Institutional challenges of climate geoengineering1

Institutions are hard to define – so difficult in fact that the very idea has been described as an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1955) that can only be clarified through argumentation. Broadly, across the social sciences, the term is applied to ‘organizations with leaders, memberships, clients, resources and knowledge and also to socialized ways of looking at the world as shaped by communication, information transfer, and patterns of status and association’ (O’Riordan, Cooper, Jordan, Rayner, Richards, Runci, et al., 1998, p. 346). Writing in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Science, Gould (1991, p. 290) defines an institution as a ‘locus of regularized or crystallized principle of conduct or, action, or behaviour that governs a crucial area of social life that endures over time’. For some theorists (e.g. Giddens, 1986; Smith, 1988) the idea of temporal stability looms large in their definitions, but for others even …