Conceptualizing power in the context of climate change: A multi-theoretical perspective on structure, agency & power relations

Stör, Lorenz Working Paper Conceptualizing power in the context of climate change: A multi-theoretical perspective on structure, agency & power relations VÖÖ Discussion Paper, No. 5/2017 Provided in Cooperation with: Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie e.V. (VÖÖ), Heidelberg Suggested Citation: Stör, Lorenz (2017) : Conceptualizing power in the context of climate change: A multi-theoretical perspective on structure, agency & power relations, VÖÖ Discussion Paper, No. 5/2017, Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie (VÖÖ), Heidelberg This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/150540 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change: A Multi-Theoretical Perspective on Structure, Agency & Power Relations Lorenz Stör Institute for Multi-Level Governance & Development, Socioeconomics Department, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), [email protected] Abstract: The predominantly positivist approach in economics towards the object of study is not able to grasp power and domination in its complex interaction of agency and structure. Also in ecological economics and its critique to economic growth, there is a lack of conceptualizations that are sensible to questions of power. The work reveals such deficits and offers a comprehensive theory overview. This overview is then contextualized along the political-economic facets of climate change. The introductory chapter discusses fundamental aspects of power in the context of structure and agency. The common positivist approach in economics is complemented by a post-positivist approach in the following chapter. Critical realism serves as a philosophy of science to acknowledge and integrate structure and agency as forms of power. The third chapter provides an historical overview of selected theories of power. It depicts how the strategic and the episodic understanding of power by Machiavelli and Hobbes respectively, informed later power theories. Theorists such as Dahl, Bachrach & Baratz, Lukes, Gramsci, Laclau & Mouffe, Giddens, Foucault and Clegg are discussed. The aim is to highlight the relevance for a multiplicity of power concepts in economic research. The following chapter puts in context their respective positions on human agency and social structures as the source of power. The fifth chapter initiates an outlook for potential power research on future global challenges. The powers that play a role in the quest for solutions on the issue of climate change are systematically separated in the multiple levels of agency, mechanisms and structure. This serves as an exemplary case to depict the complexity but relevance of power on objects of research in ecological economics. Keywords: Power, Structure, Agency, Climate Change, Hegemony, Structuration theory, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Dahl, Lukes, Gramsci, Giddens, Foucault, Hay, Jessop A German abstract is available at www.voeoe.de/dp5. This paper was presented as a master thesis in the study program ‘SocioEcological Economics and Policy’ (SEEP) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) under the supervision of ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Novy in September 2015. It was awarded with the KappForschungspreis für Ökologische Ökonomie in October 2016: www.kapp-forschungspreis.de. A shorter and revised version will be published as: Theories of Power. In: Clive L. Spash (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society. Abingdon, Routledge, 2017. Lizenz /Licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Herausgeber /Publisher: Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie e. V., Heidelberg. c/o: Corinna Vosse, Kaskelstr. 17, 10317 Berlin, Germany. [email protected] ·www.voeoe.de VÖÖ-Diskussionspapiere stellen Forschungsergebnisse und Thesen für eine sozial-ökologische Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft vor. VÖÖ discussion papers present research results and theses for a socio-ecological economy and society. www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 2Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change Introduction “There is no more elemental concept than that of power” Anthony Giddens (1984: 283) “The notion of power should be abandoned” Bruno Latour (1986: 278) These two diametrically opposing quotes exemplify the lively debate over the very concept of power in the social sciences that has been ongoing for centuries. Giddens remains of the conviction that power, as “the capacity to achieve outcomes” (Giddens, 1984: 257), is inherent to all social sciences and that it cannot be degraded to a second-order consideration. Quite contrary, for Latour (1986) power is a term that might summarize the consequences of an action but is unable to explain a process. He regards it as an empty term with no further use for the social sciences. Are these two positions unforgivingly in contrast to each other, or is it rather a matter of definition of what is exactly meant by power? Some examples from arts and literature on the different meanings of power may help to approach this question before turning to the academic debate as one part of the contribution at hand. When the German band Ton Steine Scherben released their celebrated song Keine Macht für Niemand (“No Power for Nobody”) in 1972, they coined a thereafter widely used anarchist slogan, expressing critique towards the state and authority. The slogan regards power as something negative that can be possessed by somebody or, in this case, should be possessed by nobody. However, power is often nothing possessive but unfolds in a relational situation, as Carl Sandburg famously wrote in 1936: “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come”. The entire force and coercion connected to war fulminates into insignificance if the actors who need to activate such powers do not acquiesce to the game. At other times, power is neither something possessive nor a relation between actors, but unfolds in a structure that eludes itself from the access or even the imagination of an actor. In the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (2006 [1936]), which deals with the hardships during the Great Depression in the U.S., one passage illustrates such a situation of structural power. A farmer desperately tries to find a person as the responsible source of his oppression. The tractor driver who is about to bulldoze the tenant’s shack tells him: “It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it.” He received orders from the bank, whose directors again received orders from ‘the East’. “But where does it stop? Who can we shoot?” asks the farmer furiously, and the driver replies: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all” (Steinbeck 2006: 38). These examples give a foretaste of the multiple, often fuzzy but certainly differentiated meanings of power, which sometimes give way to ignorance or frustration, as might have been the case for Latour. This work aims to step up to the challenge to describe the manifold aspects of power, discover its structural and agential aspects – and their implications for the philosophy of science to finally put power into the contemporary context of climate change as one of the most pressing challenges of our time. In line with Giddens, the work thereby treats power as a fundamental element of society. An understanding of the multiple aspects of the concept may indeed contribute to a better explanation of societal processes and phenomena. The work carries the aspiration to contribute to such an understanding in the case of climate change. The first section introduces the general topic of power and discusses the role of structure and agency in shaping social phenomena. The subsequent section is concerned with the ontological and epistemological discussion of power. Here, the positivist epistemologies of neoclassical and Keynesian mainstream economic approaches are challenged, demonstrating how both lack a comprehensive understanding of social power relations. Next, post-positivist considerations of critical realism show how this philosophy of science serves as a useful framework for conceptualizing structural and agential perspectives on power to finally transcend the debate about the two. To accomplish this, a substantial historical overview of theories of power is outlined in the third section. The structure-agency debate serves as an appropriate entry point for categorization, as most theories implicitly or explicitly draw upon this distinction. Even its post-structural critics refer to this divide through its rejection or aspiration to go beyond. Several conceptualizations of power including those of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Dahl, Lukes, Gramsci, Laclau & Mouffe, Giddens, Foucault and Clegg are reviewed chronologically and set in context with each other along the structure-agency debate. The aim is to provide a multi-theoretical approach to power that can be applied to an array of empirical phenomena in order to understand them in more depth without neglecting their complexity. Directed by these objectives, the final section outlines the relevance of such a broad perspective on power using the contemporary example of climate change as a highly relevant driver for a socio-ecological transformation. The powers connected to climate change are discussed along Clegg’s three circuits of power including several spatial levels and conceptual layers from the concrete to the abstract and from the agential to the structural. The analysis incorporates several power conceptualizations wherever appropriate to gain a truly multitheoretical perspective of power on climate change. The concluding chapter considers the ambition of this work, its findings, and indicates potential future research. 