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More details/abstract: 'Climate geoengineering' is becoming an increasingly prominent focus for global discussion and action. Yet, in academic, policy and wider political discourse, the frequent shorthand term 'geoengineering' is routinely used in very broad, ambiguous and multivalent ways. This study aims to contribute to understandings of these divergent current framings of 'geoengineering' and their implications. It asks not only about disparate understandings of geoengineering itself, but also what these reveal about deeper political dynamics around climate change, science and technology. To this end, the paper applies Q methodology to analyse geoengineering as a subjective discursive construct, the bounds of which are continually negotiated and contested. 35 participants from a variety of political and institutional backgrounds in the UK, US, Canada and Japan undertook a 'Q sort' of 48 statements about geoengineering between December 2012 and February 2013. Four distinctive framings emerged from this analysis, labelled: 'At the very least we need more research'; 'We are the planetary maintenance engineers'; 'Geoengineering is a political project'; and 'Let's focus on Carbon.' Results indicate a strong polarity around divergently-construed pros and cons of geoengineering as a wholeunderscoring the political salience of this term. But additional axes of difference suggest a more nuanced picture than straightforward pro/anti positioning. The ambiguity of the term is argued to offer interpretive flexibility for articulating diverse interests within and across contending framings. The paper questions whether increasing terminological precision will necessarily facilitate greater clarity in resulting multivalent governance discussions and public engagement. It argues that the merits of any given form of precision and their policy implications will depend on particular framings. Much ambiguity in this area may thus be irreducible, with the challenges lying perhaps less in the ordering of discourse and more in reconciling the wider material political pluralities that this suggests.

In this article, we explore how climate change science is connected to climate change governance. When formally institutionalized, as in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), these sites may be referred to as boundary organizations. These institutions engage not only in the quality assessment of scientific research, but also in the design of innovative policy instruments, or evaluation of policy impacts-activities that we refer to as boundary work. Boundary work is inherently 'tricky business'. Science and politics are normally demarcated spheres with different sacred stories. Scientists aspire to 'speak truth to power', while policymakers want 'politics on top and science on tap'. Boundary work endeavors to coordinate these apparently incompatible aspirations. In this article, we describe, analyze, and assess whether, to what extent, and how the major international and some national boundary organizations in climate change governance have been able to avoid over-politicization and over-scientization. We demonstrate that the nature and success of boundary organizations and the ways they work depend on: (1) the degree to which the climate change problem is defined as 'wicked' or unstructured, or as (relatively) 'tame' and structured; (2) the stage of the policy process; and (3) characteristics of the policy network and the socio-political context: the degree to which relevant players insist on strict separation and a linear relation from science to politics, or, alternatively, are tolerant of a blurring of the boundaries and hence a two-way, coproductive relation between science and politics.

How do the social dynamics within interdisciplinary research teams shape sustainability research? This paper presents a case study of interdisciplinary research projects at the University of Sussex, as part of a programme aimed at encouraging collaborative work to address intersections between the Sustainability Development Goals. Using data gathered during a series of participatory workshops at the start and end of the projects, combined with non-participant observation and analysis of project discussions during the lifetime of the projects, we examine the diverse ways in which research teams configure themselves to navigate the terrain of interdisciplinary sustainability research and the kinds of social and discursive dynamics that shape projects. In particular, we relate the emergence of distinct project team configurations to diverse problem framings, and aspirations for collaboration within these teams. We examine some of the challenges facing researchers attempting to work in these ways, and explore implications of these dynamics for knowledge production for sustainability. We conclude by drawing out and addressing some of the challenges for institutions funding and supporting interdisciplinary sustainability research.

As academic and policy interest in climate geoengineering grows, the potential irreversibility of technological developments in this domain has been raised as a pressing concern. The literature on socio‐technical lock‐in and path dependence is illuminating in helping to situate current concerns about climate geoengineering and irreversibility in the context of academic understandings of historical socio‐technical development and persistence. This literature provides a wealth of material illustrating the pervasiveness of positive feedbacks of various types (from the discursive to the material) leading to complex socio‐technical entanglements which may resist change and become inflexible even in the light of evidence of negative impacts. With regard to climate geoengineering, there are concerns that geoengineering technologies might contribute so‐called ‘carbon lock‐in’, or become irreversibly ‘locked‐in’ themselves. In particular, the scale of infrastructures that geoengineering interventions would require, and the issue of the so‐called ‘termination effect’ have been discussed in these terms. Despite the emergent and somewhat ill‐defined nature of the field, some authors also suggest that the extant framings of geoengineering in academic and policy literatures may already demonstrate features recognizable as forms of cognitive lock‐in, likely to have profound implications for future developments in this area. While the concepts of path‐dependence and lock‐in are the subject of ongoing academic critique, by drawing analytical attention to these pervasive processes of positive feedback and entanglement, this literature is highly relevant to current debates around geoengineering. WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:649–661. doi: 10.1002/wcc.296 This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making