Eva Lövbrand
Biographic Data
| ID | 208302 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eva Lövbrand |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eva |
| FAMILY NAME | Lövbrand |
| SIGNATURE | LÖVBRAND E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Linköping University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0968-0658 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 771 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Show Must Go On? Revisiting the Script of International Climate Cooperation Ten Years After Paris
This special issue reflects on the state and direction of global climate governance ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Informed by Michel Foucault’s political thought and the wider field of climate governmentality studies that his work has inspired, we trace the power/knowledge regimes, political rationalities, and many practical tools and techniques that make climate change thinkable and knowable as a political problem. In this…
Measure-ability: The Paris Agreement’s Transparency Regime and the Making of the Calculating State
Transparency is at the center of the Paris climate regime and one of the key mechanisms by which it seeks to catalyze voluntary climate action. In this article, we analyze the micropolitics of transparency and the power that resides in the seemingly technical and mundane reporting provisions of the Paris Agreement. Informed by Michel Foucault’s decentered account of power and government, we trace the ways of thinking and reasoning that underpin t…
In-between worlds: The Unsettled Politics of Child and Youth Representation in International Institutions
A Cautionary Tale for Polycentric Climate Governance: Sweden’s Roles in Orchestrating Decarbonization
The Paris Agreement ushered in an era of climate governance underpinned by a polycentric theory of change, emphasizing experimentation, collaboration, and innovation while downplaying political contestation, power asymmetries, and the need for regulatory action by the state. This article explores the roles the state plays in polycentric climate governance, focusing on the tension between the regulatory state, where authorities set, monitor, and e…
More than one story: Remaking community and place in Sweden’s transition to a fossil free society
In this article, we study how Sweden's transition to a fossil free society is interpreted and experienced by communities whose livelihoods and cultural identities are entangled with carbon-intensive industries. The study draws upon interviews with citizen groups in the coastal city of Lysekil, located next to Scandinavia's largest oil refinery. Our analysis speaks to a growing scholarly literature on just transitions where we argue that a better …
The Politics of Youth Representation at Climate Change Conferences: Who Speaks, Who Is Spoken of, and Who Listens
In this article, we examine how young climate activists make use of the United Nations (UN) constituency system to give voice to children and youth in global climate governance. Our study is based on a mapping of accredited youth nongovernmental organizations (YOUNGO) as well as fieldwork at two UN Climate Change Conferences, where we conducted interviews, observed events, and analyzed plenary interventions. Informed by constructivist accounts of…
Accelerating Climate Action: The Politics of Nonstate Actor Engagement in the Paris Regime
The 2015 Paris Agreement is often depicted as a turning point for global climate governance. Following years of diplomatic gridlock, it laid the foundations for a new global climate regime that invites states to partner with nonstate actors in the transition to the low-carbon society. This article critically examines the political rationalities that inform the pluralization of climate politics after Paris and the turn toward cooperative modes of …
A manifesto for shadow places: Re-imagining and co-producing connections for justice in an era of climate change
In this article, on behalf of The Shadow Places Network, we outline a working manifesto of politics and practice. We mobilise the format of the manifesto to speak to an uncertain and damaged future, to begin to imagine other possible worlds. For feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose thinking inspires this network, shadow places are the underside of the capitalist fantasy, 'the multiple disregarded places of economic and ecological support'. In…
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—…
The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space
The Anthropocene is described as a dangerous and unpredictable era in which fossil-fueled ways of life undermine the planetary systems on which human societies depend. It speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks where neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways. In this paper we examine how debates on the Anthropocene unfold in global politics and how they challenge core assumptions in I…
The Road to Paris: Contending Climate Governance Discourses in the Post-Copenhagen Era
In this paper, we advance discourse analysis to interpret how the state and direction of climate governance is imagined or interpreted by the multitude of actors present at UN climate conferences. We approach the annual Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as active political sites that project ideas, assumptions and standards for the conduct of global politics. This paper examines to what ext…
The return of carbon offsetting? The discursive legitimation of new market arrangements in the Paris climate regime
The current commitments under the Paris Agreement are not enough to achieve the 1,5 °C target. Even if states comply with their national targets, temperatures will increase between 2.4 °C and 3.8 °C; in average 3 °C (CAT, 2018). Hence, governments and international organizations hope that non-state actors help to close the ambition gap. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement provides a “new home” for the carbon offsetting community at the interface of …
Books by Our Readers
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
From climates multiple to climate singular: Maintaining policy-relevance in the IPCC synthesis report
Making climate governance global: How UN climate summitry comes to matter in a complex climate regime
This article examines the role the UNFCCC plays in a polycentric climate regime complex. Through an extended questionnaire survey at the UN Climate Conferences in Warsaw (2013), Lima (2014) and Paris (2015), we study what government delegates and non-state observers see as the main purpose of UN climate summitry and their roles therein. Only a minority of these actors attend UN Climate Conferences to actively influence the outcome of the intergov…
