Content area
Abstract
The role of science, knowledge and power in international relations is generally subordinate to the politics of interest groups or bureaucratic actors. This is most apparent in the epistemic communities perspective. In this approach knowledge acquires importance to politics when it becomes consensual and as community members capture bureaucratic posts. I challenge this position and argue that an alternative discursive practices method can better link knowledge to power by taking into account the context, practices and popularization of scientific knowledge. A genealogy of climatic change is undertaken to identify how the issue becomes important to the international community. I note that climatic change is rarely an autonomous issue area but linked to other, more pressing political concerns: first weather modification, then the food and energy crises. By the mid-1980s, a new geocentric discourse promoted the idea of a changing climate to the forefront of international politics. I conclude as negotiations for an international convention begin in 1991, but note also that this discourse is extended to an interdisciplinary agenda of Global Change. The genealogy reveals that the issue of climatic change is discursively constructed, predicated on an environmentalist ethic that transforms notions of risk, scientific instruments such as computer models that frame the type of knowledge used in politics, and popular metaphors such as "greenhouse," that impelled a collective identity around the idea of global warming. The case of climatic change and a discursive practices approach contributes to our understanding of how scientific knowledge can identify new nonterritorial functional spaces that require collective administration, thereby reconfiguring and extending international society. In so doing, the significance of international regimes and other forms of cooperation may not be in the fact of their existence, but instead in the reasons provided for their existence.
