Project description:
The adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015 is seen as a watershed moment in efforts to govern climate change. The agreement reorganizes the relationship between international and national levels of policymaking, strengthening the overall global goals while leaving it up to nation-states to determine their contributions. It also reorganizes the relationship between climate science and policy, giving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a new role of contributing directly to the process of increasing policy ambition over time.
This project investigates what these changes means for how climate change is understood and acted on as a political issue. It focuses on two sites in which the relationship between science and politics, and between the global and the national, may change following the Paris Agreement. One is the IPCC – the organisation that is more than any other associated with the constitution of a “global knowledge” about climate change: In what ways is this organisation itself involved in reworking the climate issue? The other is the processes of national policymaking that the global knowledge of the IPCC is assumed to inform and shape – in this case, the processes of governing Norwegian oil and gas production. What happens when the climate issue as enacted by the IPCC meets with other issues in the everyday practices of policymaking, and connections are made between the Paris Agreement’s carbon limits and Norway’s carbon economy?
The PhD project is part of CONNECT, a research project headed by CICERO Center for International Climate Research. It combines approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with political science approaches to study how Norway’s climate policy is affected by a changing policy context at international (UN) and regional (EU) levels.
Bård Lahn is a researcher at CICERO and a PhD candidate at TIK. This seminar marks the midway evaluation of his PhD project.
Thesis supervisor:
Kristin Asdal (TIK, UiO)
Commentators:
Béatrice Cointe (MINES ParisTech, France)
David Jordhus-Lier (Department of Sociology and Human Geography, UiO)
The seminar is open to everyone, and the manuscript is available upon request. Please register for the event by sending an email to i.h.johnsen@tik.uio.no
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