World organisations, world events and world objects: how science, politics, and the mass media co-produce climate futures

ABSTRACT

Societies are becoming increasingly aware that they owe their emergence, wealth and industrialisation to their influence as a geophysical force. Social and environmental scientists have analysed the genesis of this self-reflection and pointed to past failures that have led to this predicament. Following the gradually beginning research on differing temporalities, temporal practices and time regimes in the climate change discourse, this article shifts the perspective from past obstacles to possibilities for shaping the future. We historically reconstruct the emergence of interfaces of future co-production and theorise how these enable the imagination, communication and negotiation of climate futures. We conceptualise (1) world organisations as permanent interfaces of future co-production that bring together disparate temporal perspectives, (2) world events as temporary settings that accelerate the production of climate futures, and (3) world objects as mobile webs of meaning that travel between social worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• co-production
• future
• organisation
• event
• object
• synchronisation‌

1. Introduction

Societies are becoming increasingly aware that they owe their emergence and evolution to their influence as a geophysical force. Social scientists have observed these processes of retrospective introspection as some nation states have realised that they have fallen into a climate crisis (Bell, 2021), that they have been in a new geological epoch for a century and a half (Chakrabarty, 2009), that past efforts have not yet been sufficient enough (Willis, 2017), and that warnings about the effects of globalisation and industrialisation have long been issued (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016). Environmental and social scientists agree that “[w]e are not yet acting as if we are facing an urgent and life threatening Emergency” (Gills & Morgan, 2020, p. 885; original emphasis).

Changing action, however, requires not only reflecting on how societies got into this predicament, but also shifting and broadening perspectives from short-term interests and myopic attention to long-term processes and future impacts. Social science research is progressively beginning to examine the various time orientations that impede action on climate change. These obstacles include right-wing populists’ adherence to a ‘retrotopia’ (Hanusch & Meisch, 2022), emotional barriers that prevent people from imagining the unimaginable (Norgaard, 2011), reliance on speculative technologies (Beck & Mahony, 2018), or the Global North’s deferral to the future (Szczurek, 2021).

This paper aims to contribute to these debates by exploring the conditions under which the future is imagined, communicated and negotiated across social worlds. In doing so, we shift the perspective from looking for the obstacles that led to insufficient action in the past to a “what makes it possible” approach (Abend, 2022) that conversely looks for favourable circumstances to imagine the future. Drawing on literature from the Sociology of Time, Science & Technology Studies, World Society Studies and Climate Governance Research (e.g. Nowotny, 1996; Jasanoff, 2004; Meyer et al., 1997a; Keohane & Victor, 2016), we reconstruct historically the emergence of climate discourses at three interfaces between climate science, politics and the media (Weingart et al., 2000), and theorise how these interfaces make climate future co-production possible.

We develop our argument in two steps. Section 2 sensitises to the improbability of future co-production by suggesting that science, politics and the mass media display asymmetrical future orientations. While climate science considers climate change over multiple decades, centuries and millennia, policy makers’ options for action are limited to terms of office and the media prefers disruptive upheavals to gradual changes. In section 3, we theorise three interfaces that bridge these temporal divergences. First, world organisations have emerged as permanent interfaces of future co-production. World organisations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) bring together differing temporal perspectives and institutionalise the governance of climate change. Second, we characterise world events as temporary interfaces of future co-production. Using climate summits and extreme weather events as paradigmatic cases, we argue that their temporary limitation accelerates the production of constructions of the future and generates short-term pressure for action. Thirdly, we conceptualise world objects as co-constructions of the future that travel between social worlds, carry different meanings, and evolve over time. The 1.5°C-2.0°C climate target is a case in point. While these interfaces enable envisioning the future across science, politics and the media, they also have unintended consequences. In section 4, we summarise the findings and identify some limitations and further research desiderata.

2. Multiple times in a multiply differentiated world

In this section, we sharpen our view on the fractures between science, politics and the mass media by outlining time-sensitive theories of social differentiation. We argue that science, politics and the media constitute distinct social worlds, each endowed with its own temporalities, temporal practices, and time regimes (2.1). When viewed in relation to each other, these idiosyncrasies engender asymmetrical future orientations. Climate research is characterised by a long-term perspective on a plurality of climate futures (2.2), while politics favours short-term goals (2.3) and the media is inclined to ephemeral sensations (2.4).

