UCLA

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), this principal supra-national institution remains paramount to the project of planetary climate planning and governance. Yet, despite praise among climate leaders, reflections on this anniversary should serve to recall the contestations through which this foundational institution was formed, and the normative geographical assumptions that continue to be reproduced in its wake. The debates and political dynamics that afflicted the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) tasked with crafting the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as dissension in the periphery, remain as relevant today as they were three decades ago. Yet, few works have pieced together the antecedent conditions that formed a cleavage in the world system and sparked the elusive committee and the tedious negotiating process that yielded today’s enduring institution of planetary governance. This archival analysis seeks to reprise the critical juncture that informed the institutional innovation of the INC, probing mechanisms of frame alignment with a truth regime of global kinds of knowledge and path dependence on geographical governance norms. Considering the legacy of this enduring institution, I seek to render visible actors and proposals peripheralized in the formation of planetary climate governance to extrapolate normative boundaries and proffer heterodox lessons from the margins.