intervention of new technologies result in far-reaching and irreversible anthropogenic changes in the Earth’s natural system. However, early and development-accompanying evaluation of technologies are not yet common sense. Against this background, this review article aims to compile the current state of knowledge with regard to the early sustainability assessment of technologies and to classify this status quo with respect to the key challenges of the Anthropocene. To that end, the paper initially outlines major existing definitions and framings of the term of sustainability. Key milestones, concepts and instruments with regard to the development of sustainability assessment and technology assessment (TA) methodologies are also presented. Based on this overview, the energy sector is used as an example to discuss how mirroring ongoing transformation processes can contribute to the further development of the TA framework in order to ensure an agile, goal-oriented, and future-proof assessment system.

Introduction

For the first time in history, human development is characterized by a coupling of technological, social and geological processes. In this new geological epoch of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), humankind has become a quasi-geological force that profoundly and irreversibly alters the functioning of the Earth’s natural system (Potsdam Memorandum, 2007).

The main reasons for this extraordinarily high range of human activity are the exponential increase in the world’s population, production and consumption, as well as an increasing acceleration of industrial processes. New technologies are being developed that enable a particular high sectoral depth of intervention as well as a fast marketing of products and applications. As a result, they impose significant pressure on a wide range of sectors to change and adapt to the speed of innovation. Ultimately, society as a whole is urged to react to the impacts generated by the new technologies. A prominent example of a technology with such a high level of intervention is additive manufacturing. Also known as 3D printing, additive manufacturing is seen as a key technology for digitalization due to their production flexibility, the possibilities for function integration and product individualization. Beyond acceleration of innovation times, however, their use also allows for a reduction in component weight and thus a reduction in operating costs, which can promote resource-efficient manufacturing (Bierdel et al., 2019). However, additive manufacturing can create new consumption incentives due to faster product cycles and poses risks to new producers by shifting work and related hazardous substance risks to residential environments (Umweltbundesamt, 2018).

Both the rapid development as well as the depth of intervention of new technologies and materials result in anthropogenic changes in Earth system processes that can otherwise only be caused by meteorite impacts, continental drift and cyclical fluctuations in the Sun-Earth constellation. For example, the effects on the Earth’s nitrogen cycle are particularly serious. Through the ability to synthesize artificial nitrogen compounds by means of the Haber Bosch process, humans have managed to feed 48% of the global population. With increases in fertilizer usage, however, the nitrogen cycle has been pushed far beyond sustainability and nitrate pollution being responsible for increasing dead zones in coastal areas. Furthermore, due to the use of fossil fuels and intensive agriculture, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have reached a level last approached about 3 to 5 million years ago, a period when global average surface temperature is estimated to have been about 2°C–3.5°C higher than in the pre-industrial period (NAS and Royal Society, 2020).

The harmful effects of the technologies on the biosphere are fueled by the fact that technological developments are usually faster than political and technical countermeasures. Moreover, in many cases, technical countermeasures still focus on efficiency improvement strategies, less hazardous substitutions of substances as well as end-of-pipe cleaning technologies. While this approach has yielded some success in the past, it also entails the risk of rebound effects.

Against this background, there is an increasing need for comprehensive approaches to analysis and solutions. Hence, the following key questions arise how to deal with the challenges regarding the prospective assessment of technologies in the era of the Anthropocene:

Firstly, which applications of technologies are beneficial with respect to a sustainable development, and which ones we should rather abandon?

Secondly, which methodological approach can be used to assess and influence the development of new technologies right from the beginning and with sufficient certainty of direction?

Thirdly, who is responsible and competent to perform the evaluation on the sustainability performance of technologies and to make corresponding decisions concerning their future roadmap?

Ultimately, how can we transform technosphere and society to a culture of sustainability, in other words: “Can humanity adapt to itself?” (Toussaint et al., 2012)

In order to elaborate viable answers to these fundamental questions, this paper aims to review existing definitions of sustainability as well as approaches of sustainability assessment of technologies and associated tools within the era of the Anthropocene. Hence, it first addresses the issue of framing the term of sustainability in the era of the Anthropocene (section 2). Based on a brief overview in section 3 how sustainability assessment methodologies evolved in the past, major milestones and concepts with regard to the technology assessment (TA) framework are described in section 4, with particular focus on the concept of prospective TA. In section 5, we use the energy sector as an example to discuss how mirroring ongoing transformation processes in major areas of need can contribute to the further development of the TA framework. Finally, section 6 is dedicated to conclusions and outlook.

Sustainability in the Anthropocene

Sustainability is a delicate term. Its inflationary use in politics, science and society has rendered it increasingly arbitrary and often blurs the view of its core meaning. Sustainability as a concept was introduced more than 300 years ago by chief miner Hans-Carl von Carlowitz on the occasion of a serious raw material crisis: Wood, at that time the most important raw material for ore mining, had become noticeably scarce and without appropriate countermeasures, the operation of smelting furnaces and consequently silver production would not have been further possible within a foreseeable future. Driven by these economic requirements, von Carlowitz proposed a new principle of forest management, which envisaged taking only as much wood from the forests in a given period of time as could grow back again in the same period (Töpfer, 2013; von Carlowitz, 1713).

In the discussions about the scarcity of natural resources in the 1970s (cf. Meadows et al., 1972), the concept of sustainability was taken up again and experienced a renaissance through its further development in terms of content. Environmental and social aspects of sustainability have been placed more and more in the foreground. Hence, sustainability has increasingly been understood as a major global transformation process (Grießhammer and Brohmann, 2015; see also section 5), which is reflected in particular in the term of a “sustainable development.” Another milestone in the framing of sustainability as a concept with normative relevance has been achieved in the World Commission on Environment and Development. In its report, the so-called “Brundtland Report,” the commission defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: without page). With this definition, the aspects of intra– and intergenerational equity were introduced and particularly emphasized in the sustainability debate. Furthermore, the “Brundtland Report” frames sustainable development as a necessary transformation process of economy and society as it points out that:

“Sustainable development is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: without page).

Since the 1990s, the debate on how intergenerational justice is to be achieved has been dominated by two diverging perceptions of the concept of sustainability, referred to as “strong sustainability” and “weak sustainability”:

Strong sustainability postulates to preserve the entire natural capital of the Earth. Human capital and natural capital are perceived to be complementary, but not interchangeable. This means that humans, as users of nature, may live only from the “interest” of the natural capital. Any consumption of non-renewable resources would therefore be ruled out, and renewable resources could only be used within their regeneration rate (Som et al., 2009).

Weak sustainability calls only for preserving of the Earth’s total anthropogenic and natural capital. Accordingly, humanity could reduce natural capital to any degree if it was substituted in return by anthropogenic capital with the same economic value (Solow, 1986).

At the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the concept of sustainable development was recognized as an internationally guiding principle. The underlying idea was that economic efficiency, social justice and the safeguarding of the natural basis of life are interests that are equally important for survival and complement each other. Although 27 fundamental principles for sustainable development are enshrined in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (United Nations, 1992), for more than 10 years no concrete sustainability goals and indicators existed that would have been suitable in particular for the sustainability assessment of products and technologies.

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the member states of the United Nations for the first time agreed upon a universal catalog of fixed time-specific targets. These 17 SDGs (see Figure 1) and the corresponding 169 targets can be considered as the interdisciplinary normative basis of sustainability research, covering all three dimensions of sustainable development, that is, environmental, economic, and social aspects (United Nations, 2015).

Figure 1. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.Source: UNDP (2016).

The 2030 Agenda is universal in scope, which means that it commits all countries to contribute toward a comprehensive effort for global sustainability in all its dimensions while ensuring equity, peace and security. Furthermore, with its central, transformative promise “leave no one behind,” it is based on the principle to take on board even the weakest and most vulnerable. Hence, it seeks to eradicate poverty in all its forms as well as to combat discrimination and rising inequalities within and amongst countries (BMUV, 2022; SDGF, 2016; United Nations, 2021).

As a major specification of the 2030 Agenda, the concept of Planetary Boundaries focusses on the environmental dimension of sustainability. This approach put forward by Rockström et al. (2009) echoes the concept of “strong sustainability” (see above) and has been updated and extended by Steffen et al. (2015). At its core, it identifies nine global biophysical processes, whose significant changes can lead to conditions on Earth that are no longer considered a “safe operating space for humanity.” According to Steffen et al. (2015), several of the global biophysical processes are already beyond an uncertainty range with a high risk of dangerous changes on the planetary scale. These include the integrity of the biosphere (expressed as genetic diversity) and biogeochemical material flows, especially nitrogen and phosphorus. Others (e.g. climate change and land use change) are considered to be in an area of high uncertainty with an increasing risk of dangerous changes.

In 2016, Rockström and Sukhdev presented a new way of framing the SDGs of the 2030 Agenda. According to the concept of “strong sustainability” they argued that economies and societies should be perceived as embedded parts of the biosphere (Stockholm Resilience Center, 2016). This perspective is illustrated by the so-called “Wedding Cake” model (see Figure 2) and challenges the predominant understanding expressed by the “Three Pillars” model of sustainability (cf. Barbier, 1987) that environmental, economic and social development can be regarded as separate parts. Hence, the “Wedding Cake” model of sustainability can be understood as a combination of the 2030 Agenda and the concept of Planetary Boundaries since it calls for a transition toward a world logic where the economy serves society so that both economy and society can evolve within the “safe operating space” of the planet.

Figure 2. The “Wedding Cake” model of sustainability.Source: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

The link between SDGs and Planetary Boundaries is of paramount importance in the age of the Anthropocene. Even though the SDGs have been lauded for amplifying the global development agenda by including environmental, social and economic concerns, the 2030 Agenda remains committed to a growth-oriented development that potentially conflicts with keeping human development within the Planetary Boundaries as defined by Rockström et al. (2009). A striking example of the growth-oriented concept can be found in SDG target 8.1, which requires to “sustain per capita economic growth in accordance with national circumstances and, in particular, at least 7% gross domestic product growth per annum in the least developed countries” (United Nations, 2015). Against this background, substantial changes toward more sufficient consumption patterns that help to remain within the Earth’s environmental carrying capacity need to be established and promoted by setting corresponding political framework conditions (Fischer and Grießhammer, 2013).