1 Power, structure & agency Power is a core element of society and its analysis deeply characterizes the social sciences. As Hay (2002: 168) states, “power is to political analysis what economy is to ecowww.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 3Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change nomics.” While many theorists of political economy might reject this view for seemingly renouncing power’s significance as a core concept in economics, this simple phrase shows the extraordinary relevance that power’s discussion plays in understanding society. However, the question of what constitutes power is a matter of on-going contestation, deeply rooted in the historical circumstances and ontological considerations of scientific inquiry. The philosophical roots defining what power is or what it ought to be and how it functions can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, such as Aristotle’s six-fold classification of governments. The analytical discussion on power became increasingly relevant for our current understanding of social science and social relations with the beginning of modernist reasoning. In particular, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) laid the foundations for contemporary conceptualizations of power. The discussion was revived in the 20th century, including prominent thinkers such as Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz. It is featured in Lukes’ ‘faces of power’ debate over a three-dimensional view of power, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Giddens’ structuration theory, Foucault’s post-structuralist notions and Clegg’s ‘circuits of power,’ which will all be discussed in this work. Different conceptualizations of power often have fundamentally different views on its characteristics and qualities, including whether it is: analytical or normative, relational or possessive, negative or positive, repressive or productive, constraining (‘power over’) or enabling (‘power to’), intentional or not or constituted through social structures or human agency. Such oppositional positions support the notion that power is an “essentially contested concept” (Lukes, 2005: 105). However, a theoretical overview and analysis of a selection of existing power theories will show that the understanding of power is less contested than Lukes suggests, and that the structure–agency debate can serve as a framework around which to organise the different conceptualizations. Social science has a long tradition in distinguishing between structural and agential factors of explanation for such phenomena. Hay (2002) proves to be a useful source for helping define the meaning of this structure and agency dichotomy. He gives structure two meanings. First, context, which “refers to the setting within which social, political and economic events occur and acquire meaning” (Hay, 2002: 94). While the setting may include biophysical or social structures and exist irrespective of observation, the ‘acquisition of meaning’ incorporates an interpretive element. Second, it includes regularity, or structure, over time, which is exhibited by social institutions, such as rules, practices, routines, norms and conventions. This assumes that political, social or economic phenomena bear an element of order, making them theoretically more predictable. In a critical realist approach, structure consists of relations between social positions comprising active and passive powers that are set in motion as tendencies. Critical realism acknowledges that the actualization of such structures is contingent upon diverse factors. If structures are not actualized, they remain latent, albeit existent (Sayer, 2000). Pure structuralism would imply full determinacy and disable every individual or social unit from the ability to make autonomous decisions or influence any process, i. e. depriving all agents of the power to make a difference. Structural realism and world systems theory are examples of such theories (Hay, 2002: 102). However, most approaches take the perspective that “structures do not determine action but they produce predictable patterns of action” (Hayward and Lukes, 2008: 15). Agency means action or conduct. It is the “ability or capacity of an actor to act consciously and, in so doing, to attempt to realise his or her intentions” (Hay, 2002: 94). Agential factors are characterized by a sense of free will, choice, autonomy and conscious deliberation and have been highly important throughout the history of philosophy. When René Descartes (1596–1650) heralded the age of enlightenment with his famous statement ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I am thinking therefore I exist), elements of reasoning and rationality laid the basis for a whole liberal political and economic tradition that put the actor at the centre of its considerations. However, agency is not restricted to individual humans but extends to organized or collective actors who realize their capacity to act, e. g. trade unions calling for strikes or corporations setting prices. A broad definition of agency can also be problematic if the distinction from structure becomes blurry. Institutions, for example, are often confused with organizations but if they are understood as norms and rules, they have structural characteristics and cannot be regarded as a form of collective agent. Agency is the capacity to make a difference – the element that distinguishes the natural from the social world 1 and makes the social science struggle to explain, let alone predict, social phenomena. However, it is also the key to understanding why positivist approaches in social science, transferred directly from natural science, are exposed to failure. If structuralism is one extreme, then the other is pure voluntarism – or intentionalism – where actors are able fully to realize their intentions. However, pure intentionalism would remove all historical contexts and institutions that constrain and influence the opportunities of an actor. This concentration on the present moment “can say nothing about the process of social and political change over time” (Hay, 2002: 112) and therefore, again, deprives the analysis of any explanatory power. Other scholars claim that the differences between structures and agents are analytical rather than conceptual and that the evaluative element of “the specific research question that one is posing might naturally lead to a concentration upon either structure or agency” (Dowding, 2008: 33), which 1 While physical laws usually adhere to structural regularities, insights from quantum physics such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment where events may or may not occur or have both states at the same time. This raises questions about potential agential qualities of physical entities such as photons. www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 4Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change deprives the structure–agency discussion from being a part of the puzzle. The following review explains how structure and agency are in fact intertwined and some theoretical conceptualizations reject the ontological divide altogether. However, this framework serves as a useful reference point to put diverse theories into perspective. 2 The ontological and epistemological basis of power The question of whether power stems from social structures or (human) agency is part of a long and ongoing academic debate. Some scholars have questioned the value of this debate as “sociologists are not smart enough to solve the problem or that the problem itself is spurious” (Fuller, 1998: 104 in Hay, 2002: 90). Nevertheless, regarding the structureagency debate as a ‘problem’ for which there is a ‘solution’ to find does not appreciate the meaning of this conceptualization, as it implies that the issue is essentially empirical and can be solved over time by collecting evidence (Hay, 2002: 91). Detecting the mechanisms of power is not about finding the correct proportions of structure or agency within the social reality but depends on the context that needs to be explained. The true value of the structure-agency debate lies in the provision of a frame for social power theories. It is not a matter of empirical investigation but of ontological and epistemological prerequisites that determine to what extent structure and agency play a role. As Hay (2002) explains, “structure-agency is not so much a problem as a language by which ontological differences between contending accounts might be registered” (Hay, 2002: 91). Beyond outlining the basis for making specific conceptualizations of power possible in the first place, it is also necessary to address the question of which ones are most appropriate. To avoid a level of eclecticism in the discussion, there is the need for a mode of analysis that corresponds to a consistent social ontology. Consistency entails the ability “to demonstrate how a common social ontology is applied in each case considered and how this reveals the relative primacy of structural or agential factors in a given situation” (Hay, 2002: 113). This chapter therefore concentrates on the discussion of a philosophy of science that provides the necessary and appropriate ontological and epistemological foundations for a meaningful conceptualization of power. A narrow conceptualization of power becomes particularly apparent within mainstream economics, based on positivist approaches. The following sub-section provides a short critique of neoclassical microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics as the main approaches in the current mainstream. This provides a backdrop against which the post-positivist alternative of a critical realist philosophy arose. 