Lisa Vanhala’s new book, Governing the End, is a major scholarly achievement. The book offers an expansive and detailed yet accessible analysis of the international political processes addressing (or evading, as often is the case) the challenges of climate change. The core idea of “end” in the title refers to “the idea that climate change is going to be the end – for some lives and livelihoods; homes and homelands; practices and material artifacts; and ways of being and knowing” (3). This in turn is closely linked to the theme of “loss and damage” that permeates the discussion. But the author plays around with multiple meanings of “ends” throughout the book, including especially as goals or objectives. The idea of “loss” is likewise polysemous, including the late chapter suggestion that the “governance of loss” perhaps signals the “loss of governance” capacity (17).
The author’s analysis is brilliant, the topic timely, the narrative text interesting and exciting. The overall theorization of the analysis, outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 and sustained and revisited throughout, employs constructivist framing theory and Bourdieusian conceptions of practice plus much more in very sophisticated and illuminating ways. I especially appreciate how the author’s constructivist analysis incorporates attention to the instrumental agency of actors and institutional and institutionalizing dimensions of power, especially in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The early chapters also explain and defend the largely ethnographic method and conceptions of “deterritorialized ethnography” that produced the empirical foundation of the study, often manifest in intriguing vignettes.
Perhaps the most unique and important contribution of the book is to shift attention away from initial policy negotiations on climate issues and to what are conventionally labelled implementation stages, which are (appropriately, in my view) portrayed simply as subsequent stages of indeterminate, contested political negotiation, often involving “agreement unmaking.” Vanhala demonstrates that different actors contest the dominant frames for addressing climate issues, with a “harm, justice and liability” frame, underpinned by conceptions of climate justice and favored by less developed nations, jousting with a more technocratic “risk management and insurance” frame favored by more developed nations. The author shows how initial policy processes advance by compromises that produce ambiguous or vague policies, including especially the overarching “loss and damage” frame eventually enshrined in international climate law, which then are often reconstructed or ignored in subsequent phases of the political process(es) (46). The author notes also that “this book began by noting that this project was an ‘ethnography of the audible,’ yet it is the topics that people are most quiet about in the loss-and-damage discussions that can be the most revealing” (189). These are insightful angles that serve the overall analysis very well and provide generalizable application beyond the climate issue.
The manuscript is very well organized into sensibly constructed thematic chapters. Chapter 3 addresses the methodological challenges and strategies that developed over eight years of ethnographic research to provide the empirical core of the book. Chapter 4 offers a detailed history of the construction of climate change loss and damage frames within the UNFCCC. Vanhala amplifies and illustrates the theme that ambiguous policy language has facilitated compromise and agreement at the formulation stage but permits, even invites, evasion and deviation at the implementation stage. The author here makes great use of concepts of framing and practices/performance. Chapter 5 begins where the policy negotiations end and implementation processes continue politics by other means in the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (ExCom). Most important is the argument that practices are institutionalized so as to perform an inclusivity that reflects and reproduces power imbalances. As such, historically divergent frames ultimately play a formative role in incipient institutional practices through “four specific channels: the composition of committees with members from certain backgrounds, practices of participation, agenda-setting tactics, and practices of siting meetings” (17). Chapter 6 shifts the focus to human migration amidst climate change. The author examines how the modes of governance in the Task Force on Displacement – which are technocratic, hierarchical, under-resourced and focused on certain types of knowledge production and dissemination – shape the development of potential new norms in this area of migration. Chapter 7 shifts the focus further from contestation over the damage and loss frame to the issue of financing … for whom, from whom, how much, how …? In tracing the history of negotiations and efforts on loss and damage finance we see a continuation of the types of practices – from re-framing to forum-shifting – that have a long history in loss and damage diplomacy. Vanhala’s Chapter 8 directly assesses whether the institutionalized international climate regime can fairly and effectively manage the challenges at hand. Her provocative conclusion: “despite positive appearances and seeming successes, the story of climate change loss and damage is not so much about governing the end as it is about an apparent ‘end of governing’” (184).
I, as reader, find these arguments separately and together compelling, illuminating and largely convincing. I welcome in particular the author’s commitment to balancing a sober, often pessimistic assessment of policy formation and implementation with efforts to identify possibilities for positive change in processes addressing climate issues.
The book draws on and engages, often critically, a wide swath of sources and secondary academic literature. The bibliography is long and the core ideas should be familiar to many sociolegal scholars beyond as well as within the rapidly expanding club of climate scholars. It is relevant that Vanhala at various points acutely identifies the lack of attention to climate change politics and policy processes by political scientists and sociolegal scholars, her two primary disciplinary groundings. Vanhala’s critical posture strikes me as fair and worthwhile, and I hope that her challenge is generative.
I am pleased to underline that the book is elegantly written, and accessible. The theorization is complex and dense, to be sure, likely making it challenging for some non-specialist readers. Still, Vanhala is engaging throughout and focuses on issues in ways that are illuminating, and particularly resonant for me. I repeat that her elaborate theorization works very well for her chosen focus on climate change politics but also has considerable generalizable value for studies of policy processes in other issue areas. Vanhala’s substantive focus on climate change politics itself should generate much interest (sell books, win attention, influence debates), including from non-academics (undergrads, grad students, policy experts, the general public). It is surely a good candidate for assignment in graduate courses (on policy processes and/or climate change politics) and perhaps in some courses for advanced undergraduates.
I have few criticisms of this masterful book, and none of them are worth elaborating in this short review. This study is very much about power, and specifically about how ideas become manifest and take form amidst other dimensions of power, including the instrumental power of different actors and institutional/contextual factors (including changes in the weather). Again, it should be read by scholars with interests far beyond international climate change politics.
