Critical Perspectives on Accounting 22 (2011) 682– 697

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

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When science meets strategic realpolitik: The case of the CopenhagenUN climate change summit

Chris Cartera,b,∗,1, Stewart Cleggc,d, Nils Wåhline

a School of Management, The Gateway, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9SS, UKb Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4JH, UKc School of Management, Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney, Australiad Visiting Professor Universidade Nova, Lisbon, Portugale Umeå School of Business, Umeå University, SE - 901 87 UMEÅ, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 20 April 2008Received in revised form30 September 2010Accepted 23 April 2011

Keywords:Climate changePowerSummitsInstitutional logics

a b s t r a c t

This paper argues that the impasse over tackling climate change at the 2009 climate changesummit is a result of the outcome of the prevailing power and politics at the summit. Thepaper discusses the sociological literature on power and notes that the failure of the summitillustrates the fragility of legitimacy and authority. The paper rehearses key parts of thechronology of the summit and argues that the politics of domination often prevail over thepolitics of legitimacy. Moreover, the way in which both science and politics have failed tolegitimate the issue of climate change is explored. The paper closes with a discussion of whatis required to fix the issue as legitimate and meriting serious action by major internationalagencies and economies.

© 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In the environmental domain where more states have a voice, as became clear in Copenhagen, the dominant playersbrought enough bargaining power to the table to ensure that no global deal went through that might damage theirinterests. The Copenhagen Accord is marked by the absence of long-term emission targets, the omission of watertightpledges on new funding, and no clear indications of how to turn the Accord into a legally binding treaty. The bigemitters – the US, China, India and the countries of the European Union – will continue to be able to act without abinding framework to enforce emission reductions and speed up the pace of a transition to a low-carbon economy.(Held et al., 2010: 13)

1. Legitimacy

Climate change poses one of the major challenges to humanity, a proposition that is only disputed by a small minorityof commentators and scientists (Giddens, 2009; Stern, 2006). Despite this apparent consensus there is a notable lack ofsubstantive action to resolve or attempt to manage the problem at the level of global politics. While governments oftenbrandish their green credentials this is, in most cases, little more than gestural politics. This begs the question of why,despite widespread agreement that climate change is a major problem, powerful actors cannot subscribe to a single courseof action that might help halt man-made damage to the planet. The premise of our paper is that the inaction is the result ofa lack of legitimacy over certain courses of action. In other words, various international agencies and national governments

∗ Corresponding author. Fax: +44 1334462800.E-mail addresses: cjgcarter@yahoo.co.uk (C. Carter), stewart.clegg@uts.edu.au (S. Clegg), Nils.Wahlin@usbe.umu.se (N. Wåhlin).

1 At the time of writing this paper Chris Carter was a Professor at the University of St Andrews, from September 1st 2011 he is Professor of Strategy atthe University of Newcastle.

1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2011.04.002

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have failed to ‘fix’ meaning over the importance of climate change as a problem, which, of course, precludes agreement overthe solution. To explore this more concretely, this article examines the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit, where itis generally acknowledged that there was a failure to create international legitimacy and order. As David Held, Mary Kaldorand Danny Quah put it: ‘Civil society pressure and enlightened leadership can make a clear difference, yet bringing thedomestic policy preferences of diverse countries together is proving hugely difficult, as the UN climate change conferencein Copenhagen illustrated recently’ (Held et al., 2010, p. 11). Our paper picks up this challenge and seeks to explore theconceptual reasons why legitimacy and order has not been created and seeks to outline a course of action for future eventsin which there are attempts to determine an international approach to tackling climate change.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the context of recent sociological discussions on climate change are articu-lated; central theories of power and their conceptualization of legitimacy are introduced; the methodological underpinningsof the paper are highlighted; the Copenhagen climate change summit is analysed, and the paper concludes with a discussionof the failure to create legitimacy over climate change in Copenhagen.

2. Climate change: science and politics

Anthony Giddens’ (2009) recent study of climate change identifies the lack of a politics of climate change as the mainobstacle for achieving an international consensus on action. In a related policy paper, Giddens (2008: 5) argues ‘I want tomake the somewhat startling assertion that, at present, we have no effective politics of climate change, especially at a nationallevel where much of the action must happen’, he continues, in his recent book, ‘In other words, we do not have a developedanalysis of the political innovations that have to be made if our aspirations to limit global warming are to become real’(Giddens, 2009: 4). In articulating his position, Giddens contrasts the lack of effective politics with the broad acceptance ofclimate change science. In discussing the Kyoto Protocol, for instance, Giddens argues: ‘The result of compromise, the targetsagreed at Kyoto bear little relationship to what is required to make a serious impact on global warming’ (Giddens, 2009:188–189).

Giddens notes that while one stream of climate change opinion can be characterized as ‘sceptical’, in that they deny theexistence of man-made climate change or view its importance as being overstated, this is very much a minority view. Anexample of this in the UK would be Nigel Lawson’s climate change group or Myron Ebell who works for the CompetitiveEnterprise Institute. In recent years, such views have become increasingly untenable, which Giddens attributes to incontro-vertible scientific findings. The dominant position, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),accepts that significant man-made changes are taking place to the climate and that this needs to be tackled. Hence, diversepositions pre-existed the summit and shaped the practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules that were observable inpractice there. They constitute three separate institutional logics:

1. Climate change scepticism. Sceptics claim the case that present-day processes of global warming are produced by humanactivity is either not proven or overblown. The sceptical case was hardly represented publicly in delegations at Copen-hagen, except in the Saudi case.

2. The mainstream position of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (see http://www.ipcc.ch/publicationsand data/publications and data.shtml). As Giddens (2008: 6) states ‘The IPCC has had an enormous influence over worldthinking on climate change – in so far as there is a consensus about its extent and dangers, it has played a large part inbuilding it. Indeed, that is its declared aim – to gather together as much scientific data as possible, subject it to rigorousreview, and reach overall conclusions on the state of scientific opinion. In successive publications it has outlined differentpossible future scenarios, trying to attach probabilities to them.’ Most of the Western nations at the Copenhagen Summitwould concur with this position at a rhetorical level.

3. The radical position. This view posits that a number of ‘tipping points’ have been reached, resulting in dramatic changes tothe climate. The melting of polar ice caps in Canada and Siberia are often cited as examples. The radical position maintainsthat it may be too late to reverse ‘tipping points’; the corollary is that adapting to the changed circumstances are accordedgreater importance. James Lovelock, the pioneer of the Gaia thesis, is an example of this position, which, interestingly,has led some radical greens into advocating controversial policy preferences, such as the use of nuclear power: ‘But I am aGreen and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy’ (Lovelock, 2004)a position tantamount to heresy for most orthodox green positions. At the Copenhagen summit, some of the nation statesfrom the South Sea Islands, such as Tuvalu, advocated this position.

While there is broad acceptance of climate change science, the IPPC position, this has not been accompanied by decisiveaction to tackle the problem. Interestingly, in light of his earlier writings (Giddens, 2000), Giddens argues that the state hasa prime function in tackling climate change, especially in terms of negotiating international treaties and enforcing them.Giddens’ (2008) vision of the state is for it to engage in long-term planning, which, of course, fell out of favour in the ageof neo-liberalism. Noting the litany of failures associated with state planning, Giddens offers examples of successful stateplanning, such as the post-war Marshall Plan. Broadly speaking, he advocates the creation of the ‘ensuring state’:

A return to planning cannot mean going back to heavy-handed state intervention, with all the problems that it broughtin its train. The role of the state (national and local) should be to provide an appropriate regulatory framework that

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will steer the social and economic forces needed to mobilise action against climate change. I prefer the concept ofthe ‘ensuring state’ to that of the ‘enabling state’. The idea of the enabling state suggests that the role of the state isconfined to stimulating others to action and then letting them get on with it. The ensuring state is an enabling state,but one that is expected or obligated to make sure such processes achieve certain defined outcomes—in the case ofclimate change the bottom line is meeting set targets for emissions reductions (Giddens, 2008: 8–9).

What was missing in Copenhagen? First, the urgency of the scientific case as established by the IPCC demanded a time-reckoning system that was in advance of apparent political and public policy convergence around the issue. Action that wasscientifically essential depended on political will; in most national cases that will had only apparently been forged, often ona rhetorically moral case: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqZvpRjGtGM)called climate change ‘the great moral challenge of our generation’. Stating a moral case is one thing; building an effectivepolitical will and public policy is something quite different. What was lacking in most national cases was the constructionof what Giddens (2009) referred to as ‘political convergence’: the degree to which policies on climate change overlappedwith other areas of public policy. Giddens suggests energy security and planning, innovation policy, lifestyle politics andthe problems of cities choked by a lack of adequate public transport. The failure to construct this political convergence inadvance of the summit gave open slather to the climate change sceptics who could represent climate change policies asattacks on employment, investment and as a source of big new taxes. While climate change sceptics represent but a smallbody of scientific opinion, their views have traction with powerful interest groups, such as major corporations and financialcentres.

