Pathways and the politics of anticipation: imagining the corridor for international climate cooperation

Abstract

This chapter describes how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) performs its self-proclaimed role of 'mapmaker' (IPCC 2014) for climate policy. We show how mitigation pathways, as assessed by the IPCC, anticipate the corridor for international cooperation on climate change. Specifically, we focus on the use of Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM) as the predominant scientific approach to project mitigation pathways that are consistent with politically agreed temperature targets. Bringing together research in science and technology studies, sociologies of the future, and political science, we show how the IPCC, in its role as mapmaker, also acts as a corridor-maker that defines the corridor for political cooperation on climate change. The IPCC's core tool for assessing mitigation pathways, IAMs, provide a mode of climate anticipation historically centered on techno-economic assumptions. Based on IAMs, the IPCC narrows down the range of climate futures that are deemed to be technically feasible and cost efficient. In doing so, the IPCC's techno-economic framing of climate change and mitigation privileges techno-scientific solutions such as carbon dioxide removal over cultural, political, and systemic change.