Marie Petersmann

Tech-based Prototypes in Climate Governance: On Scalability, Replicability, and Representation

Abstract

‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns sees absorbed in the turn to prototyping as a new ‘style’ of governance. In this article, we take on this observation and explore how the ‘lean start-up mentality’ that Johns described has taken hold of tech-based climate governance. We base our reflections on the ‘Tech for Our Planet’ challenge that took place over 2021 and was showcased at the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow. While a turn ‘from planning to prototypes’ is observable, we question how exactly this ‘change of course’ affects the high modernist style of global governance and its critique by international lawyers. The ‘digital solutions for climate challenges’ that were showcased in Glasgow are indeed based on localized experiments with data science, thereby seemingly overcoming high modernist impulses towards universalist ideals. Yet, these experimental prototypes are developed with the ambition of being replicable and scaled up, to become a stack of tools deployable in any given scenario. This form of scaling up neither breaks with modernist aspirations based on technologically-mediated replicability—of moving the same logic inscribed in code to different sites and contexts—nor with a modernist understanding of knowledge as universal in its application. In our analysis, the determining feature is then not so much a matter of planning or prototyping in ideal type forms, but of replicability of knowledge production and scalability of technological know-how that underpin both planning and prototyping. Prototyping in the start-up space does not depart from, but rather reinscribes, a modernist representation of the human subject that forces its epistemological lens onto a world of nonhuman objects amenable to governance. Critical international lawyers’ toolkits must therefore be reconfigured with a focus on a governance style of disembodied knowledge production that runs through both planning and prototyping.

Read on SpringerLink

Cittadini Sentinella: Percepire Catastrofi tra Covid-19 e Cambiamento Climatico

by Marie Petersmann and Anna Berti Suman

L’Altro Diritto

Read on: Pacinieditori.it

Citizen Sensing and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: Engaging with Covid-19 and Climate Change

by Marie Petersmann and Anna Berti Suman

COVID-19 from the Margins: Pandemic Invisibilities, Policies and Resistance in the Datafied Society

Read on: Tilburg University Research Portal

Book Review: The unconstructable earth: an ecology of separation by Frédéric Neyrat

by Marie Petersmann

Law and Humanities

Read on: Taylor & Francis Online

Response-abilities of Care in More-than-Human Worlds

by Marie Petersmann

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment

Read on: Edgar Elgar Online

I wish there was a treaty we could sign: An inquiry into the making of the global pact for the environment

by Marie Petersmann

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Abstract

This article provides ethnographic insights into the making of the latest UN-backed instrument for transnational environmental law and governance: the Global Pact for the Environment (GPE). It narrates the rise and fall of a contemporary policy project designed to unify and strengthen international environmental law. The story starts in 2015 on the premises of a Parisian legal think tank and ends in May 2019 at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, where states ultimately decided not to adopt the GPE as a legally binding instrument but opted to prepare a political declaration to be presented in 2022 at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UN Conference on the Human Environment. The time between 2015 and 2019 is divided into two periods. From 2015 to 2017, the GPE was imagined, drafted, and promoted by a group of non-state actors mainly constituted by legal academics. From 2017 to 2019, the GPE was introduced in the UN machinery and turned into a state-oriented policy process. Based on original interview material and an unexplored archive of primary sources, the article traces the multiplicity of actants enrolled in the GPE, the interests that held them together, and the institutional ties they built for the project to materialize. It draws on actor-network theory's model of translation - through problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization - to reassemble the bonds between human and nonhuman actants in the making of the "global," the "pact," and the "environment." The account sheds light on the informal processes and the relational and agential dynamics at play in this laboratory of transnational environmental law making, thereby illuminating and questioning the politics of policy-entrepreneurship and consensus-building - the tenuous and fragile modes of existence that mark contemporary international law.

Read on: Jstor

Contested indigeneity and traditionality in environmental litigation: The politics of expertise in regional human rights courts

by Marie Petersmann

Human Rights Law Review

Read on: Oxford Academic

Sympoietic thinking and Earth System Law: The Earth, its subjects and the law

by Marie Petersmann

Earth System Governance

Read on: ScienceDirect

Earth system law: Exploring new frontiers in legal science

by Marie Petersmann

Earth System Governance

Read on: ScienceDirect

Assistant Professorial Research Fellow

Tech-based Prototypes in Climate Governance: On Scalability, Replicability, and Representation

Cittadini Sentinella: Percepire Catastrofi tra Covid-19 e Cambiamento Climatico

Citizen Sensing and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: Engaging with Covid-19 and Climate Change

Book Review: The unconstructable earth: an ecology of separation by Frédéric Neyrat

Response-abilities of Care in More-than-Human Worlds

I wish there was a treaty we could sign: An inquiry into the making of the global pact for the environment

Contested indigeneity and traditionality in environmental litigation: The politics of expertise in regional human rights courts

Sympoietic thinking and Earth System Law: The Earth, its subjects and the law

Earth system law: Exploring new frontiers in legal science

Sensing Covid-19 and Climate Change