Manjima Anjana

The project investigates how epistemic power—the authority to define what counts as valid knowledge—shapes the framing, governance, and legitimisation of climate solutions within the global climate regime. It focuses on Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies, which aim to capture and store atmospheric CO at scale and are increasingly portrayed as indispensable for achieving “net-zero” emissions. While framed as necessary innovations, critics argue that CDR risks entrenching fossil fuel dependency by advancing technological fixes instead of systemic emission reductions. This tension raises fundamental questions about how climate knowledge and governance priorities are constructed, and whose interests they serve.

The project asks two interrelated questions: first, how does the global climate regime, anchored in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), prioritise particular climate solutions, and what governance rationalities and discursive strategies underpin these choices? Second, how do CDR technologies, as sociotechnical systems co-produced with global institutions, reflect and reshape contestations in climate governance?

The research aims to understand how epistemic power is mobilised within international regimes to legitimise and sustain specific climate pathways, while also examining how technological artefacts like CDR function as sites of political contestation. Methodologically, the project combines critical political ecology, critical discourse analysis, and case studies to interrogate the knowledge–power nexus shaping climate governance. In doing so, it seeks to reveal how dominant governance logics—often structured by corporate influence and market-based mechanisms—are reinforced, while also identifying openings for more plural, participatory, and locally grounded alternatives.

Biography:

Manjima Anjana is a PhD scholar at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick (2025–2029). Her research investigates the epistemic politics of climate change mitigation, focusing on Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and Solar Radiation Management (SRM) as sites where the nexus of knowledge and power shapes contested and evolving climate futures. Broadly, her work engages with critical environmental politics, international political economy, and the philosophy of technology, drawing on Gramscian and critical ecological approaches to interrogate how climate solutions are framed and governed. Beyond climate politics, she has been a research fellow with the Global Research Forum on Diaspora and Transnationalism since 2021, where she has explored questions of mobility, justice, and governance. Her research is driven by an interest in understanding how knowledge regimes and political imaginaries shape the fraught and fluid architectures of global governance.

Publications:

Book review of 'Geoengineering discourse confronting climate change: the move from margins to mainstream in science, news media, and politics' in the journal ' Environmental Politics' https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2025.2481706

2025 Cohort

Email:

Supervisory Team:

Dr Madeleine Fagan

Dr Caroline Kuzemko