Evolvement of sustainability assessment methodologies

The scientific methodology for assessing the sustainability of technologies, material or products is far less developed than the debate on sustainable development and sustainable consumption would suggest. However, initial approaches in this respect were developed by the Öko-Institut as early as 1987 (Öko-Institut, 1987). The concept of the Produktlinienanalyse (English “product line analysis”), representing a pioneering step in the development of methods for life cycle-based analyses, made it possible to record the environmental, economic, and social impacts of products along the whole product line.

Nevertheless, at the end of the 1990ies, the product-related Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) became established and standardized on the international level, representing a methodology which assesses only the environmental impacts of a product over its entire life-cycle. The decisive standards of LCA are ISO 14040 (2006) and ISO 14044 (2006), which have become widely applied. These international standards essentially describe the process of conducting LCAs, examining the impact of a product from “cradle to grave.” Particular attention is paid in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 to the scoping of a LCA study, with concrete requirements on the choice of the system boundaries, the functional unit (i.e. the quantified performance of the investigated product system for use as a reference unit) and the data quality requirements. In addition, the performance of a critical review by an independent third party is envisaged as a quality assurance step.

Sustainability assessments, however, did not advance until the 2000s, with the detailed method descriptions PROSA (Product Sustainability Assessment) by the Öko-Institut (Grießhammer et al., 2007) and SEE-Balance (Socio-Eco-Efficiency Analysis) by the chemical company BASF (Kicherer, 2005; Saling, 2016). Even for the sub-methods of Life Cycle Costing (Swarr et al., 2011) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (Grießhammer et al., 2006; UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, 2009), method descriptions were presented comparatively late. There are also proposals to combine the three sub-methods of Life Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Costing and Social Life Cycle Assessment to form the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) (Feifel et al., 2010; Finkbeiner, 2011). However, in contrast to PROSA, the aim is not to analyze and evaluate needs and the realized product benefits, even though meeting basic needs through products is one of the central demands of Agenda 21. Whereas initially the sustainability of only relatively simple products such as food, textiles, or detergents had been assessed, in recent years the sustainability performance of complex products such as notebooks (Manhart and Grießhammer, 2006) and telecommunications services (Prakash et al., 2016) as well as emerging technologies and materials (Möller et al., 2012) has also been analyzed.

For many years, the comparatively open or specific selection of indicators for conducting sustainability assessment case studies was justified by the lack of a relevant normative framework as well as a generally accepted set of indicators. With the adoption of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda in 2015, this has fundamentally changed (cf. section 2). In addition to its 17 SDGs and 169 targets, the 2030 Agenda provides a globally accepted system of indicators for measuring the SDGs. However, only a few dozen of the 169 targets explicitly refer to products and companies. In a recently completed research project (Eberle et al., 2021) funded by the German Federal Ministry on Education and Research a method was developed which provided for a reasoned restriction to those indicators to the achievement of which products, services and companies can actually contribute. By means of the method, it is possible for the first time to measure the contribution to the achievement of the SDGs at the level of products and services and thus to establish a link between LCA and SLCA results and the 2030 Agenda (Eberle and Wenzig, 2020). To complete the assessment, an in-depth analysis of societal benefits according to Möller et al. (2021a) can be supplemented, which is also based on the 2030 Agenda. In this way, additional benefit aspects of the products and services considered beyond their core benefits can be identified with a view to the SDGs.

As our experience from practice has shown, for the sustainability assessment of any object of investigation, the respective functionality is of utmost importance and must therefore be considered and defined in detail. In this context, a careful definition of the functional unit as defined in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 is considered to be essential. In addition, a detailed analysis of the various benefit aspects of the studied object is recommended. Against this background, there is no technology, material or product that is sustainable per se. Only the way a technology, material or product is handled and used over its whole life-cycle may be more or less sustainable. Therefore, their sustainability performance always has to be analyzed and evaluated in the context of the intended application and with regard to a possible contribution to a sustainable development. Absolute statements such as “sustainable plastics,” often combined with the addition “due to recyclability,” must therefore be rated very critically. Recyclability, which is often regarded as synonymous with sustainability in the marketing of materials, depends on available recycling infrastructure, which typically only exists in the materials sector where it is economically viable.

Another important lesson learned from several decades of sustainability assessment is that assessment systems have changed and evolved significantly in the past. As sustainability assessment has been driven by emerging environmental risks, further developments in the normative framework and societal developments, the assessment methodology had to evolve as well. Notable examples of additions to the assessment methodology with respect to the environmental dimension of sustainability are the issues of greenhouse effect and ozone depletion in the 1980s and the microplastic problem in the recent past. It can be assumed that the aforementioned drivers will continue to influence sustainability assessment in the future. For a future-proof sustainability assessment methodology, it is therefore essential that newly emerging risks can be identified at an early stage. This calls for a flexible and adaptive assessment framework as well as an interdisciplinary exchange, especially between natural and social sciences (Möller et al., 2021b).

Evolvement of technology assessment

Roughly in the second half of the 20th century, undesirable side effects of progress in science and technology increasingly manifested themselves in the form of risks and concrete damaging events and thus found their way into the collective consciousness of society. The almost ubiquitous emergence of persistent pollutants like the pesticide DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) in the environment and the risks of nuclear power can be regarded as particularly controversial examples in this respect (Carson, 1962; Grunwald, 2019). Accordingly, the appearance of these phenomena is considered to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene era. As a result, a consensus previously largely in place, which equated scientific and technological progress with social progress, was increasingly questioned. Against this background, researchers were more and more confronted with the challenge of reflecting not only on the possible consequences of science-based technologies, but also on the epistemological foundations of their own actions (Kollek and Döring, 2012).

Consequently, the concept of TA became established in the 1960s, particularly in the United States, with early studies focusing on the issue of environmental pollution, but also issues like the supersonic transport, and ethics of genetic screening (Banta, 2009). One of the basic motivations of TA is to deal with possible short- and long-term consequences of scientific and technological progress (e.g. societal, economic, ethical, and legal impacts) as early and comprehensively as possible, in order to enable formative interventions (Grunwald, 2010, 2019). The ultimate goal of early TA studies was to provide policy makers as primary target group with information on policy alternatives (Banta, 2009).

One of the key challenges for TA relates to the question of how to respond to emerging technologies, that is novel technologies that are still at an early stage of their development. Especially in the case of basic research-oriented R&D work, the new developments are characterized by low technology readiness levels (cf. Mankins, 1995), that is the R&D results are still relatively far away from entering the market in the form of tangible products. The relatively low maturity of the technologies results in a very limited availability of quantitative data on subsequent product specifications and potential environmental impacts. On the other hand, addressing sustainability aspects at such an early stage in the innovation process basically offers an excellent window of opportunity to avoid possible weaknesses with regard to sustainable development and to identify existing strengths. This situation is often referred as the Collingridge Dilemma (Collingridge, 1980): In the infancy of an emerging technology, the potential to influence its properties is particularly high, but the knowledge about its sustainability impacts is comparatively low. Later on, the understanding on the consequences of an emerging technology is expected to increase, yet the possibilities for shaping its design may already be significantly reduced by already existing path dependencies (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Dependencies between the maturity of a technology, the knowledge about environmental, health safety and social (EHS/S) impacts as well as the ability to prevent corresponding risks.Source: Köhler and Som (2014).

Against this background, an ideal period for the assessment and eco-design of emerging technologies would be during the innovation stages of “applied technology development” or “product design.” In these stages, the ability to prevent sustainability risks is still relatively high (cf. curve with solid line in Figure 3) and, at the same time, the quantity and quality of data required for a sustainability assessment are increasing significantly. However, a sustainability assessment in the stage of “basic science and material research” is well before this ideal period.

Basically, the dilemma outlined by Collingridge presupposes a fundamental separation between cognition and action as well as between science and technology. With the emergence of the concept of “technosciences,” however, this hypothesis has been increasingly challenged since about the mid-1980s by postulating a constitutive relationship between science and technology (Haraway, 1997; Hottois, 1984; Latour, 1987). Hence, the characteristic feature of technosciences is a far-reaching convergence of science and technology on all levels of action and effect, of materiality and culture (Kastenhofer, 2010).

The concept of technosciences has been adopted by anthropologists, philosophers and sociologists in science and technology studies as well as in the field of philosophy of science (e.g. Hacking, 1983; Nordmann, 2006; Pickering, 1992). Other TA concepts attach less emphasis to the intertwining of science, technology and society, but rather aim to start TA as early as possible. These include the “constructive Technology Assessment” developed by Schot and Rip (1997), which does not focus primarily on the possible consequences of a technology but aims to assist in shaping its design, development and implementation process. In this context, it was also proposed that a “real-time assessment” should accompany technology development from the outset and integrate social science issues as well as policy and governance aspects at a very early stage (Guston and Sarewitz, 2002).

Nevertheless, the concept of technosciences generated important impulses to scrutinize and reconsider some of the central assumptions underlying many existing TA concepts. In this context, Liebert and Schmidt (2010) point out that the goals and purposes of innovation processes, which are often clearly articulated and recognizable in the context of technosciences, offer the possibility of unlocking knowledge about the respective technology development. Hence, they challenge the assumption of general knowledge deficits as stipulated by the Collingridge Dilemma. Furthermore, they argue that technosciences are usually developed and applied by many different actors. In this respect, the fiction of a control of technology (especially by political actors) as advocated in early TA concepts will increasingly shift to a paradigm of collaborative design.