Not only was political convergence hardly established in advance of the summit – and, realistically, especially in thosenations that had not been early signatories to Kyoto, such as Australia and the United States, it would have been hardlypossible, neither was economic convergence. The case for ecological modernization was barely known outside of a fewacademic social science circles (Orsato and Clegg, 2005). The idea that environmentally progressive policies could be aspur to economic development and innovation was not widely promulgated. Internationally, the competition for naturalresources/energy security frames the neo-geopolitics of the 21st century. The present resource surplus resides largely underthe Middle East and its representatives, well coordinated with other oil-rich territories through OPEC (Organization of thePetroleum Exporting Countries), had a well rehearsed and highly experienced lobbying position in relation to energy issuesthat translated easily into a position of scepticism on climate change, in the case of countries such as Saudi Arabia andVenezuela.

Insufficient foregrounding had been done prior to Copenhagen. The political process at events such as a summit can belikened to the garbage can model (Cohen et al., 1972). Problems, policies and politics sometimes converge but more often thannot attach themselves randomly and independently of each other. In wintery Copenhagen the summit was the garbage caninto which the concerns around the issues of global warming and climate change were poured, there to attach themselves tothe various solutions that the main protagonists – radicals, mainstreamers, and sceptics – promulgated. Because of the varietyof protagonist positions a policy compromise was the most likely outcome. There was not a sense in the public representationsof the event that climate change was an impending catastrophe so much as an abstract projection. Had it coincided withsomething climatically catastrophic such as Hurricane Katrina the response may well have been different. Pralle (2006), inher study of advocacy aimed at saving Canadian forests, argues that for a campaign to be effective it needs to be able to createbroader associations, such as linking catastrophic weather to climate change. Thus, while climate change science was gainingstructure, the politics of climate change remained inchoate. As various polls reported, the effect was to strengthen climatescepticism in the general public (http://www.human-health-and-animal-ethics.com/environment/climate-change/climate-change-skeptics.php).

Giddens notes that green issues have become a bandwagon and phrases such as ‘sustainable development’ have gainedgreat currency. The most widely accepted definition of the term is that of the Brundtland Report (1987): ‘Sustainable devel-opment is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meettheir own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’spoor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and socialorganization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.’ Giddens is less optimistic about sustainabledevelopment, viewing it as ‘more of a slogan than an analytical concept’ (Giddens, 2009: 63), his argument is that theconfidence invested in sustainable development is misplaced and that it has little substance other than as a mass of contra-dictions. Giddens (2009: 68–69) advocates abandoning the concept, viewing it as an oxymoron, and ‘it seems most sensibleto disentangle the two component terms again. In the case of ‘development’, we should focus on the contrast between thedeveloped and developing societies. In so far as the rich countries are concerned, the problems created by affluence have tobe put alongside the benefits of economic growth’.

The environmental accounting literature accords with Giddens’ critique (Spence et al., 2010). Spence et al.’s (2010) argu-ment is that in environmental accounting gestures trump analysis, which is ossified around stakeholder theory, legitimacytheory and political economy. In organization theory, Banerjee (2003: 153–154) takes a different tack and in a strong critiquecontests the extent to which sustainable development constitutes a new paradigm:

A majority of the sustainable development literature is of this ‘eco-modernist’ variety (Bandy, 1996) and addressesways to operationalize the Brundtland concept. Thus, concepts such as ‘sustainable cost’, ‘natural capital’ or ‘sustainable

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capital’ are developed and touted as evidence of a paradigm shift (Bebbington and Gray, 1993). There is limitedawareness of the fact that traditional notions of capital, income, and growth continue to inform this ‘new’ paradigm.The uncritical acceptance of the current system of markets is also problematic: although markets are indeed efficientmechanisms to set prices they are incapable of reflecting true costs, such as the replacement costs of an old-growthtropical rainforest or the social costs of tobacco and liquor consumption (Hawken, 1995).

Preferring the nomenclature of ‘buzzword’ to new paradigm, Banerjee, paralleling Giddens, argues that sustainable devel-opment is little more than an oxymoron (Giddens, 2009: 68). In particular, Banerjee’s analysis reveals the way in which manyof the assumptions underpinning sustainable development share family resemblances with older development discourses.Sustainable development, he argues, ‘is very much subsumed under the dominant economic paradigm. As with development,the meanings, practices, and policies of sustainable development continue to be informed by colonial thought, resulting indisempowerment of a majority of the world’s populations, especially rural populations in the Third World’ (Banerjee, 2003:144). For Banerjee, sustainable development seems little more than a fig-leaf for powerful liberal Western interests. In astrong critique he argues that sustainable development is not egalitarian, simply because ‘environmental destruction is notegalitarian’ (Banerjee, 2003: 173), in that it delivers ‘economic unfreedoms to a marginalized majority of the world’s poor’(Banerjee, 2003: 173), lacks a strong sense of local empowerment, and inscribes indigenous populations as the ‘passiveobjects of western history’ (Banerjee, 2003: p. 174). Banerjee concludes that sustainable development may be little morethan the legitimation of markets and transnational capital.

Whatever the limitations (Giddens, 2009) or dangers of sustainable development (Banerjee, 2003), any attempt to changethe balance of the economy that will have practical import involves power relations that redefine conventional carboneconomy-based conceptions of acceptable behaviour. At base, what people take to be their interests in material goods suchas cheap energy will need to be reframed because the politics of climate change mean that those with interests in a fossil-fuelled economy, such as mineral extraction companies and the trade unions that represent workers in these industries, willhave to accept actions that run counter to their immediate interests in the development of an extractive economy. Talk ofinterests necessarily brings discussions of power into focus.

3. The dimensions of power: legitimacy as a systematic delusion

Lukes’ (1974) book, Power: A Radical View, is generally hailed as a major landmark in the conceptualization of power. Itsought to bring what had hitherto been a largely liberal and individualist tradition of theorizing about power as a causalrelation into a fruitful dialogue with broader traditions of critical thought. As Lukes (2005) acknowledges, the book wasframed and in some ways constrained by the dominant ‘power over’ debate that prevailed in the early 1970s, yet whathis analysis achieves is to demonstrate that each dimension of power rests on a different set of moral assumptions: Theone-dimensional view of power is premised on liberal assumptions; the second dimensional view of power is premised ona reformist view, while it is the moral assumptions of radicalism that underlie the third dimensional way of seeing power.

The one-dimensional view of power pivots around an account of the different preferences that actors might hold andhow these will be settled empirically. It concentrates on observable behaviour and concrete decisions that are expressed inovert conflict concerning specific issues, revealed in political participation. The focus was on community power – who waspowerful in local communities and which issues were key ones over which power was exercised. It is power as Dahl (1957)saw it. Dahl’s seminal study was into decision-making in the City of New Haven in Connecticut. Dahl’s analysis focussed onwhich groups prevailed in key decisions, which he used as a proxy through which to categorize a group as powerful. Throughanalyzing hundreds of decisions Dahl was able to chart the rise and fall of certain groups in their influence over decision-making in the City. Dahl assumed that any grievance would be adopted by an interest group and would then be discussed incentres of decision-making. His analysis was irredeemably optimistic for he regarded the American political sphere as opento different viewpoints and interests. Setting aside this assumption the power of his approach – and that of the pluralistsin general – was that power was something that could be readily analysed through observing decision-making. In relationto climate change, a pluralist analysis would look at decision-making in the political sphere (ranging across the spectrumfrom local government through to international summits) as this is where they regard power as being exercised. A pluralistwould look to see the entry of climate change issues onto the formal decision-making agenda, the analysis being followedby determining whether green interest groups were able to achieve a degree of power in the political sphere. Americanpluralists’ high noon was the early 1960s and their analysis of American society was imbued with optimism, viewing theAmerican political system as open and holding the expectation that a legitimate grievance would find itself adopted by aninterest group and make its way onto the formal political making agenda. Critics of the one dimensional view caution thatthe assumption that grievances will be championed by a group and make it onto the formal decision-making agenda areoptimistic, arguing that power operates behind the scenes in setting and determining agendas.

The two-dimensional view adds some important features to the primary view. The key contributors are Bachrach andBaratz (1970) and the distinctiveness of their approach is that they do not focus solely on observable behaviour but seekto make an interpretative understanding of the intentions that are seen to lie behind social actions. These come into play,especially, when choices are made concerning what agenda items are ruled in or ruled out; the two-dimensional viewof power holds that decision-making is often kept to ‘safe’ issues with contentious issues being kept off the agenda. Thishappens when it is determined that, strategically, for whatever reasons, some areas remain a zone of non-decision rather

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than decision. Advocates of the 2nd dimension of power see this as an instance of the mobilization of bias – where the formaldecision-making arena is kept to safe issues. For instance, economic and political discussions among the former G7 countrieswere often instances of non-decision making in which discussion was limited to a range of safe topics. This was a cosy clubof western nations with mutual interests in upholding the status quo. More recently, the G7 has been extended to includeRussia, the G8, as well as the many more developed nations comprising the G20.

