Resisting counter-productive technocratic climate scientism

What is technocratic climate scientism?

There is much to commend in Hyslop et al.'s article ‘a climate risk management typology: Integrating approaches to reduce risk’. For instance, I applaud the systematic efforts to resist silos and blind-spots, to at least acknowledge some possible pluralities and to address climate issues in ways that go beyond overly aggregated, scientifically-false framings of a naturally static global mean temperature. I also support the aim of correcting irrationality and blinkers behind advocacy of solar radiation management.

Yet alongside all the positive good faith, discipline and ingenuity in this work, a tellingly negative irony emerges. In some ways, the article par excellence exemplifies modernist aspirations in policy making: applying structured objectivity and rationality to ostensibly determinate outcomes (Misa et al., 2003). If examined more closely, however (beyond impressions given by the scientific style), neglect for their own messy subjectivities, indeterminacies and performativities makes the advocated practices strikingly non-modern (Latour, 2012). These features especially warrant exploration, because they are so widespread in current climate policy (Hulme, 2009; Sarewitz, 2011).

For example, in advocating the ‘integrating’ of ‘approaches to reduce risk’, it is seriously under-explored how the six formative ‘high level factors’ and their attributes actually constitute a vastly indeterminate and intractable field for choice. Even before external context-specificities are considered, many hundreds of logical permutations arise as potential ‘scenarios’. Much then depends on selections of which exogenous framing conditions are most salient. Yet protocols for such design choices are radically under-determined by the explicit parameters of the typology. Differing equally valid choices of scenario potentially reverse resulting policy pros and cons. Singular connotations of ‘integration’ are overwhelmed by multiplicities of invisible subjectivities. An impression is given of deterministic rationality. But outcomes are far more contingent and chaotic.

Rather than being driven by the stated dimensions, steps, scenarios and interventions then, outcomes of analysis will likely be at least as strongly constituted by unstated meanings, purposes, values, virtues, identities, norms and interests that are also inevitably tacitly in play. Analytic results will be partly shaped by undocumented detailed contextualities around analysts, their subjects, patrons and processes through which these engage.

Such open-ended context dependency is not necessarily bad. It is anyhow unavoidable. Instead, the problem lies in the lack of acknowledgement (and so transparency and accountability) for conditioning factors that lie beneath and beyond the stated terms of analysis. Much more depends on these hidden contingencies than the systematics suggest. As in many other current climate policy analyses, then, what results – despite best intentions – is that messiness and indeterminacy of climate issues are overlain and rendered largely invisible by a performatively controlling technocratic scientism (Varcoe, 2002; Esmark, 2020). Technocratic because irreducibly political aspects are under-accountably delegated to technical expertise (Habermas, 2015). Scientism because this capture is asserted and concealed in the cultural idiom of science (Sorell, 2013).

Technocratic scientism is authoritarian

One aspect of this technocratic scientism lies in the notion of ‘overshoot’ that pervades the whole analysis. It is positive that this is pluralised here in more-variegated-than-usual scenarios (Saltelli et al., 2020). But the underlying ‘reductive-aggregative’ (Stirling, 2003) focus on mean global temperature nonetheless still constitutes an essentially quantitative style. As the authors correctly note (but fail fully to explore) ‘values and uncertainties … can often be hidden while focusing on temperature outcomes’. Yet it signifies technocratic scientism that the cultural authority of calculation is nevertheless also invoked here around overshoot, without sufficiently addressing associated inevitable scope for legitimate divergence in the epistemic processes pursued and the practical results thereby obtained (Porter, 1995).

So, this central notion of ‘overshoot’ further reinforces the reductive force of the underlying quantitative body language. This concept depends on assumptions and structures in technical modelling more than on direct engagement with the meanings, purposes, values, interests, virtues, norms or identities that lie behind these (Wynne, 1992a). The reference to addressing ‘trade-offs’ between dimensions and interventions also entrenches this calculative style. Procedures invoked in ‘trading off’ give a further impression that singular scalar values can be assigned to key parameters with a confidence and precision that is effectively impossible in a plural uncertain society (O’Neill, 2002).

On the face of it, presentation of this work as a ‘qualitative climate risk management typology’ may seem to relax these concerns. After all, to self-identify as qualitative is to apparently renounce the mysticism and tyranny of numbers in technocratic scientism (Mennicken & Espeland, 2019). Yet, sweeping kinds of imagined reduction and aggregation are nonetheless actually occurring here, that directly reproduce those associated with quantification. For instance, none of the risk diagrams make sense, without implicit assumptions that scalar values can be unproblematically quantified on the organising axes and commensurated across relevant dimensions irrespective of context or perspective (Saltelli and Di Fiore, 2023). Likewise it is striking that none of the scenario-specific diagrams show any uncertainty.

