Infinite Possibilities in a Finite World: Ontological Politics and Climate Emergency

Abstract

Increasingly, mainstream approaches to the climate emergency are framed around technocratic, market-based policies that leave unchallenged the anthropogenic mode of development responsible for the crisis in the first place, and tend to erase the voices of grounded and localised experiences that issue from different ways of being in the world. The trend is embodied in mounting conflicts around dispossession of indigenous land, where local demands transcend conventional conceptions of political participation and challenge liberal-capitalist ontologies. This paper will review the political implications and opportunities that adopting insights derived from the ontological turn in the social sciences offers in such a context, and consider how reflections around post-humanist concerns, and the conceptualisation of difference that transcends the modern culture/nature divide, can offer a way out of the current political and ecological impasse.