What is important is how some issues realize their potential to mature while some others do not; how some becomemanifest while others remain latent. Given that an issue may remain latent then conflict is not merely overt; it may also becovert, as resentment simmers about something that has yet to surface publicly. One may address these two-dimensionalphenomena not so much through discrete political participation as through express policy preferences embodied in sub-political grievances. In relation to studying climate change, the 2nd dimension of power concerns itself with the way inwhich powerful interests keep certain issues off the agenda and focus the agenda on safe issues. For instance, the way inwhich the United States government, under George W. Bush, did not sign up to the Kyoto Protocol is an illustration of powerbeing evident through the construction of a non-decision.

From Lukes’ point of view, the two-dimensional position is an improvement on that which is one dimensional – butit could be improved further. Hence, he provides what he calls a three-dimensional view – a radical view to be contrastedwith liberal and reformist views. While the previous views both define their field of analysis in terms of policy preferences,with the second dimension relating them to sub-political grievances, the radical view relates policy preferences to realinterests. Real interests are defined as something objective, as distinct from the interests that people think they have andexpress through their preferences. Whatever preferences people might express can always be charged with being subject tosystematic distortion and thus a result of ‘false consciousness’ – that is, if they do not accord with the preferences that onewould expect, analytically. By definition, real interests are what the analyst would have them be: they cannot be judged bythe subject who does not express them – because such subjects are systematically deluded about their interests: a conditionwhich he refers to as being subject to hegemony, a term that he borrows from the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971). Levy andEgar (2003), conducting a Gramscian analysis, explore how corporate power seeks to accommodate or elicit consent fromgroups that might be opposed to them:

First, we might expect that actors engaged in a ‘war of position’ would adopt strategies that are coordinated acrossthe three pillars of hegemony and directed toward civil society as well as the state. The drive to sustain legitimacyand a broad alliance of social actors is as important as mere narrow economic activity. For example, companies onenvironmental issues often form issue-specific associations to lobby, mobilize resources, and coordinate strategy.They also attempt to recruit mainstream environmental organizations into the historical bloc, while marginalizingmore radical groups as Greenpeace (Levy and Egar, 2003: 12)

Lukes (1974, 2005) suggests that in extraordinary conditions, when routines break down, people may be able to piercethe veil of their everyday hegemonic ‘consciousness’ and grasp their real interests. Or rather, they may grasp their interestsin terms of another discourse made available to them, or one that they have previously only glimpsed dimly. Lukes (1974)is not explicit about the nature of such alternative discourses. In western society they have usually been identified withvarious oppositional movements that define their meaning against whatever they determine is the ruling orthodoxy, suchas socialism against capitalism, feminism against patriarchy, animal liberation against meat eaters, and so on.

Rather than shaping consciousness positively, through discourse, radical theorists such as Lukes (1974) see power asprohibitory, negative and restrictive. If it were more really radical it would have to be about what people are able to articulateand say and what language, enables them to think and feel. In the second edition of his book, Lukes (2005: 9) cites Przeworski(1985) approvingly to argue a slightly different tack: that hegemony ‘does not consist of individual states of mind but ofbehavioral characteristics of organizations’, noting that when wage-earners ‘act as if they could improve their materialconditions within the confines of capitalism’ they are consenting to capitalism [Lukes, 2005: 9, citing Przeworski, 1985:145–146]). Lukes (2005: 10–11) also relates his position to that of Tilly (1991: 594) and, in doing, shows that his fundamentalviews of ‘real interests’ have not changed in the intervening 35 years since he first wrote Power: A Radical View. In Tilly’s(1991: 594) words, with which Lukes concurs, ‘subordinates remain unaware of their true interests’ because of ‘mystification,repression, or the sheer unavailability of alternative ideological frames’.

To suggest that someone is in a state of false consciousness presupposes that there must be a correct or true consciousnessas its counterpart (Haugaard, 2003: 101). Of course, in some situations it might seem quite unproblematic to say that oneis more rational and wise and understands the others real interests better than the other. Where such ideas are applied todeliberate systems of manipulation of knowledge, as, for instance, where cigarette manufacturers mislead their customersabout the health-risks associated with their products, then it might be appropriate to speak of a ‘false’ consciousness.Haugaard (2003: 102) suggests that ‘undermining power relations’ may be ‘a matter of facilitating individuals in convertingtheir practical consciousness knowledge into discursive consciousness knowledge.’ This is not a question of some enlightenedtheorist presenting subject actors with some external truth. Social life presupposes a large tacit knowledge of everyday lifeand in routine social interaction this knowledge remains practical consciousness. The moment of insight is that momentwhen what they already know in terms of their lived experience and their practical consciousness of it that what is articulateddiscursively for them as an adequate and true account of this experience is, in fact, false. It does not ring true. When this occurspeople are facilitated in critically confronting their everyday social practices as part of a system of relations of domination,which are reproduced, with their complicity, through everyday interaction. Practical consciousness is a tacit knowledge that

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enables us to be competent and capable actors in our everyday lives, while discursive consciousness comprises knowledgethat we can put into words. These two forms of knowledge are not entirely separate. The relative separateness of thetwo types of social knowledge is an important element in the maintenance of systemic stability. If practical consciousnesshas never been critically evaluated, never formed part of discursive consciousness, then it will be reproduced virtually asa reflex.

As Haugaard (2003) argues the case, social critique entails converting practical consciousness into discursive conscious-ness. Once knowledge of structural reproduction becomes discursive, the actor may reject it or they might simply shrug andaccept that this is how things are and there is little they can do to make them otherwise. In this event, it may become appar-ent that certain structural practices contribute to relations of domination and/or are inconsistent with other discursivelyheld beliefs. What is useful about this approach to the matter of consciousness is that it accommodates arguments aboutthe definition of the situation (Thomas, 1923; McHugh, 1968). On balance, as the adage has it, if people define situationsas real they are real in their consequences, and while interlocutors may try and argue different definitions with differentconsequences, they rarely have any fulcrum outside of the consciousness of the people whose definitions they are, to do so.

Inasmuch as each of the three positions figure in the climate change debate, as it was constituted in the run-up to theCopenhagen Summit, each appears to think of the others in terms of false consciousness and the denial of real interests,Haugaard’s analysis is spot-on: the sceptics utterly dismiss the evidential basis for the other two positions, more usuallyout of the strength of their ideological positions rather than the strength of their science. From their perspective, the realinterests of the present generation are in jobs, lower taxes and living costs and the claims of climate science on the IPPCmodel would threaten all these while being a Trojan Horse for radical green positions. From the perspective of the radicalsthe sceptics are ideologically deluded, protecting the real interests of the resource-based industry and capital and theunions that organize it, while the radical view of the IPCC position is seen as ideologically compromised by the consensusmethodology used: it reflects climate science as if it were a paradigmatically cohesive enterprise which leaves the radicalperspective as a fringe position. The radicals see the real interests of the long-term health of the planet and the legacyleft for future generations being compromised because of the normatively induced consensus-based conservatism of thescientific community. From the IPPC position, the sceptics are clearly deluded, unable to grasp the science because of theiroverwhelmingly ideological position, and interests that are clearly supported by the resource-based lobbies, while theradicals are drawing inferences from the data based on their ideologically radical green commitments rather than fromthe cohesive body of disconfirmed knowledge. In Lukes’ terms these positions are essentially contested because they arefundamentally moral positions rather than scientific ones: the radicals are self-evident; the IPCC are the liberals, while thesceptics are the conservatives. Lukes sees moral positions as the basis for an essential contestation that cannot be resolved.Essentially contested concepts are evaluative, delivering value-judgements about inherently complex phenomena, which,for different interpreters, are characterized by quite variable and distinct properties. The debate over these concepts isnot resolvable by evidence or debate; while supported by differential forms of evidence diverse positions tend to becomedogmatically held in a conflictual way among proponents equally committed to the incontrovertibility of their position.Faced with an essentially contested concept such as climate change one might be tempted to assume that a rational analysisis impossible because of the strength of the diverse positions. What is at stake in essentially contested concepts is the truthof the different positions being held in a more or less organized way. However, rather than seek to determine the ‘truth’ ofany specific position, what one can do is to ask what each position does. To ask such a question we need to add some keyconcepts from institutional theory to the analysis of power. The debates about power can be joined to debates in institutionaltheory, centring on the idea of organizational fields and institutional logics, and the mobilization of bias within them, toinform what actually transpired in Copenhagen.