2.1 Power in mainstream economics The microeconomic perspective of neoclassical economics only partially considers aspects of social power relations despite their extraordinary relevance for social science research. The assumptions of rational choice approaches based on the homo economicus (rational, utility-maximizing, egoistic, perfect preference substitution, etc.) considers power only as relative bargaining power based on game theoretical properties such as asymmetrical information or moral hazard within principal-agent relations. However, all social situations are based on the premise of voluntary exchange as the core aspect of economic interaction (Dowding, 2009). Addressing social power relations is regarded as unnecessary for further empirical analysis because it exhausts itself in the sovereignty of the consumer. Consumer sovereignty is the cornerstone of a neoclassical theory of power. In consumption, each person can choose and has the capacity to make a difference: buying one product instead of others. However, consumption as the only means of satisfying needs remains unquestioned. The agent is reduced to the consumer whose purchasing power is defined by budget constraints and concrete bargaining situations within a selfregulating “natural” market. Other forms of power are seen as artificially interfering with the market and are mostly unwanted, such as monopolies or oligopolies. The power of monopolies is considered problematic, as potential extra profits might lead to inefficient distributional effects among sovereign consumers. The role of institutions in shaping outcome and behaviour is also increasingly acknowledged in rational choice approaches but is incorporated into models as principal-agent issues rather than acknowledging institutions’ structural ability to enable or constrain social actors or groups (Dowding, 2009: 41). Apart from such analytical constraints, there are also logical flaws within the epistemological edifice of the microeconomic mainstream approach. The methodological individualist epistemology ostensibly only allows for an agential perspective per definition. However, agents under rational choice assumptions do not allow for contingency, as their characteristics are pre-defined. As Hay criticises, “any rational actor in a given context will always choose precisely the same course of action” (Hay, 2002: 53). Paradoxically, structure is then conceptualized through determined agents, which allows for a deductive methodological approach. The tools of such mainstream economic analysis reduce rational ‘choice’ to one rational ‘option’ and therefore defeat their own logic (Hay, 2002: 104). The will to make a difference turns out to be quite the opposite of the neoclassical calculus and the rational-choice assumptions are mistakenly considered agential or episodic. Both the analytical and epistemological constraints show how power is “analysed away” (Dowding, 2008: 32) in the neoclassical mainstream. The second mainstream economic approach with a similar one-sided view on power is the macroeconomic Keynesian perspective. This methodological nationalist epistemology www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 5Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change puts a strong focus on “society as organized and limited by the nation-state” (Beck, 2008: 167) and thereby the role of the state as a major economic actor. Economic processes are considerably demand-driven, which is steered through interest rates and monetary policy by the central bank and fiscal policy through government expenditure. This makes power a question of state sovereignty rather than consumer sovereignty. The premises for such macroeconomic policies are implicitly rooted in the idea of social engineering, a term which was first coined by critical rationalist Karl R. Popper (1902–1994). For Popper, social engineering stands in diametrical opposition to historicism. For the social engineer, [I]t would be the factual information necessary for the construction or alteration of social institutions, in accordance with our wishes and aims. Such a science would have to tell us what steps we must take if we wish, for instance, to avoid depressions, or else to produce depressions; or if we wish to make the distribution of wealth more even, or less even. In other words, the social engineer conceives as the scientific basis of politics something like a social technology. (Popper, 1945: 17) This rationalist and technocratic approach of planning and steering a society – spatially fixed by the nation state – nevertheless has a democratic component to it. Other than the pre-defined and therefore disempowering rational choice assumptions, it can be democratically enabling. In a publication almost coeval to Popper, the economist George J. Stinger argues in a commentary on alternatives to new welfare economics: For surely the primary requisite of a working social system is a consensus on ends. The individual members of the society simply must agree upon the major ends, which that society is to seek. If any large share of the population actively disagrees with the society’s ends, and in particular if it believes that the system is unfair by that group’s criteria, the social system will surely disintegrate, probably with violence. [...] At the level of economic policy, then, it is totally misleading to talk of ends as individual and random; they are fundamentally collective and organized. (Stinger, 1943: 358f) The discipline to determine such ends “might be called, following J. M. Keynes, applied ethics“ (Stinger, 1943: 359). Referring to the father of the more famous philosopher and economist John Maynard Keynes, this notion of applied ethics may have helped lay the foundations for the Keynesianism outlined above. Value judgements seem to play a role in the philosophical question of how to find consensus on specific ends. Nevertheless, the mechanism of social engineering is in clear line with a positivist research agenda, which is not surprising as Popper himself is the intellectual father of critical rationalism, the most prominent 20th century current of positivism. Although this example provides greater considerations of societal power relations, the focus remains on the state (i. e. the social engineer), especially its central and national bodies, as the sovereign actor. The two mainstream economic approaches exemplify the limitations of using positivist approaches to make sense of the relationship between structure, agency and power and reveal an uncritical process of knowledge production. Dynamic and disruptive instances of change and transformation are not explicable within such frameworks. Critical theory, and more specifically the philosophy of critical realism, provide an opportunity to integrate the relationship between structure and agency, between context and conduct and thereby remediates the mainstream economic mistake of underestimating power relations. One aim of critical realism is to “relate in research practice the concrete to the abstract and the abstract to the concrete” (Danermark et al., 2002: 109). It is therefore the intermediary of structure and agency, if they function as an analogy to the abstract and the concrete. The rejection of positivist approaches implies neither pure anti-positivism or interpretivism merely focussing on hermeneutics, nor a constructivist epistemology emphasizing the mere creation of social facts through discourse and meaning. The challenge is to conceptualize a post-positivist understanding of the world that acknowledges the existence of an objective reality, while at the same leaving room for the critical assumption that we as humans can never fully grasp such a reality without giving social phenomena meaning to make sense of the world. This challenge in social science is described as ‘double hermeneutics’: While natural scientists necessarily have to enter the hermeneutic circle of their scientific community, social scientists also have to enter that of those whom they study. In other words, natural science operates in a single hermeneutic while social science operates in a double hermeneutic. (Sayer, 2000: 17) According to Dryzek (2013: 13), one potential way out of this dilemma is to acknowledge that “it is possible to subscribe to both a hermeneutic epistemology and a realist ontology.” 