2.1. Social differentiation and asymmetrical future orientations

To speak of asymmetrical future orientations in science, politics and mass media presupposes to understand them as distinct social units of a differentiated society. Common to the various theories of differentiation is the assumption that social units are characterised by relative autonomy, idiosyncratic rationalities, specialised forms of communication, self-limitations, and so on. It is only through this specialisation, delimitation and demarcation that science as a specialised context for the production of truth claims can assert itself against politics (Gieryn, 1983). Politics, in turn, limits itself to making collectively binding decisions and does neither also promise novel news (mass media) and treatment of the sick (health care system) nor does it assess solvency (economy) and legality (law), and so on. For the purpose of this study, it makes no difference, whether these units are labelled as social worlds (Strauss), systems (Luhmann), fields (Bourdieu) or disjunctive landscapes (Appadurai) (for an overview, see Kaldewey, 2015). In line with the common usage of the term ‘social worlds’ in the English speaking literature (e.g. Sundqvist et al., 2017; Grundmann & Rödder, 2019), we refer to them as social worlds.

Following these multidimensional theories of society, scholars have urged to take the temporal dimension into account. They highlight that the differentiation of social worlds does not only take place with regard to ‘local rationalities’, specific rules or procedures but also materialises as an emergence of a specific temporal structure (for an overview, see Adam, 1990; Bergmann, 1992; Nowotny, 1992). To describe this observation, Nowotny (1996) coined the term “proper time” as an inherent characteristic of all social worlds. According to this, social worlds have their own specific rhythms, pace, temporal horizons, sequences of action, time resources, etc. These different time patterns and time perspectives regarding the relationship between past, present and future can no longer be synchronised without further ado (Rosa, 2013). In this perspective, recklessness with regard to external proper times constitutes the rule, while the convergence of differing temporal patterns and perspectives becomes improbable. This has profound consequences for the analysis of the climate discourse at the interface between science, politics and mass media.

2.2. The emergence of future orientation in science

Whereas climatology had understood climate as a static and regional quantity until well into the nineteenth century (Baker, 2021), the concept of climate developed a dynamic connotation in the twentieth century. Colonial and imperial aspirations, scientific internationalism, and strategic war investments had gradually opened up a far-flung network of observatories, CO₂ monitoring stations and geological archives, whose data could be fed into a new computing machine (Edwards, 2010). The computer proved to be a rewarding field of experimentation, bringing to the fore the question of how the climate might change in the future. With the advent of globalisation and computerisation, research radically turned away from nineteenth-century climatology – and thus also from immediate political and public concerns (Heymann, 2019). First, regional and geographical details lost relevance in favour of global and atmospheric dimensions. Second, computer-generated models elided local ways of knowing and lived experience, replacing them with formalised and computed global and long-term simulations. Third, science now shifted its attention to potential future changes. Plural futures of the singular global climate system came into focus.

2.3. Temporal limitations in politics

The new scientific field of climate change research at the time encountered nationally organised and democratically constituted political systems (among others, see below). These are primarily subject to temporal self-restrictions: democracy is “government pro tempore” (Linz, 1998), i.e. government for a certain time. Compared to autocratic systems, the periods of government are shortened and assure the opposition the prospect of a term of rule. The government is granted time resources to exercise power. The periodisation of legislature consequently makes long-term future orientation an unattractive option, since politicians want to deliver results that will distinguish them as promising candidates and increase the probability of being re-elected. Future orientation restrains the present in favour of the future (Lazarus, 2009) and unpopular decisions may not pay off later (Hovi et al., 2009). Whether a long-term decision is ‘worth it’ is eventually decided in the future, whereas politicians are elected and evaluated in the present. This is why in everyday political practice there is a tendency to “wait and see” rather than to follow the precautionary principle (Sterman, 2011).

Even if policymakers are willing to make long-term decisions (also at the expense of their re-election or approval ratings), constitutional barriers (such as the distinction between office and incumbent) ensure that individual future encroachment is limited to a very short period of time (Lazarus, 2009, pp. 1195–1200).¹ In this respect, “the reduction of that time by increasing democratisation and politicisation […] is likely to be one of the sources of instability and inefficiency of democratic government” (Linz, 1998, p. 22). Thus, past decisions (not: their consequences) become reversible and the present is kept free for alteration.² Means to influence the future are limited and kept in reserve. For the treatment of long-term problems, this is an unfavourable starting point.

It is important to note, however, that this point is far from endorsing an authoritarian approach. Indeed, for several years, democracies have been called into question among activists, and some scholars already ask under what environmental conditions authoritarian political systems might be considered ‘legitimate’ (Mittiga, 2022). However, as history reveals, authoritarian regimes are far from capable of improving their relation to the natural environment (Wilson, 2019). As recent examples show, authoritarian regimes are by no means less destructive than democratic systems. What is more, in authoritarian systems citizens get both environmental destruction and no right to vote out the government.

