Technology and International Environmental Cooperation

Florian Rabitz

Global Environmental Politics, 2025, vol. 25, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: When does technology matter for resolving global challenges of environmental sustainability? Starting from the concept of “techno-fixes” that centers on the impacts of technology on environmental challenges, I develop an alternative account that assesses the implications of technology for international environmental cooperation. I propose the concept of techno-political fixes to refer to technologies that improve cooperative prospects. Techno-political fixes improve the structure of cooperation problems in terms of distributional impacts, epistemic complexity, and/or tractability, thus facilitating the joint management of environmental problems. This concept offers a new and nuanced approach to the role of technology in resolving sustainability challenges. I apply this framework to solar geoengineering, a set of proposed methods for planetary albedo modification to control anthropogenic global warming. By shifting the analytical focus from technological impacts on the climate system to technological implications for international cooperation, I show how solar geoengineering aggravates, rather than ameliorating, the problem structure of anthropogenic global warming.

Keywords: Technology; solar geoengineering; climate change; international cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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