4. Institutional theory and power relations

Zucker’s (1983: 5) central concept for institutional theory is that of institutionalization, a state in which within an orga-nizational field ‘alternatives may be literally unthinkable’. The organizational field has been defined in relational terms as‘those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource andproduct customers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products’ (DiMaggio andPowell, 1983: 148). Later they add that the field includes all those who have ‘voice’ as well as those who do not – picking upon Bachrach and Baratz’s (1962, 1970) influential critique of Robert Dahl’s (1961) work by stressing non-action, or absencefrom a field, as a significant form of presence. There are evident similarities with Lukes’ (1974, 2005) second dimensionalview of power. In another article Tolbert and Zucker (1983: 25) suggested three indicators of the presence of institutional-ized practices: they are widely followed, without debate, and exhibit permanence; in this formulation the similarities withLukes’ radical view of power are evident.

In the case study that follows we will be looking at a case drawn from the field of international relations. In the fieldof international relations few organizational fields are as utterly institutionalized as Tolbert and Zucker (1983) suggest; forinstance, even the ANZAC alliance, one of the longest standing post-war alliances of the US, has seen New Zealand thinkalternatives to the harbouring of the US’s nuclear armed fleet. Typically, international relations are more often than notcharacterized by dominant institutional logics that are held in place through a second mechanism of institutionalizationthat Zucker identifies: a mobilization of bias. A mobilization of bias represents a situation where a set of predominantvalues, beliefs, rituals, and institutional procedures operates to the benefit of certain persons, groups and perspectives at

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the expense of others. Typically, mobilization of bias is sustained by non-decision making where certain persons, per-spectives, issues or conflicts never enter the overt political arena. Where this bias is mobilized theorists speak of an‘institutional logic’ being dominant. Although Alford and Friedland (1985) and Friedland and Alford (1991) introduced theterm ‘institutional logics’ the approach taken by Jackall (1988: 112) is more useful. Rather than associating institutionallogics with specific institutional sectors, as they do, he suggests that an institutional logic should be defined as ‘the com-plicated, experientally constructed, and thereby contingent set of rules that men and women in particular contexts createand recreate in such a way that their behaviour and accompanying perspective are to some extent regularized and pre-dictable. Put succinctly, an institutional logic is the way a particular social world works.’ The relation to Lukes’ notion of anessentially contested concept is evident. Building on this, Thornton and Ocasio (2008: 101) offer the following definitionas:

The socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by whichindividuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to theirreality.

Thornton and Ocasio’s perspective, integrating the structural, normative and symbolic, allows for a focus on the inter-institutional contradictions that can occur in contemporary forms of organizational arena. Ocasio (1995) sees institutionallogics affecting the allocation of attention to salient aspects of the environment that is enacted through the deployment ofalternative schemas. In the context of international relations institutional logics provide national representatives with setsof rules and conventions for deciding what gets to be defined as a problem and how; which solutions come to be consideredand why, and, in practice, what solutions become linked to which solutions (March and Olsen, 1976). Institutional logicsstructure attention both by generating a set of values denoting legitimacy, importance, and relevance of issues and solutionsand by framing interests and, in this case, national identities (Ocasio, 1997). Dominant institutional logics dominate becausethey represent power relations that are highly concentrated in their circuitry: where circuits of power are fixed on particularnodal points then there are relations of domination (Clegg, 1989, 2006). What institutional logics dominate are organizationalfields. In what follows the organizational field we are concerned with is that of climate change. The field of climate changehas been punctuated in its formation by a number of key events, the most significant of which occurred in late 2009, whenthe long-awaited United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Copenhagen. It comprised the 15th session of theConference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 5th session of theMeeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol.

5. Case study

The Copenhagen Conference was regarded as critical to gain consensus about how to tackle climate change. This wasparticularly the case as the Kyoto Protocol, agreed at COP3, which was negotiated in 1997 and ratified in 2005, was due tolapse in December 2012. The Kyoto Protocol, infamously not ratified by the United States during George W. Bush’s presidency,inter alia, legally bound developed country signatories to cutting their carbon emission levels.

The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in December 1997, is a climate change treaty with a difference. Unlike the FrameworkConvention on Climate Change that preceded it, the Kyoto Protocol incorporates targets and timetables—that is,ceilings on the emissions of greenhouse gases and dates by which these ceilings must be met. Barrett (1998: 20)

According to the World Bank, despite the intentions of the Kyoto Protocol, it has only had a marginal impact on cuttingcarbon emissions and only a few countries are close to meeting their targets (Giddens, 2009: 189). According to Victor’s(2001) critique of the Kyoto Protocol, any reductions in carbon emissions during this period can be attributed to reasonsother than the Protocol. In an insightful analysis, Victor argues that the failings in the Kyoto Protocol can be explained bya deeply flawed architecture: ‘When viewed in totality, the hurdles to be cleared are so daunting that a sensible emissiontrading system is infeasible in the foreseeable future’ (Victor, 2001: 7). Moreover, Victor (2001) argues that the negotiatorswho developed the Kyoto Protocol did so in such a way to store up problems for the future: they left much of the actual detailfor future meetings and set emission targets that ‘would be politically impossible to implement without an emission tradingsystem’ (Victor, 2001: 7). Kyoto failed in most important respects, as Giddens puts it, ‘The great danger of the Kyoto-styleapproach to climate change is that an elaborate, detailed and nuanced architecture may be created, but no buildings actuallyget constructed’ (Giddens, 2009: 192).

As we have established, the dominant institutional logic that informed the mainstream scientific community was encap-sulated in the publications of the IPCC: scientific rationality established the reality of climate change and policy scienceproposed remedies designed to lower the global temperature by curbing carbon and other dangerous emissions. However,as it transpired, scientific rationality was not embodied in the decision-making that occurred at the Copenhagen Summit.What did not happen was, in many ways, more important than what did (Carter et al., 2010). Studies of power have long beenconcerned with that which goes on and that which does not happen in decision-making arenas. Much of the classic work onpower, some of which is reprised above, has been conducted in the realm of city decision-making: Dahl’s (1961) historicalstudy of New Haven; Bachrach and Baratz’s (1970) study of Baltimore; Crenson’s (1971) comparison of East Chicago andGary; Flyvbjerg’s (1998) analysis of Aalborg. The concentration of a single city decision-making structure can reveal domi-

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nant groups and the extent to which they maintain their grip on power and how, almost certainly, at some point their powerwill wane. By making comparisons between similar cities that are organized quite differently, as in the case of Crenson’sstudy, it is possible to read the ‘non-decision making’ and ‘mobilization of bias’ that is taking place.

The appeal to us of studying a summit is that it brings together a number of different and more complex issues. In a summitthere is no sovereign authority at work as there is in an urban context; by definition, the different nations represented havedifferent national interests. Whereas in the case of cities the ‘mobilization of bias’ and ‘non-decision making’ can be difficult todemonstrate empirically, in the case of a summit differences of opinion and agenda setting can be more easily established,especially through the commentaries from NGOs (Carter et al., 2008a, 2008b). At summits, in addition to the differentnations represented, numerous NGOs and activist groups routinely attend the geographic place in which the summit is beingconvened, in order to make their voice heard in the international media space, which maintains a close watch on proceedings.The media attention builds speculation that a meaningful agreement will be made at a summit. If a modus vivendi is to befound that can steer a common way through these diverse national interests then different representatives will have todevelop a language of translation of their interests into some calculus that is capable of both producing a common languagefor conceptualizing problems and for achieving a common declaration as the result of the summit. Otherwise, legitimacywill not have been created. Legitimacy is, essentially, granted discursively: different agencies accept the representation oftheir interests and those of others that is coded into the constitutive protocols of a specific event, setting, organization orinstitution. Consequently, for the summit to be declared a ‘success’ or for it to be labelled a ‘failure’ is a discursive process.

In terms of our methodological approach, each of the authors monitored the Copenhagen summit, as represented throughthe media, while it was taking place. The process was not difficult as the event was heavily reported, so the process involvedlistening to BBC news reports, reading articles in newspapers and following the blogs of various commentators. Our analysisof the media was international but focussed particularly on Australian, Swedish and UK outlets which reflected the locationsin which the writing team are domiciled. The method was abductive in the sense that we approached the summit not withan intellectual tabula rasa, but we were interested in analysing the power relations of the event. We debated at great lengththe events at the summit and constructed a narrative, which we developed into a case study (Clegg et al., 2011) that weuse for teaching ‘Strategy, Politics and Accountability’. Our discussion of the summit continued and resulted in the presentarticle. The claims we make for our analysis is not that it constitutes an exhaustive account of event in Copenhagen butrather that it yields insights into what was going on at the event, which in turn has implications for our understanding ofpower and of climate change politics.

In the field of international relations institutional logics express the collective identities of an institutionalized polity.Collective identity is formed both through explicit policy position arrived at in advance of negotiations as well as throughimplicit cognitive, normative and emotional cues shared by members of the same representational bloc in a specific arena(Thornton and Ocasio, 2008: 111). In highly institutionalized fields, such as the United Nations, these collective identitiesrepresenting national interests are dramaturgically staged performances (Goffman, 1956) in which all other aspects ofidentity are subsumed relative to the identity of national interest representation. The representation of these interestscreates alliances and power contests between different national representatives.