2.4. The mass media’s attention cycles

Like politics, mass media are chronically afflicted with myopia. Since the media select any information according to its news value, this benefits phenomena that are characterised by the urgency, novelty or discontinuity of events rather than gradual processes of change (Adam, 2022). Since more is happening in the world than is reported, topics compete for the scarce attention of the mass media, i.e. for a certain duration and scope (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). Typically, the duration is described as “issue attention cycle” (Downs, 1972) in which a problem in the early stages is a topic only for affected groups or interested experts, then suddenly is discovered by the media. The media then frame it as a problem that demands a public and policy debate and broadly report on it, before the issue is gradually replaced, possibly unsolved. To maintain public attention is complicated with regard to the scope, which is usually described as coverage (Schäfer et al., 2014) and includes the allocation of time resources for speaker positions and frames. In addition to competing issues, there is also competition within an issue cycle.³ In both these regards, the problem of climate change is “not a good candidate” (Ungar, 1992, p. 495) for media attention. As expressed by climate research, climate change is both an enduring problem not to be ‘solved’ within one attention cycle and a complex problem that clashes with newsworthy but binary schemes such as consensus/denial, catastrophe/solution, or alarming/downplaying (Grundmann, 2016).

Shifting to a sociology-of-time perspective brings these temporal obstacles to the fore. Rather than lamenting non-action, this perspective suggests that it is astonishing that a science-driven and future-related topic such as climate change did not peter out when it first encountered politics and mass media. As we have argued, it is by no means self-evident that politics and the media address the long-term problem of climate change. Rather, they are each governed by specific, divergent and idiosyncratic time regimes and temporal perspectives (i.e. proper times) that cannot be easily synchronised, that is the adjustment and convergence of disparate proper times (see section 2.1). Synchronisation takes work, requires tools, depends on the availability of specific sites and, even then, it is contested (Jordheim & Ytreberg, 2021). This is why the scientific concept of climate change can never be reproduced in the same way as climate researchers would like to see. Conversely, science cannot fully take into account the needs of other social worlds, at least not without unintended consequences. In the next section, we will explore the ‘work’ and problems of synchronisation.

3. World organisations, world events and world objects of future co-production

This initial situation – predictive future orientation of science, short-term orientation of politics, attention cycles of mass media – changed when several developments at the end of the 1980s laid the foundation for an institutionalisation of favourable circumstances of future co-production. The concept of co-production draws attention to the problems and consequences of the interactions and mutual observations of social worlds (Jasanoff, 2004). Of interest are the “nodes” and “hinges” that link social worlds together (Baker, 2017) and shape, problematise, and drive the evolution of scientific research agendas as well as re-conceptualise political problems and redistribute media attention. These are specified in the following as interfaces at which the future of society as a world society is envisioned, communicated and negotiated across social worlds by providing an emergent temporality. To analyse societal co-productions of the future, we distinguish three specific interfaces: (1) world organisations, (2) world events, and (3) world objects.

3.1. Permanent world organisations and temporary national policy goals

World organisations contribute to supranational cooperation by not leaving collaboration to mere chance or the fluidity of personal contacts and face-to-face interactions (Guston, 2001). Rather, they provide a permanent organisational framework for repeated contacts, roles independent of persons, and relatively invariant goals over time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the number of environmentally-related international governmental and nongovernmental organisations has grown exponentially to hundreds of world organisations by the end of the last millennium (Meyer et al., 1997b). A share of this growth can be attributed to the increasing internationalisation of scientific research, which has contributed to the definition and perception of policy problems (Frank, 1997). Scientists are commonly directly involved in these organisations. In an advisory role, in committees or in organisational partnerships, they inform global political relations based on scientific evidence and thus contribute to transforming global politics into “science diplomacy” (Flink & Schreiterer, 2010).

In this respect, the summer of 1988 plays a key role for the climate discourse: under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, the “Conference on the Changing Atmosphere” took place in Toronto. Here, climate change was established not only as a scientific research interest but also as a global political problem with a dimension “second only to a global nuclear war” (Allan, 2017). The Toronto conference initiated a diplomatic era that lasts to this day, codified in 1992 with the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and resulting in the establishment of a world organisation with the same name whose ongoing work is negotiated at the annual Conferences of the Parties (COP). In addition to the discussion papers prepared by working groups, the negotiations are based on the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Organization on Climate Change (IPCC) (itself a world organisation), which was founded in the year of the Toronto Conference, and the recommendations of the permanently installed Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice. This set-up made it possible to no longer leave climate policy to the scheduled commitment of individual politicians or parties, but to provide a permanent arena for the scientifically informed treatment of climate issues in the political world. World organisations thus represent a central actor for the co-production of climate futures.

The fact that world organisations such as the UNFCCC first inform the nation-state about the problems it is causing (Meyer et al., 1997a) and then remind the government that it is “by definition responsible for the continued vitality of the natural environment” (Frank et al., 2000, p. 101; original emphasis) renders the internal relationship between world organisations and nationally organised politics precarious. What may appear as a solution for the asymmetry of future orientations between science and politics, namely to create a space for a goal such as the UNFCCC’s goal to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, produces inconsistent and conflicting proper times within the political world and its multiple levels of governance (cf. Kessler, 2012, p. 91).

