The IICAT logo, our mission and methods, and suggestions on how to use this site
Richard Widick (IICAT:6/9/2023)
The IICAT logo embodies our mission.
It is meant to suggest that the world, as we know it and represent it (indicated by the map icon), rests on a foundation of perpetual labor (indicated by the two workers).
In striving to understand and represent this world and the desirous work that constitutes it as such— especially the work of international climate negotiators and the social movements for ethical climate action and governance—IICAT inserts itself into the struggle to conceive, design and build the economic, public and legal infrastructures necessary for a livable future on an environmentally friendly planet.
iicat.org is our media hub and research web log documenting, archiving and publicizing our activity towards this end.
If you are a scientist, scholar or theorist interested in contributing to this experiment in the public use of reason for the advancement of climate policy relevant understanding of global warming, climate governance and/or climate activism, please direct a query to richard.widick@orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu.
ON USING THIS SITE:
We suggest you begin here, on this page, with attention to the following basic principles of our analysis, including Widick’s 3-fold institutional division of modern everyday life into three dominant spheres of social practice: the economic, public and state (governance) spheres.
We think this basic theoretical stance provides the best starting point for understanding the modern predicament in general, and the predicament of global warming in particular.
Richard Widick has developed his Research Archive to embody this 3-fold institutional division in the organization of its menu structure, with a main page devoted to each of the three spheres, several auxiliary and self-explanatory additional main pages (the climate justice movement, etc.).
As we explain below, our work proceeds first of all by thinking dialectically (treating/seeing/describing all objects of our theoretical contemplation, from individuals to ecosystems, as emergent compromise formations between opposing forces) and institutionally (treating/seeing/describing everyday modern life in terms of our largely unconscious, necessary and habituated embeddedness in legally constituted, rights-driven, state-sponsored and regulated spheres of economic, public and political activities).
STARTING POINTS: Basic Principles of Our Analysis
The first principle of our analysis of the international climate wars can be stated simply: the planet’s climate, its world industry, its transnational social movements, and even its nation-states and their global cities are not constituted prior to the social and environmental relationships and struggles in which they are embedded, but rather through them.
These struggles are linked to a global crisis that is itself a set of interlinked crises, each of which is to some extent constitutive of our collective future: climate change, militarism, the economic abyss, perennial poverty in every country, and most perniciously the pervasive economic, racial and gender inequalities at every scale – community, nation and global system.
This interconnectedness of things means that change in one arena always has unintended consequences in related arenas.
Economic, social and environmental policy addressing the climate crisis therefore necessarily requires a systematic cultural analysis grounded in relational epistemology, as well as historical analysis of modern societies explaining how these contemporary relations came to be as they are.
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
We begin from the observation that the nation-states are modern to the extent that they continuously employ the human and physical sciences for social engineering, working to better organize themselves for survival and continuity by instituting laws and policies that govern peoples’ activities.
An expectation of constant change and progress is thereby established as a hallmark of modernity, an unshakable faith in and orientation toward the future, even if such improvements never fail to deliver unintended consequences, sometimes of disastrous proportions.
A basic mode of operation of nation-states and the inter-state system is to craft laws and policies, which they back by force, to encourage some and discourage other activities in the interest of managing the expectations of progress.
It can be observed, for example, that they make rules for debating and deciding on legislation and policy that will promote economic accumulation, public expression of certain ideas, and the distribution of decision making power.
At IICAT, we begin from this observation—that the various states and the UN employ legal means to constitute relatively autonomous domains of economic, public and political activities.
We then proceed to study these legal means and the relations between the spheres.
The key phrase here is relatively autonomous: it means that the three domains are precisely not totally independent, but rather reciprocally determining.
For example: Individuals engaging in directly economic activities of production for life, like farming, are given protection from public mobs of hungry people, who are not allowed to take the food by force, but who are allowed to stand somewhere off the farmer’s land, in the public space provided, to conduct directly public discussions of how they can and should go about getting some of the food and how they can make rules for distributing the food.
Direct production, discussion, and rule-making thus refer to the dominant value-making activities in the three reciprocally determining, relatively autonomous spheres.
By force of law, activities in each sphere are accorded some independence from the others, but observation shows, and our simplistic example of the farmer, the food, and the mob demonstrates how outcomes in each discrete sphere shape conditions in the others.
Plainly, this focus on positive legal speech and policy law as constitutive of social practice leaves open the question of myriad social phenomena that independently shape activities and outcomes in these three specific social spheres.
But we claim that legal speech and policy law alike take their meaning and constitute their force in shaping behaviors as much by what they leave unsaid and unspecified in rules and regulations as by what they state positively and directly enact legislatively.
Therefore, even as we proceed by studying what is said and done, we understand the meaning of said speech and action in terms including additional scrutiny of what has been left unsaid and undone.
To adopt this perspective on social organization and apply it to the struggle over emergent global climate governance is to take a definite theoretical stance, from which it follows that to fully grasp the implications of any given international climate action plan or climate treaty, journalists, policy-makers, scholars and voters will require historical analysis of the forces by which the present distribution of wealth and power among the several states was originally constituted.
That is largely what we mean by what is left unsaid—the historical dimension that has been neglected.
From this perspective, it follows that the actions of energy executives, climate action planners and climate activists are shaped by what they do not know and what they leave unsaid as much as what they know and say.
For example, United Nations-sponsored emission offset plans designed under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, intended to promote the preservation of forests in developing countries as carbon sinks, are intended to be paid for by rich northern industrial countries (and/or corporations) seeking to cheaply offset emissions at home, thereby avoiding more costly point source mitigation investments in sustainable technologies.
Understanding the popular, local resistance to such programs, and more effectively planning their successful execution of a just climate policy, would require a difficult accounting of the historical facts that determined the prevailing distribution of wealth and power locally on a specific project by project basis, as well as the historical process of deforestation in general in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, a long process of environmental destruction that set the global environmental and social conditions of the present in which rich and deforested northern countries try to promote the preservation of still existing native southern forests.
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We invite you to examine our work at IICAT, every facet of which is imbued to some extent with this basic conceptual apparatus.
For example, reading the Menu Structure of Richard Widick’s Research Archive, you will see the tripartite division of the three spheres built into the structure of his research, as follows: after introducing ourselves on the home page and the mission & methods page (which you are now reading), and then offering a climate change page to introduce the basic physical science of the problem in which we are interested, the menu offers globalization (his analysis of the economic sphere), civil society (his analysis of the public sphere), and global governance (his analysis of the legal sphere). Then we offer several additional self-explanatory menu items. >>> Read more about Richard Widick’s research.
In and through each division of our site, and all of our papers, and grounding everything that we do, you will see some reflection of this basic theory of human culture, this way of seeing and thus thinking about how modern societies organize themselves into nation-states by exercising the force of law to constitute relatively autonomous spheres of activity.
At IICAT, our work as knowledge-driven intellectuals, policy-driven social engineers, and justice-driven activists is to better understand and shape the relations between these spheres in any given municipality or state and among the various states, as far as these relations concern global warming, climate change, and the emergent international regime of economic and environmental law.
We are intent on continuously refining this theory, our research, and hence our working knowledge of the globalizing capitalist world economic (culture) system, emergent global civil society, and emergent global climate self-governance.
With this work and the knowledge we produce, our great hope it to contribute constructively to solving the great social and ecological problems facing humanity.
And in our view, global warming and climate change represent the biggest and most complex problem we presently face.