Colonizing the climate?: A decolonial critical analysis of the global scientific discourse on solar geoengineering

Abstract

Solar geoengineering (SG) has emerged within scientific research circles as a potential technological solution to address global climate change, with critical contestation arising from different disciplinary fields given concerns for inadequate governance, technical uncertainties, research inequities, and challenges for democracy. The development of SG research is dominated by a homogenous community of Western actors and the proliferation of uneven research raises concerns for critical climate justice given the exclusion of a plurality of interests, values, and norms in the formulation of the research landscape and the construction of SG as a socio-technological imaginary. While commitments to critically investigate the positionalities and subjectivities shaping the knowledge grow more numerous, less explicit investigations exist that expose the ways in which the current discourse normalizes climate imaginaries that belong to a singularly Western tradition of thought. This research seeks to expose the ways in which the current epistemic climate engineering community totalizes a Western imaginary and thus entrenches discursive and material forms of ‘climate coloniality’. Using a decolonial analytical frame to construct and interpret a critical discourse analysis, I examine the most prominent (powerful) scientific literature on SG and its governance for the presence of narratives that institute climate coloniality. The findings reveal those dominant discourses within the field that totalize Western conceptions of climate change, earth, the role of science, the future, and humanity. By naming the genealogy of these discourses in Western modernity, the research challenges their universality that currently obscures colonial histories, reduces complexities, enables certain justifications, and reifies power imbalances. The research emphasizes the limitations of this investigation as situated and partial in its subjective and limited application of decolonial theoretical praxis, emphasizing the need for further research on climate coloniality that is critical of this research and its intended contributions.