IR, climate politics, and change: opportunities for productive engagement?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Change’ or ‘transformation’ are longstanding preoccupations of both International Relations (IR) and global climate change politics scholarship. Yet, the two fields largely occupy independent axiological, epistemological, normative, and ontological spaces that have led to misunderstandings, mutual criticisms, and a lack of serious engagement on these questions. The result is missed opportunities to transform IR, misdiagnoses of political dynamics of climate change, and, perversely, the limited influence of political analysis on wider climate change scholarship. This article identifies understandings of change and transformation relevant to both fields and introduces a productive epistemological and ontological shift for analyzing and normatively engaging with change in the face of uncertainty. It then introduces practical research strategies for policy-relevant and forward-looking scholarship that moves from explaining change to identifying causal logics and dynamic processes that can reinforce (or undermine) change and transformation. It concludes with illustrative analyzes of trajectories and possible limits of two macro policy changes with transformative potential: the 1.5-degree Celsius aspirational target in the Paris Agreement, and the proliferation of ‘net zero’ policies around the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.058 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.125 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.044 | 0.047 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.031 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".