Non-state actors in global climate governance: From Copenhagen to Paris and beyond
‘Together now!’ was the slogan used in the invitation to the Marrakesh Partnership for Global Climate Action (GCA), an initiative launched on the second day of the 22nd Conference of the Parties (C
Simulative governance: On the collaborative narrative of civil society participation in the CDM stakeholder framework
The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often cited as an exemplar of new, hybrid forms of global environmental governance operating at the public–private interface. Practically, enacting this arrangement involves a wide range of non-state actors. This broad involvement is here assumed to mark a shift towards more polycentric and networked modes of governance in which agents collaborate as ‘stakeholders’ in the process of consen…
Foucault and critical policy studies
This chapter explores what kinds of critical policy studies may transpire from Michel Foucault's nominalist engagement with traditional political concepts such as power, government and the state. We argue that Foucault's work paves the way for a decentred form of policy analysis that asks how we govern and are governed in micro-settings including at the level of the individual subject. The focus on the 'how of governing' stems from a rejection of…
Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene
Towards a Reflexive Turn in the Governance of Global Environmental Expertise. The Cases of the IPCC and the Ipbes
The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation
Rendering global change problematic: The constitutive effects of Earth System research in the IGBP and the IHDP
Efforts to predict the future habitability of Earth are examined in three interrelated IGBP and IHDP projects: Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE), Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC), and the Global Land Project (GLP). Drawing upon project documentation and research plans from 1986 to 2012, and 10 interviews with researchers involved in project design and implementation, we trace how these projects have represented the problem of g…
In pursuit of carbon accountability: The politics of Redd+ measuring, reporting and verification systems
Co-producing European climate science and policy: A cautionary note on the making of useful knowledge
This paper examines the tight coupling between European climate science and policy. Drawing upon the analytical idiom of co-production it examines how knowledge-making practices are incorporated into European climate policy-making, and more importantly, how EU climate policy has influenced the funding, making and interpretation of useful European climate policy research. The paper identifies a tension between the critical/reflexive ambition built…
Making climate change governable: Accounting for Carbon as Sinks, Credits and Personal Budgets
This article explores how climate governance is accomplished in practical terms. To that end we develop an 'analytics of carbon accounting' that draws attention to the calculative practices that turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance. Carbon accounting as a rationality of government is primarily concerned with the ways in which carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated; but the concept also al…
A Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Technology
Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission's (EC) report ''Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously'…
Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene
Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change: Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism
Forest plantations or so-called carbon sinks have played a critical role in the climate change negotiations and constitute a central element in the scheme to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations set out by the Kyoto Protocol. This paper examines dominant discursive framings of forest plantation projects in the climate regime. A central proposition is that these projects represent a microcosm of competing and overlapping discourses that…
Structuring sustainability science
It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this article, we propose a research agenda that advances …
Making climate change governable: Accounting for Carbon as Sinks, Credits and Personal Budgets
This article explores how climate governance is accomplished in practical terms. To that end we develop an 'analytics of carbon accounting' that draws attention to the calculative practices that turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance. Carbon accounting as a rationality of government is primarily concerned with the ways in which carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated; but the concept also al…
Earth System governmentality
Non-state actors in global climate governance: From Copenhagen to Paris and beyond
‘Together now!’ was the slogan used in the invitation to the Marrakesh Partnership for Global Climate Action (GCA), an initiative launched on the second day of the 22nd Conference of the Parties (C
In pursuit of carbon accountability: The politics of Redd+ measuring, reporting and verification systems
Closing the Legitimacy Gap in Global Environmental Governance? Lessons from the Emerging CDM Market
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a prominent example of the contemporary turn towards more hybrid modes of global environmental governance. It epitomizes the trend away from hierarchical state regulation towards softer forms of steering along the public-private frontier. In this article we analyze the legitimacy of this novel governance arrangement. While we approach input legitimacy as a procedural ideal that guarantees actors affected b…
The climate as political space: On the territorialisation of the global carbon cycle
International Relations have increasingly projected an image of the world where territoriality has lost its organising force. The global movements of people, information, capital and pollution are seen as signs of increasing deterritorialisation. Climate change is one of these issues ‘beyond borders’ that due to its global framing has been established within the international. This article is an investigation into the political geography of the c…
From climates multiple to climate singular: Maintaining policy-relevance in the IPCC synthesis report