This problem primarily concerns the incremental mode of legislative procedures (Lazarus, 2009, p. 1180), which results from the purpose orientation of political processes. Luhmann (2014:, pp. 177–179) describes purpose orientation as a procedure of coordinating decision-making processes. In such cases, future goals to be achieved are specified (e.g. prosperity, disease control, climate governance), and the means to achieve these ends are left open (e.g. tax cuts, hospital financing, nuclear energy expansion). Only constant monitoring can provide information on the extent to which the mobilised resources prove to be useful means, which then reveals, for example, that readjustments would be necessary or that undesirable side effects have become apparent.

Furthermore, politicians pursue different purposes in different institutional arrangements. On some days of the week, they campaign in their constituency or shine at press events. On other days, they need to gain the rhetorical upper hand in parliament or settle disputes among their staff. Politicians have a range of audiences and a wide variety of obligations that they follow in rhythmic patterns (Crewe, 2021) and to which they can refer to as excuses. This means that in addition to their day-to-day business, even the most committed climate policymakers must adapt to changing problematic situations, for example, in the event of emerging crises. In contrast to world organisations like the UNFCCC, policymakers do not engage in climate politics full time. Together with the periodisation of politics outlined in section 2.2, purpose orientation emerges as a temporal precondition of any politics, which also makes climate politics incremental.

The inconsistency of future orientations can be found in the seemingly sobering course of the political negotiations. While the initial aim was to reach legally binding agreements, it became apparent as early as the 2000s that nation states were giving priority to their individual goals, which is why a system of voluntary but ambitious pledges has been in place since the 2009 COP in Copenhagen (McGee & Steffek, 2016). Indeed, the hope for a global turn in climate governance failed to materialise. Instead, the reality of successive, tentative and reversible politics set in. Interviews with British parliamentarians revealed, for example, that while politicians do not question climate change, they find it difficult to advocate for concerns that are decoupled from the lived experience of themselves and their constituents (Willis, 2017, 2018, 2019). While extreme weather events may favour putting climate change on the daily political agenda, these efforts are at risk at any time of being drowned out by the pressures of everyday business (Ungar, 1992). Therefore, politicians tend to put climate governance into the manageable form of reasonable and reversible ‘little solutions’. For example, politicians told Willis (2017) that they try to avoid talking about climate change directly, because they regard the issue as too abstract for their voters. Nevertheless, they run campaigns for environmental policies that they assume to be ‘achievable’ such as better public transport.

At least since the establishment of the UNFCCC and Copenhagen, diplomatic negotiations have been about reaching forward-looking agreements with large degrees of freedom, while in national politics climate governance has become one goal among many and can be linked to others (Keohane & Victor, 2016). This is not to say, that the process of decision-making at the level of the UNFCCC is merely a circus (Aykut, 2017), theatre (Death, 2011), or ritual (Little, 1995) on a world stage. On the contrary, there are indications that the mere persistence of world organisations has institutional effects (Schofer & Hironaka, 2005). Although global political decisions are usually not legally binding or at least lack the possibility of sanctions in case of non-implementation, world organisations such as the UNFCCC have succeeded in providing an arena, where states are kept under pressure through the self-binding nature of publicly stated declarations (cf. Heintz, 2014), through informal sanctions of blame games, through the competition for ‘soft’ global goods such as legitimacy, attention and prestige (cf. Werron, 2015) and through the mobilisation of scientific evidence (Schenuit, 2023, p. 171).

In this perspective, failed expectations can even be understood as success: the more the political world responds to demands, the more likely it is that incremental change processes on the national level will attract increasingly ambitious goals on the global level. If world organisations were to align their expectations with feasibility and the conflicting goals, they would lose their relevance.

3.2. Temporary, temporal and temporalising world events

While world organisations are permanent, the specificity of world events is their “temporary limitation” (Stichweh, 2008, p. 19). Following Stichweh (2008), this section distinguishes planned world events such as the COPs from unplanned, natural world events like extreme weather. Both constitute and represent world society. We argue that climate-related world events are not only temporary interfaces but unfold as temporal and temporalising events.⁴ The temporal structure of world events can be represented in the phase model of issue careers outlined in section 2.3. In the first phase, the world event is prepared; movements plan their protest actions, while organisers determine seating arrangements. Advance attention may be given, for example, when negotiation documents are leaked or calls for mobilisation circulate. When popular politicians arrive onsite, the media inform the public on dedicated newspaper pages and in special broadcasts that they are witnessing a world event.

