Avoiding catastrophes? Central banks and the technoscientific imagination of climate futures | Matthias Täger

Matthias Täger will be presenting the paper ‘Avoiding catastrophes? Central banks and the technoscientific imagination of climate futures’.

Abstract

Why is there such a discrepancy between the rhetorics of senior central bankers describing climate risks as systemic and potentially catastrophic and central banks’ own analyses finding such risks to only pose a benign threat to finance and economies? This paper finds that the climate scenarios underpinning many of such analyses – the NGFS scenarios – are avoiding the imagination of plausible catastrophic climate futures. We argue that this avoidance of catastrophes is not due to a concerted and planned effort in the scenario design process but rather the unintended outcome of social dynamics unfolding during the scenario development. This development was dominated by socially conservative dynamics aimed at minimising disturbances to pre-existing norms and relations of sociotechnical arrangements. These socially conservative dynamics collectively and unintentionally rendered the climate scenarios financially optimistic. These findings challenge the consensus in the sociology of algorithms that model-based algorithmic means of prediction and foresight reproduce social structures and relations. Drawing on the sociology of futures, we stress the potential of imagined futures to represent alternative societal arrangements thus allowing for a problematisation not just of the reproductive but also the creative layers of imagined futures such as the NGFS scenarios.

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