6. The biography of the summit

There was a great deal of expectation in the days prior to the Copenhagen summit that an agreement could be reachedto mitigate the effects of climate change. Interestingly, a few European leaders had lobbied hard in the previous year tohave Copenhagen discursively constructed as a summit – thus investing it with greater importance than if it were merelya conference or convention. Indeed, that international meetings are now convened and attended by governments is a signthat the issue of climate change has entered the policy agenda (Pralle, 2006: 14). In many respects, the optimism invested inthe Copenhagen summit was surprising as the portents of the international community in agreeing and enforcing a series ofmeasures to mitigate the effects of climate change were far from promising. Local organizers of the conference coined theterm ‘Hopenhagen’ to articulate their aspiration that meaningful agreements would be secured at the meeting. The summitdominated the city of Copenhagen with over 40,000 climate change activists joining the phalanx of politicians, diplomats,journalists, broadcasters and security. Space was carefully policed, with tight security separating the various delegationsfrom the activists and many of the NGO groups that were attending the event. The attendance of large numbers of activistsin Copenhagen was a means of providing a carnivalesque atmosphere saturated with dramatic and emotive imagery. Bysignifying the same space as government officials they sought to hold the politicians to account, as a means of constantlyattempting to shift the agenda towards more radical positions on climate change. Pralle (2006: 14) notes that the presenceof activists at an event such as a summit can be important: ‘Put differently, policymaking around issues with and without‘publics’ will differ’.

Copenhagen was significant in that inscribed within it were the changes to the geo-political global order since the Kyotosummit, convened in 1997: the interests of China, India and Brazil were far more significant to the negotiations and theEuropean Union was keen to adopt a single position. The summit took place in the first year of the Obama administration,a period imbued with hope for a more ‘enlightened’ position on environmental issues from the United States government.That is to say that the orientation of American climate policy was more aligned with the IPCC view of climate science. TheBush Administration, which preceded Obama, had stuck obdurately to a position of climate change scepticism.

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Negotiating teams representing 192 countries commenced discussions on the 7th December 2009. The basis of theirnegotiations was a 176 page draft agreement, which required condensing into a short document for the Heads of Governmentwho were due to arrive on the 18th of December 2009, for the final day of proceedings. At the outset of the CopenhagenSummit the following interest groups and alliances were identified in the media: the European Union – the EU viewsitself as being at the vanguard of climate change policy. As a loose coalition of twenty-seven nations it was committedto securing large reductions in emissions but was often split between different constituent countries; the United States,which was viewed by much of world opinion as antediluvian in its approach to climate change, was keen that any deal onclimate change should be non-binding and extend to developing countries as well as the developed world; China, as anemerging economic superpower, was now firmly established as one of the leading polluters and defined its prime interest asmaintaining its right to grow economically without interference from international treaties; India was in a similar positionto China in that it viewed climate change as something produced by the West for which the West should bear the economiccost while the right of India to pursue economic growth should be taken as sacrosanct as it seeks to lift its population out ofpoverty through development; the G77 was a loose federation of developing world countries, who viewed climate changeas a result of policies pursued by the West. Often located on the ‘front-line’ of climate change, the G77 were acutely awareof the need for climate change to be tackled. The G77 were suspicious that the West would try and evade its responsibilitiesand shift the burden of costs onto the developing world countries; Brazil, under the leadership of President Lula, had anambitious plan to reduce carbon emissions by 36% and to put pressure on the US and China for a meaningful agreement.Brazil had entered into a joint position with the French government.

The mainstream scientific position was well known by the various national delegates to the Summit. Nominally, mostrepresentatives of the different countries adhered to the mainstream scientific opinion. However, as we have said, rationalscience did not translate into rational decision-making: there was a disconnection between the rationality of science andthe realpolitik of power. Flyvbjerg (1998), in his classic study of power in the city cautions that in a confrontation betweenrationality and naked power, the latter is always likely to prevail. However, in the case of the summit, naked power couldnot be seen to prevail, as it would be seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the world’s media. Naked power sought to find ameans of rationalizing a challenge to, or subversion of, the rationality of climate change science positions through meansother than wielding power arbitrarily, which would have undermined the legitimacy of the summit.

6.1. The Danish Text

Instead of scientifically informed and transparent debate the summit was characterized by secrecy and suspicion. Forinstance, early on at the summit there were leaks of information. In particular, on the second day of the summit (8th ofDecember) notes emerged referring to a document – ‘the Danish Text’ – prepared clandestinely by a group of 30 wealthycountries. They were annoyed that this had been revealed, as it provided a glimpse into the ‘backstage’ of realpolitik. Thedocument was, of course, not intended for consumption outside of closed circles. It was a revealing instance of the ‘mobi-lization of bias’ whereby the powerful sought to set an agenda that was in their interests. The leak, of course, revealed thatbackstage operations were taking place and that there was, in fact, a ‘hidden agenda’. The ‘hidden agenda’ contained in thealleged content of the Danish text signalled a departure from the principle established by the Kyoto Protocol, namely thatthe industrial countries are primarily responsible for climate change and should, accordingly, bear a greater cost than thedeveloping world in clearing up the problem. The Danish text, if adopted, would lead to a cessation of the Kyoto Protocol,which was legally binding, thus relieving wealthy countries of their obligations.

The developing countries were furious that deals were going on behind closed doors and at meetings from which theywere excluded. As Bachrach and Baratz (1970) highlight, one of the ways in which non-decision making takes place is bypreventing certain groups having access, something that was signalled by the existence of the ‘Danish text’. The episodeunderlined the power differentials that exist between different nations, and, despite official rhetoric, in Orwellian cadencessome nation’s interests were clearly more equal than others. Rather than being empowered by their participation in thesummit many developing world countries were very aware that they were being disempowered and that deals were beingstitched up elsewhere from which their participation was excluded. Legitimacy was not ceded to hierarchical and secretivemanoeuvring.

6.2. Defending interests: symbolism and legitimacy

Rancour pervaded the summit. Leaks continued throughout the summit, adding to the feeling of distrust and uncertaintywhile, late in the summit, when negotiations stalled, the Chinese, who forged a powerful alliance with India, wanted toprevent any measures that would stop their ability to expand economically: anything that did this was viewed by theChinese as illegitimate. A clear cleavage was emergent between those countries, such as those in Western Europe, that hadachieved mature post-industrialization for whom climate change controls from the baseline of development that they hadreached was desirable and the still ‘developing’ economies, such as India and China, for whom industrialization representedthe future they were still building. For them, the use of power in the summit was essentially one of resistance to any claimsthat sought to rob them, as they saw it, of a future prosperity based on industrialization. To advance these interests theywere quite prepared to challenge authority and legitimacy. The form this took were visible and highly symbolic expressionsof power. For instance, at the beginning of the summit, Su Wei, the Chinese Government’s chief negotiator, interrupted

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the Danish chair of the meeting, a move interpreted in some quarters as questioning the legitimacy of the hosts of theconference. It could be read as a means of signalling that the conduct and outcome of the deliberations of the summitneeded to be acceptable to the Chinese Government. Minor breaches of protocol were a means of asserting power: Anemergency meeting was convened by a small number of countries and attended by country leaders and their advisers,though interestingly, and in a breach of diplomatic protocol, the Indian and Chinese leaders did not attend, sending advisorsinstead. At one point, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, walked out of the conference.

6.3. Crisis

The fractious state of the summit was such that on the 15th of December there was a loss of five hours negotiation timewhen the conference chair, Hedegaard, called a ‘time out’ to try and cool negotiations down. This was a juncture at whichthe legitimacy of the summit was under threat, the break in proceedings was an attempt to repair legitimacy. The Africandelegation were particularly suspicious that the conference was being used to suspend the Kyoto Protocol, thus relievingdeveloped world signatories of their statutory obligations to reduce emissions. Africa, they reasoned had enjoyed none ofthe benefits that these emissions had produced in the developed countries and would carry considerable climatic costs ifthe wealthy countries were to continue with their disproportionate carbon footprints.

Hedegaard proposed to call a meeting for 50 out of 192 countries, an initiative that incensed many of the developingworld nations, who were excluded. Exclusion meant that their issues were non-issue, issues that they could not even geton to the agenda of a divided summit. This is a classic case of non-decision making whereby certain groups are deniedrepresentation: ‘The powerful define which matters are legitimate and discussible, and the forums and procedures throughwhich such issues are raised, thus stifling the articulation of some issues and demands, while encouraging ‘acceptable’ or‘safe’ topics and themes’ (Buchanan and Badham, 2008: 54). Not surprisingly, where interests were denied then legitimacywas not ceded. From their perspective a great deal of power was being exercised, but it was power over them premised onpower relations between the wealthy countries.

