In 2013, the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties, the annual meeting of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, established a new mechanism for compensating loss and damage. The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, was a further significant step toward establishing a new Fund for Loss and Damage. In 2023, the Conference of the Parties established the fund (Vanhala, pp. 3–4). Small island developing states (SIDS) (Think Haiti, Tuvalu, Guinea-Bissau) and other lesser developed countries pay a greater price for a changing climate than richer countries. Places that were not heavy users of fossil fuels and did not benefit from their use as much as richer countries did have been suffering disproportionately from rising seas and storms. Therefore, a fund.
Lisa Vanhala’s pathbreaking new book analyzes what happened next. She follows the process of negotiating for a compensation fund and its financing across eight years of international meetings. A Fund for Loss and Damage links people and places across time and long distances. The world of international negotiations means the place is not where flooding occurs, nor where people flee to, but in beige meeting rooms. What do the negotiation practices say about disadvantage, what loss and damage mean, and how nation states will agree to compensation? She concludes her book discussing climate grief (Vanhala, 189–192), not least because the fund for compensation is, on any account, woefully underfunded.
Vanhala’s purposes within sociolegal studies are multiple, all of which are useful across areas of study. First, sociolegal scholars can study how legal stock is created, rather than centering on how it is interpreted in bureaucracies, by advocates, or in courts. Many questions are precluded by the time legal obligations reach a court or bureaucracy.
Other scholars have brought sociolegal studies to international negotiations – notably, Sally Merry (Reference Merry2006), Annelise Riles (Reference Riles2000) – and Vanhala draws on their foundational work. Vanhala takes frameworks for studying international agreements about individual human rights to climate. Vanhala shifts focus by taking on international (rather than domestic) negotiations to implement an already agreed-upon international framework.
Second, Vanhala argues that scholarship on legal initiatives – international or domestic – has often focused on initiatives that succeeded or were at least agreed upon. As she explains, that means we ignore a conceptual half of legal initiatives, and empirically probably more than half. Compensation for a changing climate has not garnered anything like the funding poor states have argued for. Vanhala investigates how an agreement on a matter that everyone agrees is important can end up as anemic as it has.
Next, Vanhala studies the construction or failure of an agreement by tracking the practices of negotiations. She frames her work by drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu to argue for the value of capturing a field. She also draws upon constructivism in international relations: interests and positions do not pre-exist the processes through which people express them. She describes herself and her team members as relying upon an “ethnographic sensibility.” In an engaging methodological chapter, she describes strategies for observing negotiations: hanging out (taking time to get to know what is happening), hanging around (noticing space and matter), hanging in (committing), and hanging back (reflexivity) (ch. 3).
The practices Vanhala centers on are material: delegation funding, chairs (p. 31), meals (p. 19), late night pizzas (p. 220). She illustrates large concepts – the privileged position of wealthy states, not least due to their ability to exclude poorer states – through memorable illustrations. Wealthy countries can send large, well-funded delegations to negotiations. Participants may have only one job: climate. Poorer countries send smaller delegations of people, any one of whom may have multiple jobs. People meet in down time, often replicating disadvantage. In the opening anecdote in one chapter, Vanhala tells of her team walking into a restaurant, talking about how best to describe who is included and who is excluded in negotiations. At the restaurant they spot representatives of wealthy states sitting together for dinner, without representatives from the poorer states (Vanhala, p. 19). She also describes negotiations that go overtime, requiring participants to order pizza in. Representatives from smaller states with less well-funded delegations cannot participate in the late night camaraderie of chipping in for a pizza.
Vanhala works with ambiguity and motivated interpretations of what loss and damage are. She does not define loss and damage, the central topic for the negotiations because parties couldn’t agree to what the term means. Alternative interpretations carry the different weight of interests. She follows how different meanings are made real in different fora. For negotiators from wealthy countries, notably the United States (p. 76), loss and damage is the language of risk: what could happen in the future, weighing probabilities, and compensating for anticipated harm. It’s about taking responsibility for causing harm from a specific cause. To some, loss and damage negotiations are unnecessary. Vanhala notes the preference of representatives from wealthier countries for pointing to the non-binding Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which places primary responsibility on states (pp. 105–106).
To negotiators from SIDS, the language of risk misstates the problem. First, by focusing on the risk of damage, it ignores the damage that is already here. There is no insurance to compensate SIDS when people have already had to move. Second, it ignores justice. SIDS deserve compensation because they have been damaged. A justice claim also does not require proving that every bit of damage is a result of a changing climate. Instead, from the point of view of justice, compensation is necessary to allow states to build.
