Promise, deferral and dissonance
Law, time and environments in the Anthropocene
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4842849 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Julia Dehm (0000-0001-9495-6705, School of Law, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Time & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0961-463X • E-ISSN: 1461-7463 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0961463x251363756 |
| OpenAlex | W4413359531 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 134 |
Dominant modes of temporal ordering premised on linear, progressive time are deeply implicated in the production of "Anthropocene" conditions. This article explores how international law is responding to the temporal challenges of the Anthropocene. It describes the deployment of technologies of deferral that attempt to mobilize specific ideas of the future to both delay the transition from fossil fuels and secure, lock in, and maintain belief in a sense of linear, progressive time even as the climate crisis presents a fundamental challenge to this modernist narrative. Dangerously, these technologies of deferral create increased temporal dissonance because they fail to heed the clear warning from climate science that continuing business-as-usual will create a catastrophic future. This article explores these dynamics through three case studies: first, the mobilization of the future promise of-currently untested and unviable at scale-carbon dioxide removal technologies in the international climate regime; second, the protection of future expected profits from fossil fuel reserves and infrastructure in the international investment law regime; and finally the tensions about competing imperatives of continuity and change at the heart of debates about the rights of future generations. Yet this article also suggests a different way in which international law could engage with time, focused less on shaping, standardizing, and synchronizing time, but rather on enlivening trans-temporal obligations in ways that create just relations between plural times and temporalities
Anthropocene · Cognitive dissonance · Deep time · Deferral · Economics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Sociology · Environmental law and policy · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Geology
The idea of progress
The Idea of Progress
Ghostly Visitations
The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860
The Deadly Life of Logistics
Takings
The Implicated Subject
The Gentle Civilizer of Nations
Chronotopes of Law
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Law As A Social System
The Future of the World
The trouble with negative emissions
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation
Futures Past
Europe and the people without history
Time and the Other
On Time
Introduction
Anticipatory Culture in the Bering Sea
The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets
Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies
The ‘question of possibilities’ as a leitmotif for re‐imagining law for the ‘Anthropocene’
Marx's Temporalities
Decolonising International Law
Discourses of climate delay
Reconsidering Reparations
The Temporal Rivalries of Human Rights
Discounting the future
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene
The Temporal Ontology of the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review
Environmental law and governance for the anthropocene
Minerals are a shared inheritance
Transformative pathways – Using integrated assessment models more effectively to open up plausible and desirable low-carbon futures
On Becoming Less of the World
Synchronizing the World
Victim, litigant, activist, messiah
Climate justice
Changing images of climate change
Unseen urgency
A history of the 1.5°C target
Climate futures in the time of the unbroken asset
Navigating the political
Decision making in contexts of deep uncertainty - An alternative approach for long-term climate policy
Are Rights Out of Time? International Human Rights Law, Temporality, and Radical Social Change
Registering Cosmetics? The Constitution of Legal Form and Injurious Substance in Canada (1945–1946)
Deconstructing Anthropos
In Defence of Future Generations
Against Future Generations
Islands and the South
International law
Locating Nature
Supply Chains and the Human Condition
Conceptual Synchronisation
Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future
No Future
Fossil Fuels and Fossil Kin
Introduction
Law and the Time of Angels
Narrative Time
Imagined communities
Incantatory’ governance
Just in Time
Law and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene
Preemption, precaution, preparedness
Does time colonise intergenerational environmental justice theory
From historical chains to derivative futures
The cene scene
Regulatory Chill in a Warming World
Forecasting and foreclosing futures
Anthropocene Time
Contingency and Foundation
Time Matters
Fossil modernity
The Temporality of Generations
The trajectory of the Anthropocene
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
Looking to the Horizon
Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand
Speculative futures in the time of debt
Seeing Like a State
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene
Time for politics
Turbulent Worlds
Patchy Anthropocene
World Futures
Economentality
The Standardization of Time
The frontier in heterogeneous time
The challenges of assets
The Capitalocene, Part I
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |