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Abstract
Why do people resist acting upon climate change? The article approaches this much-debated question through a study of the failed attempt to implement congestion charging in Tromsø, Norway. Taking this event as its starting-point, the article sets out to examine how climate change is rendered governable and how this in turn affords the citizen rather limited political agency. Arguing that this in itself created resistance towards the congestion charging scheme, the article moves to look at how a specific object sought governed through – the car – can inform ideas of the citizen and its agentic capacities. It is here argued that whilst the concept of relational agency has sensitized political analysis towards the doings of non-human entities, the orientation towards symmetrical accounts of agency has also left more or less unexplored what it is that constitutes the subject. There is, I thus suggest, a need to distinguish between symmetry and sameness and, further, to find ways of teasing out difference that does not simultaneously re/produce asymmetries. Approaching this by way of object multiplicity and affordances, the article concludes with a discussion of how subjectivities can be understood as a ‘gathering’ of relations and encounters that constantly re-enact the subject. Arguing that this represents a form of ‘compression’ through which potentials of ‘the subject multiple’ are made more proximate and thus also concentrated, the article suggests that rather than to work through perceived mechanisms of the subject, authorities should instead work with it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Tone Huse is a Research Fellow at the University of Tromsø. She works in the field of urban and political geography, with works spanning from urban regeneration and climate mitigation to post-colonial relations. Her most recent publication is Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City: On Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put (Ashgate 2014).
ORCID
Tone Huse http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5866-4350
Notes
1. Official website of the European Commission, Climate Action: Carbon Leakage. Accessed on November 20 2014. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/cap/leakage/index_en.htm.
2. Recent research suggests that since the 1980s the Arctic region has been warming at approximately twice the global rate, the sea ice having declined by 13% each decade (Larsen et al. Citation2014, 4).
3. The mayor's choice of words – ‘en stein død sak’ – translates into ‘a stone dead case’, the equivalent of which in English would be close to the term ‘dead in the water’.
4. Ideas from social and behavioural psychology have also been gaining influence in Norwegian public debate and policy circles. During a Cities of the Future meeting in Sandnes (15 and 16 April 2013) a whole plenary session was devoted to so-called climate psychology. There was also a session on ‘green nudging’ (see e.g. Thaler and Sunstein Citation2008; Goodwin Citation2012) where the private foundation GreeNudge presented its work. The foundation further directed a workshop where the participants were asked to come up with nudges. In the group that I observed this proved rather fruitless; the participants could not come up with any nudges, quickly began discussing well-known incentives, and concluded that for the transport sector the nudge method was not really viable.
5. The site assemblages do not necessarily consist of sites that are geographically proximate, nor do they necessarily belong together independent of my ‘bundling’ together of them (Law Citation2004). Rather, the sites of each assemblage share certain qualities that make their conceptual alignment useful, their assemblage being the contingent result of how I have sought to bring together qualitatively different entities (discourses, materialities, processes, events, actors, places, and movements) encountered during field-work and that in light of each other could inform the research questions posed. My use of the term ‘assemblage’ here follows Law's (Citation2004) interpretation of its translation from Deleuze and Guattari's French term agencement. Agencement, Law explains, is an abstract noun that denotes the action of the verb agencer. In French this has several different meanings, like ‘to arrange’, ‘dispose', ‘fit up’, ‘combine', and ‘order'. So whilst the translation is not wrong, the term has in English come to sound ‘more definite, clear, fixed, planned and rationally centered than in French. It has also come to sound more like a state of affairs or an arrangement rather than an uncertain and unfolding process’ (Law Citation2004, 41). If the term is to be of any use, Law thus stresses, ‘it needs to be understood as a tentative and hesitant unfolding, that is at most only very partially under any form of deliberate control. It needs to be understood as a verb as well as a noun’ (Law Citation2004, 41–2). What I here conceptualize as ‘site assemblage’ moreover resembles what Law defines as ‘method assemblage’. The two should, however, not be confused with one another; Law's description of method assemblage as ‘the process of crafting and enacting the necessary boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness’ (Law Citation2004, 161) is far more general than what I intend for ‘site assemblage’ to be. My coinage of this term is rather an attempt to describe the particular geography of research material that has emerged from a multi-sited, ethnographic engagement with the study's research questions.
6. The Cities of the Future programme was led by The Ministry of the Environment and ran from 2008 to 2014. The mandate of the programme was to facilitate, though to very little extent fund, climate work in the 13 largest cities in Norway.
7. Braidotti (Citation2003) develops her idea of the subject multiple by cross-reading Irigaray's theory of the subject with Deleuze's nomadology.
8. Case 93/09, 17.6.2009.
9. In the 2006–2007 White Paper (no 34, 36) a similar section, ‘Principles Behind the Government's Targets’, lists a range of other principles that are also quite close to those laid down in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In addition to cost-effectiveness and the view that the rich countries must shoulder most of the responsibility and costs of climate mitigation, it is here stated that: Norwegian climate politics should be guided by governmental efficiency; the polluter pays principle; the principle of sustainable development; the ‘critical limits’ principle and the precautionary principle. The principles laid down in the 2011–2012 White Paper are thus also quite similar to those outlined in the 2006–2007 White Paper (no. 34, 36).
10. ONRs are produced by committees and working groups appointed by a ministry to consider affairs that are within the ministry's areas of responsibility. For an English summary, see: http://www.lavutslipp.no/article_1334.shtml.
11. NPRA (Citation2010, 3, 23, 70)
12. The unstable nature of the AutoParticular as premise object can in many respects be seen to confirm a point made by Marres (Citation2008) on Dobson's (Citation2003) suggestion that sites classically defined as private, like homes, may be thought of as locations of civic involvement and as generators of civic responsibilities. Studying the deployment of ‘green domestic technologies and arrangements as publicity devises’, Marres (Citation2008, 36) comes to the conclusion that Dobson's ‘materialist understanding of environmental involvement may be overstating its case. More precisely, it seems to overstate the solidity of material publics [ … ] the material publics that are organised with its aid appear to be much more malleable, partial, and fragile than a materialist theory of citizenship can acknowledge’.
13. My idea of experimentation as a strategy for creating innovation in a policy field characterized by stagnation takes much inspiration from Law and Williams's (Citation2014) analysis of the UK economy and the need for other modes of ordering than those developed in accordance to neo-liberal ideals. See also Marres (Citation2009) on ‘green living experiments’. Importantly, I do not see innovation of political technologies as contra to, for instance, new uses of information and communication technology (e.g. the potentials of coupling big data with smart city technologies) or changes in the types of energy supplied to consumers. Instead, the innovation of political technologies can – and probably should – happen both as integral to and alongside such innovations. This notion of the city as laboratory should moreover be used with some caution. For as is remarked by Karvonen and van Heur (Citation2014, 380), ‘experimentation’ is currently one of the buzzwords tailing the various urban development discourses in circulation: ‘It holds forth the promise of experimental processes and innovative actions related to environmental protection, social cohesion, capitalist expansion, creative sector development, policy improvements, infrastructure provision, academic research, and so on’. ‘Urban laboratory’ may simply become another metaphor for ‘urban development’. How or in what instances, Karvonen and van Heur (Citation2014, 380) thus ask, does it suggest ‘urbanisation by significantly different means?’ Which then leads them to the question of what the specific contribution of experimentation to knowledge production is. For as the laboratory vocabulary is applied to non-laboratory settings, it changes the idea of what an experiment is, where it begins, and where it ends. The terminology of experimentation thus runs the risk of becoming rather imprecise and, further, of being conflated with terms such as ‘change’, ‘development', and ‘complexity’. In order to avoid this, Karvonen and van Heur (Citation2014, 383) suggest, experimentation could be understood as: ‘(1) involving a specific set-up of instruments and people that (2) aims for the controlled inducement of changes and (3) the measurement of these changes’. Experiment would thus always involve ‘a double mode of observation and intervention’.
14. The term ‘spaces of exception’ can be traced back to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who describes how in times of crisis rights of citizens are superseded, and has been used by among others Gregory (Citation2004, Citation2006) to describe how the USA and its allies after the 9/11 attacks created spaces excepted from the usual rules of war (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine) and imprisonment (Guantanamo). My use of the term is clearly somewhat different, in that I here use it to suggest a move that can aim to reinsert and strengthen the rights of citizen co-determination and local self-determination.