Global climate governance as boundary object: Making the meaning of the anthropocene

Governing climate change in the Anthropocene is essentially transformation governance: either a transformation towards sustainability or a transformation through unabated climate change. Transition research has sought to understand how transformations unfold. This chapter seeks to take advantage of this knowledge and make it productively available for global climate governance. It does so by briefly reviewing both strands of literature - transition research and international governance theory - and exploring the ontological basis of both fields with a view to develop an integrated theoretical framework. The article conceptualises the governance complex for climate change as a boundary object that translates a largely external pressure - global climate change - into something that is amenable and provides direction at the level of the socio-technical systems under transformation. As such, it is designated to reconfigure and endogenise unsustainable routines and deep structure variables that are otherwise difficult to change from within the socio-technical systems.