DEATH, DESIRE, MODERNITY AND REDEMPTION: CLIMATE CHANGE AND PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

Death and desire exist in a critical tension, contributing to climate change as a crisis of modern civilisation. Public international environmental law, in particular the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Climate, is a point of potential redemption for the deaths and loss that are predicted to occur with global warming. Arguably, climate change is a cumulative outcome of a 'shift' in governance from state control and concern about 'death' to a regulation of 'desire' or life. In the modern governance of life and desire by 'Northern' states, there has been a successive deflection of the ecological limits of 'civilisation' into the colonial and postcolonial space of the peoples and places of the developing world. In the first instance, these deflections were achieved through the instruments of law as sovereignty in colonial periods. In a postcolonial era, such deflections are implemented as 'regulation' adopting the techniques of a governance of desire to realise the processes of climate change mitigation, credit and trade, notwithstanding the language of co-benefits for local communities that is emerging at international law. Tensions about this history of deflection and appropriation at an international level surface in the climate change context around the principle of a 'common but differentiated responsibility'. Whether such tensions can be resolved, at least partially, will be important to whether any post-Copenhagen agreement is achieved and whether civilisation is able to avert crisis.