Consequently, TA should be framed as a “Prospective Technology Assessment” (ProTA) and initiate phases of science- and technology-related reflection as early as possible:

“ProTA aims to shape technologies by shaping the goals, intentions and attitudes from the perspective of the anticipated consequences and realistic potentials” (Liebert and Schmidt, 2010: 114).

According to Liebert and Schmidt (2010), ProTA requires a normative framework that can be derived from the history of philosophical reflection. Concerning the underlying ethical criteria, two antagonistic principles are outlined: The “heuristics of fear” (Jonas, 1979) and the “principle of hope” (Bloch, 1959), which in combination serve as a mindset for shaping emerging technologies as well as technoscience as a whole and that entails four different types of orientation: human, social, environmental as well as future orientation.

Furthermore, ProTA is also strongly perceived as a participatory approach. In contrast to an observation from an external perspective (as practiced in earlier TA concepts), ProTA should become part of a of self-reflection and self-criticism among scientists and engineers within the R&D stage itself that also includes the perspective of societal and political actors (Fisher et al., 2006; Liebert and Schmidt, 2010).

Discussion

As the evolutionary history of TA has shown, an early assessment of technologies and their impacts on environment and society is possible in principle. Despite of the epistemic limitations caused by the Collingridge Dilemma, the concept of ProTA provides a participatory and incremental self-reflection process that facilitates data acquisition even during the early stages of R&D and thus enables the shaping of technologies throughout the innovation process. One of the most important features of ProTA is a well-defined normative framework. Yet Liebert and Schmidt developed the associated criteria several years before the establishment of the 2030 Agenda. With its 17 SDGs and the 169 SDG targets, however, substantial opportunities have been created to concretize the normative framework of TA, especially with respect to a sustainable development. Hence, by referencing to the 2030 Agenda, a comprehensive sustainability assessment of technologies has become possible (Eberle et al., 2021; Möller et al., 2021a). Even more than that, with the 2030 Agenda representing a globally accepted framework that all United Nation member states have committed themselves, sustainability assessment of technologies has become an obligation.

In order to ensure goal-oriented and future-proof assessments, TA methodology needs to be able to recognize changes regarding its assessment criteria at an early stage, as already pointed out in section 3. For early detection, the investigation of existing and predicted transformation processes plays an important role in this context.

Transformations can lead to structural paradigmatic changes at all levels of society, for example in culture, value attitudes, technologies, production, consumption, infrastructures and politics. The corresponding processes take place co-evolutionarily, simultaneously or with a time lag in different areas or sectors, and can significantly influence, strengthen or weaken each other. The decisive factor for a transformation is that those processes become more and more condensed over time and, in the sense of a paradigm shift, lead to fundamental irreversible changes in the prevailing system. Transformations can be unplanned or intentional, they can take several decades and proceed at very different speeds (Grießhammer and Brohmann, 2015).

In contrast to the non-targeted transformations of the past (such as the first and second industrial revolution), it is now presumed that intentional transformations (e.g. the “Energiewende,” i.e. the transition of the energy system in Germany) can be significantly influenced and accelerated in a desired direction, but nevertheless not controlled in detail. This assumption is based on the recently available knowledge and experience of complex control, governance and strategy approaches (Grießhammer and Brohmann, 2015). The fundamental possibility of influencing or even controlling transitions is expressed by the term “transition management” (Kemp and Loorbach, 2006).

For understanding transition management, a multi-level perspective is fundamental. Accordingly, three different levels exist in each system under consideration, referred to as niches, regime, and landscape, with interactions between these levels (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Multi-level perspective of transition management (Grießhammer and Brohmann, 2015; modified based on Geels, 2002).

At the level of the prevailing regime, Grießhammer and Brohmann (2015) distinguish eight fields of action or sub-systems of society in which transformative innovations and initiatives can influence each other or proceed in a co-evolutionary manner. These eight fields of action are defined as follows:

Values and models: normative orientations such as values, socially or legally formulated goals, guiding principles or ideas for society as a whole or for individual areas of need (e.g. “Limits to Growth” according to Meadows et al., 1972);

Behaviors and lifestyles: individual and society-wide shared (consumption) actions, everyday practices and habits, which can often deviate significantly from values and consciousness (e.g. dietary habits);

Social and temporal structures: social and culturally determining structures (such as different gender roles or demographic shifts) as well as temporal factors (such as the duration of the transformation, windows of opportunities or diffusion processes of innovations);

•

Physical infrastructures: permanent material structures that influence or even dominate the action spaces for groups of actors (e.g. road network);

Markets and financial systems: market structures (e.g. degree of concentration, globalization) and market processes such as supply, demand and prices of goods and services;

Technologies, products, and services: individual products and services as well as overarching technologies that can act as a key driver of transformations;

Research, education, and knowledge: science, research and development in practice as well as their institutional constitution, appropriate educational measures at various levels as well as knowledge stocks required for transformations;

Policies and institutions: control instruments such as commandments and prohibitions, financial incentives or informational instruments, as well as the associated institutional and organizational framework (e.g. state bodies, competencies, separation of powers, course of the democratic process and legal framework).

The analysis of the determining factors of a transformation process and their possible impact on the method of sustainability assessment of technologies shall be exemplified by the transformation in the energy sector representing an area of need where general principles for the sustainability assessment of technologies have already been formulated (cf. Grunwald and Rösch, 2011). The following table summarizes the findings from this exercise and provides an overview of the determining factors for the fields of action in the energy sector. In this respect, it has to be noted that the scope of the investigation refers to the specific situation in Germany.

Many of the identified determining factors for the fields of action are transformation processes themselves. Digitalization, for example, is coupling the energy transition with the ongoing industrial revolution in information and communication technologies. Furthermore, the transition of the energy sector influences the energy supply for the transport system as well as for the building stock, and vice versa. The parallel transformations can influence, support, or hinder each other. For example, electromobility generates a higher demand for renewable electricity; on the other hand, the batteries installed in cars provide a storage option for electricity. In this context, it is also important to consider the various and partly rivaling innovations emerging from niches (cf. Figure 4). These include e-cars, for example, but also fuel cell cars and e-bikes as a fundamental alternative. The same is applicable for phenomena at the level of the greater landscape: The efforts of an increasing number of companies to achieve climate neutrality play an eminently important role here, as the demand for renewably generated energy will continue to grow significantly. However, the current consequences and long-term effects of the Corona pandemic could lead to significant energy savings through a reduction in air travel, at least in the short to medium term.

The concept of ProTA is currently implemented in the Cluster of Excellence “Living, Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems” (livMatS) funded by the German Research Foundation. The vision of this cluster is to develop novel, bioinspired materials systems, which adapt autonomously to their environment and harvest clean energy from it. The research and development work in livMatS aims to provide innovative solutions for various applications, particularly in the field of energy technologies. Sustainability, psychological acceptance and ethical approval form essential claims of the work done in livMatS. Therefore, prospective reflection of the sustainability aspects as well as research into consumer acceptance and social relevance of the developed material systems form an integral part of livMatS work right from the very beginning (livMatS, 2022).

The prospective TA of the technologies and materials to be developed in the livMatS cluster is designed as a tiered approach called TAPAS (Tiered Approach for Prospective Assessment of Benefits and Challenges). The ultimate goal is the design of a new development-integrated sustainability assessment framework that starts with interactive early tools on a qualitative basis (e.g. questionnaires and prospective chemicals assessment) and also covers quantitative case studies. Development-integrated assessment entails that the methodology both encourages and enables the innovators themselves to carry out assessments on sustainability, ethics and consumer issues as part of the innovation process (Möller et al., 2021c).

With regard to the livMatS materials, the ongoing transformation in the energy sector has considerable influence on the potential application fields: In their efforts to become climate-neutral, companies will make much greater efforts to harness previously unused (waste) energy. Energy harvesting in industrial processes as well as in the mobility sector and in buildings will consequently gain considerably in importance and may become common practice. For example, due to progress in digitalization, there will be more and more sensors at peripheral locations requiring power supply. Moreover, prosumers may also find it attractive in the future to feed harvested energy of their own solar systems into the grid, especially at times of high energy prices.

For the methodology of the prospective sustainability assessment, however, no fundamentally new issues can be identified on the basis of the available findings, which could not be captured by the existing toolbox. This can be justified with a closer look to the relevant technological approaches (digitalization, hydrogen technology, energy harvesting) presented in Table 1, as their respective designs do not reveal any radically new materials and process configurations. This assessment, however, needs to be subject to continuous review as the new material systems mature. Furthermore, it should be noted that for sustainability assessments in living labs and citizen science projects, instruments are required that provide meaningful and consistent results even when used by laypersons. In this context, a tiered approach as described in section 4 is also expected to be beneficial.Table 1. Determining factors for the fields of action in the energy sector.

