Irish climate governance has not emerged from nowhere. In other words, it looks at the world from somewhere. Its origins extend well beyond the arrival of climate as a policy issue in the 1990s. It is a view that seems to have emerged and continues to evolve through a chameleon-like socio-economic structure that preserves elements of its form and carries them forward into new iterations. Perhaps some elements get disregarded as it iterates, and perhaps not. Either way, it doesn’t seem totally fluid. Some of its contours are hard, while others appear to be soft or malleable or perhaps permeable.
To understand Irish Climate governance, we need to understand the extent to which this arrangement of hard and soft contours has proved durable over time. In other words, what signals can climate governance accommodate and on what terms? The structure has a language (or institutional grammar). The language is maintained by rituals (e.g., of reporting or conferencing). The language reflects an underlying belief system about what counts, what gets measured, and what is measurable. That belief system is informed by an origin story that assumes and takes for granted a particular view of reality (ontology) and what is required to be able to say that life is good.
We need to understand this and see ourselves within it. We need to recognise and understand the ground we stand on, all the way down. How shaky is it? How did we end up here? Whose ground is it? Who or what is maintaining it? Is this truly where we want to stand? What’s holding us here on this spot? This isn’t about understanding the ground so that we can re-engineer it to our liking, claim it as truly ours and pin our identity to it. That would be to repeat a mistake. No, the reason we need to know the ground is that in doing so, we might open ourselves to it, allow it to permeate our code, so that we might see and sense more comprehensively and cultivate agency about the next step. Right now, it feels like the ground is moving us, and we feel even more transfixed by it. It might be useful to notice more. Could this hypothesis have a grain of truth? And if it does, and we can feel that truth, might we see differently or choose differently?
In this context, a pertinent question might be about the evolving terms under which environmental signals are admitted into governance. This table is a rough draft of environmental themes emerging from signals, being framed by governance to enable response and a consideration of what may be obscured or lost as a result.
| Environmental Themes | Environmental theme is framed as… | Governance becomes responsive to… | What may be obscured or lost? |
| Romantic, aesthetic Signals: Despoilation through early industrialisation, decimation of species like buffalo, passenger pigeons, eagles (Ireland) | Nature as refuge, beauty, national inheritance, References: Muir, Wordsworth, Thoreau,
| Amenity, preservation, idealised conceptualisations, moral relief Examples: National Parks, Nature Restoration Act | Industrial metabolism – nothing left untouched (the illusion of refuge), nature that the human eye cannot see or that is unappealing to the human eye, suffering outside the refuge Reference: The one who walks away from Omelas (Ursula K Le Guin) |
| Resource management Signals: Food and energy insecurity, | Nature as natural resources, a condition of economic continuity and security of supply References: David Ricardo, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill… | Land management, productivity, resource efficiency, strategic inputs, supply variability, and responsiveness to natural events Examples: the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the joint stock company – capitalism, deforestation, the Arterial Drainage Acts (Ireland), Green Revolution, European Coal and Steel Community, (early) Common Agricultural Policies | Ecological limits, systemic impacts, unpriced goods and services, the value of harms prevented, rebound or backfire effects Reference: Jevons Paradox |
| Ecological rebound: Signals: Dust Bowl, acid rain, cod fisheries collapse, ozone layer depletion, climate crisis… | Nature as harbinger of systemic fragility, tipping points, thresholds, unintended consequences, externalities (that are not external), systemic risk, eco-anxiety… References: Silent Spring (Carson), Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin), Limits to Growth (Meadows), Population (Malthus, Ehrlich), Planetary Boundaries (Rockstrom) | Pollution, population growth, scientific reports, weather extremes, technological innovation (green), media influencers Examples: Formation of US EPA (1970), ban of DDT (1972), UN Conference on the Human Environment (1972), formation of UNEP, Club of Rome, President Jimmy Carter (installs solar panels on the White House) | Depth of path dependency, the dilution of human agency, the limitation of sovereignty, the super wicked nature of the dilemma, and that the solution may be worse than the problem (dependent on leadership and trust) References: Bjorn Lomborg (Sceptical Environmentalist), Deep Adaptation (Bendall), Hospicing Modernity (Andreotti), Great Simplification (Hagens)… |
| Sustainable development Signals: 1970s oil crisis, inflation, end of Bretton Woods, Keynesian economics – gold standard, rise in monetarism (Friedman and Chicago School) → Reaganomics, Thatcherism, diminishment of government and rise of markets, post financial crash and return to Keynesian style economic policy | Nature as a compatibility problem that needs alignment with environmental and social goals (triple bottom line), internalisation of externalities, References: Brundtland Commission – Our Common Future (1987), UN Earth Summit 1992, Agenda 21, UNFCCC, IPCC… | Better growth, green growth, market alignment, global governance, market instruments – environmental assets, sustainability as a brand (intangible value), circular economy, stakeholder engagement, shared goals, behavioural nudges through pricing – carbon taxes. Examples: UN Conferences of the Parties, Agenda 21 and SDGs, Kyoto Protocol – Clean Development Mechanism – Emissions Trading, EU Green Deal, Fit for 55, MACC Curves | Sufficiency – degrowth, power interests and dynamics, deepening path dependency, non-decoupling of growth and impact, diminishing future optionality, temporal clashes (blind spots), eroding sovereignty, non-human agency, corporate capture… References: Hickel (Degrowth), Morton (Hyperobjects) |
