It has long been acknowledged that climate change is a matter of life and death for some states in the international system. Small remote low-lying island states in the Pacific, like Kiribati and Tuvalu, are in danger of disappearing under rising ocean tides. These territories face state death, indirectly but undeniably, at the hands of those supercharging global heating through unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions tied to the fantasy of endless growth. Organized as an alliance of small island developing states (SIDS) in the United Nations, this group was influential in the push for the Paris Agreement, in December 2015, where the world’s states rhetorically committed themselves to keep global heating levels below 1.5°C. “1.5 to stay alive” was the rallying cry of the SIDS, while “loss and damage” was an emergent catchphrase that promised compensation and climate justice for those acutely exposed to the negative consequences of climate breakdown.
But how precisely would “loss and damage” be pursued and realized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)? This is the subject of Lisa Vanhala’s excellent book Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage. The “end” here is an objective, an aspirational goal of creating a mechanism for accounting for and compensating for loss and damage. But it is an end within a more ominous end, an immanent condition where stability is giving way to instability, the present world hurtling toward tipping points and uncharted territory. “Loss and damage” are the permanent conditions of things within the endgame of the Holocene climate regime. Could this endgame be governed? Or was this an endpoint for UN global governance and the very idea of governance itself?
Vanhala’s work is an in-depth ethnography of the laudable desire to address the accumulating costs of climate change among the most vulnerable states in the UN system. She centers her work on the ExCom, the executive committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts, which is made up of 20 states representing developed, developing, and vulnerable states in the UN system. Conceived in the Polish capital in 2013, the subsequent Paris Agreement enshrined the concept in international law with its own separate article. ExCom’s job was to make “loss and damage” meaningful and create a system for financial payments from rich developed states to poor vulnerable countries. Stakeholders and interested observers could apply for credentials to attend its meetings, which were mostly open.
Vanhala spent 8 years attending “loss and damage” related meetings between 2016 and 2023, observing numerous UN workshops and conferences, and conducting more than 150 semi-structured interviews with ExCom negotiators, experts, civil society representatives, and international diplomats. She brought to this research an ethnographic sensibility which, together with her graduate students working in this area, she codified as a three-part methodology: “hanging out” (participant observation), “hanging in” (enduring commitment, access, and trust), and “hanging back” (cultivating practices of reflexivity). Her work is thorough and grounded, attentive to the mundane yet incisive about the complex governance ecosystem she is studying.
The substantive core of the book is a series of chapters that present her research findings. She organizes these using three constructivist methods that refine her ethnographic sensibility: a focus on the framing strategies of participants (inspired by Irving Goffman), an attentiveness to embodied practices and rituals in climate negotiations (Pierre Bourdieu is a guide here), and a concern with the power of material objects and locations (Jane Bennett and new materialism). One chapter is devoted to the ExCom meetings, while another is devoted to a subcommittee task force on displacement, and a third to the effort to create the financing mechanism for compensating loss and damage. The empirics are rich and reveal admirable academic labor, integrity, and reflexivity. I particularly liked how Vanhala isolates the competing framings around loss and damage using attention to diagnostic and prognostic frames, generating what become competing storylines and discursive coalitions around key concepts. To developed countries, keen to inhibit questions of climate justice, loss and damage is a story about risk that requires a suite of technocratic responses grounded in insurance industry practices and ways of seeing. To developing and climate-vulnerable countries, loss and damage is a story about harms requiring climate change responsibility recognition and, following the “polluter pays” norm, compensation and reparations. Delegates skillfully deployed various tactics to advance their positions.
Vanhala is particularly attentive to the strategies of powerful, rich countries and their diplomats. Ambiguity is weaponized. There is deliberate foot-dragging and forum shopping. Rather than consolidating the concept, institutionalizing it, and establishing clear financing mechanisms, she documents strategies to “unmake” international law on climate change, to renegotiate and renege on agreed principles. She chronicles practices of exclusion, “microrelational assertions of power, repeated denials of the loss that countries are already experiencing, and blatant refusals to take responsibility for the effects of almost two hundred years of processes of industrialization from which developed countries and emerging economies have benefited” (p. 7). This leads her to a devastating but empirically justified observation: “This book suggests that, at its worst, the global governance process is symbolic window dressing that lends a fig leaf of legal legitimacy to business as usual” (p. 7). Her summation in the conclusion is equally sharp: “This is not a book about strong, visionary political leaders and policy makers responding to global needs and facing the realities of climate change head-on. It is ultimately about the withdrawal of leadership and the eschewing of responsibility” (p. 184). It is not governing the end but the end of governing.