Fields of actionDetermining factors in the energy sector in Germany
Values and models“Energiewende” (English: “energy transition”) mission statement with a focus on renewable energies (Krause et al., 1980)
Rejection of nuclear energy by a vast majority of the German population (Statista, 2021)
Fridays for Future activities and demonstrations push debate about climate change and renewable energy back to the forefront of the political agenda (Marquardt, 2020)
Behaviors and lifestylesProsumer movement leads to a constantly increasing number of consumers who simultaneously consume electricity and supply it to the grid, for example via an own photovoltaic system (Agora Energiewende, 2017; BMWi, 2016)
Social and temporal structuresFukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 as a major window of opportunity for the nuclear phase-out (Bernardi et al., 2018)
Increase in the share of smaller households with a specifically higher electricity demand (Umweltbundesamt, 2020)
Flexible and time-dependent pricing structures (e.g. variable electricity prices) and process conversions in industry and commerce (operating energy-intensive processes during the day instead of previously at night) foster load management (Agora Energiewende, 2017)
Physical infrastructuresDigitalization enables the networking of electricity generators and consumers, for example, through smart meter gateways, that is, intelligent metering systems consisting of a communication unit and a digital electricity meter (Agora Energiewende, 2017; BMWi, 2016, 2017)
Coupling of the electricity sector with the building, mobility and various industrial sectors, turning (renewably generated) electricity into the most important energy source (Agora Energiewende, 2017; BMWi, 2017)
Markets and financial systemsDecentralization of power generation (formerly a few large fossil-based power plants to currently several million small and large renewable energy plants) creates new market players and enables new business models (Agora Energiewende, 2017)
Strong cost degression in electricity generation from renewable sources (e.g. by 90% regarding photovoltaics) enables an energy system based on solar and wind power (Agora Energiewende, 2017)
Technologies, products and servicesNew energy storage systems (especially “green” hydrogen technology) for intermediate storage of electricity from renewable sources (Matthes et al., 2020)
Efficiency increase in the use of electricity both at industrial plants and in household appliances (Agora Energiewende, 2017)
Energy harvesting technologies enable the use of previously dissipated photonic energy, thermal energy or kinetic energy (Fraunhofer, 2018)
Research, education and knowledgeLiving labs and citizen science projects explore sustainable energy technologies (e.g. hydrogen technology) under real conditions and on an industrial scale (BMWi, 2020)
Policies and institutionsLiberalization of the electricity market since the 1990ies enables a flexible and efficient response to volatile power generation from renewable energy sources (DENA, 2021)
 Substantial financial incentives for renewable energy generation through the Renewable Energy Sources Act since 2000 (EEG, 2021)
 Nuclear phase-out (by 2022) and coal phase-out (by 2038), that is political decision by the German federal government to stop operating nuclear power plants (Bundesregierung, 2011, 2021)

Source: Own compilation.

Conclusions and outlook

In light of the findings and the results of the previous sections, the four fundamental questions from the introduction will be revisited and answered as far as possible.

With regard to the first question, it could be demonstrated that universal and absolute statements on the sustainability of technologies are just as misleading as they are for materials or products. Possible contributions to a sustainable development can only be discovered in a case-by-case analysis of the entire product-line and in the context of the functionality and benefits of the object under investigation.

Secondly, an early and prospective assessment of sustainability of technologies requires a flexible and tiered approach. In this respect, we reference the TAPAS framework that aims to establish a new tiered development-integrated assessment methodology within the livMatS Cluster of Excellence. To enable assessments at an early stage and with sufficient certainty of direction, TAPAS starts with interactive early tools (e.g. questionnaires and prospective chemicals assessment) which are incrementally underpinned with quantitative case studies in an iterative process. In order to ensure an agile, goal-oriented and future-proof evaluation system, TAPAS also includes a careful reflection of ongoing transformation processes in application sectors (e.g. the energy sector) that are relevant to the technology. The prospective mirroring of the determinants of transformation processes of related areas of need as described in section 5 aims to provide a further feature for the continuous refinement of the TA framework, especially with regard to ProTA.

As of third, the assessment of the sustainability performance of technologies should include much greater involvement of those actors who are particularly good at overseeing and influencing the innovation process—the innovators themselves. To ensure sufficient feedback with society, science has to open up to the public and the participation of society in the sense of transdisciplinary research. In this respect, initial assessments of the technology developers need to be discussed in real laboratories, that is, open-innovation environments that focus on cooperation between science and the public in an experimental environment. Hence, suggestions from society should in return become part of the innovation process (Möller et al., 2021b).

Ultimately, in order to give humankind a chance to adapt to itself (Toussaint et al., 2012), technology and society need to co-evolve. Global agreements on normative goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda form a good starting point in this respect. For a culture of sustainability, however, policy should promote cooperation between actors for societally desirable transformation processes to a much greater extent. Equally important is a “greening” of ongoing transformations that are not induced by environmental policy (Grießhammer and Brohmann, 2015). The need to foster cooperation can be illustrated by the example of the energy transition: Driving forces for the “Energiewende” can already be found in all stakeholder groups, that is in civil society and governmental actors, but also in science and companies. Unfortunately, however, these players in many cases still act independently of each other. Instead, earlier and greater involvement of business and industry in ongoing transformation processes, support for new business models, and greater international cooperation would be needed.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC-2193/1 – 390951807.

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Celebrities and Climate Change

Michael K Goodman, Julie Doyle, Nathan Farrell

OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, CLIMATE SCIENCE

Summary and Keywords

Since the mid-2000s, entertainment celebrities have played increasingly prominent roles in the cultural politics of climate change, ranging from high-profile speeches at UN climate conferences, and social media interactions with their fans, to producing and appearing in documentaries about climate change that help give meaning to and communicate this issue to a wider audience. The role afforded to celebrities as climate change communicators is an outcome of a political environment increasingly influenced by public relations and attuned toward the media’s representation of political ideas, policies, and sentiments. Celebrities act as representatives of mass publics, operating within centers of elite political power. At the same time, celebrities represent the environmental concerns of their audiences; that is, they embody the sentiments of their audiences on the political stage. It is in this context that celebrities have gained their authority as political, social, and environmental “experts,” and the political performances of celebrities provide important ways to engage electorates and audiences with climate change action.

Contemporary celebrities work to shape how audiences and publics ought to feel about climate change in efforts to get them to act or change their behaviors. These “after data” moments are seen very clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood. Yet, with celebrities acting as our emotional witnesses, they not only might bring climate change to greater public attention, but they expand their brand through neoliberalism’s penchant for the commoditization of everything including, as here, care and concern for the environment. As celebrities build up their own personal capital as eco-warriors, they create very real value for the “celebrity industrial complex” that lies behind their climate media interventions. Climate change activism is, through climate celebrities, rendered as spectacle, with celebrities acting as environmental and climate pedagogues framing for audiences the emotionalized problems and solutions to global environmental change. Consequently, celebrities politicize emotions in ways that that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and actions that responsibilize audiences and the public.

Keywords: celebrity, climate change, affect, emotion, embodiment, spectacle, neoliberal, commodification, activism, media

Introduction

Given the increasing pervasiveness of celebrities in humanitarian and environmental campaigning since the late 1990s—as spokespeople for NGO campaigns (Anderson, 2013) and as creators of their own organizations (Alexander, 2013)—it is surprising that relatively little research has been undertaken to explore celebrity involvement in climate change campaigning and communication. Indeed, as the COP21 negotiations in December 2015 indicated, high-profile A-list celebrities were the “charismatic megafauna” (Boykoff, Goodman, & Littler, 2010) in Paris: They lent global star power to this high-profile political event by “expertly” navigating the intersections between media, politics, and science through speeches at the UN conference from actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Alec Baldwin, and former celebrity politician and actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the rise of “Celebritus Politicus” (Goodman, 2013) in recent years, it is not surprising that a global political event about the future of our planet would garner elite celebrity endorsement, yet research on understanding this growing “celebritization of climate change” (Boykoff & Goodman, 2009, p. 395) is relatively scarce.

Climate change communication scholars and practitioners have over the last decade called for more culturally meaningful and socially relevant forms of climate change communication that connect it to the cultural values, and mediated/social practices of our everyday lives (Boykoff, Goodman, & Curtis, 2009; Doyle, 2011; Moser & Dilling, 2008). Celebrities have arguably provided a significant response to these challenges, using their Celebrities and Climate Change celebrity status to draw media and cultural attention to climate change, helping to bring it within the popular cultural sphere, as well as utilizing their fan bases to mobilize engagement and action via social media (Alexander, 2013). But, they have done so through what might be termed the “spectacle”: highly visible, eye-catching, and visually exuberant media appearances that have the potential to distract audiences from the “real” environmental issues under scrutiny. Here, then, celebrities provide an important human dimension to climate change beyond polar bears and melting glaciers to develop a kind of “human embodiment of the spectacle” (Goodman, Littler, Brockington, & Boykoff, 2016) in the ways they utilize their very bodies to garner media and audience attention around environmental activism. Yet concurrently, these visible embodiments may render climate change as monetized and meaningless media performances rather than interventions related to the intricate social practices of the everyday or political realms.

This article explores these tensions to understand what is politically, socially, and ethically at stake in the growing celebritization of climate change. How is it that celebrities have come to be the preferred spokespeople for climate change at global scientific events, and in what ways might their involvement reshape the cultural politics of climate on a global, national, and everyday level? In order to explore these questions this article reviews a set of distinct and interrelated literatures from celebrity and media studies, cultural geography, development studies, and environmental and climate communication. The first part of the article examines the research on the historical developments of celebrity culture within mainly Western contexts in order to situate the changing media and political landscape through which celebrities have gained their authority as political, social and environmental “experts.” In doing so, it explores the emerging literature on celebrity activism in relation to humanitarian and environmental issues and considers the problematic ways in which politics and a commodified culture are mutually entwined and reinforced through the practices of celebrity. The article then moves on to examine the small amount of existing research on celebrity involvement with climate change specifically, and simultaneously draws upon the work of climate change communication scholars and practitioners to consider the possibilities and limitations of celebrity work on climate change. This allows an exploration of the broader sociopolitical-economic factors that shape celebrity work on climate change in the context of a media consumer culture, and a more specific investigation of celebrity’s role in (potentially) making climate change more visible and embodied for Western audiences.

From there, the article examines campaigns from 2014–2016, in which celebrities offer novel engagements with climate change, helping to move public discourse beyond scientific data, and facilitating more emotional and visceral connections with climate change. The article ends by speculating upon the challenges generated by such emotional particularly when undertaken by celebrities who may politicize emotions that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and action.

Celebrity Politics, or the Politics of Celebrity

In order to understand the role celebrities play in the cultural politics of climate change, it is important to establish how celebrities have come to occupy privileged position within 21st-century media, culture, and politics. Throughout history, famous or well known individuals have featured commonly within many cultures across the globe (Braudy, 1997), reflecting and re-inscribing the characteristics held in esteem within their particular societies. Consequently, historical fame reflected social structures that valorized rigid class distinctions and legitimized the inherited positions of social elites (Inglis, 2010). Despite these historical precedents of fame, contemporary celebrity culture is commonly understood within academic literature as a phenomenon of predominantly Western origin, arising in the 20th century (Schickel, 2000, p. 21; see also Rojek, 2012).