| Climate delivery Signals: Missed climate targets, declining confidence in politics – rising populism, observable climate impacts, growth outpaces transition, resource insecurity, supply chain insecurity, inflation (food, energy and housing), rising interest rates and return of Friedman’s monetarism | Nature as an implementation or delivery challenge: References: UN Reports, Climate Change Advisory Council Reports, Irish Fiscal Advisory Reports… | Targets, plans, infrastructure, finance, technology, GDP growth, delivery capacity, green skills, grid constraints, competitiveness, energy and food security… Examples: Electrification of everything (with renewables), Net Zero, EU Omnibus (deregulation – relaxation of CSRD, CSDDD, CBAM etc…), growth imperative strengthens, electricity demand (data centres), US regime and tariffs, New trade partnerships (Mercursor), regional blocs challenge globalisation, Critical Infrastructure Bill (Ireland) | Whether the delivery model reproduces (or mirrors) the disturbance, pattern of power interests served or undermined, systemic risks (AMOC decline), continued loss of optionality, References: see Dark Matter Labs, Michel Foucault’s theory of power |
The table above is not just a sequence of themed environmental management regimes, with each replaced by the subsequent. It is more like a stack of emergent grammars through which an environmental or climate problem can be articulated, with each articulation being additional to the previous. The goal is to understand what the environmental problem had to become to be governable. In that translation process, what potential meanings are lost or obscured? In this translation process, what remains consistent and what changes? Whose interests are protected or promoted? Whose interests are ignored or undermined? To what extent is the process influenceable? By whom or through what?
The table speculates that the entry of each signal into governance changes (or distorts) the signal. What is mistranslated or obscured circles back as a signal again (i.e., its origin has not changed), though the signal itself may change form, perhaps because it is stronger and/or the ground that the signal enters onto has shifted or changed. Or perhaps human perception has changed, but the signal remains the same.
Something about Learning
The table is an invitation to consider how signals are processed, how errors are fixed and the extent to which underlying assumptions or beliefs change.
One way of reading the table might be that:
- Nature as a pretty background to where real economic work happens remains an ideal.
- But the need for ever more natural resources to keep the economic work supplied, driven by technology and the desire to accumulate a surplus, causes continued encroachment on and extraction from nature.
- An ecological rebound manifests. Perhaps this is a real moment of doubt about the capitalist and technology-driven expansion of human civilisation.
- Sustainable Development arrives and finds a way of smoothing over the doubt. Everything is possible with the right type of growth that respects a triple bottom line of economy, environment and society.
- Delivery of the environmental and social ends of the sustainable development bargain falters. Climate targets are missed. The social contract frays. Society polarises. Delivery of the social and environmental promises must be expedited. The imperative for economic growth strengthens as a result.
So if “delivery” is the dominant theme for this moment and if the governance response to the theme’s signals is to sharpen targets for social and environmental goals, while simultaneously deregulating and offering (near) risk-free returns to investors to fuel the growth in economic activity that is required to finance the achievement of those targets, it feels easy to argue that governance is caught in a trap. In fact, by this thesis, we all are.
An adaptive learning system would at least ponder the exhortation to accelerate an activity that portends to address the crisis while knowing that the same activity is a cause of the crisis. Moving through themes, many of the governance framings might be represented as transformative or systemic (e.g., switching to renewable electricity), but in a system that is being governed for growth, such framings risk being illusory or a delay tactic that facilitates a continuation of the status quo. For example, in Ireland, the growth in electricity demand arising from new data centres risks being greater than the growth in supply coming from renewables, meaning that fossil fuel infrastructure cannot be retired. I sense this could be a microcosm of a global pattern.
So what is to be done?
A more adaptive learning system would take a much more critical view of the underlying beliefs, strategies, and policies and their relationship with the issue at hand. This critical view exists. It correlates with the theme of ecological rebound. But the table suggests that the critical view gets subsumed by the lure of sustainable development, which essentially argues that you can have your cake and eat it too. This might be a reasonable interpretation of what happened in the 1980s, when the growth imperative needed social cover and sustainable development became a grammar through which ecological doubt could be reconciled with continued growth (Our Common Future, 1987). This seems to continue to pattern governance thinking.
So if this is correct, and climate governance cannot find a set of terms for admitting ecological rebound signals into its remit, even when those ecological rebound signals are understood and often accepted, what is to be done? Learning theory would suggest that it calls for a system-wide transformation – not of technology or policy – but of identity, purpose and values.
The difficulty with that is it’s too big to be a human project (which is not to argue that it can’t happen). The danger with it being a human-led project is that it would result in the mass rollout of an alternative dogma of progress and what constitutes a good life. That feels dangerous. It smacks of something that a charismatic autocrat might dream up, promulgate and wreak hell with and result in something that is at best very similar to our current predicament, and more likely much worse. So, if not that, what else is there?
I sense it is something about education and awareness. It might begin with a rigorous diagnosis of the structures that make choices before people can make choices themselves. Understanding this, and feeling the predicament, is what it means to know yourself all the way down to the ground you stand on. That is the level of intimacy required for transformation to have a chance. Begin there, sit with it and see what happens. That is my thesis.
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