A manifesto for shadow places: Re-imagining and co-producing connections for justice in an era of climate change
In this article, on behalf of The Shadow Places Network, we outline a working manifesto of politics and practice. We mobilise the format of the manifesto to speak to an uncertain and damaged future, to begin to imagine other possible worlds. For feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose thinking inspires this network, shadow places are the underside of the capitalist fantasy, 'the multiple disregarded places of economic and ecological support'. In…
The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space
The Anthropocene is described as a dangerous and unpredictable era in which fossil-fueled ways of life undermine the planetary systems on which human societies depend. It speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks where neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways. In this paper we examine how debates on the Anthropocene unfold in global politics and how they challenge core assumptions in I…
Revisiting the politics of expertise in light of the Kyoto negotiations on land use change and forestry
A Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Technology
Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission's (EC) report ''Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously'…
Pure science or policy involvement? Ambiguous boundary-work for Swedish carbon cycle science
Rendering global change problematic: The constitutive effects of Earth System research in the IGBP and the IHDP
Efforts to predict the future habitability of Earth are examined in three interrelated IGBP and IHDP projects: Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE), Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC), and the Global Land Project (GLP). Drawing upon project documentation and research plans from 1986 to 2012, and 10 interviews with researchers involved in project design and implementation, we trace how these projects have represented the problem of g…
Accelerating Climate Action: The Politics of Nonstate Actor Engagement in the Paris Regime
The 2015 Paris Agreement is often depicted as a turning point for global climate governance. Following years of diplomatic gridlock, it laid the foundations for a new global climate regime that invites states to partner with nonstate actors in the transition to the low-carbon society. This article critically examines the political rationalities that inform the pluralization of climate politics after Paris and the turn toward cooperative modes of …
The Politics of Youth Representation at Climate Change Conferences: Who Speaks, Who Is Spoken of, and Who Listens
In this article, we examine how young climate activists make use of the United Nations (UN) constituency system to give voice to children and youth in global climate governance. Our study is based on a mapping of accredited youth nongovernmental organizations (YOUNGO) as well as fieldwork at two UN Climate Change Conferences, where we conducted interviews, observed events, and analyzed plenary interventions. Informed by constructivist accounts of…
Making climate governance global: How UN climate summitry comes to matter in a complex climate regime
This article examines the role the UNFCCC plays in a polycentric climate regime complex. Through an extended questionnaire survey at the UN Climate Conferences in Warsaw (2013), Lima (2014) and Paris (2015), we study what government delegates and non-state observers see as the main purpose of UN climate summitry and their roles therein. Only a minority of these actors attend UN Climate Conferences to actively influence the outcome of the intergov…
In-between worlds: The Unsettled Politics of Child and Youth Representation in International Institutions
Simulative governance: On the collaborative narrative of civil society participation in the CDM stakeholder framework
The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often cited as an exemplar of new, hybrid forms of global environmental governance operating at the public–private interface. Practically, enacting this arrangement involves a wide range of non-state actors. This broad involvement is here assumed to mark a shift towards more polycentric and networked modes of governance in which agents collaborate as ‘stakeholders’ in the process of consen…
The return of carbon offsetting? The discursive legitimation of new market arrangements in the Paris climate regime
The current commitments under the Paris Agreement are not enough to achieve the 1,5 °C target. Even if states comply with their national targets, temperatures will increase between 2.4 °C and 3.8 °C; in average 3 °C (CAT, 2018). Hence, governments and international organizations hope that non-state actors help to close the ambition gap. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement provides a “new home” for the carbon offsetting community at the interface of …
Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change: Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism
Forest plantations or so-called carbon sinks have played a critical role in the climate change negotiations and constitute a central element in the scheme to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations set out by the Kyoto Protocol. This paper examines dominant discursive framings of forest plantation projects in the climate regime. A central proposition is that these projects represent a microcosm of competing and overlapping discourses that…
Pure science or policy involvement? Ambiguous boundary-work for Swedish carbon cycle science
The climate as political space: On the territorialisation of the global carbon cycle
International Relations have increasingly projected an image of the world where territoriality has lost its organising force. The global movements of people, information, capital and pollution are seen as signs of increasing deterritorialisation. Climate change is one of these issues ‘beyond borders’ that due to its global framing has been established within the international. This article is an investigation into the political geography of the c…
Revisiting the politics of expertise in light of the Kyoto negotiations on land use change and forestry
Earth System governmentality
Closing the Legitimacy Gap in Global Environmental Governance? Lessons from the Emerging CDM Market