The media was reporting that, in general, no progress had been made in the previous 10 days. The British Prime Minister,Gordon Brown, arrived two days earlier than anticipated, to meet with Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to try andformulate a way out of the impasse. Both Premiers had a strong interest in the summit being deemed a success: they wereof the centre-left and broadly concurred with mainstream climate change opinion. Brown’s premiership was unpopularand prone to error; it was important for him therefore to be associated with a successful outcome, as he had been a yearearlier when he was at the forefront of the move to recapitalise the banks, on the global stage. Rudd, more than any ofthe other Western leaders, had made the environment an electoral and a moral issue and was keen for the summit tocreate a meaningful policy for the future. Hedegaard, conference chair, who also had a strong interest as host in the summitsucceeding warned the media: ‘In these very hours we are balancing between success and failure. Success is within reach.But I must also warn you. We can fail’. The quote is interesting as it draws a sharp distinction between success and failure,where in reality the best that could be hoped for was a compromise. Failure in this context, however, would have been forthe summit to collapse into acrimony. Such an event would have labelled the summit a failure and would have underminedthose associated with it. Thus, in power terms all of the major players had an interest in the talks not collapsing as that wouldhave undermined the legitimacy of the actors involved: thus they were exercising 1st dimensional power to try and ensurethat the summit continued, doing so through organizational processes in which many of the attributes of the 2nd dimensionof power were represented. A South African representative captured the mood of many countries well: ‘No-one wants to bethe country to be accused of collapsing the talks but we fear a political settlement that is contrary to our interests may beimposed without real consultation’. Given that the world’s media was watching Copenhagen and there were around 40,000activists in the city itself, it was very important for the legitimacy of all the major players to contain potential conflict in thesummit, by actually keeping proceedings going and ensuring that there was some symbolic resolution of the process.

The Danish Chair provoked the conference to such an extent that behind the scenes a delegation from Australia, Britainand the USA ensured that she was removed from the post as chair of the conference. This is an illustration of the 1st dimensionof power (‘a getting b to do something that a would otherwise not do’) being used to keep the summit going. These behindthe scenes moves scapegoated Connie Hegegaard for the failures of the summit. Once again, we see backstage operationsaimed at repairing legitimacy at the front-stage of the summit. On December 16th, Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Chair ofthe summit, resigned as chair, being replaced by Lars Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister. Officially, this was explained,by Connie Hedegaard, as a procedural change: ‘With so many heads of state and government having arrived it’s appropriatethat the prime minister of Denmark presides,’. Rasmussen was deemed more appropriate as a head of government to dealwith other head of governments; unofficially, Hedegaard was said to be unhappy with the content of the ‘Danish text’, theclandestine document, discussed above, which, when revealed, undermined the formal proceedings of the summit, andAfrican countries were said to have complained that she favoured the wealthy Western countries in her chairing style. Thechair’s role was seen as an instance of the ‘mobilization of bias’, where representatives of the status quo are favoured overother groups.

Again issues of legitimacy surfaced. Considerable disquiet was expressed about the apparently heavy handed treatment ofclimate activists, who had visited Copenhagen for the duration of the summit. A strong security presence gave the appearanceof stifling debating positions that were located within civil society organizations. Mainstream environmental groups were

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being prevented from entering the conference, which led to accusations that the conference was silencing civil society andkeeping radical voices off the agenda.

On Friday 18th of December media headlines screamed that the summit was in disarray and the talks could collapse atany moment. 30 countries had put their name to an accord, but Bolivia, Venezuala, Nicaragua, Sudan and Saudi Arabia – theoil-producing countries – were threatening to veto the accord, which would have led to a complete failure of the summit.The so-called Danish text which, it is alleged, was going to be produced at the last minute to try and force an agreement,was counteracted by a counter-text produced by developing countries (the G77 plus China). There were now two competingdocuments in circulation.

There was an impasse, which it was hoped President Obama’s arrival would help circumvent so that a way would befound out of the deadlock. In terms of power relations, the arrival of national leaders towards the end of the summitwas highly symbolic – they would be in attendance in Copenhagen to lend their imprimatur to proceedings. Prior to thesummit it was anticipated that only a few issues would have to be resolved by government leaders, with most issueshaving been already agreed by their negotiators in the early stage of the summit. President Obama’s arrival did not gounprepared: prior to the summit there were considerable attempts at mobilizing bias. According to Carrington (2010), USdiplomatic cables made public on WikiLeaks reveal that the CIA gained leverage for the US over nations opposed to itsapproach to tackling global warming through requesting human intelligence from its UN and national diplomats across arange of issues, including climate change, particularly on specific countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, as wellas evidence of UN environmental ‘treaty circumvention’ and deals between nations. US diplomats around the world and atUN headquarters were asked to provide detailed technical information, including passwords and personal encryption keysfor communications networks used by UN officials. Specific countries targeted included China, France, Japan, Mexico, Russiaand the European Union. The US’s objective was to avoid a binding UN commitment imposed equally on all nations. Insteadit sought individually nationally negotiated targets. To persuade countries to adopt this position, particularly microstatesclimatically vulnerable to inundation, the US promised billions of dollars of aid for political support for the accord that theysought to broker. With other nations, such as Ethiopa, there were blunt US threats that either the accord would be acceptedor future aid would be terminated, an instance of the 1st dimension of power. Financial and other aid as well as diplomaticactivity was used to overwhelm opposition to the positions favoured by the US in the Copenhagen climate change summit in2009: active shaping of the dominant institutional logic adopted by other countries was in part a result of specific practicesof mobilization of bias by the US.

After intense negotiation, late nights and high drama, an accord, brokered by President Obama and Premier Wen Jiabao,was drafted. China, India, Brazil and South Africa played a central role in drafting the agreement, which denotes the impor-tance of the BRIC countries and the role played by South Africa as an emerging regional power. Moreover, as previously noted,in the course of the summit China and India forged a strong alliance. It is also noteworthy that the European countries didnot play a role in drafting the accord. In a fascinating power play preceding the accord, the Chinese delegation insisted thatAngela Merkel, the German Chancellor, reduce the commitment of wealthy, developed countries to reduce their emissions,which was perhaps a sign that China expected to be among their number in the near future:

It is known that Angela Merkel in particular was incensed that even previously agreed and publicly announcedtargets by industrialised countries should also be excised from the text. Australia’s Kevin Rudd, too, protestedstrongly. But China stood firm and the targets disappeared. Mark Lynas, (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2009/12/lynas-climate-change-china).

Rasmussen, the conference chair, announced the accord to the summit and gave delegates an hour to consider theaccord, which led to an outcry among the various delegations and a fresh crisis ensued. One hour was clearly perfunctoryand signalled to the summit that the individual views of delegate countries were immaterial when set against the interests ofthe major international power brokers such as the United States. Rasmussen’s ploy to guillotine discussion to one hour was aclear power play to attempt to foreclose proceedings around the accord, thus containing any conflict or further discussion. Itwas, however, counterproductive and had the unintended consequence of exposing the careful orchestration of the summitto the danger of ending in disarray. Ed Miliband, the British Climate Change Minister, sensed the danger and called for anadjournment that can be read as an exercise of agency in the attempt to repair the legitimacy of the summit. Once again,legitimacy was repaired by the removal of the chair – on this occasion Rasmussen – which symbolised those that wantedthe summit to succeed needed to provide a symbolic offering to those that were feeling increasingly disenfranchised byproceedings. As with the removal of Hedegaard, difficulties with the processes at the summit were attributed to the actionsof the chairman, a turn of events that allowed the accord to be announced to the summit.

The accord, which had gone through several prior drafts prior to its agreement, acknowledged the scientific case for notallowing temperatures to rise more than 2C this century (‘The increase in global temperature should be below 2C’). Thiswas a ratification of the IPCC mainstream view of climate change science. Countries agreed in principle with the need toreduce carbon emissions (‘Parties commit to implement individually or jointly the quantified economic-wide emissionstarget for 2020: US – reduction of 14–17% from 2005 levels; EU – 20–30% reduction from 1990 levels; Japan – 25% from1990 levels; Russia – 15–25% from 1990 levels’), which, again, was an acceptance of the policy implications of mainstreamclimate change science. It was mooted that countries should try and cooperate to reduce emissions and acknowledgedthat developing countries were at a disadvantage (‘We should co-operate in achieving the peaking of global and nationalemissions as soon as possible, recognising that the time frame for peaking, will be longer in developing countries’). In

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addition to this, a recommendation was made for the investigation of a ‘cash for forests’ deal, whereby countries are paidnot to de-forest their land (‘Substantial finance to prevent deforestation; adoption; technology development and transferand capacity’). The accord was ‘noted’ by the summit and not formally ratified or agreed. Crucially, it was non-binding andmerely an expression of intent. That said, the accord did legitimate the IPCC view on climate science, albeit in a non-bindingway.