At the level of face-to-face interaction, the brevity of world summits complicates the temporality of diplomatic negotiations. The “temporal boundedness” (Schüssler et al., 2014) of rare occasions of short duration forces diplomats to “literally devote time to gaining agreements” (Macduff, 2006, p. 42; original emphasis). In most cases, COPs do not take place in the time zone where diplomats usually live, which is why negotiations are burdened by overtiredness (Gleditsch, 1974). Physical co-presence may be essential in negotiating compromises (Heintz, 2014). Yet, given the time pressures of seemingly never-ending presentations (Little, 1995, pp. 274–277), the risk of ‘negotiation by exhaustion’ (Schroeder et al., 2012, p. 835), and lengthy line-by-line discussions (Aykut, 2017), the struggle for an acceptable agreement appears to amount to a struggle for a desirable future. The outcome of a conference may be unsatisfactory in retrospect, but in view of the fact that numerous issues are frequently unresolved in advance, yet have to be decided under these temporal constraints and could mean the failure of the negotiations, the participants often agree to an inadequate agreement rather than none (Allan, 2019).

The example of climate summits furthermore shows that world events unfold as temporalising interfaces of future co-production. World events bring together a wide variety of actors, time perspectives, and future narratives, turning them into sites of “heightened, future-oriented public debate” (Mische, 2014, p. 438; see also Roche, 2003). In contrast to the everyday business, the stronger reference to the future at world conferences can be attributed in particular to scientists present and the reports of the IPCC as subjects under discussion. As an “arena of societal synchronisation” (Laux, 2017), world climate summits offer an interactional framework in which scientists, politicians, and journalists coordinate their expectations of the future with one another and generate time pressure. Significant is also the role of the “widening frame of climate diplomacy” (Christoff, 2016, p. 769) through an increasing participation of civil society actors. In the formal status of “observers” of the negotiations, NGOs and social movements increasingly act as “watchdogs” (Bäckstrand et al., 2017) and take the opportunity to link their issues to climate change (Hjerpe & Linnér, 2010).

World events such as COPs develop into a veritable “media mecca” (Schneider, 1989, p. 194) at which the co-production of climate futures does not only take place under conditions of physical co-presence but is also mediated by the media. Indeed, the mediatisation of society’s climate futures particularly takes place at times of world climate summits. This includes both social media, such as scientists’ Twitter use (Walter et al., 2018), and the number of reports in traditional media (Schäfer et al., 2014). Climate summits turn into a “nodal point for imagining futures” (Kumpu, 2013) in which images of desired futures of a low-emission society as well as undesired futures of natural disasters culminate. As the future fills with hope or fear, it also brings up the question of how this crossroads could have come about in the first place. The past may appear in a new light and questions of responsibility come to the fore. In the face of a “bleak future” (Hellsten et al., 2014, p. 482), the past is reassessed and now reveals the missed opportunities and disappointed expectations. In this sense, planned world events are also used to place the past and present into a “sequence of events” (Weingart et al., 2000, p. 276) leading to a potentially catastrophic future of natural extreme weather events.

It is worth noting that unplanned, natural world events such as extreme weather events have not always been interpreted as bellwether for a greenhouse effect (Stehr & von Storch, 1995). This is the case only since the year of the Toronto Conference in 1988 when the opportunity opened up to link extreme weather events to climate change. Journalists and scientists interpreted a summer heat wave, which swept across America at the time, as a current portent of future climate change. Before the U.S. Senate, a climate scientist affirmed with 99 percent certainty that recently observed weather anomalies were attributable to increased emissions of greenhouse gases (Ungar, 1992, pp. 491–492). Subsequently, the drought, as a now scientifically confirmed effect of climate change, and other extreme weather events (such as a flood in Sudan) were delocalised and gained a global dimension by being reported elsewhere and by being linked to global climate change (Jaspal & Nerlich, 2012; Weingart et al., 2000). Scientists supported this dynamic by downplaying uncertainties and caveats whilst experiencing a “double ethical bind” to find a “balance between being effective and being honest” (Schneider, 1988, p. 114). In this perspective, the co-production of climate knowledge appears to be an endeavour that holds out the prospect of media attention and pressure on politicians.

While the conditions under which local extreme weather becomes a world event appear to be primarily contingent, a new research field works, to increase the awareness of extreme weather. Research on “Extreme Event Attribution” recognises the problem that the attribution of an extreme event often occurs “when the public has moved on”, and has therefore set itself the goal “to change this”.⁵ Through modeling and statistical analysis this research field attempts to rapidly identify to what extent an extreme event is made more likely and thus can be causally linked to climate change. Yet recently, its protagonists have noticed some unintended consequences that this co-production yields: the effects of extreme weather events are increasingly naturalised, and political responsibility is thus shifted (Raju et al., 2022). While an old saying in hazard research states that “floods are ‘acts of god’, but flood losses are largely acts of man” (Gilbert White), politicians tend to blame climate change for the avertable disasters (Lahsen & Ribot, 2022). The future then comes to serve as a retreat to which politicians withdraw from responsibility for the failure to avert past damage, i.e. they hold out the prospect of future mitigation measures (Janković & Schultz, 2017).

