The Transitional Order of Climate Governance: Transition, Uncertainty, and Urgency

Abstract There is a discrepancy in global climate governance between acknowledging the need to act on climate change and the failure to effectively implement such action. A pivotal reason for this discrepancy is the temporal dilemma woven into democratic transition processes: the tension between the demand for short-term and immediate action on one hand, and the time-consuming requirements of democratic governance on the other. Common perceptions of climate change as a crisis, however, tend to exacerbate this temporal dilemma, as this paper demonstrates. For this reason, the paper employs the concept of transitional orders to capture the salience of temporality in global climate governance. Based on an extended qualitative content analysis, the paper investigates how key climate governance documents assess topics of temporality. Analyzing three groups of documents—those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Conference of the Parties (COP), contrasted with documents advocating for either more or less climate governance—the paper identifies transition, uncertainty, and urgency as the major topics of temporality. On this basis, the paper develops three criteria for democratically oriented climate governance: linking the present and future, dealing with complexity, and providing a temporal space. In conclusion, the paper elaborates how the notion of transitional orders is more conducive to such democratic governance than crisis-oriented perspectives, and how this ultimately also affect future orders.