2.2 Critical realism and power Critical realism starts from the premise that the real world is ‘stratified’ into different layers. Other than the ‘flat ontology’ of other philosophies of sciences such as empirical realism (i.e. empiricism), which assumes that what we can observe is all that exists, a ‘stratified ontology’ allows for the possibility of a reality to exist without our ability to fully comprehend it with our knowledge (Sayer, 2000: 12). The intellectual challenge is therefore not to verify theories through empirical observations, but to constantly refine our www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 6Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change knowledge about the real world in a circular process and understand reality with adequate concepts. Observation is concept-dependent. Better observation depends on adequate concepts for grasping reality; for example, people entering member states of the European Union can be treated as either refugees or illegal migrants – with tremendous implications for the framing of the problem, actual actions by different actors and realized policies. In other words, “critical realism seeks to understand ‘real’ structures of society and the world, while acknowledging that any model or understanding of such structures will reflect only partial experience of them” (Forsyth, 2003: 15). To make sense of this premise, critical realism draws on the epistemological distinction between transitive and intransitive dimensions of knowledge. The transitive dimension refers to the “knowledge domain in which the theoretical object is produced. The intransitive dimension refers to the real object, the structure, or mechanism which ‘exists’ and acts quite ‘independently’ of people” (Clegg, 1989: 119). Both forms of knowledge are produced during their interaction when using practices (scientific or non-scientific) to make sense of the world. This production of knowledge is regarded as fallible because it shows an inherent independence between the world on the one hand and our thoughts, concepts and theories about this world on the other hand. It depicts a major difference to positivist research agendas, which “take for granted their respective research objects” (Sum and Jessop, 2013: 6). The distinction between transitive and intransitive dimensions of knowledge is also referred to as ‘thought objects’ and ‘real objects’ respectively (Sayer, 1992: 47). To conceptualize this further, critical realism differentiates between the real, the actual and the empirical. Sayer (2000) distinguishes two main elements of the real: First, the real is whatever exists, be it natural or social, regardless of whether it is an empirical object for us [...]. Secondly, the real is the realm of objects, their structures and powers. Whether they are physical, like minerals, or social, like bureaucracies, they have certain structures and causal powers, that is, capacities to behave in particular ways. (Sayer, 2000: 11) This definition shows the relevance of critical realism for the purpose of this thesis because it indicates a conceptualization of structural powers beyond the agent-centred view. It is important to note that the actualization of powers is not necessarily activated but the activation is contingent upon diverse factors or actors. If powers are not actualized, they remain latent, albeit existent. Taking the simple example of a teacher and a class, the teacher carries the capacity to punish the class for non-complying behaviour. This capacity parallels to the real and may or may not be activated, dependent, for example, on the action of the class or the temperament of the teacher. The actual happens in case those powers are activated, in our case when the punishment is realized. The empirical is then “defined as the domain of the experience” (Sayer, 2000: 12). It is the effects of such punishment that the class observes and experiences, be it in form of extra work or of bad grading. Our observability of the empirical is limited and in fact is fallible in several ways, as the existence of the underlying real is not dependent on it. First, it does not reveal its full inherent potentials. Students may also be treated differently; for example, they may be expelled from school. Second, the empirical observation does not guarantee that it is a causal effect from the assumed real and actual: bad grades for students might be caused by low performance instead of non-complying behaviour in class. This shows that the same result can be caused by reasonably different causal mechanisms. In the ‘open systems’ of the social science, this is even more apparent than in the ‘closed systems’ of natural science where regularities can be observed through controlled experiments (Sayer, 2000: 14f). Whether the causal powers that stem from the structures of the real objects are actualized depends on contingent conditions. Therefore, the causation is not a regular succession of events. In this sense, “[g]athering data on regularities, repeated occurrences, is therefore misguided” (Sayer, 2000: 14) because it cannot explain the reasons for those regularities nor identify the causal mechanisms on how they work. For the identification of such structures, conceptualizations and abstractions are important. The critical realist position on the structure-agency debate is not a united one. Critical realist scholars are discordant on the question, whether structure and agency are analytically or ontologically separable. In her ‘morphogenetic approach’, Margaret Archer (1995) argues that structure and agency depict a dualism that is ontologically independent. Her aim is to “reveal the structured reality beneath the surface” (Hay, 2002: 122) on the critical realist quest for a ‘deep ontology’ in a world that “does not present itself to us as it really is” (ibid.). Temporality is the crucial aspect for this morphogenetic approach. Structures are seen as emergent entities, while agency is seen as an emergent property either reproducing or transforming structure instead of creating it. Therefore, structures pre-exist to agents, which make structure and agency analytically and ontologically separable, a position that is also defended in Archer’s more recent writings (Archer, 2003). In the strategic-relational approach outlined by critical realist Bob Jessop (2008), the distinction between structure and agency is purely analytical, not ontological. Both components are present in any given situation and cannot exist in isolation from each other. They must be seen as relational and dialectical, in other words, “not so much as flip-sides of the same coin, [but] as metals in the alloy from which the coin is forged” (Hay, 2002: 127). Speaking of structure and agency as theoretical abstractions is merely an analytical tool to make sense of their interaction in real social and political interaction. A new conceptual language draws the distinction between strategic action and strategically www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 7Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change selective context. According to Jessop, this distinction is more useful as it does not suggest an ontological divide. It leads from the abstract conceptual dualism of structure vs. agency to the concrete conceptual duality of strategic action and selective context (Hay, 2002: 128). Additionally, the distinction is more useful to work with, as it acknowledges the ‘strategic selectivity’ in social relations. Sum and Jessop (2013) divide those selectivities into four modes: structural, discursive, technological and agential. Structural selectivity, or structurally-inscribed strategic selectivity, refers to the asymmetrical configuration of social forces that is reproduced through social practices over time. Discursive selectivity refers to the constraints and opportunities expressed through discourses. It goes beyond linguistic aspects and incudes sense-making or semiotic resources constraining what can be imagined. Discursive selectivity is also asymmetrical, as it defines who enunciates which message. In academia, for example, the discursive power – its constraints and opportunities – is different to the public media, urban subcultures or the EU administration. Technological selectivity addresses specific technologies of governmentality, with which social relations of production or the transformation of nature occur, and therefore implies material effects (Sum and Jessop, 2013: 214ff). For example, it is concerned with the rationality on how humans handle their societynature relationships (gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse). The concept of society-nature relationships recognizes the existence of nature as a “material-substantial environment, but it is always already shaped by society and is managed and symbolised in spatio-temporally different forms [and its configuration] is constitutive of social and political