Actors, legitimacy, and governance challenges facing negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies

ABSTRACT

Institutional theory, behavioral science, sociology and even political science all emphasize the importance of actors in achieving social change. Despite this salience, the actors involved in researching, promoting, or deploying negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies remain underexplored within the literature. In this study, based on a rigorous sample of semi-structured expert interviews (N = 125), we empirically explore the types of actors and groups associated with both negative emissions and solar geoengineering research and deployment. We investigate emergent knowledge networks and patterns of involvement across space and scale. We examine actors in terms of their support of, opposition to, or ambiguity regarding both types of climate interventions. We reveal incipient and perhaps unforeseen collections of actors; determine which sorts of actors are associated with different technology pathways to comprehend the locations of actor groups and potential patterns of elitism; and assess relative degrees of social acceptance, legitimacy, and governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon dioxide removal
• greenhouse gas removal
• solar radiation management
• climate justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2210464.

Additional information

Funding

 This project has received funding from he European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the European Research Council (ERC) Grant Agreement No. 951542-GENIE-ERC-2020-SyG, “Geo Engineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe” (GENIE). The content of this deliverable does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed here in lies entirely with the author(s). Also, theproject was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Aarhus University 2021-13 as well as by the Ethics Committee at the European Research Council.