When Aging and Climate Change Are Brought Together: Fossil Fuel Divestment and a Changing Dispositive of Security

Abstract

Pension funds have become major targets for the incorporation of climate change into their investment decisions. Recently, divestment from carbon intensive companies or industries has been the object of a wave of campaigns directed at these institutional investors. This paper uses Foucault’s dispositive of security to investigate the decisions of one organization, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which in 2021 divested from seven oil sands companies. Conceptualizing divestment within a security dispositive helps us build theory which understands divestment within existing security-oriented arrangements. It shows how changes build upon the existing dispositive, and that by looking to existing governing arrangements we can see elements that act as operators to change their direction and emphasis. In the case of pension fund divestment, risk is the operator that both sustains the investment function and also tilts the arrangement towards climate change. In these existing arrangements lay the ingredients for future social relations.