This chapter – the concluding substantive chapter of the book – asks how a concern with ecosystem resilience might ultimately come to inform the way political communities approach the relationship between climate change and security. If ecological security constitutes the most progressive account of climate security, encouraging approaches that emphasize the rights and needs of the most vulnerable in the face of climate change, how might we get there? The chapter draws on the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in developing an account of political possibility. It then locates immanent possibilities for movement towards ecological security in existing principles and practices (from the precautionary principle to accounts of geoengineering governance), before acknowledging a role for considering alternative and novel sets of institutional arrangements and practices to advance ecological security. In the process, it makes the case for recognizing and facilitating progressive change, even if such change does not wholly align with the principles of the ecological security discourse. In this context, the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

This chapter explores a key effect of REDD+, namely that it recasts how the North–South differentiation in the climate regime is understood and how questions of responsibility and capacity for climate mitigation are conceptualised. This has the effect of enabling the countries of the Global North – who bear the greater responsibility for GHG production – to evade necessary action to ameliorate the climate crisis. Simultaneously, an emphasis on the presumed lack of capacity of Global South countries to act on climate disruption has provided a justification or authorisation for greater international intervention in the name of assisting them to act on climate change. This chapter examines debates over the contentious principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capacities in the climate regime and explores changes in how the principle is interpreted and enacted over time. It also shows how the adoption of flexibility mechanisms within the regime transformed how differentiation is operationalised in practice. Finally, this chapter shows how the discourse of ‘capacity building’ in the climate regime has facilitated the establishment of regulatory and legal infrastructure to support neoliberal markets, especially through REDD+-readiness programs.

This chapter identifies a number of prescriptions for climate governance that could, alongside other actions being taken worldwide, mitigate the climate crisis. Success in this regard would entail dramatic and quite rapid declines in greenhouse gas pollution globally and successful adaptation to the impacts arising from past pollution. These outcomes would engender greater protection of human interests and substantial reductions in the many injustices arising from climate change, all while enhancing environmental sustainability in the long term. The prescriptions outlined here are intended to address corresponding governance pathologies described in Chapters 3–7. Before these prescriptions can be applied in practice, much more explication would be required. Thus, they are intended to illustrate the kinds of steps that will be required to make climate governance much more effective. All of these prescriptions for climate governance are aspirations: they are proposals for action that will have practical significance for the climate crisis only if they are taken seriously.

The opening chapter lays out the conceptual groundwork for respective historical, practical and theoretical case studies across three governance areas in which responsibility has become a core focal point of policymaking over the course of the last three decades: security, environmental, and business governance. Researching the rise of responsibility requires engaging with the simultaneity of formal and informal accountability mechanisms, questions of morality and ethics, and the relations that this practice establishes between a variety of actors in global politics. The general framework of the book holds that moral agency is socially embedded, which paves the way for inquiring into how the normativity of policies plays out in interaction on the ground, particularly in so-termed communities of responsibility. Three results of the case studies stand out: first, there are parallel developments between governance fields, especially the increased formalisation of responsibility in multilateral treaties; second, the observation that responsibility often constituted a compromise in negotiations between states and non-state actors; and third, reliance on human rights as a common point of reference.