Immediately after the summit, various leaders lined up to tell the world’s gathered media that the accord was ‘meaningful’,‘a vital first step’. Such rhetoric can be seen as means of diplomatically preserving the legitimacy of the proceedings and ofcontaining conflict to the confines of the summit itself. President Obama stated: ‘We’ve come a long way but we have muchfurther to go’, while Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, described it as a ‘start’. President Sarkozy acknowledged: ‘the text isnot perfect. . .if we had no deal, that would mean two countries as important as India and China would be freed from anytype of contract’. China was upbeat: ‘The meeting had had a positive result, everyone should be happy’; similarly, the IndianGovernment were positive: ‘We can be satisfied that we were able to get our way. . .India came out quite well in Copenhagen’.Different interests were shaping a commonly expressed institutional logic here, one that had clearly been used to shape theagreement as a discursive object in which the power of these countries was embedded. By contrast, Brazil described thesummit as ‘disappointing’. Other critics lined up to condemn the accord. One of the participants, Lumumba Di-Aping, whowas chief negotiator for the G77, complained: ‘[the accord shows] the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It’s nothingshort of climate change scepticism in action. It locks countries into a cycle of poverty forever’.

Some participants expressed dismay that key points disappeared from the text of the accord during the day: particularly,the desire to have a new treaty, superseding Kyoto and a deadline for the agreement of the treaty. Outside of the formalmeeting, NGOs lined up to criticise the outcome of the Copenhagen summit. In particular, the lack of specific measures orplans to ensure that the temperature did not rise about 2C was criticised. African and other countries that had lobbied foragreement that the climate could not rise above 1.5C were dismayed. Some of the developing world delegates criticised theorganization by the Danes, in particular their tactic of convening a small group of powerful countries to draft an accord to beagreed by everyone. The Danes retorted that some countries were getting too concerned about the process of the meetingrather than focussing on achieving a desired outcome. Critics were not impressed: a spokesman for the NGO, Greenpeace,likened Copenhagen to a crime scene. While a US spokesman with Friends of the Earth argued: ‘This toothless declaration,being spun by the US as a historic success, reflects contempt for the multi-lateral process and we expect more from ourNobel-prize winning President’. The criticism from NGOs reveals the ‘mobilization of bias’ and ‘non-decision making’ thatwas taking place within the summit: their criticisms highlight the way in which decision-making was restricted to safe andnon-contentious issues.

7. Discussion

When climate science met the global polity, the rationality of science was trounced by the inability of the participants tofind a vocabulary aware of its own shortcomings in communicative practices and by the inability to find a mode of organizingin which different interests were represented. This resonates with Flyvbjerg’s (1998) assertion that dominant power willprevail over rationality. In this case the organizers of the summit had to steer a path that brooked compromise betweenpower and rationality, such that the views of the dominant powers could be construed as rational. The various juncturesat which the summit nearly broke down were cleavages where apparent power and apparent rationality parted and one– naked power – found the other – scientific rationality – unacceptable in what it was proposing. While climate changescience was broadly accepted in its conclusions, this was not matched by a need for political action and a commitment toan agenda of policies to deliver such action. Instead, blanket declarations of climate desiderata were espoused, though theespousal was not accompanied by action.

Different parties were constructing different legitimacies, born of different interests. On the one hand there was theinstitutional logic of climate science, which had coalesced around the proposition that anthropogenic change was occurring,that, if caught in time, it was reversible, and that the rational scientific case for prophylactic action was overwhelming. Whilethere was a language capable of translating these views into a common programme in climate science, that derived fromcommon professional socialization in the institution of science, its peer-reviewed processes, and amassing of evidence, theauthority of science was not imposed on an assembly of persons who were not, on the whole, institutionalized in its normativestructure. Other institutional logics were dominant in the assembly that had more to do with the normative, symbolicand structural patterns of material practices, values, beliefs, and rules with which national representatives organized theirsensemaking, which, as we have seen, were subject to considerable political jockeying and mobilization of bias.

Viewed in terms of the distributional politics of international relations (in terms of knowledge of climate change’s costsand benefits apportioned to different nations) science, that most legitimate and rational of institutional logics, was consti-tuted as an instrument of the advantaged against the disadvantaged, the wealthy nations against the poor, and the powerfulagainst the weak. The IPCC position that was adopted, albeit in a non-binding way, was interpreted as a defence of indus-trializing and post-industrial nations against those that were largely bereft of modern industry. The irony was that thesepost-industrial nations had the largest per capita footprint although they might not have the largest gross emissions. Theirhistorical legacy was the problem of climate change: the costs of fixing it through legally binding targets were seen by theindustrially developing nations such as India and China as an impost on their interests, that preferred some mechanismsmore negotiable, as did most of the post-industrial nations; meanwhile, the poorest nations of sub-Saharan Africa were,

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according to the modelling, most exposed to the ravages of changing pattern of temperature and rainfall – and they haddone little or nothing to create the problems that science said they were undergoing.

When science met politics in the global arena a most delicate calibration and organization of processes needed to occurif the rationality of science was to prevail as a dominant institutional logic. The self-evident self-sufficiency of science’sinstitutional logic cannot be taken for granted: rational institutionalized logics that might dominate a professional commu-nity do not necessarily mobilize bias in the arena of international relations. While the realpolitik of superpower relationsshaping specific national interests can be taken for granted and while each has its way of creating legitimacy from their ownauthority and rituals, on this occasion neither succeeded in stabilizing the organizational field of climate change planning.Indeed, neither could have succeeded because the arena was governed by the rules of neither institution. Realpolitik soughtto rule through the mobilization of bias while science had no strategies of power available to it other than the belief in itsown rationality and, as Flyvbjerg (1998) notes, where powerful interests are concerned, rational arguments are weak ratio-nalizations, easily cast aside by the realities of power relations. It was not possible for legitimacy to emerge: while sciencecould secure legitimacy, international relations, precisely because of its dominant form of power relations centred aroundthe mobilization of bias, could not. The Copenhagen declaration was very much a minimalist position: it acknowledged thelegitimacy of the climate science position but took no mandatory steps to do anything about it. The volitional element suitedboth the established polluters such as the US and the EU and those playing industrial catch-up, such as India and China. It didnot satisfy the G77 group, nor did it satisfy countries such as Brazil who had seen the summit as an opportunity profitablyto lock the Amazon in to the future of mandatory carbon offsets.

8. Implications

No social structuring or ordering exists without being characterized by power relations. Where these are structurallyembedded and reproduced we may, with Weber, refer to structures of dominancy in which certain probabilities for commandand obedience are lodged and in which resistance, although unlikely to be absent, can be authoritatively represented asillegitimate. That this is the case in organizationally controlled domains is evident. Whether these structures of dominancyare regarded by those subject to them as legitimate will always be an empirical matter and not a question of the a priorilabelling of such structures as authority; in other words, authority is always a provisional claim and can be contested (viz.the UK Parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009 which undoubtedly tarnished the legitimacy and authority of parliament asan institution). Where authority is ceded there is always the possibility that those ceding it are systematically duped intobelieving in the legitimacy of that which they support because the existing array of power relations sustains their practicalconsciousness in a mode in which interpellations of contradictory discursive consciousness are minimized, marginalized,ridiculed and so on; this is the point of the radical or third dimensional view of power.

If domination is possible intra-organizationally it is much more difficult inter-organizationally, in a complex organiza-tional field such as that of the international relations that attended the Copenhagen Summit over contested concepts ofclimate change. It is all too easy for a politics of domination to trump a politics of legitimacy. Legitimacy depends on prac-tical consciousness and practical consciousness – as the modes of knowing embedded in everyday social relations – willalways be already structured in ways that reflect the dominant logics institutionalizing power relations in both material andideational forms. While the climate scientists were capable of presenting a more or less united front and the delegates toCopenhagen from the developing world were not unaware of this, they were also seeking to mobilize bias in their favourfrom the dominant international relations players, notably the US, China and the EU, and their sensitivities in this regardwere exacerbated by the insensitivities in their use of power over these countries by these wealthier countries.

At Copenhagen there was a crisis of differing elite representations. In such a context, science as an institution cannotbind others to its authority readily, as once might have been the case when legislative knowledge dominated interpretiveknowing (Bauman, 1987). For interpretive knowledge to accept the authority that science claims requires some sense ofcritical everyday practice. While this is clearly available as a local resource, as coral bleaches, atolls diminish, ice melts, it isnever a generalized resource: available everywhere at once. For instance, Australia, in the summer of 2010, saw the mostclimatically devastating weather that the country has ever had. An area twice the size of France and Germany was underwater. The majority of scientists attribute these extreme weather events to global warming intensifying normal cyclicalevents such as the dialectic of El Nino and La Nina, the Southern Oscillation that provides a quasi-periodic climate patternthat occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean with on average five-year interval. While this continent battled floods as extremeweather events, simultaneously, in the northern hemisphere, the problems were those of blizzards. While science may beable to produce a joined up representation of these events embedded in a causal logic as a coherent narrative, it is not onethat has much resonance with specific national interests and their representation and representatives not affected. Quitesimply, given the scientific consensus, the policy implications do need better marketing: greater association needs to bedrawn between climate change induced disasters and climate change policy. The former, often construed as one-off ‘naturaldisasters’, need to be mobilized to legitimate far reaching action to tackle climate change.