Vanhala is not an insider but gets close enough to convey what is going on. Particularly effective in her work are the moments when she personalizes her research, moments in a meeting or after a meeting in a restaurant. Then, there are questions that stay with her. One of her expert interlocutors asks her: “Did she really want to study something called ‘loss and damages’ for the next ten years?” (p. 42). This prompts her to reflect upon the psychological burdens and costs that come with her topic. There are moments of surprise, such as when preparing to travel to COP28 (Dubai), where she expected extensive negotiations on a loss and damage fund, and she is stunned to hear that the fund has been agreed on the very first day of the conference! Vignettes such as these humanize a subject that is often abstract and highly bureaucratic.
Vanhala returns to the central issue in the conclusion: confronting loss: “It is difficult to be reminded every day of the precarious position the world is in and the scale of denial that exists among our political leaders. When I tell people what I work on, they inevitably want to know whether I think progress is being made, whether the COPs are living up to the headlines, whether everything is as dire as it currently seems. I want to be able to give them a positive answer, something that can provide hope and inspire agency. Yet the division and bureaucracy in the UNFCCC at times feels so entrenched as to be insurmountable. I think meaningful change will be extremely difficult” (p. 191).
Vanhala’s book confronts one of the most important issues of our time, but one relegated to mid-level diplomats and a thicket of international bureaucratic forums. Most liberal governments in the developed world at least acknowledge the material facts of global heating and that climate justice is an issue. But the United States under Trump 2.0 will not even do that. Instead, his regime is doubling down on hydrocarbon extractivism and imperialist resource grabs while “governing” through attention-grabbing outrage made possible by energy-demanding technospheres of unreality. His government sees geopolitical power as centered on its hydrocarbon energy dominance and has actively undone renewable energy systems and infrastructures. The United States under Trump is a petrostate power still chasing a glorious, masculinist dominance over nature. It has withdrawn the country from the Paris Agreement (again) and from a range of UN institutions, including the Loss and Damage Fund.
For me, Vanhala’s book provoked two major questions. The first concerns whether the existing structures of global governance are fit for purpose when it comes to climate change. The UN governance system is anchored around state sovereignty, and state diplomats are by profession loyal servants to their particular state. But, by virtue of their education and work, these are also cosmopolitan individuals with a commitment to international society and global governance ideals. Further, as educated officials, they are likely very familiar with the science of global climate change (and associated crises like biodiversity loss). Vanhala notes how many of the ExCom members “no doubt desperately want” to do more (p. 2), but they face serious constraints on their ability to do so. One way of reading Vanhala’s book is as a portrait of the sharp inadequacies of the existing structures of global governance to address a planetary problem like climate change. Others, like Blake and Gilman’s (2024) Children of a Modest Star, explicitly call for new planetary-level governance institutions and structures. Given that the COP process appears fatally hamstrung by consensus requirements and seemingly captured by hydrocarbon interests, there appears to be a strong case for a revolutionary break from existing governance structures and practices. But I suspect that Vanhala sees this as an impossibility, and that we are sentenced to struggle for modicums of small progress within a deeply flawed system of sovereign states.
The second question concerns broader geopolitical shifts over the last decade, which understandably are not addressed by Vanhala. Russia’s war against Ukraine is a major blow against the UN system and global governance. But the big story is China, which has made remarkable strides in recent years in deploying clean energy systems at scale. China, of course, remains the largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, currently alone accounting for nearly a third of total global CO2 emissions. The country is still building coal-fired electricity plants and is deeply committed to its domestic coal production. Yet China’s broader vision is to become an electrostate, a civilization and modernity powered not by hydrocarbons but by clean energy transportation infrastructures and power systems. On the global stage, China is making a bid for leadership over the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy. Yet it has not donated anything to the loss and damage fund, citing its status as a developing country. Instead, it operates bilaterally through Belt and Road projects and a South–South Climate Cooperation Fund. There are a few bright spots in the domain of climate change politics. Do we dare to believe that the clean energy ecological civilization ambition of China’s authoritarian communist state might be one of them?