However, just as historical fame acted as an indicator of the moral, political, or economic orthodoxies of a society, due to the corresponding elevation of those individuals who embodied such ideals to the level of “famous,” contemporary celebrity culture reveals much about current global societies. In this instance, celebrity reflects and validates, to some degree, ideas of social mobility and the political ascendancy of the crowd, and is informed by what P. David Marshall credits as the “twinned discourses of modernity: democracy and capitalism” (Marshall, 2001, p. 4). As both of these intertwining discourses work to emphasize and centralize the individual—in the respective roles of citizen or consumer—it stands to reason that celebrity, with its “capacity to house conceptions of individuality and simultaneously to embody or help embody ‘collective configurations’ of the social world” (Marshall, 2001, pp. xi–xii), would assume such a primary position within current global cultures. Celebrities are simultaneously socially exceptional hyper-individuals and the embodiment of the affective will of their audiences. That the 20th and 21st centuries have witnessed a significant increase in the agency and territorial reach of the mass media industries within which many celebrities have forged their fame (Turner, 2013, p. 3), further helps to solidify their position. Richard Dyer, whose work on film stars (Dyer, 1979, 1986) provided a foundation for later scholarly work on celebrity, considers that stars reflect socially acceptable modes of being. They are role models for particular ways of being someone of a certain gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, etc. This imbues celebrities with considerable power and influence, which led to them being considered a type of “powerless elite” (Alberoni, 1972).

However, in more recent decades, the political activity and possible influence of celebrity upon formal politics has become more pronounced, particularly as politics has become increasingly mediatized and more heavily influenced by public relations. Developed as a means of explaining the “process of change in which politicians tend to adapt to various constraints imposed by the media” [original emphasis] (Asp, 2014, p. 351); “mediatization” refers to the ways in which aspects of social and political discourse are shaped to fit the structures and conventions of contemporary media platforms of communication. One outcome of mediatization is the convergence of celebrity and political cultures. This is further enabled by publics who, as John Corner and Dick Pels (2003) suggest, “want to vote for persons and their ideas rather than for political parties and their programmes.” In this context, Corner and Pels write, “political style” becomes a key “focus for post-ideological lifestyle choices, which are indifferent to the entrenched oppositions between traditional ‘isms’ and their institutionalization.” Instead, “more eclectic, fluid, issue-specific and personality-bound forms of political recognition and engagement” (2003, p. 7) are enacted. Consequently, the role of the political leader, “who must somehow embody the sentiments of the party, the people, and the state” has become aligned with the role of the celebrity, “who must somehow embody the sentiments of an audience” (Marshall, 2001, p. 203).

Outcomes of this emerging political formulation include the “celebrity politician” and the “political celebrity.” Defining and developing a taxonomy of celebrity politicians is a primary focus for some of the academic literature. John Street, for example, categorizes two types. Celebrity Politician Type 1 is represented by “the traditional politician who engages with the world of popular culture in order to enhance or advance their preestablished political functions and goals” (Street, 2004, p. 437). Celebrity Politician Type 2 “refers to the entertainer who pronounces on politics and claims the right to represent peoples and causes, but who does so without seeking or acquiring elected office” (Street, 2004, p. 438). Van Zoonen (2005) offers a more detailed typology of celebrity politician, the focus of which is the relative distance of the individual to traditional centers of political power. She focuses on four key points along a spectrum that runs from traditional politician and political insider, to political insider with mass media appeal, to political outsiders, to the celebrity performer who is also a political outsider. This article focuses more on the celebrity who pronounces on politics (Street, 2004) and the celebrity performer (Van Zoonen, 2005), rather than the celebrity politician, to explore the celebritization of climate change.

Consistent with this literature, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) develop a taxonomy informed by the institutional background of the individual. They offer a more diverse range of celebrity types that includes celebrity actors, celebrity politicians, celebrity athletes, celebrity business people, celebrity musicians, and celebrity public intellectuals, thus indicating the potential for different access points for audiences and forms of affective engagements with climate change. This is explored in more detail in the “CELEBRITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE” section of this article. What unites the various manifestations of the Celebrity Politician and/or Political Celebrity is that they provoke concerns among some commentators regarding “the trivialisation of public affairs” (Gitlin, 1997, p. 35); concerns that can be traced, perhaps, as far back as Daniel Boorstin’s dismissal of celebrity as the human “pseudoevent” (1963). Indeed, for Eric Louw (2010), celebrity politics amounts to a form of “pseudo politics.” Similarly, Daryl West expresses concerns about a political system “where star power is weighted more heavily than traditional political skills, such as bargaining, compromise and experience” (West, 2008, p. 83). Celebrities, it is thought, might crowd out more expert voices from public discourse. However, any consideration of the role of celebrities in the politics of climate change must account for the necessity of climate change being made culturally meaningful and accessible to a wide range of audiences beyond scientific and political discourse—a function that celebrities may be better placed to undertake given the dependency of their celebrity status on mediatization (Driessens, 2013).

Other scholars, perhaps taking their cue from Marshall and Street, turn away from questions of the legitimacy celebrities’ political interventions in terms of a potential dumbing down. Seeing this as something of a false dichotomy, they accept that celebrity activists serve as the embodiment of the affective responses of their audiences to a range of social and/or environmental concerns. They seek, instead, to determine the cultural, political, economic, and institutional factors that facilitate this and determine its form. One factor is the celebrity’s status as outsider to political establishments (Cooper, 2008). This is particularly the case when considering the decline in trust of traditional politicians and institutions, and the suspicion among the electorate that “politicians are in it for themselves and that they serve special interests” (West, 2008, p. 79). Nonpoliticians such as celebrities, West argues, are by contrast “considered more trustworthy and less partisan” (West, 2008, p. 79) because “[i]n a world where entangling alliances are the rule, these individuals are as close to free agents as one can find” (West, 2008, p. 81).

Celebrity Activism

The celebrity activist’s status as an embodied representation of the affective will of their audience, then, both reflects and informs the relationship of both to elite institutions: They are outsiders. However, as Van Zoonen suggests, the successful political celebrity projects a persona that has inside experience of politics but is still an outsider to political institutions (van Zoonen, 2005, p. 84). This distance from formal politics lends celebrity activists a type of moral authority, the meaning of which is transferrable to the cause with which they are associated. Yet, celebrity activists can provide clear qualitative benefits to humanitarian and environmental causes associating the cause with aspects of their public persona. They can, as Richey and Ponte suggest, “guarantee the cool quotient” of campaigns concerning issues that might otherwise be unappealing to mass publics (Richey & Ponte, 2011, p. 37). These qualitative benefits, provided by entertainment celebrities to environmental organizations, work in tandem with clear quantitative benefits: Celebrities can attract significant public attention for a cause (Anderson, 2013). This is a valuable asset for a social or environmental organization as the competitive nature of the “attention economy” increases (van Krieken, 2012).

Such ideas move scholarship of celebrity beyond concerns of a potential democratic deficit caused by celebrities’ political interventions. This is replaced by an understanding that, as Wheeler suggests, “[c]elebrities engaging in partisan or causal affairs can bring a guile and persuasiveness in using the media, which may reinvigorate politics with new ideas” (Wheeler, 2013, p. 24). The question that prompts much research on celebrity politics is what might these “new ideas” be? In the case of this article, what new ideas can celebrities bring to the politics of climate change? And how might these approaches reflect and reinforce existing political and economic orthodoxies? Accepting that celebrities might “teach us how to think and act politically” (Ross, 2011, p. 5), academics have questioned the types of discourses and practices into which audiences and consumers are being interpellated. For example, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) point to branding as a determinant of celebrity political intervention, hinting at the commercial nature of celebrity culture and opening up the possibility for tensions between the political economy of the celebrity industry, on the one hand, and the needs of social and environmental causes, on the other.

Given that the production and maintenance of celebrity status is dependent upon the interrelated processes of commodification, mediatization and personalization (Driessens, 2013), these pressures are not surprising. Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte’s Brand Aid (2011) offers a sophisticated analysis of these tensions, where social and environmental campaigning meet cause-related marketing and corporate social responsibility initiatives, through a series of case studies of brands that give financial aid in a way that gives aid to brands. In other words, through ethical consumerism, initiatives such as Product (RED), for example, rather than focus on poverty in the Global South, celebrate the agency of consumers in the Global North “solve” such problems through their choice of consumer purchases. Celebrity, in such instances, becomes a means to market these ideas to citizen-consumers and lends campaigns the types of moral authority. Goodman (2013) goes further to identify a “novel ‘species’ of celebrity called Celebritus Politicus” whose members “have situated and also have worked to situate themselves as a stylised form of the neoliberalized governance of the problems of environment and development.”

In its most simplistic sense, neoliberalism is understood as “a political-economic project which advocates, first, a strong free-market economic system, facilitated by and unrestricted by the state and, second, the use of the market as a model for other areas of political and social life” (Farrell, 2015, p. 256). Individual manifestations of this philosophy vary historically, geographically, and culturally. However, they often involve unique combinations of processes such as the privatization of state assets; the deregulation of markets, and/or the re-regulation of areas of civic life in a manner more favorable to markets; the turning of people and objects into commodities to be bought and sold through the processes of commodification, such that natural assets are converted into goods tradeable within a market; the commercialization of institutions and sectors not previously oriented toward for-profit practices—such as charity, health care, or education; the marketization of sectors of society in which such commercialized institutions may function; the individualization of societies, such that populations are encouraged to self identify as discrete individuals, operating as entrepreneurs or consumers, rather than part of collective groupings; and entrepreneurialization. The methods of social and environmental campaigns involving celebrities so often feature consumer practices, and encourage supporters to identify with the subject position of “consumer” engaging in moral activity within a market place (Richey & Ponte, 2011). Consequently, Celebritus Politicus both reflects and contributes “to the moral authority of a hegemonic market-led governance of sustainability” (Goodman, 2013, pp. 72–73). In a sustained but far less empirically grounded critique, Ilan Kapoor argues that celebrity humanitarianism “legitimates, and indeed promotes, neoliberal capitalism and global inequality” (Kapoor, 2013, p. 1).

