Description
This paper explores the politics of reframing climate change as a problem of local governance and traces the ways in which this process has produced and legitimized new governance agents. The paper draws on a discourse analysis of the scientific reporting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a participant observation of the IPCC Climate Change and Cities Scientific Conference, an event held in Edmonton, Canada in March 2018 that aimed to set the future agenda for scientific research on local climate change. It argues that through its scientific reporting, the IPCC has, over time, contributed to reframing the climate as a distinctly local problem. More importantly, the paper argues that the problem as it is framed in IPCC reporting legitimises some actors and communities to act as governors of local climate change while implicitly delegitimising others. It further illustrates how, at the Climate Change and Cities Scientific Conference, practitioners and non-state actors advanced problem framings that reinforced their particular positions in the field of climate governance. Consequently, IPCC reporting and the results of the conference have reinforced the dominance of some governance actors and issue interpretations. Analytically, the paper contributes to existing debates on non-state actors in global climate governance, and highlights in a nuanced manner how particular non-state actors come to be perceived as more legitimate in a field of governance than others. Normatively, the paper highlights a key process through which particular actors come to define the problem of—and therefore solutions to—the climate emergency.