The ‘risk management’ framing also does crucial work here. By contrast with less rigidly structured forms of ‘politics’, ‘management’ wrongly implies a clearly bounded, tightly-disciplined, hierarchically stratified social world. This is the only context in which credibility arises for ‘integrated’ scalar quantifications, whose implied conditionality-free prescriptions would be implausible in less notionally managerially controlled settings (Wynne, 1987). Whatever definitions are used for ‘risk’, this is also a more circumscribed, determinate and tractable condition than, say, ‘uncertainty’ or ‘ignorance’ (Wynne, 1992b). So, a range of dimensions may (as persuasively claimed) be ‘extended’ by this analysis, but it is problematic that these are addressed reductively ‘explicitly in terms of risk’. Overall, then, this framing of analysis around risk also helps bolster misleading impressions that the framework has addressed the inconvenient complex unruliness of climate politics, when it has not.

All this matters for many reasons. In its own terms, a technocratic scientism that aims to ‘integrate thinking across all climate risk management interventions’ in ways that are so subject to hidden assumptions, is a fundamentally ineffective means practically to address the real nature and depth of climate challenges. How did this slippage take place, from duly recognising damaging impacts, to pretending at a mandate for control (Stirling, 2023a)? The history of environmental movements suggests this is a mistake. For instance, across many successful (albeit continuing) struggles – like those over agrochemicals, toxic wastes, overfishing, biodiversity, asbestos, heavy metals and nuclear safety – past environmentalist victories were arguably won more through pursuit of political qualities that are largely the opposite of the performed technocratic authority and scientistic precision identified above in this controlling ‘integrative’ style (Gee et al., 2001; Harremoës et al., 2013).

For instance, direct articulation of plural values tended to be more central in past green campaigning, than claimed integrated scientific understandings. Mobilisations were more unruly and bottom-up, than structured and top-down. Bearing witness was more crucial than asserting authority. Greater emphasis was placed in humility about uncertainties and ambiguities, than in hubris about the determinability of risks. Action focused more on alternative political hopes than technically mediated fears. Attention was more on caring than controlling dispositions towards fellow humans and other life. As in much wider climate policy, then, it seems striking in this analysis, that the most successful traits of past ecological struggles are those that are now less emphasised.

This leads to a more specific reason why it matters that this kind of scientistic technocratic performance is so prevalent in current climate policy. This is because wider real-world politics make this style not only ineffective, but often seriously counterproductive. By sidelining accountability for its own contingently determining factors, technocratic scientism is actually authoritarian. And when confronted with such overbearing body-language in politics, the relational response is to meet like with like. Thus, as currently played out around the world, opposing viewpoints are less likely to be persuaded by a professed ‘scientific’ analysis (that actually hides its own postmodern characteristics), than to double down with their own even more authoritarian political response.

Simplifying science for justification is ineffective and counter-productive

Of course, the particular values, interests and sources of authority associated with anti-environmental populism are largely different to those mobilised in climate action. But the authoritarian style is similarly neglectful of its accountabilities. So (surprisingly for some), current forms of regressive ‘post truth’ nationalism can, in this view, be recognised as progressive environmental internationalism in the mirror. Each is authoritarian in their own way. Both pay too little attention to the inconvenient complexities of the world. Both betray due responsibility for their own conditionalities and so fail to invite accountability. Under this dual attack, ‘democracy’ retrenches into structures for asserting privilege, power and patronage, rather than arenas to catalyse and nurture political struggles enabling these to be challenged (Stirling, 2024).

To be fair, these concerns extend far beyond the scope of this paper – or even climate policy analysis in general. For all the current prominence of ‘evidence based policy’ and ‘sound scientific assessment’, the most valuable commodity for hard-pressed policy makers around the world has always arguably lain less in truth itself, than in political justification. In a tradition of understanding following Habermas (1976), Foucault (1971), Collingridge (1980), Hood (2011) and Boltanski and Thevenot (1991), what I mean by this, is an ability for decision making to foster persuasion, trust, acceptance, legitimacy, compliance and blame avoidance. This ability can be aided by intrinsic qualities of 'truth' (however seen). But epistemic validity of content is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for justification. More than inconvenient real-world pluralities, what policy making typically most strongly demands is uncertainty-deleting, ambiguity-effacing, conditionality-denying engineering of closure (Stirling, 2008).

So, when policy analysis delivers a framework like this as a (self-styled) ‘tool’, what such a tool is most clearly for, is more about performing political justification than accurately conveying the messy multiplicities and conditionalities that are always associated with real-world truth (Stirling, 2023b). This is why there is such a dearth of substantive attention in this analysis to uncertainties, ambiguities, sensitivities and gaps in knowledge within the individual scenarios (Stirling, 2010). This is why such a framework as a whole can so overplay its own objectivity and completeness and so underplay the shaping effects of subjectivities. This is why policy making in general thus becomes – quite literally – instrumentalised by the tools that are used.

In a field as high stakes and encompassing as climate governance, what are at issue are not only technical means but political ends. In a plural, unequal and power-laden world (in which climate science itself is also embedded), the consequences of analysis are always radically more multiple and indeterminate than either experts or policymakers are incentivised to acknowledge. So the justificatory ‘task’ to which a ‘tool’ like this is applied, is not what the body language of science implies. Again, the advent of a ‘post truth’ era appears at least as much a consequence of such practice, as its opposite.

