Description
This paper explores the social construction of climate policy at the hand of expert bodies enjoying epistemic power, specifically, analysing the fiscal dimensions and underlying economic ideas of the IMF’s ‘Climate Change Trilemma’ (IMF 2023). This focal point – on how expert economic bodies understand the ecological crisis of capitalism - is crucial to the politics of tackling climate change, with important and real socio-ecological consequences. Analysing how expert economic governance bodies broach climate change, its mitigation, and the associated economic costs and implications, reveals contestations within technocratic climate politics. We interrogate some of the assumptions fed into IMF climate change analysis, and why and how they matter. Evaluating the intellectual production of technocratic economic governance bodies enables us to delineate the evolving economic ideas on tackling climate change, and how these inform thinking about the costs of and transition towards ‘net zero’. The IMF’s mainstream macro-models, which are deeply linear in orientation and built on questionably conservative ‘discounting’ assumptions, are decidedly ill-equipped to make sense of ecological non-linearities such as climate ‘tipping points’. This, alongside powerful attachment to traditional notions of fiscal discipline, hinder the IMF’s ability to give life to its insight that governments cannot afford not to tackle climate change. Fund fiscal evaluation and policy recommendations remains excessively rooted in unecological thinking.