Today, after the relative failure of Copenhagen, opposition politicians in many countries use climate scepticism as aninterpretive device and political weapon in the daily grind of being in opposition. We should not be surprised – they are,after all, resisting the authority of the government in order to assert the legitimacy of their own brand of politics and almostany interpretation of anything is, seemingly, fair play in this game. One consequence of these adversarial politics of authorityand resistance, however, is that public confidence in climate science continues to shrink under attacks on the legitimacy

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of the science as an institution by conservative politicians and non-climate scientists alike. The upshot is that, in practice,there are diminishing returns in fixing climate change as a legitimate issue in the circuits of power of both politics and publicrepresentation in the media and polls. The institutional logic of the science suffers – as we see in the case of the Universityof East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s predictable reluctance to furnish data to interlocutors who, a priori, would use it inways that were not governed by the institutional logic of science but of entrenched climate scepticism. It may have beenunwise politics but it was understandable, nonetheless (see: http://www.pewclimate.org/science/university-east-anglia-cru-hacked-emails-analysis). It will take a new kind of politics and organization of legitimacy at the global level for thesituation to change, a change that the only available agency, the United Nations, has thus far been unable to achieve.

According to the theory of institutional logics there are three possible ways in which change in institutional logics canoccur: through the work of institutional entrepreneurs, through structural overlap, or event sequencing. We shall brieflyreview each of these. Institutional entrepreneurs are the agents that create new and modify old institutions through access topowerful resources with which they can represent their interests. The major institutional entrepreneurs in the climate changesummit were largely absent from the deliberations: these were figures such as Lord Nicholas Stern, whose Stern Review on theEconomics of Climate Change (2006) was a major document mobilizing global opinion in advance of the Copenhagen Summit.However, while this entrepreneurship was able to mobilize the summit into being it was incapable of imposing its legitimacyon the deliberations. The Stern Review identified clear risks, probabilities and remedies but to turn these prescriptions into apolitical environment in which the claims of the new theory of climate change could be enacted required forms of institutionalentrepreneurship that were not evident in the summit, either in the established centre of the most developed nations or inthe periphery of the less developed and developing nations. Other key institutional entrepreneurs, such as Al Gore (2007),had played a major role in mobilization through symbolic action in the form of storytelling (Zilber, 2008) and intensiverhetoric (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005), but were not the type of agent represented in the summit and hence lackedpower to push change through. Structural overlap was not so much evident except in blocs, rather than between blocs, atthe summit: the early leaks of information contained in the notes referring to a document prepared clandestinely by a smallgroup of wealthy countries alone ensured that structural overlap through the merger or bridging of different interests wasunlikely to occur.

Finally, while Copenhagen was very precisely event-sequenced, with enormous anticipation and build up prior to themeeting, the inability of the summiteers to dislocate, rearticulate and transform the interpretation and meaning of climatechange in a transcendent, culturally symbolic, socially and economic decisive event, in the face of the mobilizations of biasthat were evidently in play, has lowered considerably the expectation that future event-sequencing will achieve what wasexpected prior to the event’s unfolding.

For the scientists and their institutional entrepreneurs, such as Stern, the case for adopting the policy package containedin the Stern Review was clearly overwhelming. The logic of natural science allied with the logic of political economics seemedevident. However, the nature of the summit as an event that was widely anticipated would garner widespread internationalsupport, thus seeing the ratification of many, if not all of the elements in the Stern Review, did not materialize, sunk as it wason the reef of conflicting national interests. Symbolically, the failure of the event was a potent symbol, akin to the failureof the League of Nations in the 1930s: an institution had been created that could not achieve its purpose. After the eventwas over, many national representatives seemed to be over the event; moreover, the failure to produce a binding accordstrengthened those political and oppositional interests in the various nations that saw political capital in climate scepticism.

What is to be done for the future? Realistically, the program that Giddens (2008, 2009) has suggested seems a wayforward, despite its criticism in some of the sociological literature (Grundmann and Stehr, 2010). The state must take thelead in forging a new business environment in which it pays to be green and costs to be a polluter. In Giddens’ (2008:8–9) terms, an ensuring state needs to be constructed. Internationally, it is evident that the moral lead must come fromthe per capita per head heaviest polluters who are also the established democracies and thus most subject to electoralpressure. The state, by changing the rules of the game through legislative action can begin to frame creative responsesto the meta-problem of climate change. While meta-problems are chronic and recursive and do not respect political andgeographic boundaries (Beck, 2002) and cannot be resolved by a single organization any more than they can be limited byindustry, governmental, or citizen initiative, the state can create a situation of strategic ambiguity that plays into creativemarket-based solutions. In a context in which an ensuring state sets targets but leaves the achievement of these to theinitiative of organizations in the market and in civil society, a situation of strategic ambiguity (Eisenberg, 1984) can createa ‘space’ in which multiple interpretations and responses by stakeholders are enabled and possible (Davenport and Leitch,2005). In such a space institutional entrepreneurship (Veenswijk, 2006; Maguire, 2008) will occur whereby actors createnew institutions, change existing ones, or destroy old ones, as Maguire (2008: 674) says. In advance, one cannot know norprescribe how these should be implemented – that is up to the initiative of the institutional entrepreneurs. We have someclues as to how this might work through earlier analysis of Pilot Emission Reduction Trading (PERT) initiatives, notably in theprovince of Ontario, Canada, from 1996 to 2000 (Turcotte et al., 2008) or the Clean Development Mechanism (MacKenzie,2009) or the imposition of carbon taxes (Andrew et al., 2010; Mete et al., 2010). In situations of such strategic ambiguitya great deal of learning and innovation can occur as opportunities are explored and exploited. Offsets could be built intosuch an ensuring state policies – so that to the extent that pollution in one domain was resolved by exporting it elsewherethen the polluter would have to pay penalty rates in their domicile for the imposition of negative externalities on statesless able to ensure their futures. The very fact that key institutional entrepreneurs would emerge and be subject to vale-

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dictory treatment in the business and other press would be a major strategy in advancing the learning from the strategicambiguity created.

Giddens’ (2009) analysis provides further insights into the realpolitik underpinning climate change science. He notesthat formulating a response to climate change has the potential to foster greater international coloration, yet he notes, ‘theprocesses and interests promoting division are strong’ (Giddens, 2009: 203). He argues that while major players accept theIPCC’s view on climate change they are unwilling to engage in unilateral measures to combat climate change that mightundermine their geo-political position, especially in the case of relations between China and the USA, the two major polluters.Giddens notes that economic strength and energy security are as important to the aforementioned nations as tackling climatechange:

The US is already starting to see the world through the prism of a struggle for energy resources against the backdropof damage inflicted by climate change. The main focus of US strategic and military planning, according to a recentofficial report, will henceforth be on a competition for resources, a competition the Pentagon sees as already underway (Giddens, 2009: 206)

The significance of this – with similar moves by China and Russia – is that however strong the rationality of climate sciencemay be as an institutional logic it is always likely to be trumped by logics constructed around the narrow, short-term selfinterest of nations. In summary, countries are unlikely to embark on unilateral actions that may undermine their economicinternational competitiveness and global power. The Copenhagen Climate Summit reveals it is possible to achieve consensuson the dangers of climate change but, for reasons of realpolitik, it is difficult to translate this into meaningful action. Giddensargues that it might be useful to learn from the cold war period, when there were regular summits between the US and theSoviet Union to discuss the arms race, and to institute annual climate meetings between the US and China.

9. Conclusion

Organizational authority is difficult to secure intra-organizationally. It is even more difficult to secure inter-organizationally, especially when these organizations are expressly established to represent ‘national interests’ that arethe condensation of many local discourses, pressures, and politics. While there is an explicit normative language availablefor securing such agreement in the institution of science it is evident that politics trumps science in complex assembliesin which sovereign freedoms are at stake, massive interests are vested, and where the institutionalized norms of sciencecannot be taken for granted.

The institutional and discursive failures of the Copenhagen summit mean that while securing consensus on climatechange is essential it is even more distant in most developed economies, where polls show a steady decline in support foraction on climate change in terms of mechanisms such as a carbon tax. The democracies have variable capacities to organizea reconfiguration of interests nationally and the assemblies in which these nations, and the rest of the world, meet lackthe political means to organize it at present (Giddens, 2008, 2009). Hence, existing democratic institutions exacerbate theproblem both at the global and national levels. Despite its basis in scientific research climate change is more of a politicalthan a scientific problem: as an essentially discursive matter we need a better vocabulary for organizing interests, ratherthan a better science.

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