The way that international climate policy develops is not exclusively the result of interstate negotiations. Leaning on the work of Gramsci, civil society is regarded as a site of negotiation over that which is considered to be adequate or legitimate in terms of climate policy.Philip Bedall investigates the formation and contestation of this consensus during the 2009 World Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, on the basis of the demands of transnational NGOs and social movements, and in doing so, makes the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe manageable. He shows that NGOs and movements cannot be divided according to a binary of affirmative and revolutionary, and traces the affirmative essence of articulated critique with the help of the methods of deconstruction. In this way, he manages to give a nuanced evaluation of the protagonists and their demands.
