Fiddling while the ice melts? How organizational scholars can take a more active role in the climate change debate

Abstract

The debate over anthropogenic climate change or the idea that human activities are altering the physical climate of the planet continues to rage amid seemingly irreconcilable differences, both within the developed world and between developed and less developed countries. With high uncer-tainty, rival worldviews and the wide diversity of meaning attached to the expression, climate change has become a key narrative within which local and transnational issues – economic, social and political – are framed and contested. The field is fraught with controversies regarding causes and consequences, as well as different attitudes towards risks, technologies and economic and social well-being for different groups. Parties also dispute how to share responsibility for reducing emissions – whether the issue primarily needs market, regulatory, technological, or behavioural solutions. Climate change is many things to many people. Competing interests negotiate over its interpretation and utilize various strategies to promote practices that advance their own under-standings regarding climate change and its governance.Against this backdrop of widely divergent interests and views, constructing consensus around climate change at the transnational level is particularly challenging, not only because of the sheer number of players involved but also because there is no a priori, overarching governance system in place at this level that can force sovereign national governments to sign or adhere to any agree-ment. Policy paralysis is further exacerbated due to ‘future discounting’, in which people find it hard to assign the same level of reality to back-of-the-mind and contested future scenarios as they do to present, immediate, tangibly visible and front-of-the-mind issues (Giddens, 2009). It is hard to imagine, for example, how the seeming necessity of car travel today is connected to dangerous future changes in climate. Consequently, developing long-term policy is thwarted by demands for short-term economic prosperity, be they from politicians seeking re-election, share-holders demanding short-term profits, or middle-class families trying to make ends meet. In