Performative and political: corporate constructions of climate change risk

Abstract

Climate change poses a significant threat to future social and economic activities. This article seeks to understand how corporations respond to climate uncertainties and threats through the performance of different 'risks', including market, reputational, regulatory and physical risks. In doing this, we demonstrate how these risks are performative and political. Based on interviews and document analysis, we show how climate change risks are naturalized within market conventions through processes of reiterating climate change as risk, codifying the risk in monetary value, entangling the risk in market conventions and cementing the frame through political activities. We also show how these risk frames have political effects in that they fail to fully account for, or represent, the complexities of climate change. Indeed, the social and natural consequences of climate change undermine the risk models that seek to explain and predict these events. The consequences of these 'misfires' highlight the political nature of risk frames in that their effects are unequally distributed among less powerful actors. Importantly, however, these misfires also have the potential to provide space for new interventions in responding to climate change