domination” (Brand and Wissen, 2013: 690). Agential selectivities refer to the capabilities of agents to make a difference. Those capabilities are influenced by the other selectivities, as all of them need to be seen in combination with each other. These four modes of strategic selectivity allow for senseand meaning-making to conceptualize the underlying real structures acknowledged by critical realists. The selectivities thereby aim to reduce complexity without being reductionist. It is not the aim here to go further into the philosophical details of critical realism and the strategic-relational approach. However, its strategic selectivity is also of relevance for the structure of this work. The following section reviews several power theories in their historic context and with regard to their position on the structure-agency debate. Most of those theories can be seen in the context of one of the four modes developed by Sum and Jessop. Structural selectivity is important for Gramsci’s thoughts on hegemony, while discursive and technological selectivity is relevant to the writings of Foucault and agential selectivity is at least partially prominent in all other conceptualizations. The multi-perceptivity reflected in the theories mirrors the concept dependency 2 of our observations. Contemporary global 2 “Social phenomena such as actions, texts and institutions are concept-dependent. We therefore have not only to explain their policy challenges can thereby be analysed as is subsequently done in this thesis’ illustrative case of climate change. This example shows how theories contextualize current aspects of social reality differently, thereby fostering specific types of structural, discursive, technological and agency selectivities. 3 Historical overview of power theories The existing literature on power theories is extensive, therefore the following subsections can only discuss a selection of relevant approaches 3 . Placing them within the structure–agency context provides a pathway to conceptualize the approaches and put them in context vis-à-vis the others. For that purpose, the chapter mixes chronological and logical ordering to make sense of the development of power theories over time. 3.1 Hobbes & Machiavelli: The godfathers of power Niccolò Machiavelli was a diplomat during the reign of the Medici in Florence and military turmoil as France and Spain fought for the control of Italy. He was eventually the victim of corruptive political circumstances and lived reclusively from the political arena after his career. In his famous treatise, The Prince, first published in Rome as De Principatibus (1532), Machiavelli (1985 [1532]) describes power as a set of strategies to achieve certain outcomes. For him the important question was ‘what does power do’ (Clegg, 1989: 5)? Given Machiavelli’s historic circumstances and own political experiences, he characterized power as decentralized, strategic and contingent. Power is not a resource that can be possessed, nor does it belong to a certain place or sovereign, but is rather evaluated upon the effectiveness of strategies that are deployed to achieve a greater scope for action (Clegg, 1989: 32). Some scholars regard Machiavelli’s writings on power to be ‘post-modern’ (despite his works having preceded modernity), which helps explain the renewed appreciation for his ideas that arose in the 1970s. Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan in 1651 while living in France and employed as tutor by the then-exiled future King Charles II. He was essentially concerned with sovereignty and the question ‘what is power?’ Based on his impressions of the English Civil War, Hobbes (1970 [1651]) regards humans as competitive, egoistic, rational and selfish beings, who can only escape from a state of devastating rivalry if they use their reason and agree to subordinate to production and material effects but to understand, read or interpret what they mean. Although they have to be interpreted by starting from the researcher’s own frames of meaning, by and large they exist regardless of researchers’ interpretations of them.” (Sayer, 1992: 6) 3 The author is aware that the discussion on power is much broader than what is depicted here. Just to name a few, Weber, Arendt, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Bourdieu or Luhmann are all excluded. Not because they are less relevant, but because some of their considerations are either incorporated in the theories discussed or because their inclusion would have gone beyond the scope of this thesis. www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 8Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change an absolute sovereign state, the Leviathan. The argument undermined the religious justification for sovereignty and instead condoned either a monarchy or a commonwealth; the result was his expulsion from the royal court and his subsequent return to England where he lived under Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Hobbes’ mechanical perceptions of power are based on an actor-centred, causal and episodic understanding of human nature. Power consists of the abilities to acquire a certain good and is therefore itself instrumental (Hobbes, 1970: 79). These characteristics fit within the emerging modernist age of reason because they entailed an element of observability and measurability. According to Clegg (1989: 4), this meant, “Hobbes’ conception was to be the intellectual victor” over Machiavelli’s notion of power. Hobbes’ ideas have informed theorists such as sociologist Max Weber and political scientist Robert A. Dahl. However, the two foundational traditions Machiavelli and Hobbes have become increasingly intertwined in recent times. 3.2 Lukes and the three-dimensional view of power The Hobbesian mechanistic and causal understanding was challenged in the ‘faces of power’ debate outlined in Lukes’ (2005 [1974]) ‘three-dimensional view’ on power. Lukes thereby contributed to an increasing acknowledgement of the complexity of power. The writings of behavioural political scientist Robert A. Dahl in the 1960s represent a first dimension of power, which is a clear continuation of the Hobbesian tradition because he takes an intentional and active perception of power. As Dahl (1957: 202–203) states, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” The method of Dahl’s (1961) studies puts a focus on the visibility and empirical measurability of power, resulting in a perception of a ‘plurality’ of equally powerful actors. As Lukes explains, “different actors and different interest groups prevail in different issue-areas, there is no overall ‘ruling elite’ 4 and power is distributed pluralistically“ (Lukes, 2005: 5), which means evenly. Power is exercised in concrete situations and understood as decision-making in the political arena. This accessible, classical understanding remains influential as a common perception of what constitutes power today. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) regarded this conception of power as too narrow, and added a second dimension where decision-making is intentionally limited to relatively non-controversial matters. They draw on the idea that “all forms of political organization have a bias in favour of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias“ (Schattschneider, 1960: 71). Power is then also a matter of non-decision-making and agenda-setting. 4 Hunter (1953) and Mills’ (1956) elite theory expressed moral concern over the impossibility of ideal democracy. The ‘faces of power’ debate grew out of Dahl’s critique of Hunter and Mill and his demand for empirical studies on the existence of such elites. Bachrach and Baratz are interested not only in agenda issues that are actualized, but also in potential issues. Both of these dimensions still stress the existence of observable conflict, overt or covert. If there is no conflict, then consensus on the prevailing allocation of values is assumed (Lukes, 2005: 23). This view is challenged by Lukes’ ‘third dimension’ of power for three reasons. First, he criticizes the first and second dimensions’ behaviourist and methodological individualist viewpoint that fails to take into account the “socially structured and culturally patterned behaviour of groups, and practices of institutions” (Lukes, 2005: 26). Second, he criticizes the limited focus on observable conflicts. Lukes acknowledges that “A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing, shaping or determining his very wants” (Lukes, 2005: 27). This adds the element of preference-shaping to the powers of decisionmaking and agenda-setting, which reveals Lukes’ concern about the latent and hidden aspects of power. The third element of criticism is closely linked to the second and rejects the assumption that any form of grievances in the social or political process is necessary to allow power to unfold. In fact, the existence of latent conflicts allows for a very subtle form of domination in which ‘perceived interests’ obscure the ‘real interests’ of the dominated and acquiescence is fulfilled without their awareness. But how do we find out about our ‘real interests’ if they are dominated without our awareness? The answer cannot be found in