Note: The next seven essays are not a view from nowhere. I’ve spent decades working with governance systems as a sustainability consultant, a strategic adviser, a sectoral representative and now as a researcher. I am a long-term participant in the processes I’m now trying to understand. That position is part of the argument: because what I want to suggest is that the limits I’m describing here are not visible from a distance. They show up as lived tension, in practice, at the boundary.
Signals and noise
Earlier this year, two very different signals entered public discourse.
One was a research note on the financial implications of AI by Citrini. Markets reacted almost immediately.
The other was a UK government assessment outlining how biodiversity collapse could undermine food systems, water security, supply chains and geopolitical stability. There was no comparable response.
Around the same time, reporting on the increasing likelihood of a collapse in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a system that underpins Europe’s climate stability, generated a brief news cycle and then disappeared from view, with no repricing of risk, no sustained political attention and no shift in governance posture.
Risks that are not actionable
It’s tempting to explain this as a failure of communication, political will, or urgency. But that explanation is too easy.
The signals are evident, the science is sound, the uncertainties are understandable, and the implications are profound.
The more uncomfortable possibility is this: some risks do not register as actionable within our governance systems, not because they are unknown, but because they do not fit the way governance knows.
Governing shocks versus crisis
In practice, governance is highly effective at responding to shocks:
- energy price spikes
- extreme weather events
- supply disruptions
These are legible. They can be quantified, modelled, budgeted, and assigned.
But another class of signal behaves differently. These are signals about the degradation of the underlying systems that make the capacity to respond to shocks possible in the first place.
These do not arrive as discrete events, they do not fit within existing categories, and they do not translate easily into decisions. Because of that, they remain, in effect, pre-informational.
Therefore, governance can appear responsive, busy, active, and engaged, but much of that activity is oriented toward stabilising events, while the conditions that generate those events continue to degrade.
We respond to the shock, while the crisis accumulates. If this is true, it’s a pattern that guarantees further shocks, potentially to the point where underlying systems cannot cope. This would be a point of collapse.
Looking at this from inside governance
The governance task is made more difficult because GDP (cumulative financial flows in the economy) can grow, giving the illusion of well-being, while the underlying system is failing.
So, from inside governance, firefighting with shocks doesn’t feel like the denial of a crisis. It feels like pragmatism. But over time, what is deemed “feasible” starts to define what is seen.
And what falls outside that frame becomes increasingly difficult to recognise, let alone act upon. Governance is trapped inside a very tight loop.
What about political will?
I don’t think this is a problem of failed leadership effort or institutional blindness. It is more a problem of how governance systems determine what counts as reality.
Until we engage with that question, calls for more data, better communication, or greater urgency may reinforce the very loop they are trying to break.
For climate governance practitioners…
For those working in climate governance, there may be something in this argument that feels familiar. It could arise in moments where something important is sensed but cannot quite be said. It could be occasions where the response space feels too small for the context or where the available responses feel disproportionate to what is at stake.
These are not edge cases. They may be signals of the limits of the system itself. Inhabiting that limit and noticing it might be the first step towards moving it.
Finally..
If this is the case, then the challenge is not just to improve climate governance. It is to understand the conditions under which governance can recognise what matters in the first place.
Next post in the series
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