Towards Oblique Engagements With ‘Tipping Points’: A Critical Geography for Redirecting Debates

ABSTRACT This intervention brings debates about tipping points into conversation with critical geographical thinking to suggest a more ‘oblique’ engagement with the concept. Such an approach is vital for rethinking the normative discourses and established imaginaries that dominate in the application of ‘tipping’ to understandings of environmental change. The use of the term ‘tipping point’ has grown exponentially over the last two decades within environmental sciences to describe accelerated, self‐amplifying and often irreversible changes to environmental systems. It has also garnered significant momentum in policy debates. Yet it is far from a universally lauded concept, with widespread concerns in the sciences about the validity and usefulness of defining such catastrophic points of no return and within the social sciences and humanities about the politics and ethics of tipping points. This intervention argues that human geography has a key role to play in this complex landscape in furthering critical engagements with tipping points as the concept continues to unfold and take hold. It calls for an unfixing of dominant understandings and framings through key geographical ideas: space and scale, time and temporalities and a/effect. These geographical ideas permit a redirection in current debates, especially around governance. Much is at stake in such a critique where tipping points may be productively questioned, imagined as something otherwise, or even outright refused as a guiding concept of our times. More equitable enquiries may emerge as a result.