The inchoative failure of climate governance: Artificial Immanence and the ontological challenge of the post-COP30 Amazon
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the structural failure of global climate governance as revealed by COP30, held in Belém in November 2025. It argues that the inability of international climate negotiations to protect Amazonian ecosystems stems not from a lack of political ambition, but from the ontological architecture of the post-war economic order itself. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon's ontogenesis, the article distinguishes immanent structures – the legal, financial and computational architectures that operate beneath deliberation – from Artificial Immanence, understood as the deliberate reincorporation of technical objects into the logic of the ecosystems that form their associated milieu. Methodologically, the study combines participant observation conducted during COP30 with a comparative textual analysis of two primary treaty texts, the 1948 Havana Charter and the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, read alongside the COP30 Action Agenda Final Report. From that comparison the article extracts a four-axis rubric, termed an inchoation index, which measures the degree to which an institution encodes or deletes milieu-feedback. The analysis finds that the abandonment of the Havana Charter installed a closed-loop architecture whose operating logic still governs climate policy, and it reads two COP30 outcomes – the Tropical Forest Forever Facility and the operationalisation of Article 6 carbon markets – as outputs of that same loop. The article concludes by proposing an inchoative approach as an operational horizon for redesigning the relationship between technical systems and living milieus.
Source: Novos Cadernos NAEA
Institution: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7207515631