To conclude, world events provide an increasingly relevant interface at which science, politics and the mass media co-produce the future. Whether it is COPs at which thousands of scientists, policymakers and journalists gather annually, or extreme weather events which mobilise research capacity, attract media attention and present a window of opportunity for political declarations, such interfaces set up an avenue for aligning the time horizons of the actors involved and for addressing the future of society in times of climate change. They unfold their effect precisely because of their temporal limitation. But this also means that – unlike organisations – they are fluid, and end as quickly as they begin.

3.3. Initialising, inhibiting and including world objects

The term ‘world objects’ denotes mobile webs of meanings that bridge the boundaries between social worlds, inhibit communication within social worlds, and thus enable the co-production of overarching futures for world society. In this section, we conceptualise the 1.5°C-2°C target as a world object. We observe how it travels between social worlds, assembles and changes different meanings and serves as a blueprint for the future of world society in times of climate change.

This understanding of the term world objects combines three conceptual debates. First, it takes up the concept of boundary objects. Star and Griesemer (1989) conceptualise boundary objects as objects that can be found in different social worlds, can be given different meanings in each, and thereby initialise cross-boundary communication. Of particular interest for boundary object analysis is how concepts, models, ideas or facts are endowed with meaning, how they travel, and how they fulfil various roles in different contexts (cf. Krause, 2021).

A second conceptual component is inspired by recent proposals to conceptualise boundary objects not only as initialising communication but also to take into account possible inhibiting effects (Fox, 2011; Rödder, 2017). While Star and Griesemer saw above all the possibility of cross-boundary communication, inhibitory boundary objects have the opposite effect; they prevent cross-boundary interventions and serve to define boundaries. Based on these considerations, we propose looking for possible inhibitory effects of boundary objects not between social worlds but within. As an unintended consequence of employing world objects in cross-boundary communication, their usage may constrain the scope of possible, legitimate or desired action and communication within a social world.

A third aspect of world objects is captured by the notion of future objects. Esguerra (2019:, p. 969) speaks of future objects to refer to objects that “play a crucial part in peoples’ attempts to produce, negotiate, and experiment with when engaging in future practices”. Beyond this proposal, there seems to be benefit in understanding future objects also as a possibility in which not only producers inscribe themselves, but with which they also point beyond themselves. The co-produced futures, after all, often include not only the future of the producers, but they also anticipate other stakeholders’ futures, markets, trends, political decisions, public opinion, and so on. In their most elaborate form, as is of interest in this context, world future objects in this sense represent co-produced futures that claim to include world society as a whole and assume a common future.

The 1.5°C or 2.0°C climate target represents a supra-systemic future construction as it simultaneously promotes cross-boundary inter-systemic communication and inhibits intra-systemic communication. It significantly narrows the production of scientific knowledge, political decisions, and media reports while claiming to serve as a blueprint for future world society. According to Randalls’s (2010) reconstruction of the history of this temperature goal, its intellectual origins date back to the first calculations of climate sensitivity. Following Svante Arrhenius’ calculations around 1900, climate sensitivity was established in the second half of the twentieth century as a scenario that examined how global temperature would respond to a doubling of the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere. Initially conceived as a heuristic tool for scientific attempts to assess the reliability of models, the idea of deriving a temperature goal from climate sensitivity that could guide climate policymaking developed at the end of the 1980s. As a “do-able problem” (Fujimura), the 2°C goal was approved by the EU in the mid-1990s on the rationale that it represented “the lower end of the mid-range IPCC emissions scenario” (Randalls, 2010, p. 601). Reaffirmed in the EU in 2005, the limit was recognised in an agreement in 2009 as a desirable (legally non-binding) target.

The definition of temperature goals is scientifically informed but not reducible to science. This became apparent when Europe endorsed the goal, and at the latest with the retightening of ambitions through the introduction of the 1.5°C goal with the 2015 Paris Agreement (Guillemot, 2017; Cointe & Guillemot, 2023). On the one hand, observers commented already after the European goal was reaffirmed that it was based on a very selective reception of the state of research. Tol (2007), for example, deemed the underlying studies unrepresentative, doubted the credibility of the drafters, and expressed concerns about the methodological approaches. On the other hand, some scientific and political communities rumoured in the aftermath of the 2009 agreement that the 2°C goal would not be sufficient (Guillemot, 2017). Two developments characterised this period until the Paris conference. On the side of science, a new type of scenarios gained popularity. Scientists followed the IPCC’s call to develop a set of more policy- and solution-oriented scenarios (Beck & Mahony, 2018). Shortly thereafter, the scenarios were included in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report and thus legitimised. Among the different scenarios, one scenario – abbreviated as RCP2.6 – attracted particular attention: it viewed the achievement of the 2°C goal as plausible, not because it called for the most drastic measures, but because it anticipated the introduction of technologies that would supersede rigorous emission reductions. The scenario confirmed hopes that time had not yet run out (Beck & Mahony, 2018).

