Measure-ability: The Paris Agreement’s Transparency Regime and the Making of the Calculating State

Transparency is at the center of the Paris climate regime and one of the key mechanisms by which it seeks to catalyze voluntary climate action. In this article, we analyze the micropolitics of transparency and the power that resides in the seemingly technical and mundane reporting provisions of the Paris Agreement. Informed by Michel Foucault’s decentered account of power and government, we trace the ways of thinking and reasoning that underpin the Paris Agreement’s push to disclose, measure, and evaluate climate performance and how its complex transparency apparatus seeks to arrange things so that states behave as they ought. We identify measure-ability as the governmentality that gives the Paris Agreement’s transparency regime a particular matrix of means and ends. It is a liberal form of climate rule, we argue, that seeks to foster measure-able states that do not need to be governed by others but will govern themselves.