Object-oriented theories have previously been used to understand how
the global climate and other entities have been rendered discrete,
malleable and salient objects of contestation and governance and that
these ‘governance-objects’ structure polities domestically and
internationally. However, there has been a failure to distinguish different
kinds of governance-objects that have fundamentally different
characteristics and implications. This article contributes to objectoriented approaches by revisiting definitions of ‘governance-objects’ and
developing a key distinction between ‘weakly’ and ‘strongly’ malleable
objects, arguing the former are malleable only in terms of (not)
perturbing them in relation to a ‘natural’ or otherwise given baseline.
Strongly malleable objects are in principle governable along multiple
dimensions and in terms of their purpose or telos. The weak/strong
distinction is developed and used to understand implications for
international climate politics of ‘geoengineering’ – schemes for the
deliberate modification of the climate. Large-scale carbon removal and,
potentially, solar radiation modification techniques are billed as
necessary responses to the fraught politics of mitigation but have the
potential to shift the framing of the climate from a ‘weakly’ to a ‘strongly’
malleable object: Far from circumventing political logjams by separating
‘the climate’ from societal processes linked to emissions, this would
‘untether’ climate governance from the aim of returning to pre-industrial
conditions, politicizing the climate in new ways. The previously elided
international fractiousness of ‘global’ climate politics would come
properly to the fore, and preservation of the climate could then be
superseded by other goals, notably economistic ones