Think tanks and the politics of climate change

Abstract

In pluralist accounts, in deliberation minded and civil society-oriented scholarship think tanks are considered relevant because of their constructive role in policy related knowledge generation. They are held to establish and enable expertise from diverse stakeholders and multiple angles, and to successfully feed the policy process by way of addressing the media and particular audiences. The environmental policy field in general and climate change mitigation in particular allows observing a less benign and wider range of roles and functions of think tanks in multiple conflict constellations. In light of militant policy battles think tanks amass relevance with regard to a more fundamental transformation of policy fields and political institutions. Conflict theoretical and power sensitive approaches also suggest an increasing need to relate the work and role of think tanks and expert knowledge in general in quite agnostic ways to political struggles of competing discourse coalitions that frequently rely not only on innovative and problem-solving research, but also on destructive strategies of “ knowledge shaping ” and “strategic ignorance ” ( Bonds 2011, McGeoy 2018). To illustrate both the participatory-democratic and post-democratic-technocratic potential of policy think tanks this chapter will go back to the post-WW II origins of academic and partisan think tanks in the emerging field of environmental studies. The advancing field of climate science in conjunction with the growing concern over ecological degradation eventually led to the co-constitution of both radical ecology and aggressive corporate and neoliberal defenders of fossil industries and life style. The development of the climate change mitigation struggle needs to recognize movement-counter-movement dynamics that play out heavily in the field of policy related expertise and the academic sphere. It turns out that current vitriol in climate change mitigation debates cannot simply be attributed to the abuse of science and fake news. Evidence instead points to the far-ranging transformation of the “ global knowledge power structure ” (Susan Strange 1988) in past decades, and of a range of national and international governance structures, in which the rising number of policy-think-tanks have come to play an ever more important role.