Saving the ‘disappearing islands’: Climate change governance, Pacific island states and cosmopolitan dispositions

The ‘disappearing islands’ is a distinct idea that emerged out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to describe the vulnerability of small island states in the Pacific to sea-level rise as a result of climate change. In this article I deploy the ‘disappearing islands’ to map the complex politics of climate change governance. Through various governmental rationalities the ‘disappearing islands’ are operationalized as proof of climate catastrophe; as a means of concretizing climate science's statistical abstractions and as a signifier of the urgency and uneven impacts of global climate change. Drawing on focus group research from the Australian Research Council Linkage project Hot science, global citizens: The agency of the museum sector in climate change interventions, I juxtapose these multifarious governmental perspectives with the views of ordinary citizens in Australia and the United States in relation to the fate of the disappearing islands as a result of developed world consumption choices and carbon-burning practices. I conclude that rhetorical gestures made towards mobilizing a moral and ethical ecological citizenry charged with the responsibility of saving the ‘disappearing islands’ are too simplistic and more difficult to achieve than imagined.