“The losses that have been and will be caused by climate change are both catastrophic and commonplace,” writes Lisa Vanhala [2] at the start of Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage. She then meticulously documents how those catastrophic and commonplace consequences could have been mitigated and why they were not. In what follows, I briefly detail the content of the book, before explaining why this work is important—substantively, theoretically, and methodologically—for the fields of sociology, socio-legal studies, environmental politics, and international relations.

The book proceeds as follows. After introducing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the challenge of climate change governance in Chapter 1 and her theory of climate change governance in Chapter 2, Vanhala describes her ethnographic approach to studying the topic in Chapter 3. She probes the history and social construction of the idea of “climate change loss and damage” in international law in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 examines the intricate yet ambiguous negotiations at the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanisms for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts. Chapter 6 turns to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Committee Task Force on Displacement and to shifting understandings of migration and displacement. Chapter 7 explores the financial resources—or lack thereof—dedicated to loss and damage and offers reason to exercise caution when assessing the momentous establishment of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) in 2022. Chapter 8 offers conclusions on the future of climate governance.

Governing the End focuses on a key component of one of today’s most pressing issues: the international community’s inaction—or at least inadequate action—in response to climate change. Vanhala compellingly analyzes the process by which the idea of climate change loss and damage became an object of global governance and shows how the making of this international legal order fundamentally undercut any effective or just response to the consequences of climate change. Put in more general terms, the book demonstrates that what is effective or even necessary for the construction of international agreements can fundamentally undermine meaningful change. International governance practices can worsen the problems that international governance actors are attempting to remedy. Vanhala’s analysis is rich and technical, yet also deeply accessible.

The goal of this book is not to assign particularistic blame for the failures of the international community to adequately respond to the life-or-death challenges presented by climate change, but to probe the structural, institutional, and ideational environments that have impeded an effective response. Ultimately, Vanhala shows that it is not just raw national interest or formal institutional design that undermine international organizations and global policy implementation, but also the embodiment of power within international institutions and the exclusionary practices of even well-intentioned actors. She concludes: “In both subtle and overt ways, the governance of climate change loss and damage has been blocked and stagnated by arguments over definitions, processes, and technicalities,” and adds that “throughout the negotiations, voices from developing countries have been directly and indirectly marginalized, minimized, and silenced” [185]. Such a clear-eyed assessment of the global community’s collective shortcomings is a necessary step in tackling the specific problems posed by climate change and disrupting the long-standing and deeply unequal power relations that inhibit the realization of climate solutions.

Vanhala establishes a three-pronged “theoretical scaffolding,” which involves attention to (1) the different ways that actors who are part of climate change loss and dynamics conversations frame the problem (and how those frames open up or close off responses to the problem identified), (2) the unfinished quality of so-called “agreements,” that are reconfigured by continued debates about policy implementation, and (3) the material forces that shape governance outcomes. In setting out this scaffolding, she builds on prior work informed by sociological and liberal institutionalism. The loss-and-damage frame was not preordained. In fact, at various points, three competing frames have circulated: harms and justice, risk and insurance, and loss and damage.

The loss-and-damage frame prevailed in large part because of its ambiguity. This ambiguity and flexibility made the frame acceptable to many but ultimately narrowed the possible range of policy responses. Where Vanhala departs from prior scholarship on frames and norm emergence is that she theorizes not just success (the subject of most early works) or failure (a growing area of focus), but the gradations in between, and the ways in which success on one metric can all but guarantee failure on another. This frame analysis allows Vanhala to articulate the intersection of the political and the bureaucratic, demonstrating the ways in which bureaucratization can undercut or elevate issues and isolate or obscure their political implications. She effectively translates legalese and bureaucrat-speak to clarify these dynamics. Drawing on the second and third parts of her theoretical scaffolding, Vanhala identifies how the possibility of renegotiating or reconstructing agreements through debates over their implementation has enabled more powerful countries to perform solidarity with less powerful (but more immediately precarious) countries. This performance of solidarity has also served as a denial of responsibility and allowed these countries to shirk blame for the material catastrophes that have followed climate change.

Turning to method, Vanhala’s background in sociological institutionalism is apparent. Yet, she expands on those kinds of approaches, deepening her methodological toolkit by engaging in what we might call “multi-sited” or “de-territorialized” institutional ethnography and broadening her focus to assess the myriad actors involved in the governance of climate change loss and damage. Vanhala illuminates the possibilities of ethnographic inquiry for questions related to international law and governance. The book was based on years of fieldwork, participant observation, and interviewing—data-gathering techniques that allowed Vanhala to uncover the paths both chosen and not chosen and the power that underlies not only what happens, but also what does not happen. This kind of work is necessary to deepen our understanding of the process of global governance, and it is very difficult to carry out successfully. The sheer quantity of data is daunting—more than 150 interviews and more than 450 hours of observation. The embodied perspective that Vanhala advocates is only possible with such meticulous and time-consuming data collection. Vanhala’s methodological approach will be a crucial model for other scholars for years to come.

As Vanhala notes, this framework allows for attention to “the subtle ways in which some understandings of a problem become dominant whereas others are marginalized through the development of new institutions, diplomatic practices, and contestation over nascent norms” [20]. Her focus is on “the sociological processes through which power is embodied and the seemingly mundane practices that nonetheless can shape legal outcomes” [20]. Emblematic of this dynamic is her observation that unequal global power relations were manifest even in the pizza dinners and other informal gatherings following long days at ExCom meetings. She further demonstrates how the lived reality of these unequal power relations and cultural differences shaped the ability to participate in negotiations. The act of huddling or creating side conversations to nail down specific phrasing had the effect of excluding those reliant on translation technology, to say nothing of different physical abilities or religious, cultural, or social norms that may discourage such close contact. In addition, the cost of participating in these meetings resulted in the re-creation of geopolitical relations. Those from less wealthy and more marginal countries tended to stay on the margins of the conference cities, while those from wealthier and more powerful countries could afford to stay in the core. These observations are vital for understanding the reality of climate change governance, but they would not be possible absent Vanhala’s ethnographic approach to the project.

The theoretical and methodological contributions of the book flow well beyond the subject of climate change (which is, of course, an enormously important topic today). As Vanhala writes in the conclusion, more than anything else, this book is “about an apparent ‘end of governing,’” “the withdrawal of leadership and the eschewing of responsibility” [184], charges that have become increasingly common in global politics. Vanhala’s call for more overt attention to the politics of loss offers a partial way forward: rather than falling prey to toxic positivity, despair, or ambivalence, we must do the hard work of labeling loss and the emotions that accompany it. We must also be attentive to the various channels of contestation—both small and large, and both politically palatable and not so politically palatable—that are spurred by that loss. Only by accurately naming the problems posed by climate change (and our culpability in them) will we be able to enact meaningful solutions. The far-reaching insights of this book will benefit scholars of international law, global governance, climate change/environmental politics, law and society, bureaucratic politics, and political ethnography.