Concerns about the commercial imperatives of celebrity involvement in environmental and humanitarian advocacy and activism thus characterizes much scholarly work in this area. Other important contributions highlight, for example, the colonial nature of Global North-South relations as embodied by celebrity activists. Repo and Yrjölä (2011), for instance, analyze media representations of Western celebrities engaged in development campaigns in Africa, and trace the lineage of such portrayals back to colonial narratives concerning popular European figures and their travels to the “dark continent.” Such media representations work to subtly promote ideas of the rational White, European man, as a binary opposite to the irrational African subject (also, Biccum, 2016). Taking account of these critiques, this article now examines existing scholarly research on celebrity involvement with climate change to explore the possibilities and limitations of this work in creating more culturally meaningful and affective engagements with this issue in the context of a neoliberal commodity culture.

Celebrities and Climate Change—Media, Politics, and Commodity Culture

Much of the earliest work on celebrity and climate change seeks to provide conceptual and theoretical frameworks through which to make sense of, and analyze, the celebritization of climate change, laying the foundations for specific case studies of climate celebrities in later scholarly work (Alexander, 2013; Anderson, 2013; Boykoff & Olson, 2013; Doyle, 2016; McCurdy, 2013). Anderson’s (2011) review of celebrity involvement in climate change was the first of its kind, signaling a growing academic interest in celebrity work on climate change. However, with very little published research in this area to draw upon at the time (notable exceptions being Boykoff & Goodman, 2009; Smith & Joffe, 2009), Anderson brings together work on media coverage of climate change, news media sources, and the PR packaging of news/politics, celebrity advocacy in environmentalism, celebrity culture and democratization, and public perceptions of climate change, to explore how the contemporary media and political landscape has shifted to include a wider variety of voices, beyond scientists, to publicly speak about climate change.

Anderson argues that as news media increasingly rely upon PR agencies to provide content, voices and sources are increasingly more packaged, in turn facilitating the amplification of celebrity voices within news stories. Anderson explains that the symbolic power that celebrities can bring to climate change, particularly if supported by the work of an established environmental NGO (such as Greenpeace), importantly shifts the issue from the domain of science into popular culture. Celebrities thus act as mobilizing agents (like NGOs) to raise awareness and potentially shape public opinion: particularly important at a time when world news coverage of climate change peaked in 2009 and then fell, following the “Climategate” scandal. As news actors in their own right, celebrities can provide “a powerful news hook with a human interest angle, crystallizing issues that may otherwise be perceived as relatively removed from people’s everyday lives” (Anderson, 2011, p. 535). Yet, Anderson concludes that increasing the visibility of climate change through celebrity work represents a “double edged sword” (p. 543). For example, while environmental NGOs have used celebrities for “symbolic leverage” to gain access to news media, thus bringing attention to an issue, there is a lack of public trust in celebrities as spokespeople for the environment and climate change (see Smith & Joffe, 2009). Rather than characterizing celebrity involvement in climate change politics as “either democratization or distraction,” she thus calls for more “ethnographic research into the impact of celebrity advocacy on public perceptions of climate change and trust” (Anderson, 2011, p. 543): a call that is subsequently taken up by researchers working on public perceptions of climate imagery (O’Neill, Boykoff, Niemeyer, & Day, 2013).

In one of the first journal articles to critically explore the celebritization of climate change, Boykoff and Goodman make the case for a nuanced understanding of celebrities as non-state actors involved in “the cultural politics of climate change” (Boykoff &Goodman, 2009, p. 396), rather than dismissing celebrities as mere distraction (Wieskel,2005). Through the confluence of “science, celebrities, and politics,” they explore how celebrities have become “authorized speakers” on climate change in the context of a “Politicized Celebrity System” (p. 396). By identifying a system, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) call attention to the multifarious ways in which celebrities as authorized speakers operate within a broader media and political landscape that highlights the interconnected and contested dimensions of celebrity as brands, performances, and images that circulate through the political economies of news, media, and entertainment, and whose signs are variously consumed by audiences. Calling attention to these spaces of interaction that produce, sustain, and contest celebrity work (on climate change), enables a more complex understanding of the socio-economic-political conditions that characterize and shape the ways in which celebrities speak on climate change, and to also help illuminate the material implications of celebrity work in shaping beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, values, and types of (in)action on climate change.

Representative of a more nuanced approach to the study of celebrity climate politics, Boykoff and Goodman (2009); see also Boykoff & Olson, 2013) suggest employing a celebrity typology to highlight how different cultural factors (through diverse celebrity types) may shape different forms of discourse and action on climate change. Drawing upon the “circuits of culture” model (Du Gay, 1997) from cultural studies, as well as Carvalho and Burgess’s (2005) reinterpretation of this model in their analysis of news media coverage of climate change in the U.K. press, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) suggest employing a “Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities model” to focus our attention upon celebrity status as the means by which celebrities gain their “privileged spaces of interaction” (p. 402). What Boykoff and Goodman point to is the ways that climate celebrities’ images, words, and deeds circulate within and around the cultural sphere across media and meditated conversations about climate change.

Their framework foregrounds three key relations that underpin celebrity climate work: celebrities as commodities (i.e., goods to be bought and sold); celebrity bodies, performances and embodiment (i.e., the ways that celebrities embody certain environmental politics); and celebrities as signs/values (i.e., images to be marketized for social and economic value). While commodity culture is central to the development of contemporary celebrity culture (Driessens, 2013; Rojek, 2001; Turner, 2004), the implications for considering the effects of celebrity work on climate change in particular are important here. Although celebrities can raise awareness of this issue through their elevated media voices, it is the question of what is being consumed and the extent to which this alters audience beliefs and values, or impacts upon courses of political, social, or personal action on climate change, that is key: a concern that continues to underpin subsequent scholarly work in this field (Doyle, 2016; McCurdy, 2013).

Individualism as a form of neoliberal consumer identity arguably has limited capacity to engender large-scale collective changes required for mitigating and adapting to climate change. As such, individualism is a key issue for scholars examining celebrity involvement with climate change communication and campaigning. As high-profile commodities and images circulating within culture, Boykoff and Goodman are concerned about the celebrity being viewed as the “heroic individual” (2009, p. 404), further entrenching individual responses to climate change through neoliberal commodity actions—such as purchasing green products, or carbon offsetting—that distract from “the articulation of discourses calling on systemic and large-scale political, economic, social, and cultural shifts that will likely be necessary to address the multifarious problems and difficult choices associated with modern global climate change” (p. 404). Anderson similarly echoes this concern when she notes that research on celebrity involvement in environmental and climate politics “points to a tendency for the celebritization of climate change to promote individualist rather than collective frames of action” (Anderson, 2011, p. 535). Indeed, in an interesting observation on the rise of celebrity endorsements of climate change in the media, Keeling (2009) notes the impact of such endorsements on climate mitigation practices such as carbon trading: “Celebrities are commodities and increasingly the atmosphere is beginning to be thought of as another commodity, with a price and value being placed on it” (Keeling, 2009, p. 50). While celebrities may have helped bring climate change into the popular imagination, it is the very nature of their celebrity status and its problematic rise and fall that could impinge upon media coverage in the long term, as celebrity climate failures such as Live Earth in 2007 or DiCaprio’s 11th Hour documentary are deemed more newsworthy than successes (Keeling, 2009).

Can Celebrities Help Make Climate Change More Visible and Felt?

While much earlier (and subsequent) scholarly work on celebrity and climate change situates celebrities within their socioeconomic networks and practices of global media, politics, entertainment, consumer culture, and neoliberalism, with its attendant dimensions of individualism and commodification, there are also important points through which celebrities can potentially reach out to audiences precisely because of their celebrity status as “intimate strangers” (Schickel, 2000) using their affective capacities to get audiences to feel certain emotions (Marshall, 2001; Nunn & Biressi, 2010). Celebrities’ capacity to communicate and engage with diverse audiences through (social) media and popular culture could bring climate change awareness—and its perceived distance—into different social and cultural spheres, particularly for younger audiences (Alexander, 2013).

Indeed, climate change communication research over the last 20 years (see Moser, 2010) highlights that persistent barriers to communication and engagement have prevailed, with climate change perceived as a distant, remote, and future threat for Western audiences (Boykoff, 2011; Doyle, 2011), unless its impacts have been experienced personally. As such, scholars have explored the role of imagery, framing/discourse, ideology, and values in communicating climate change, and how these forms of meaning-making shape public understanding of, and engagement with, this issue. Researchers and practitioners are increasingly calling for more localized, emotional/affective, and participatory modes of communication that more clearly link to, as well as challenge, people’s existing social values and identity in order to make climate change understood and felt at the level of the everyday. Two key opportunities for climate communication through celebrity work coalesce here: the potential to personify and make climate change more visible and salient as a human (rather than simply an environmental) issue; and the role of celebrities as human signs who can embody and generate a range of feelings and affects about climate change. Here, though, the confluences of visibility/image and embodiment through celebrity are problematic. Boykoff and Goodman’s (2009) observation that celebrities literally and figuratively embody climate change politics refers to the media performances of celebrities as commodities. As such, these human embodiments problematically focus upon the celebrity body as a politicized site that embodies economic relations, transforming into what Goodman (2010) later discusses as “spectacular” visuals that deflect attention away from the political cause under question.