On the political side, one conclusion seemed obvious: if the 2°C goal is achievable, then an even more ambitious target, which not only averts the damage in the Global North but also preserves world society as a whole, should also be possible. After all, the 2°C goal is a European proposal. Thus, diplomats from the Global South, with the support of philanthropic organisations, climate justice movements and scientists, succeeded in anchoring at least the ambition to aim for 1.5°C in the Paris Agreement (Guillemot, 2017). The temperature limit of 1.5°C-2°C has thus been able to establish itself as a boundary-bridging and inclusive world object claiming to be a blueprint for the future of world society, against which the social worlds involved, above all politics, must accept to be held responsible, e.g. by the recent wave of climate protests. In this sense, “1.5°C or 2°C not only becomes a policy target but also comes to represent the collective psyche of our times” (Asayama, 2021, p. 12).

While there were lively debates about the sense and nonsense of the goal right after Paris, the publication of the IPCC special report on “Global Warming of 1.5°C” in 2018 made clear that the world object had proved to inhibit communication within politics, science, and the mass media in favour of cross-boundary communication. This resulted from the principle of the temperature limit (Asayama et al., 2019): in order to avoid an overshoot, measurable budgets of permissible emissions were set for certain periods of time. The faster the budget is used up, the faster society approaches the future. Immediately, messages were heard about how many years remained until the catastrophe would occur, which is why Asayama et al. (2019) speak of a new “climate deadline-ism”.

Unintended consequences of this fixation on temperature limits and the expiration of time can be reconstructed in all three social worlds. First, following the release of the IPCC report, media coverage narrowed to a reading of the report sounding the alarm that only 12 years remain to act (Boykoff & Pearman, 2019). Among the recipients, the fear-based communication fuelled the risk of oversaturation, feelings of helplessness and, in consequence, “unintended denial” (Boykoff & Pearman, 2019, p. 286). Second, in the wake of emergency declarations following the report, policymakers further widened the gap between mitigation and adaptation (Howarth et al., 2021). While the “taboo on adaptation”, which Pielke et al. (2007) have pointed to several years ago, is gradually lifting, a strong global governance framework to pursue efforts in adaptation is still lacking, not least because of unclear global goals and uncertainties in the global dimension of local adaptation (Persson, 2019).

Third, in the aftermath of Paris, critics expressed the general fear that the focus on the 1.5°C goal would exhaust considerable scientific capacity and divert it from research on much more likely scenarios (Boucher et al., 2016), as it eventually did for the IPCC’s special report. Guillemot (2017:, p. 49) claims to have heard rumours that critical scientists at the Paris conference were urged to withhold their pessimistic views of achievability. As a reason for keeping the target alive, van Beek et al. (2022) suspect what they term “political calibration” at work. Since climate scientists want to maintain their policy relevance, they adjust (“calibrate”) their models to policy needs (for example, by including evermore technologies). Since politicians had already agreed on the target, to speak out against it would have had dramatic consequences, as interviewees told van Beek et al.: “In fact, if the IPCC would have concluded that the 1.5°C was unrealistic, Paris negotiators might even have had to go back to the negotiation table” (van Beek et al., 2022, p. 195).

In sum, through a history of mutual adjustment the 1.5°C-2°C goal emerged as a world object that forged an alliance between science, politics and the mass media, but at the same time narrowed the “corridor” (Beck & Oomen, 2021) of imaginable climate futures.

4. Conclusion

International organisations, world public events, global temperatures as well as the Anthropocene, the Earth system, the ‘global we’ – this list could easily be extended –, all these terms refer to new forms through which world society in times of climate change is constituted and represented. This article has explored three interfaces at which divergent time patterns and future orientations synchronise. Due to the fragmentation of society into differentiated social worlds such as science, politics and mass media, we have argued that the intersection and convergence of the differing temporal practices and time perspectives is genuinely improbable. This situation is complicated by the fact, that, although the impacts of climate change are already felt around the world, climate change is regarded as future problem (Otto et al., 2022). While scientific modelling practices bolster this view, the temporal perspectives in politics and the media tend to short-sightedness.

Despite these conditions, we argue that several mechanisms of future co-production are at work in the climate case: world organisations, world events and world objects allow bridging the proper times of social worlds and provide favourable circumstances for the co-production of climate futures. First, world organisations offer a permanent set-up where the production of scientifically informed long-term policy is institutionalised and persistent towards the partisan fluctuations, short-sighted goals and multiple demands at the national level. Second, world events such as climate summits and extreme weather events act as focal points where climate futures are brought into the present and the co-production of futures is intensified. Third, we characterise world objects as webs of meaning that travel between social worlds. The career of the 1.5°C-2°C target shows how such an object develops a life of its own, starting as a heuristic tool in science to become a blueprint for policy making and subsequently world society’s climate future.

