Discussant: Kristin Asdal, Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Discounting the future: The ascendancy of a political technology
Keynote speaker: Liliana Doganova, Centre de Sociologie de L’innovation, Mines Paris Tech, PSL University
The fires that devastated European forests last summer incarnated not only the effects of climate change but also the aporias of climate action. Struggling with the urgency of saving the present and the preparedness for a warming future, how can we envision the possibility to act on the future? I propose to address this issue through the devices that compose our relationship with the future. I focus on a device that recently came under the spotlights in debates on climate change but has been entrenched in economic and policy practices for decades. This device is discounting: a technique that values all things through the flows of costs and benefits/revenues that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present.
Building on my research on the historical sociology of this device, I outline three troubles with discounting. First, is the future worth less than the present, and should it be counted or discounted? Second, does value stem from the future, and should looking at the future guide acting in the present? Third, is discounting a general form of action, which encompasses all kinds of entities? I discuss these three troubles through past and present examples relating to the use of discounting in governments’ and investors’ attempts at valuing forests and mineral resources.
Analysing discounting as a political technology leads me to exploring the links between temporality and valuation. I conclude that shifting focus from the problem of knowing the future, to which much attention has been devoted in STS and economic sociology, to the problem of valuing the future, through devices such as discounting, enables us to examine afresh what acting on the future means and entails.
Distributive responsibilization for future-oriented wicked problems: The case of pensions funds and climate risk
Keynote speaker: Yuval Millo, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
We examine the dynamics that evolve around attempts to responsibilize actors for a future-oriented wicked problem, focusing on UK pension funds and climate risks. Since September 2022, the UK Government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) requires pension funds to calculate and report on climate risks implied by their asset holdings by incorporating the principles of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) into their governance processes.1 The aim is to mobilize pension funds’ considerable influence over the flow of investments in the economy to support national commitments to a net-zero carbon future. Pension funds provide an opportunity to study future-making practices and its consequences for distributed action because they are both inherently long-term future-oriented and constitute a distributed network of actors. Our findings reveal that, first, pension governance involves a highly distributed and interdependent network, making it difficult to assign responsibility to a single actor. Second, climate risk involves the collective and contested construction of an imagined future. Relatedly, we identify a set of interlinked practices that we describe as distributive responsibilization. These practices construct an object of responsibilization through distributed epistemic practices and enroll distributed actors in the to participate in and act upon responsibilization. In addition, we highlight the centrality of non-human actors in the pensions network, such as asset classes, calculative devices and ‘ghost documents’ in mediating this process. Our research makes the first steps towards developing a theory of responsibilization in the area of investment.