This is where the above paradox rests most heavily, of a performance of modernity that is actually highly non-modern (Latour, 2012). Like diverse notions of democracy, science itself began as a social movement in aspirations (never fully realised) to the challenging of shaping effects of power and privilege in knowledge production (Wilsdon & Doubleday, 2015). ‘Nullius in verba’, as the original motto of the Royal Society had it (Royal Society, 2008). But – on climate as elsewhere – centuries of pressure from justification are now in danger of subverting this to its opposite. Science thus risks moving from a process for questioning the undue shaping effects of power and privilege on knowledge, to a body of doctrine for asserting them (Wilsdon & Doubleday, 2015).

Of course, none of this implies that the authors are fully unaware of these issues, nor, still less, that such dynamics are intended. Indeed, credit should be given for the clear statement in describing this framework as a ‘tool’, that ‘no tool is value-free (the role of the mapmaker is not apolitical)’. Yet the depth and scope of the above core dilemmas remain unmentioned. As around climate disruption itself, the principal forms, loci and gradients of ‘asymmetrically structuring agency’ in play in this field are collective and distributed (Stirling, 2019). Individual social actors are more shaped than they are shaping of this whole. So, even if it is incidentally acknowledged that analysis is ‘not apolitical’, political consequences can be the opposite to those that are intended.

So, we return to the core stated purpose of this article, with which I strongly agree: to support a global moratorium on solar radiation management. It is specifically to this end, that the authors are eager to be ‘more “legible” to policy makers’ by setting ‘stylised risk levels as a visual mechanism for incorporating into risk management’.

In this regard, what I am arguing here is that in trying to be ‘useful’ like this, something very different is actually delivered. And this conclusion is all the more important, for also applying to a vast array of other well intentioned climate policy interventions. What is intended is to boost justification for progressive mitigative action. Yet what can all too easily inadvertently result is the further bolstering of precisely the regressive incumbent general structures of power, privilege and patronage that are broadly causing the focal problems (Stirling, 2025). Ever more so as the world grows more transparently authoritarian and war-like, it is these structures that actually drive the self-interested deployment of largely military-derived technologies of geoengineering like solar radiation management.

Alternatives for opening up climate democracy

What to do about this? Some pretty good initial steps might be to reverse the above-discussed kinds of damage being done by technocratic scientism to progressive democratic struggle. The pretence can be dropped, that is it ‘useful’ to simplify scientific complexities and treat them as more free from uncertainty and indeterminacy than is really the case (Stirling, 2023b). These overly assertive pressures from ‘real world’ politics can be explicitly countered such as more rigorously and accountably to convey the contingencies and open-endedness of the ‘real real world’ (Stirling, 2019). Tightly structured hubris of ‘risk management’ can be relaxed with greater humility about how sensitivities, conditionalities and legitimately diverging subjectivities radically change political pros and cons even in highly specific scenarios. In other words, ‘solutions’ can be strongly acknowledged to lie in democratic struggle, more than in science. Science can of course play crucial roles: but this is as much about ‘opening up’ space for political choices, as closing them down (Stirling, 2008).

More than singular typologies asserting rigid risk frames, this is better done by methods that actively elicit and illuminate (rather than conceal) the messy and open-ended ‘plural and conditional’ subjectivities and contingencies that shape the structuring of the typologies themselves (Stirling, 2023b). Instead of hardwiring claimed ‘qualitative’ analysis with underlying ‘integrated’ singular metrics, then, the real reverse dependencies can be recognised between interpretation and calculation (Stirling, 2024). Calculative ‘tools’ remain essential, but in service more than in mastery of democratic processes. Instead of reduction, aggregation and integration, they can – like sensitivity analysis –differentiate, disaggregate and nuance. This applies to structures of typlogies as much as their contents.

With all quantification thus recognised as necessarily dependent on constituting subjective qualitative categories, frames, structures (and so institutions and cultures), the undue epistemic authority of the calculative idiom can be rebalanced (Porter, 1995). Climate policy analysis can more openly embrace the foundational importance of interpretive appreciation for underlying and overarching politics. Rather than being inconvenient social pathologies that need to be ‘managed’ by technocratic scientism, the shaping importance can be openly admitted and directly engaged with, of vibrant diversity in social meanings, purposes, values, interests, virtues, identities and norms. Plenty of practical methods are available to enable, catalyse, enact and promote this enhanced transparency, accountability and grounded plurality (Stirling, 2024).

In the end, it is arguably only in these more open, ‘horizontal’ ways that efforts to resist climate disruption can shed their own ‘vertical’ authoritarian style – and so cease to provoke this in countervailing political forces. The greater space that is thereby afforded to democratic struggle is the only effective means by which entrenched interests and concentrated power can be challenged, whether behind climate disruption itself or some of the delusionally controlling geoengineering remedies waiting – potentially catastrophically – in the wings. In this sense, the fate of Earth's democracies and climates arguably lie with each other.