behaviourist accounts but rather through dialectical approaches. Depending on the framework or methods applied, ‘real interests’ can therefore be material (if a materialist explanation is applied), the individual’s best interest (if a rational choice framework is applied), and so on (Lukes, 2005: 148). This reduces the interest of the subject to the ideological framework applied and therefore exposes it to moral relativism. According to Clegg (1989: 93), Lukes’ argument could have been considerably strengthened if he had applied the Habermasian idea of the ‘ideal speech situation’ to find out about the ‘real interests’ instead of making the question of power one of moral philosophy. Lukes instead refers to hegemonic approaches where subordinate classes have a ‘false consciousness’ that enables consent to the ruling class (Lukes, 2005: 144f). The reason why Lukes speaks of a three-dimensional view is that he regards these views as a subset of a specific concept of power. The three views are not mutually exclusive but rather gain depth by complementing each other, as the ‘dimension’ metaphor already suggests. They all build upon one concept “according to which A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests“ (Lukes, 2005: 30). This is a clear actor-centred conception of power, although Lukes’ own third dimension – paralleling hegemony – suggests that structural factors also play a role in obscuring ‘real interests’. The fact that Lukes’ views are manoeuvring within only one concept is also addressed by Clegg who writes, “even a writer like Lukes, who has www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 15 Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change by the Stern Report and Friends of the Earth, some 200 million people will be displaced by 2050 due to environmental change (Oliver-Smith, 2014). Such projections already indicate the crisis and conflict potential of environmental change (Welzer, 2012), especially if future environmental migrants are not regarded as eligible for refugee status. The coercive power of enforced nation borders by state authority against the will of migrants is then an apparent result of climate change-induced events. While the impacts of climate change often manifest in local situations, the episodic power struggles also become apparent in international climate negotiations or transnational epistemic communities such as in the scientific work of the IPCC. The COP21 in Paris is part of a global governance strategy to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Such strategies, however, are increasingly under criticism as they fail to provide the necessary binding commitments and results. On the one hand, this a matter of straightforward lack of bargaining power of the regions most affected by climate change, in contrast to the industrialized nations that are primarily responsible for global emissions. Sea level rise as one of many effects of on-going climate change will threaten large regions and populations to their existence. This threat has led the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) to push for ambitious emissions reduction goals for many years (Spash, 2002). Due to the lack of bargaining power vis-à-vis large emitters such as the U.S. who have not yet agreed to binding commitments, AOSIS states will face severe consequences. Some affected governments have lost confidence in global governance strategies to the extent that island states such as Kiribati are buying new land elsewhere (Caramel, 2014). While this land-buying model might work for the 100,000 citizens of Kiribati, it is not feasible for the millions of people in other regions such as Bangladesh, who are similarly affected by sea level rise. In November 2014, the U.S.-China joint presidential statement on climate change as the two main emitters of emissions worldwide aimed for a bilateral cooperation in the abatement of emissions. This shift of strategic selectivity from multilateral back to bilateral agreements depicts a trend, not only on the issue of climate change, but also for international trade agreements (Raza, 2015). Although the bilateral talks between the U.S and China include specific emissions reduction targets and mechanisms such as cap-and-trade programs (Nelson and Mauldin 2015), they do not include binding targets. Many observers, however, regard this agreement with cautious optimism in the context of future multilateral climate negotiations. On the other hand, specific discursive strategies and selectivities inscribed in the climate negotiations contribute to ineffective abatement. The Kyoto-protocol’s geographical approach with a focus on the “emissions generated from production activities within a country’s territory” (Helm, 2008: 220) instead of focussing on consumption, gave way to a dominant logic of efficiency through technological progress as the key to abatement. High efficiency countries with a strong service sector such as Sweden (often treated as role-model for emissions reduction by researchers and policy makers) rely on emission-intensive production sectors abroad to maintain their living standards. However, the emissions and resource consumption embedded in trade are not attributed to the final consumers in UNFCCC calculations. This is taken into account by research on the carbon footprint of nations using multiregional input-output (MIRO) models (Hertwich and Peters, 2009) but has not yet become prominent in policy negotiation criteria. Additionally, this discursive strategy allows for the agreement on emissions reduction goals instead of recognizing the absolute limits of burnable fossil fuels as outlined above. It contributes to a sense-making of climate change as a policy issue that is not treated as substantially different to any other contemporary policy issue, thereby failing to recognize the deep structural socio-economic changes necessary to effectively abate climate change. 5.3 Second circuit: state, (financial) markets and regulation The rule of practice within which such episodic power is embedded goes far beyond the nation-state containers of power and sovereignty. In the examples above, it is not only the public order of the state that is enforced by coercion. State police in conflict situations and state authorities in negotiation situations also secure property rights and yetunrealized financial assets of multi-national cooperations. Such unrealized financial assets are largely inscribed in the cooperation’s market value and distributed along global (financial) markets. Markets can be regarded at the ‘obligatory passage point,’ or the basis on which the episodic powers of the first circuit is fixed. Those markets form the rules and practices of how natural resources are commodified and financialized for the rent-seeking members of the market, often at the expense of climate change. While the power episodes of the first circuit are best described by specific events involving the power of actors, the second and third circuits are concerned with the power fields in which such events are embedded and acquire meaning. To illustrate this process, it is worthwhile to describe the shift of the power field from the state to the market by different accumulation regimes within capitalism. A regulation theory perspective is useful not only because it claims to consider structure and agency equally and synthesize them in its analysis, but also because some scholars of regulation theory make a strong effort to incorporate society-nature relationships into their considerations of the political economy, which are highly relevant when talking about climate change (Raza, 2003). The traditional Fordist accumulation regime of mass production and consumption had its spatial foundation in the nation state, while Keynesian economic policies provided a mode of regulation with the state acting as the sovereign power container representing the ‘obligawww.