While maintaining this critical perspective on climate celebrities and the spectacles they create, reviewing the research on climate imagery highlights some of the potential that celebrities offer in terms of generating different types of imagery to make climate change more culturally meaningful. Earlier research by Doyle (2007, 2009) on environmental NGO campaigning highlighted the problematic role of photographic imagery in prioritizing climate impacts to non-human nature (particularly polar bears and melting glaciers) at the expense of humans, as well as reinforcing the notion of “visible truth” and “bearing witness” as a representational condition of climate change knowledge and its communication. Focusing upon humanitarian and development NGOs, Manzo (2010) found a wider repertoire of climate imagery used, including humans and non-human nature, but criticized the ways in which humans affected by climate change were positioned through a colonial gaze that rendered climate change as happening to geographically “distant others.”

More recent work by O’Neill (2013) has demonstrated a broader range of images of climate change within news media in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, with people being the most frequent theme, followed by impacts. Celebrities were present in the people theme—a finding that supports earlier research by Smith and Joffe (2009) into climate imagery in U.K. press coverage. Smith and Joffe note that celebrities are often visualized in activist modes, for example, at demonstrations, and that such images help personify climate change for a British audience. In contrast, research on climate imagery within Canadian print media by DiFrancesco and Young (2010) found that while human beings were the most common form of imagery, celebrities made a minimal appearance, demonstrating national differences in terms of celebrity saliency in the context of climate change. Yet, even as celebrities become visually associated with climate change, further research by O’Neill et al. (2013) finds that people in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, perceive images of celebrities to undermine the saliency of climate change.

Taken together, these findings identify an increase in celebrity images within the visual iconography of climate change, while simultaneously indicating the public’s lack of trust of celebrity involvement with climate change. Celebrities, it is suggested, are not helpful in terms of raising awareness and facilitating action on climate change. However, it is important to acknowledge the current lack of textual or ethnographic research in this area beyond still imagery within print or online media, particularly as social media, rather than print news or news websites, are the main source of news for women and young people (Reuters Institute for Journalism, 2016). Given that celebrity culture is largely youth and female oriented, different types of imagery (such as video), celebrities, media, and consumption practices would need to be analyzed.

Importantly, this research also points toward a diversification of voices in climate change communication beyond scientists and NGOs (Anderson, 2011). Historically, environmental NGOs, and particularly Greenpeace, were the main non-state actors making climate change meaningful to the public through their campaign and communication strategies (Doyle, 2007), “bearing witness” to climate impacts through photographic documentation (Doyle, 2009). Goodman and Barnes (2011) have explored how celebrities bear witness to suffering by visiting “spaces of poverty.” Thus, have celebrities become the new witnesses of climate change? What are the spaces that celebrities are visiting/embodying/signifying within the cultural politics of climate change, and how do these reinforce, challenge, and/ or advance different forms of public and political engagement? These questions will be explored in the next section.

Indeed, if we return to the question of the embodiment of climate activism by climate celebrities, the potential for celebrities to offer more affective, and effective, forms of public engagement can be explored by diversifying the range of celebrities, media forms, and demographic groups analyzed. For example, Alexander (2013) explores the use of Twitter by U.S. actor Ian Somerhalder, star of The Vampire Diaries, to engage his youth fan base with environmentalism and climate change. The assumed “authenticity” of Somerhalder’s apparently self-created tweets, including his appreciative tweets to his followers, are important in creating a two-way relationship with his fans, helping build an affective relation. Alexander analyses the forms of communication used by Somerhalder in promoting environmental advocacy, finding both a marketing approach (of small step changes and altering consumption practices) and values-based approach (advocated by Crompton, 2008) that focuses upon relationship building, rather than external status, as a means of enabling more long-term pro-environmental behavior change. While tensions occur between these two discourses—partly due to Somerhalder’s celebrity status—his use of social media enables the “collectivism of the social media generation” (Alexander, 2013, p. 364) to be aligned with the ethical/moral values he communicates. In doing so, Alexander is hopeful for the emergence of more “eco-celebrities such as Somerhalder, role models and objects of desire with embedded spiritual/environmental values and collaborative modes of address” (p. 365). Indeed, given the increasing level of overwhelm and hopelessness associated with climate change (Moser, 2016), and the need for more emotionally resonant and participatory modes of communication and engagement, we wonder if celebrities who are able to engage with young people specifically through social media and popular culture, might find more hopeful ways of facilitating social and political action, in “cool” (Richey & Ponte, 2011) and creative ways. The next section explores some of these questions.

Emerging Climate Celebrities After Data: Emotion, Affect, and Journey in Novel Modes of Climate Engagement

Considering celebrities as contemporary forms of “climate muses”—regardless of how potentially commodified or individualizing in action or outcome—the nature of celebrity reflections and media production around climate have shifted over time. They have changed in both the format—from telling audiences about climate change to witnessing its impacts for us—and also characteristics—from knowledge and exhortations for action to affective and emotional appeals to audiences and the public. Through a brief overview of some of the key celebrity interventions in climate change discourses, here we explore how celebrity involvement in climate change pedagogies has formed part of a shift in climate change communication. This has moved from dry accounts of the latest scientific knowledge about the changing climate, to stories of personal and/or literal journeys upon the climate landscape and those of climate-related impacts. Indeed, as the header on Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood (2016) suggests, “the science is settled, the future is not.” This section works to briefly explore these shifts in what we might call novel “modes” of climate change celebrity engagements, from climate celebrities as narrow pseudo-experts and green lifestyle gurus to the newly expanded role of a climate change witnesses who work as on-the-ground correspondents telling audiences the stories of ordinary people and everyday ecologies at threat from climate change. In doing so, this section builds on the previous research previously analyzed to pose questions that, we argue, necessitate further research and suggest where research on celebrity and climate change communication might find fruitful possibilities.

From An Inconvenient Truth to Before the Flood: Getting Emotional About Climate Change Through New Modes of Media and Celebrity Performance Celebrities and Climate Change

Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary in An Inconvenient Truth was designed to provide its audience the latest data, information, and knowledge about climate change and the threat it posed to the planet. Simply put, it attempted to educate and convince the public in minute PowerPoint detail about the rise in CO emitted by humans and the corresponding rise in global average temperatures. At roughly the same time, the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced documentary the 11th Hour was also designed to teach the public about climate change. Utilizing the “talking head” appearances of numerous environmental movement figures such as Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai, Bill McKibben, and David Suzuki, all voiced-over by DiCaprio, it spread the word about climate change exclusively through climate “experts.” Equally, 2007’s Live Earth concerts intended to raise global-scale awareness about climate issues educating the public about climate change through “enviro-tainment” in order to make these politicized, educational-focused encounters more audience friendly. These three celebrity-fronted climate change media events utilized celebrities to not just bring attention to the issue, but also act as public pedagogues who could speak about the science of climate change and vouch for its “reality.”

In profound contrast, more contemporary celebrity climate interventions are quite different. While celebrities are still public pedagogues, they intervene in ways that intend and create alternative, novel, and more complex outcomes. Such interventions offer, we suggest, “After Data” media modes of discourses, practices, and audience connections. For example, one important recent After Data climate change celebrity intervention comes in the form of the documentary Before the Flood (2016; BTF). We briefly discuss BTF in order to illustrate the ways that more contemporary celebrity-fronted climate change media—and the role of the celebrities themselves—have moved us into novel, more affective modes of celebrity climate change engagement and framing.

BTF is a heavily resourced and visually stunning documentary film produced and narrated by, but also starring, Leonardo DiCaprio. In the film, he goes on a “witnessing” journey as the UN Ambassador of Peace to see the firsthand impacts of climate change in the Arctic, the island nation of Kiribati, the oil sands of Alberta, and the polluted streets of Shanghai. Unlike the 11th Hour, this is a significant personal journey for DiCaprio shot through with stories of his early childhood to the ways he has been ridiculed and critiqued by conservative pundits. This is a journey that has DiCaprio front and center as our serious, earnest and caring, emotive and affective guide and male “lead.” He solemnly implores us to do something about the climate in front of the UN, sheepishly admits he has a larger carbon footprint than most people, and is angrily confronted by an Indian conservationist about America’s grotesque levels of material and energy consumption. As Fisher Stevens, the film’s director, stated about DiCaprio: “. . . it’s nice to film someone like Leo who has the quality of charisma. We wanted Leo to meet the experts and make the experts more palatable, so that everyone could understand them” (G’Sell, 2016). Importantly, on the ground and emplaced encounters with nature, experts, environmentalists, and elite politicians and business leaders are specifically interspersed with ordinary people and communities “performing” their emotive responses to the everyday ways they are being impacted by climate change.

Before the Flood is one of the most watched documentaries of all time with over 60 million views across multiple media platforms (Calvario, 2016). Unlike previous climate change interventions, BTF accentuates and showcases emotions and affects throughout the film: the smiles and sincerity of Elon Musk who is ready to deploy his battery business and entrepreneurial skills in service of a carbon-free future; the dire warnings of Ban Ki-Moon; and, of course, those of the main witnessing muse of DiCaprio who marvels at the “violence” of icebergs calving into the ocean, the surprise of being confronted about his own personal climate impacts, and his hopeful tone in discussions of easy climate “wins.” The narrative that DiCaprio crafts and the images he shows us are as emotional and affective at their core as they are “rational” and “statistical” in the climate science that should underpin our feelings. The “‘debate’ about climate change is over” (BTF, 2016) the film’s website shouts—the word “debate” firmly squeezed between quotation marks—as we move into the human-induced era of the Anthropocene. As a review of the BTF in The Hollywood Reporter states (DeFore, 2016), “Maybe movie stars can sway public opinion more effectively than tightly reasoned activist docs full of hard data and compelling narratives. Here’s hoping.” BTF illustrates the distinct shift to an After Data mode of climate change intervention whereby the emotional registers of climate change—be they of the “star” celebrity, those they are talking to or those feeling the impacts of global environmental change—are what define and carry the narrative arcs of these new forms of spectacular environmental media (Goodman et al., 2016).