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a prominent example of the contemporary turn towards more hybrid modes of global environmental governance. It epitomizes the trend away from hierarchical state regulation towards softer forms of steering along the public-private frontier. In this article we analyze the legitimacy of this novel governance arrangement. While we approach input legitimacy as a procedural ideal that guarantees actors affected b…
Environmental Politics and Deliberative Democracy: Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance
Structuring sustainability science
It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this article, we propose a research agenda that advances …
Co-producing European climate science and policy: A cautionary note on the making of useful knowledge
This paper examines the tight coupling between European climate science and policy. Drawing upon the analytical idiom of co-production it examines how knowledge-making practices are incorporated into European climate policy-making, and more importantly, how EU climate policy has influenced the funding, making and interpretation of useful European climate policy research. The paper identifies a tension between the critical/reflexive ambition built…
Making climate change governable: Accounting for Carbon as Sinks, Credits and Personal Budgets
This article explores how climate governance is accomplished in practical terms. To that end we develop an 'analytics of carbon accounting' that draws attention to the calculative practices that turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance. Carbon accounting as a rationality of government is primarily concerned with the ways in which carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated; but the concept also al…
A Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Technology
Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission's (EC) report ''Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously'…
In pursuit of carbon accountability: The politics of Redd+ measuring, reporting and verification systems
Towards a Reflexive Turn in the Governance of Global Environmental Expertise. The Cases of the IPCC and the Ipbes
The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation
Rendering global change problematic: The constitutive effects of Earth System research in the IGBP and the IHDP
Efforts to predict the future habitability of Earth are examined in three interrelated IGBP and IHDP projects: Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE), Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC), and the Global Land Project (GLP). Drawing upon project documentation and research plans from 1986 to 2012, and 10 interviews with researchers involved in project design and implementation, we trace how these projects have represented the problem of g…
Foucault and critical policy studies
This chapter explores what kinds of critical policy studies may transpire from Michel Foucault's nominalist engagement with traditional political concepts such as power, government and the state. We argue that Foucault's work paves the way for a decentred form of policy analysis that asks how we govern and are governed in micro-settings including at the level of the individual subject. The focus on the 'how of governing' stems from a rejection of…
Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene
Simulative governance: On the collaborative narrative of civil society participation in the CDM stakeholder framework
The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often cited as an exemplar of new, hybrid forms of global environmental governance operating at the public–private interface. Practically, enacting this arrangement involves a wide range of non-state actors. This broad involvement is here assumed to mark a shift towards more polycentric and networked modes of governance in which agents collaborate as ‘stakeholders’ in the process of consen…
Making climate governance global: How UN climate summitry comes to matter in a complex climate regime
This article examines the role the UNFCCC plays in a polycentric climate regime complex. Through an extended questionnaire survey at the UN Climate Conferences in Warsaw (2013), Lima (2014) and Paris (2015), we study what government delegates and non-state observers see as the main purpose of UN climate summitry and their roles therein. Only a minority of these actors attend UN Climate Conferences to actively influence the outcome of the intergov…
Non-state actors in global climate governance: From Copenhagen to Paris and beyond
‘Together now!’ was the slogan used in the invitation to the Marrakesh Partnership for Global Climate Action (GCA), an initiative launched on the second day of the 22nd Conference of the Parties (C
From climates multiple to climate singular: Maintaining policy-relevance in the IPCC synthesis report
The Road to Paris: Contending Climate Governance Discourses in the Post-Copenhagen Era
In this paper, we advance discourse analysis to interpret how the state and direction of climate governance is imagined or interpreted by the multitude of actors present at UN climate conferences. We approach the annual Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as active political sites that project ideas, assumptions and standards for the conduct of global politics. This paper examines to what ext…
The return of carbon offsetting? The discursive legitimation of new market arrangements in the Paris climate regime
The current commitments under the Paris Agreement are not enough to achieve the 1,5 °C target. Even if states comply with their national targets, temperatures will increase between 2.4 °C and 3.8 °C; in average 3 °C (CAT, 2018). Hence, governments and international organizations hope that non-state actors help to close the ambition gap. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement provides a “new home” for the carbon offsetting community at the interface of …
Books by Our Readers
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space
The Anthropocene is described as a dangerous and unpredictable era in which fossil-fueled ways of life undermine the planetary systems on which human societies depend. It speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks where neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways. In this paper we examine how debates on the Anthropocene unfold in global politics and how they challenge core assumptions in I…
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—…
Political science (25 works) · Politics (23 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Climate change (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Economics (16 works) · Corporate governance (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Ecology (12 works)