The analysis also reveals relevant unintended consequences that science, politics and the media abide to maintain these interfaces. For example, the emergence of conflicting time perspectives within politics (3.1) or the dilemma of accepting an inadequate agreement rather than none and the naturalisation of extreme weather events (3.2) or the narrowing of the scope of (desirable) climate futures (3.3) are cases in point.

The analysis of the three interfaces is necessarily incomplete, especially in three respects. First, our study certainly did not cover all aspects that characterise the interfaces. Future research could take a closer look at what other temporal constrains and enablers are at work at the interfaces. For example, by what routines and sequences of action is the work in world organisations characterised? Or how does the repetition and acceleration of world events affect the capacity of future thinking? A second limitation concerns the social worlds that we have taken into account. For instance, since the spectrum of the participants at COPs is increasingly diversifying, how does the participation of movements or businesses affect the negotiations, modify what counts as a world object and limit or widen the future horizon? Or how do seemingly unrelated social worlds as local communities encounter and make sense of climate futures (see, for example, Schnegg et al., 2021)? A third desideratum would be to identify and characterise further interfaces of future co-production. For example, places like the Arctic, New Orleans or Pakistan whose visit or whose memory accelerates futures thinking could be considered as a possible candidate.

To conclude this article we would like to emphasise the importance of such interfaces. In recent years, criticism of the meaningfulness of climate events, of the supposedly modest successes of the UNFCCC, and also of the idea of formulating temperature ‘targets’ has increased on the part of both climate activists and climate change deniers. While it is fundamentally contingent, whether an extreme weather event rises to the level of a world event, whether the negotiations lead to desired outcomes, and what the world will look like at 1.5, 2, or 2.7°C, these interfaces remain significant intersections where different social worlds make sense of and shape the future of world society. To return to the introduction: These interfaces make things possible, not necessary. It would be important to acknowledge that the interfaces certainly bring unintended consequences and low controllability, but perhaps also one or two pieces of good news.

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the research class “Social Science Research on Climate Change” at Universität Hamburg for their helpful comments on the draft. We are especially grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments helped to improve the article significantly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany‘s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2037 ‘CLICCS - Climate, Climatic Change, and Society’ – Project Number: 390683824, contribution to the Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) of Universität Hamburg.

Notes on contributors

Youssef Ibrahim

Youssef Ibrahim is a research associate and PhD student at Universität Hamburg in a DFG-funded project on “Social Constructions of Climate Futures”. He took up his work in Hamburg after studying sociology at Bielefeld University. His research currently focusses on climate discourses from the perspective of the sociology of time, world society studies and historical sociology. Recently, he co-edited (with Simone Rödder) "Schlüsselwerke der sozialwissenschaftlichen Klimaforschung" (transcript, 2022).

Simone Rödder

Simone Rödder is an assistant professor of sociology, especially science studies, at Universität Hamburg. Her current research focuses on climate futures, climate movements and the medialisation and politicisation of expertise. Recent publications include "The role of scientific knowledge in Extinction Rebellion’s communication of climate futures" (Front. Commun. Sec. Science and Environmental Communication, 2023) and "'Unite behind the Science!' Climate movements’ use of scientific evidence in narratives on socio-ecological futures" (Science and Public Policy, 2022).

Michael Schnegg

Michael Schnegg is a professor of anthropology at the Universität Hamburg. His research explores how humans collectively enact their understandings of and engagements with the more-than-human world. The results of his work are published in a wide range of journals in anthropology, sociology, economics, geography and theoretical physics. Recently, he co-edited (with Edward Lowe) "Comparing Cultures: Innovations in Comparative Ethnography" (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Notes

1 In this regard, the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a pertinent example. Although politicians have previously decided against a ‘short-termist’ policy and committed to the agreement, Trump could declare the withdrawal, which he justified with current national interests. Interestingly, Obama commented on this course by accusing him of “rejecting the future” (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40127326). (The relationship between global and national policy is revisited in section 3.1) In contrast, the German Constitutional Court’s 2021 verdict represents a “landmark in climate litigation” (Ekardt & Heyl, 2022) by mandating policymakers to take into account not only the present and near future, but also to consider the interests of future generations through long-term policy planning, “so that freedom is fairly balanced intertemporally” (Ekardt & Heyl, 2022, p. 697).

2 A case in point is the German “exit from the exit from the exit” from nuclear energy (Engels et al., 2020).

3 For example, the media cover the same problem in different ways, such as alarmist or solutionist (Guenther et al., 2022).

4 This line of reasoning is inspired by the theoretical figure used by Ringel and Werron (2021), who distinguish temporal, temporalising and temporalised practices of comparing.

5 https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/about/