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 16 Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change tory passage point’ of the mid-20th century. After decades of stability typified by the compromise between capital and labour, the Fordist accumulation regime came into crisis in the 1970s. It was then replaced by a post-Fordist accumulation regime, which used the market as the new dominant form of regulation. The financialized accumulation that goes along with this shift relies on the continuous valorization of natural resources to stabilize the new accumulation regime (Becker, 2009). With respect to climate change, this shift becomes relevant in commodification and financialization mechanisms that are increasingly found in the objectives of a green growth economy and are heavily present in the tools of climate negotiations. In line with neoclassical assumptions and its ignorance towards a comprehensive account of power relationships, climate change is commonly regarded as market failure that can be eliminated through the internalization of external costs, such as pollution (Stern, 2006). The Kyotoprotocol, for example, introduced flexible mechanisms such as clean development mechanisms (CDM) and joint implementation (JI). This allows carbon-intensive nations to offset emissions to less developed nations through buying their ‘rights to pollute’ or investing directly in emissions reduction projects towards a low-carbon industrial development. The commodification is thereby not restricted to natural resources, but also expands to emissions. This is demonstrated in the third flexible mechanism, namely the set-up of carbon markets such as the European Union emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). Despite the hope for efficient allocation of pollution certificates through market mechanisms, the first two phases of the EU ETS proved ineffective in terms of their capacity to abate carbon emissions. The alternative to tax emissions instead of trading with pollution permits was initially discussed but quickly abandoned, since “Kyoto’s targets have been framed as part of an economic discourse where priority is given to creating gains from trade, extending the role of markets and protecting the profits of potentially vulnerable polluters” (Spash, 2010: 170). It was shown that the EU ETS not only did poorly in fulfilling its goal of combatting climate change but also turned out to provide significant windfall profits for polluting industries that took part in the scheme, due to an almost free allocation of tradable permits (Spash, 2010). The later adaption and improvement of the EU ETS in its third phase since 2013 does not alter the underlying market logic of such flexible mechanisms. This logic was similarly extended to other environmental areas such as ecosystems and biodiversity. The United Nation’s Environments Programme (UNEP) initiated “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) programme with the aim of mainstreaming the economics of nature and thereby “making nature’s values visible” (teebweb.org, 2015) using the cost-benefit logic that was likewise used in the Stern Report. Cap-and-trade systems are no longer restricted to emissions, but are now also used “to offset a company’s negative impact on threatened species and habitats” (Spash, 2011: 142). Such developments illustrate how any mode of regulation is connected to specific society-nature relationships in which resources are constructed in a certain way and secured by a specific political and legal framework. “Resources are not, they become,” as institutional economists already pointed out in the 1950s (Gregori, 1987). The current mode of regulation through markets is characterized by the hegemonic acceptance of the domination of nature through an ever-extending commodification of resources and emissions. Markets become the ‘obligatory passage points’ for the valorization of nature and the handling of climate change. Such hegemonies are useful, if not necessary to stabilize an accumulation regime. Beyond the episodic and agential power relations of climate conflicts and negotiations, these are clearly the structural powers that frame the issue of climate change. Although the market represents the dominant form of regulation in this case, the state remains essential. An adequate definition of the state in this context can be found in the strategic-relational approach. Jessop sees the state as a social relation that is characterized by strategic selectivities within spatial and temporal context: “Rather than speaking of the power of the state, one should speak about the potential powers(or state capacities), in the plural, that are inscribed in the state as institutional ensemble” (Jessop, 2009: 379). Whenever an accumulation regime and its mode of regulation co-evolve and thereby stabilize, a ‘spatio-temporal fix’ occurs (Jessop, 2013). However, regulation is a conflictual process that is prone to crisis as an inherent characteristic of capitalism. Crisis may open up the opportunity for a new type of regime – a regime that goes beyond the imperative of accumulation in capitalism towards a different mode of production and consumption. Regulation theory can provide a basis to understand the market as an ‘obligatory passage point’ with regard to climate change. A different way to understand the power mechanisms that unfold more specifically through financial markets can be found through the perspective of cosmopolitan realism, or Machiavellianism as described by Beck (2005). According to him, this perspective “deals with the way in which the national and international forms of ‘legitimate domination’ (Max Weber) are being dissolved and its rules rewritten in the globalized power game of mobile capital, states and social movements” (Beck, 2005: xiii). Beck draws on the logics of social action in world politics to emphasize this perspective. The ‘logic of consequentialism’ is characterized by rational actors driven by utility-maximizing action while the ‘logic of appropriateness’ is often conceptualized in sociological institutionalism and describes the institutionally framed, rule-guided behaviour of actors and organizations such as states, markets and the civil society (Risse, 2000). In times of globalization, those logics are complemented by the ‘logic of rule change’, where the “relationship between institutions and organizations are turned around” (Beck, 2005: 3). Financial markets break out of www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 17 Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change their institutional mode of regulation and are not obliged to follow the norms and rules of appropriateness. Capital rather “acquires a form of legal sovereignty” (Beck, 2005: 119) and legitimation, facilitated by global governance organizations such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO. Systems of arbitration and international trade agreements are examples of some manifestations of such increasing sovereignties of capital vis-à-vis the state. “Capital strategies” (Beck, 2005: 122) thereby dispense the spatial-temporal fix of the nation state and leave the state authority often helpless with the rather traditional task to defend property rights wherever demanded by such strategies. This establishes financial markets as more specific ‘obligatory passage points’ through which power is constituted and reproduced by effective organization. However, the power of such passage points is relational and counter-power strategies thereby consist of equally effective organization, if the ‘playing field’ of the financial market is principally accepted. The disintegration of carbon intensive investments, such as shares from resource extracting cooperations, can be a leverage point for transforming the ‘obligatory passage points’. Such disintegration again happens within the agency circuit. A prominent contemporary example of this endeavour is the constantly growing ‘divestment’ initiative that is gaining increasing attention predominantly among universities, churches and public sector investments (Klein, 2014). This campaign is on the one hand concerned about the stranded assets of a potential carbon bubble, which would evolve in major disruption or collapse of the existing financial system. On the other hand, the campaign aims at emissions reduction by divestment from heavy emissions industries and appeals to the moral responsibility of investing actors. Arguing about impending financial losses and at the same time questioning the public acceptance of fossil fuel investments, the divestment campaign rolls back the logics of social action. The ‘logic of rule change’ transforms back to the ‘logic of consequentialism’ to avoid the burst of a carbon bubble and the ‘logic of appropriateness’ to appeal to moral responsibilities. Divestment thereby aims to occupy the financial markets as ‘obligatory passage points’ with a counter-strategic effective organization. An alternative reading on the power of capital consists of an exit strategy rather than an attempt to counter-power financial markets within their own logic, as divestment does. By accepting financial markets as one ‘obligatory passage point’ through which power constituted, the neoliberal hegemonic field within which such markets can operate is strengthened. This is a rather dialectical issue but reveals the importance of discursive power in constituting hegemony, as stressed by Laclau and Mouffe. Rather than divesting from fossil fuels and operating within the logic of financial markets, the real alternative consists of building different financial institutions all together as new passage points for capital. This promotes a set of different infrastructures, which constitute a novel power field that works more towards the containment of climate change and the implementation of a socio-ecological transformation in general. However, such transformations are particularly hindered by systemic structures, which are a matter of the third circuit of power. 