Description
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has been at the forefront of framing the need for proactive climate policy in terms of ‘gaps’. This strategy manifests itself in its Emissions Gap Report, Production Gap Report and Adaptation Gap Report series. As the phenomenon of governing through gaps has received limited attention overall, the more specific logics behind the UNEP’s heavy discursive reliance on gap-centred arguments are also largely unknown. This paper therefore employs qualitative content analysis of key UNEP reports to examine how the organisation has, over time, constructed its policy agenda around the general notion of ‘gaps’ and specific instances of them. I focus on detailing UNEP’s use of gap language in connection with ‘planetary boundaries’ and related concepts that assume the existence of certain environmental limits. Such references work to naturalise gaps in climate policy as something physically determinate and, thus, externally given, rather than expressing their contingency as negotiated social agreements. By looking into the deployment of ‘gaps’ in UNEP policy discourse, the paper advances our understanding of the organisation’s attempts to shape the international climate agenda and, more specifically, cajole states into action.
