ABSTRACT Global climate governance has produced ambitious agreements and extensive policy frameworks, yet decisive action remains out of reach. Emissions continue to overshoot Paris targets, and warnings of accelerating risks persist. This paradox—ongoing activity alongside a sense of insufficiency—raises a deeper question: Why do governance failures endure despite recognition of the threat? This article applies morphogenetic regulation (MR), a critical realist framework, to examine how systemic dispositions shape climate governance. Focusing on UN and EU climate policy documents, it shows how the public problem of climate change is objectified as a governable problem through externalist reasoning that treats nature as separate from yet interdependent with society. The article traces how this orthodox framing reflects deeper systemic properties that condition what appears governable, feasible or meaningful. Heterodox critique of this framing, analysed in a separate paper, can be brought into systematic comparison through calibration to identify the systemic conditions of climate governance's persistence. This article clarifies why efforts so often fall short and develops the problématique of perseverance: How systemic identity can be traced through diverse interactions—including critique itself—and how that identity persists even as it is contested.
Daniel ‘Zach’ Sloman (Wed,) studied this question.