An anti-geoeconomics of climate change

Abstract

This essay develops a critique of emerging narratives on the geoeconomics of climate change. In recent years a growing policy agenda on climate change that can be listed under the rubric of geoeconomics has emerged in the literature. This scholarship is characterised by persistent imaginaries that articulate geopolitical fears and geoeconomic hopes over nature and society. The key argument mobilised in this discourse is that ecological shifts raise considerable threats, some of which are geopolitical in nature. At the same time, they also represent tremendous geoeconomic opportunities for businesses in terms of new industries such as in the area of the energy transition. Analysing dominant narratives and providing examples from the photovoltaic industry, this essay develops an anti-geoeconomics of climate change that links the sites of production to those of reproduction and aims to reverse the order between the positions of power where climate change is discussed and the places where it is embodied and lived.