Taming uncertainty: Climate policymaking and the spatial politics of privatized advice

This chapter examines the phenomenon of climate consulting, a new and rapidly growing field of professional services. Presenting findings from an in-depth investigation of climate adaptation consulting in Australia, it draws on John Allen’s three spatial vocabularies of power—territorial, networked, and topological—to highlight three different ways in which private sector advisors are shaping public policymaking. The chapter shows how the work of consultants has been critical to rendering the complex public policy problem of adaptation governable, largely through the unproblematic translation of pre-existing technical and managerial approaches to decision-making under uncertainty for new existential risks posed by climate change. The use of consultants in this way reconfigures public policymaking in ways that simultaneously stimulate new economies of expertise and a crisis in expertise. This has profound implications for the ability of public policy to effect the transformational changes required to tackle pressing environmental issues like climate change.