5.4 Third circuit: organizational outflanking, governmentality and the growth dispositiv The installation of new ‘obligatory passage points’ described in the preceding chapter underlies a specific transformation of governmentality, which is understood as “an intertwining of political rationalities and technologies of government” (Henman, 2011: 289). Foucault used the concept of governmentality as a contextual triangle of sovereignty, discipline and government targeting the population, as he analyzed the shift from state rulers’ interest in geographical territory throughout previous centuries towards the 20th century forms of government rationalities (Foucault, 2005). The neoliberal governmentality figures prominently here and has been used to describe and analyze neoliberalism as the political ideology of marketization tendencies. This advancement of governmentality acknowledges that neoliberalism does not exhaust itself in the rhetoric of minimal state government, but rather that “neoliberalism is government by other means. It operates ‘at a distance’ [using] experts, market mechanisms, and individual choice, rather than through coercive state regulations and rules” (Henman, 2011: 291). This does not render the state irrelevant but demonstrates the importance of a contemporary state theory, such as provided by Jessop (2008). During the shift of accumulation regimes from Fordism to post-Fordism, the necessity to deal with the increasing issues of environmental and climate change gave room for a specific form of ‘green governmentality’, which Luke (1999) discusses in an American context. With reference to Jessop’s strategic-relational approach, specific discursive selectivities are used to serve the technological selectivities inscribed in such a shift. According to Luke (1999): To preserve the political economy of hightechnology production, many offices of the American state must function as ’environmental protection agencies’, inasmuch as they continue to fuse a politics of national security with an economics of continual growth, to sustain existing industrial ecologies of mass consumption with the wise use of nature through private property rights. (1999: 151) As mentioned earlier, all these aspects of economic growth, industrial ecologies, mass consumption and private property rights have the strong potential to stand in the way of effective climate change abatement and thereby unfold powers and conflicts on agential and structural levels. Paralleling the commodification of emissions trading and biodiversity described above, a green governmentality also pervades further areas such as biotechnology. As Luke www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 18 Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change observes, “a postmodern condition is perhaps reached when the life of all species is now wagered in all of humanity’s economic and political strategies” (Luke, 1999: 150). The shifts of passage points and transformations of governmentality are accompanied by the ‘organizational outflanking’ of societal entities, such as individuals, groups but also discourses or institutional mechanisms. The consideration of outflanking links back to the example of financial markets and provides a starting point to understand the systemic structures that underlie different accumulation regimes. One reason why incremental strategies of counter-power, such as divestment strategies, are pursued within the passage point of the financial market is partially rooted in the material conditions of economic growth. Establishing alternative financial institutions in a more radical act of change is rare, as the foundational basis for such a strategic move barely exists – alternative financial institutions are organizationally outflanked through the necessity of economic growth that is inherent to all accumulation regimes. Brand (2014: 296) suggests that while there has long been an extensive discussion of the dominating character of capitalism, the necessity for economic growth is widely consensual in nearly all systems of production and consumption. Social forces become hegemonic by manoeuvring within the consensually accepted paradigm of economic growth on which the ‘imperial modes of living’ of the Global North rely upon (Brand and Wissen, 2013). The more recent acknowledgement of economic growth as a core driver rather than a solution to climate change fits within the degrowth movement (Kallis et al., 2012). However, degrowth remains a discursive niche and is far from being capable of establishing hegemonic powers. The coercive and disciplining measures of growth-based capitalism unfolds on all three types of outflanking and thereby link back to several conceptualizations of power. First, the organizationally outflanked casualties of climate change do not recognize its connection to economic growth, perpetuated through financial markets. Rather, a specific set of discursive selectivity or sense-making constructs an imaginary of growth. A “decolonization of the imaginary” (Latouche, 2014) is necessary to enable the imagination of a social system without economic growth and thereby unfold the possibilities for counter-power strategies. Second, knowledge about the interconnection between economic growth and climate change might exist but the costs to treat it as a problem of the many in the future are outflanked by the benefits of economic growth for the few today. The agential selectivities on power show how privileged access to resources enables the ‘good life for a few’ instead of ‘the good life for all’. The third aspect of outflanking concerns cases where the organizationally outflanked are not given room to manoeuvre, whether they are communities that suffer under the effects of climate change or low-income classes that are forced to reproduce the conditions in which they are situated. A full-time job in a growth economy is seemingly necessary to earn a living, contribute to a growth-dependent social security system and thereby perpetuate specific living and working patterns. The respective form of governmentality here is not only constituted by the ‘obligatory passage points’ of (financial) markets, but also by “state power [that] is capitalist to the extent that it creates, maintains, or restores the conditions required for capital accumulation” (Jessop, 2009: 378). Fossil fuel-based capitalism, with its inherent character of economic growth, depicts the deep structural order of Fordist and post-Fordist accumulation regimes and has persistently outflanked any alternatives that may provide an effective strategy for climate change abatement. The concept of the dispositiv was central to Foucault during his considerations on governmentality and can productively address the issue at hand. Summarizing the systemic structures of the third circuit as a growth dispositiv helps to also understand the deeply embedded power relations connected to climate change. Conclusion This explorative and predominantly conceptual work aimed to contribute to the research and discussion on power in the social sciences. It has outlined the theoretical foundations of power and hinted towards their empirical relevance for contemporary policy challenges. The ontological and epistemological discussion on power showed that taking the issue of power in society seriously demands a multi-theoretical analysis of power in social science. This discussion also provided for the post-positivist reflections that are useful to frame the field in a multi-theoretical manner. The tentative outline for future power research indicated the possible benefits of this approach in the case of climate change. This explorative part discussed a selection of agential power relations on multiple geographical levels from the local to the global as well as the structural aspects of power connected to climate change. Such structural aspects include the shift from the state to the market as the predominant mode of regulation in post-Fordist accumulation regimes, the green governmentality accompanying such a shift, and the growth dispositiv that provides the systemic structures for institutional mechanisms such as the commodification of nature, resources and emissions. This structural power field is not directly visible in conflicts, struggles, negotiations, innovations or catastrophes connected to climate change, but is equally relevant for a meaningful understanding and explanation of such visible phenomena. Although a critical social research agenda aims to describe and transform society through its inquiry, a thorough understanding of the problems is the precondition to do so. This work does not claim to provide a comprehensive analysis of power relations. It has given interested readers and the author the opportunity to discover the possibilities in the field and has to be understood as a plea for more concrete power research on empirical areas. This work may www.voeoe.de/dp5 Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie ·Discussion Paper 5/2017 19 Stör: Conceptualizing Power in the Context of Climate Change also be seen as a theoretical toolkit, a quarry on power that serves as inspiration and contributes to knowledge but also highlights the concept dependency of all empirical research. The author has only touched upon the benefits of such a toolkit in one specific empirical field, but hopes to inspire further research that criticizes and improves the work to make the research on power fit for the challenges of the 21st century. Power might increasingly continue to be at the core of societal issues in a globalized, yet fragmented world of multiple crises and opportunities. Literature Agamben, G. (2008). Was ist ein Dispositiv?. 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