Resisting counter-productive technocratic climate scientism

Hyslop et al. advocate the ‘integrating’ of complex climate politics under a singular ‘risk management’ typology focused on ‘overshoot’. As in much parallel climate policy analysis, this raises (alongside some strengths) a range of serious problems. These may detract from both scientific rigour and political efficacy. Objectivity and completeness are overplayed. Uncertainties and ambiguities are sidelined. Framing subjectivities and conditioning factors acting on analysis are neglected. Criticised here as ‘technocratic scientism’, the result risks spuriously cloaking an essentially political intervention behind the ‘neutral’ authority of science. Such an under-accountable style fails to be persuasive. It also arguably helps provoke rising wider regressive forms of authoritarianism. Remedies are argued to lie in supporting (rather than subverting) democratic struggle: using scientific method to ‘open up’ (more than ‘close down’) space for challenging (not reinforcing) existing patterns of incumbent privilege. As much against climate disruption as other threats, it is on this (rather than technocratic scientism) that effective progressive action depends.