Vanhala also explains the kinds of expertise that have been valued in international negotiations, and what that means for excluding or including participants from different countries and from civil society groups (Vanhala, 103–104). She notes the high value placed on scientific or economic expertise. Knowing climate change once seemed abstract, relying on physical scientists and their models. Models projected an increase in global temperatures that would be extremely difficult to adapt to as temperatures and sea levels rise, and disasters increase in their intensity. Adapting could prevent the worst of harms. As storms have increased in the damage they cause, and farmers consider how best to adapt to drought, a changing climate is also a matter of experience, not just abstract models.
“Believe the science” was once the clarion call for climate action and the dividing line in the United States about the reality of a changing climate. Climate advocates wanted to get officials and the public to name climate change as the problem, not specific harms that have agricultural practices and the use of fossil fuels at their root. Vanhala points out that valuing the expertise of those who can draw upon complex models and link glaciers to local floods means valuing expensive science. Expensive science is out of reach for representatives from SIDS. However, they do have experience with climate-related floods and droughts. Asking representatives from SIDS to rely on climate damage models denigrates the local expertise of experience.
Opinion polls accompanying COP 30 in 2025 have demonstrated that “believe the science” has won. However, the assumption that believing the science would mean addressing the problem of a changing climate has not held up. Most people, even in wealthier countries, believe a changing climate is real. A declining percentage of people report it as a major threat, compared with misinformation and terrorism (Poushter et al. Reference Poushter, Fagan, Smerkovich and Prozorovsky2025). Believing something is real does not necessarily lead to mitigating harm.
In chapter 6, Vanhala turns her attention to the significance of different ways of framing a problem to the Task Force on Displacement. Wealthy countries see migration as a problem of security, which means the problem is one for the states managing internal displacement, with “thin” responsibility for international governance. If the aim is instead protection, international governance has a much larger role to play. If migration is an adaptive response to a changing climate, international governance can support states as they manage where people move (pp. 144–145). Word choice packs in interests and possible international obligations.
The world Vanhala analyzes is one where states believe that to protect their interests they need to participate in international negotiations crafting an agreement. Wealthy states protect their interests through the multiple advantages they bring to negotiations: more money, more expensive science, and an ability to influence who is at the table when negotiating the terms of agreements. Mobilizing advantage during negotiations pays lip service to the importance of international agreements. If key players do what they can to refuse to participate, the need for the negotiation practices Vanhala documents so engagingly fades. In 2025, the United States, a wealthy state and a participant in the talks, began the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. Domestically, the national government has withdrawn information, cut staffing for the mandatory National Climate Assessment, and undermined commitments to energy transitions.
The very point of international negotiations is that inequity in a changing climate works across national boundaries. International inequity in compensating people and nations in a changing climate replicates within countries.
Vanhala captures the grounds upon which climate will continue to be fought, in both wealthy and poorer countries: insurance, risk, justice, and compensation for harm that is already happening. Damage in a changing climate colors litigation and legal settlements now, and will continue to (Bouwer, Reference Bouwer2018). Since harm is already happening, insurance and compensation within countries are also sites for climate compensation (Sterett and Mateczun Reference Sterett and Mateczun2022). The language of insurance and risk in international governance that Vanhala analyzes replicates in losses even within the wealthy countries meant to be held responsible. Problems are not a singular event, however damaging heat waves, floods, and wildfires are. People are paying the costs of a changing climate now. Insurance governs, and inequity in changing rates and in compensation is rife (Elliott Reference Elliott2021; Pralle Reference Pralle2019). Just as Vanhala argues for international negotiations, insurance and risk do not satisfy justice claims and losses here now. Even if insurance is not emotionally compelling, losing home is. In the United Kingdom, the flood insurance program underwritten by the government, Flood Re, is set to end in 2039. After that, market rates for flooding are to price risk appropriately for a changing climate. Needless to say, falling off an insurance cliff will not support home values. Therefore, an insurance cliff may well not be politically feasible, but no clear alternative is on the horizon. In the United States, the National Flood Insurance Program has run a deficit since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. In France and Germany, flood losses in a changing climate are changing the reinsurance market. In the United States, state government plans now back up the private fire insurance market. Insurance and risk were once a key site of study for sociolegal scholars. It’s where many people experience a changing climate. Studying how the increasing damage in a changing climate exceeds previous actuarial approaches could shift the study of climate and legal rights and wrongs to where people live, experience that Vanhala argues is excluded in international negotiations.
The book opens and concludes with Vanhala’s reflections on the multiple meanings of her title. What is the purpose of governing? Does the failure of an international agreement to do what it would seem it was meant to do – to compensate the less powerful, a result of “delay,” “undermining[ing],” and “underresourc[ing] by rich countries (p. 4, 184) – mean the end of governing? What does it mean to have an end to governing when the world is “sleepwalking toward climate catastrophe”? (p. 184). When the leadership of one country is upending the post Second World War international institutions and order, asking about the end of governing in climate is prescient.
