Learning to Be Postmodern in an All Too Modern World: “Whatever Action” in International Climate Change Imaginaries

Recent contributions in International Relations focus either on a shift from modernity towards postmodernity in approaches to address climate change, or underline the permanencies and continuities of modern thought and power hierarchies. In contrast, we suggest that there is a contradictory simultaneity of both of these framings through which the world is continuously decomposed and recomposed. Today climate change programmes seem to be driven by a key contradiction, which lies at the heart of the Anthropocene: the environment is ours to manipulate and yet is out of reach. Based on this framing, and thinking through Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour’s writings on political ecology, we argue that “whatever action” best captures current policy thinking: multiple initiatives are taken without a telos; rather they are designed to avoid that opportunities for adaptation and climate mitigation are foreclosed.