Feeling the Atmosphere Through Star Power: Initial Thoughts and Potential Future Directions

While space does not allow a fuller exploration of this novel After Data mode of celebrity climate change media outputs and engagement, we do want to provide some short thoughts on why, we think, this shift has occurred and some of its implications. Why this shift, then? Several potential and further “testable” reasons come to mind. One of these seems quite simple: According to a Pew Research Center Global study, the majority of those in their study of global attitudes to climate change from the United States (74%) and United Kingdom (77%) believes global climate change is either very or somewhat serious (Stokes, Wike, & Carle, 2015). Moreover, 69% of those polled from the United States supported action as part of an international agreement, while in the United Kingdom 79% responded similarly (Stokes et al., 2015). Given these shifting public attitudes and beliefs, narratives and urgings have to shift into new registers to not just gain audience attention but spur public action for those who “believe” but also as a strategy to engage the remaining “non-believers.”

At the same time, however, these polling numbers belie the fact that there are still large numbers who maintain partisan denialist and skeptical outlooks on climate change—including many powerful political figures in the media—as any quick read of the comments section attached at almost any climate change article on the Web will lay bare. In particular, there is growing concern over “climate silence,” which is the worry that there are not enough public, media, or even personal discussions about the severity and impacts of climate change (Romm, 2016); emotional climate celebrities are perhaps working to maintain climate change as a topic worthy of continued urgent and critical public discussion. In a way, no matter what, these shifts in celebrity-fronted climate media are quite astute given the knowledge/action gap —whether that be individual action or policy action—that has come to bedevil larger scale, immediate solutions to the climate conundrum. In some ways, the moves to these impact and emotional registers through celebrity media interventions is not just about making these new tropes and registers “fashionable” but also utilizing them in ways that might work to cut through not just the normalized, everyday media cacophony, but as a means by which to transcend the knowledge/action gap to spur more and greater action.

Furthermore, if Dan Brockington’s (2014) work on the role of celebrities in the realms of humanitarianism rings true, then one of the key audiences for these new interventions might actually not be the general public but rather other elites and those in power in order to make affective connections and get them to work for more and better climate policy. DiCaprio’s position as Peace Ambassador is certainly what this is about so his documentary seems like a logical extension of this elite-to-elite emotionally tinged communication.

A second reason for these movements might also be quite simple, if somewhat problematic: These shifts might be about maintaining and expanding these celebrities’ brands as eco-warriors to both use but also expand their fan base in a desire to create greater cultural, political, and economic capital for themselves. As Jo Littler (2008) has so astutely put it, being socially conscious and politically active is part of the very job description of celebrities operating in the early 21st century, such that caring is not just a part of their brand but caring works to create economic value for the “celebrity industry complex” that is behind even these climate change interventions. Thus, the move to more emotional and impactful registers is not mutually exclusive from the creation of value nor deepening of the celebrity industrial complex, but instead go right to the heart of the “conspicuous redemption” Boykoff and Goodman (2009) discussed as one of the characteristics of climate celebrities. As argued earlier, climate change celebrities are commodities in human form that generate cultural and economic capital but are also caring commodities that embody, perform, and work to elicit the concerns, emotions, and behaviors of care and responsibilities in audiences. As the old adage goes, climate change celebrities are “doing well by doing good” and more research is needed to determine not just what the impacts of their notions of “the good” are but also how audiences’ react to these changing registers in contemporary climate change media.

Discussion and Conclusion: From Accentuated Celebrity Emotion and Affect to More Vociferous Climate Action?

By way of a brief conclusion, we offer a short discussion of what we feel some of the implications might be with this more emotionally charged celebrity-fronted climate change media that seems to have ushered in our proposed After Data era of climate communications. First, as suggested throughout this section, the example of BTF works through a different set of framings than previously offered by earlier “numbers” and “science” focused climate media interventions by articulating and fully accentuating emotion and affect through narrative arcs and encounters of the impacts of climate change on people and nature, communities and ecologies. Thus, the overall “feel” of these novel celebrity-fronted climate media outputs is one of a greatly heightened emotional register, the desire here for the audiences—and of course wider publics—to emotionally and viscerally connect with and through recognized celebrities to those people and places witnessing and experiencing climate change.

Second, not only have the engagements and outputs of celebrity-fronted media interventions shifted, so too has the role of climate change celebrities themselves: They now work as morally tinged, affective pedagogues, framing for us through emotional discursive reflections, embodiments, deeds, and performances how and in what ways we should feel about climate change impacts and what to do about them. In addition climate change celebrities have taken on the novel roles of emotive climate journalists and investigative documentarians, allowing us to see and feel firsthand the impacts of climate change. Climate change celebrities, through this new “witnessing” mode of their persona and performances become “affective translation devices” who emote about climate change but also report, interpret, and explore those communities and ecologies impacted by climate change. No longer are climate change celebrities sales people and endorsers of the products of brand “climate science,” but instead they are witnesses to, and the affective voices of, the Anthropocene. In a twist, then, on the byline from BTF, given these contemporary climate change celebrity media engagements, the science of climate change might be settled but how to feel about it is certainly not.

Third, and directly connected to the previous two points, the emotive climate change media and the celebrity engagements and performances that facilitate novel climate affects normalize emotion as a response and as a motivational force to “solve” climate change. In this, celebrity performances of affect also normalize the celebrities themselves: They feel as ordinary people and so should and must we. They care—showing this in words, deeds and affect—and so should and must we. They are ordinary, they are authentic, they are genuine, and, most importantly, they are believable. Their performances of ordinary emotion—a kind of performance of a non-performance as it were—are those designed for maximum authenticity such that we too can and should feel, we too can and should do. For example, as the director put it about DiCaprio’s role in BTF,

We wanted Leo to be Everyman. Obviously, he lives a very rarefied life, but in this film he plays a kind of Everyman in terms of this issue. He actually has a good effect on the experts during interviews; they want him to understand, to make it clear . . . It was important to humanize Leo, to make him seem vulnerable. And he was vulnerable; we all were. When you’re walking on ice in the Arctic you have trust people to tell you where to walk or you’re gone. When you’re in Greenland, you take a wrong step and you shoot down the rapids. When you’re in a helicopter flying over bushfires in Sumatra, it can be pretty terrifying. The fact that Leo is willing to go there and do all this—none of us made any money on this film, and certainly he didn’t—it shows that he really cares.

(G’Sell, 2016)

Yet, climate change celebrities are also, at the very same time, extraordinarily, or better yet, extraordinarily ordinary in ways that are also about authenticity and connection. Their extraordinariness provides them that heightened perch from which to feel, from which we want to watch them feel, and to which we are supposed to respond. They are, but also are not, outside of their elite status through their emotive behaviors and concerned words. It is this vacillation between and among elite and not elite, ordinary and extraordinary, every day and spectacle, through their media performances that allows climate change celebrities the ability and multiple identities from which to attempt to transcend climate politics. Affect and emotion are wielded here as sorts of “transcending” tools to cut across audience political identities and get them in the “gut” or “heart” from which care, responsibility, and action will flow. But of course, as we know, there really is no transcending of politics either in general nor in this highly charged case of climate change. Rather, a better way to see all of this might be that these novel modes of affective climate media and celebrities work to specifically politicize emotion and affect in the context of climate change in ways and to ends that have yet to be seen but which have also begun to define the After Data era of the climate mediascape.

Fourth, the proposed pathways to change and climate change solutions through these new emotive climate media interventions have potential implications and offer up important new questions, particularly the gendered modes of engagement and action this may generate. What if emotion and affect, the core entryway to raising awareness and spurring public action, don’t gain the traction that these celebrities hope? Moreover, will these attempts actually overcome the knowledge and now, emotion and action gaps that might appear and be maintained? This begs a further question: Perhaps these moves to affect and impacts are missing the point in that some of the issues with lack of rapid movements on climate impacts are less about feelings and more about what the audience does (Mendick, Allen, & Harvey, 2015) with the science, knowledge, and data around climate change? Either way, further research needs to explore the ways that the public and climate media audiences actually engage in shifting everyday actions or broader political action in light of our suggested affective shifts in climate change celebrity media.

A second issue of concerns is the ways that climate celebrities and their media interventions, affect, and emotion or not, work to set up particular pathways to solutions. Thus, we might be more emotive about climate change, but if the solutions celebrities propose include the typical “weak brew” of more and better conscious capitalism, sustainable consumption, and individual responses of light bulb changing, then it seems that even the historic Paris Agreement might now not mean much. Critical interrogation of what affective climate celebrities propose as solutions, like the overall public impact of the turn to impacts and emotions in climate media, is greatly needed.

Finally, we end this section with a more speculative and possible set of implications worthy of critical questions. Namely, will science and data return as a celebrity-endorsed product as climate change impacts accelerate and we get deeper into the Anthropocene? Will the science of mitigation and resilience come to the forefront of celebrity performances? In particular, it seems as if feeling more deeply about climate change might not be enough as the “climate denialist in chief” of Donald Trump begins to move on reversing U.S. climate policy and creating much wider global impacts in terms of the Paris Agreement. Or will these accentuated affects spur greater and more vociferous climate action that might cross both social media and city streets in unprecedented ways working to combine knowledge, pedagogy, affect, and celebrity in ways unforeseen as of yet? The new roles and performances of climate change celebrities will be fascinating to watch, if nothing else, as we potentially move into even more dangerous times in the Anthropocene.

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Notes:

(1.) See Moser (2016) for an excellent summary of climate communication research in the last five years, and its potential future directions.

(2.) The COP21 Paris Accords are a ray of light here, and it might be interesting to consider the impacts of these media interventions and indeed the role of affect and emotion both before Paris and after as well as how further interventions might be called upon in light of the “climate change denier in chief” in form of Trump coming to power in the United States.