The Space to Think is Not a Luxury

A Conversation Outgrowing Its Infrastructure

The solar geoengineering conversation is likely to grow quickly over the next few years. Governments that hadn't previously considered solar radiation management are beginning to do so. Research institutions across the Global South are weighing whether and how to engage. Funders are asking new questions. A growing number of organizations — including the Degrees Initiative, the American Geophysical Union, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), Council on Energy, Environment and Water, Environmental Defense Fund, and DSG — have been doing important work to build capacity in civil society and enable people encountering SRM for the first time to do their own thinking. But most civil society groups are still arriving at the issue not through years of gradual exposure, but through headlines, conference invitations, and direct asks for their position.

This expansion is happening at a moment when international governance is under extraordinary, almost impossible-to-exaggerate, strain. Confidence in multilateral institutions is eroding. Norms that once (mostly) structured how states and institutions approached shared challenges are fraying. The assumption that there will be time and institutional capacity to sort out governance later — that someone, somewhere, is handling it — is less warranted than ever. 

Against that backdrop, the way new entrants are introduced to SRM is not just unhelpful — it is actively counterproductive.

What most new entrants currently face — outside of limited deliberate learning opportunities — is pressure to position themselves quickly by choosing between two false poles. On one side are actors advocating implicitly for deployment readiness, often treating governance as friction to be minimized and the trajectory of research as effectively settled. On the other are advocacy groups demanding immediate prohibition, applying the urgency and mobilization logic of other climate fights to a domain where those tactics are counterproductive. Both claim to represent the consensus view. Both present themselves as speaking for broad constituencies. But most of the people who will eventually need to make decisions about SRM have never even heard of it, much less thought about it. There is no consensus to claim.

Both poles share a common theme.  Beyond their competing conclusions, they are both demanding speed. You are here to agree with us, and you need to do it now. Your job is to ratify a conclusion that was reached before you arrived. This leaves almost no space for an institution, a government, or a community encountering SRM for the first time to do the most basic and necessary thing: to think about it.

Why Process Determines Outcome

What both poles miss is that even if you are right on the substance, if you tell people the decision was made before they had a chance to weigh in, insist that something is inevitable and obvious, you ensure backlash. Strip someone of agency in a process and you do not gain an ally — you generate resistance. Not necessarily because they disagree with any particular conclusion, but because they were never given a legitimate role in reaching it. This is not specific to SRM. It is a consistent feature of how contested decisions work: where the process is not experienced as legitimate, the result is not resolution but indefinite contestation.

The impulse to capture uncommitted actors — to recruit them to a side before they have had time to assess the question on their own terms — is understandable as campaign logic. But SRM is not and cannot be a campaign. Open questions, uncommitted actors, institutions still weighing their views — these are not problems to be solved through faster mobilization. They are the conditions under which genuine deliberation is still possible.

We believe protecting those conditions is concrete work. It means transparency systems that make research activity publicly legible. It means engagement pathways that are proportional and genuine — not extractive consultations that produce a report and then end, but sustained regional partnerships where each stage creates value on its own terms and opens the next. It means working through local institutions in climate-vulnerable regions, developing tools and frameworks that reflect the priorities and political realities of the communities using them. And it means constructing pathways through which people who bear the greatest climate risks can shape decisions that were previously made without them.

This is slow work by design. The governance infrastructure that legitimate deliberation requires cannot be compressed without breaking. But in a domain where deployment could begin before most of the world has had a chance to weigh in, starting that slow work now is not cautious preparation — it is the most important intervention available. 

What We Believe About Research

And here it is important to be clear. 

We believe research is vital. Research — conducted responsibly and governed credibly — will tell us whether SRM could actually reduce the climate harms that vulnerable communities are already experiencing.

The argument we are making is not that all research must wait until governance is complete. Governance is never complete — it develops through practice, not prior to it. What legitimacy requires is not universal consent but proportional, credible process: governance that scales with the type and stakes of the work, earns trust through transparency and genuine engagement, and gives affected communities real standing without giving any single actor a veto. The goal is not to gate research but to give it the infrastructure it needs to survive (and benefit from) public scrutiny and produce outcomes the world can live with. 

DSG’s work is to build the regional partnerships, the engagement pathways, the capacity in civil society, the governance frameworks that together create the conditions under which genuine deliberation can happen. DSG's work is rooted in a conviction that the communities most affected by climate change must have real standing in shaping how SRM is governed — not as an afterthought, but as a structural feature from the beginning. And not only as a moral imperative, but as a practical need.

That work has many dimensions. But one is particularly relevant here: communities do not need to scrutinize every experiment to deliberate meaningfully about SRM, but they do need reason to trust that research is being conducted within structures that are credible, transparent, and accountable. Without that, even well-designed participatory processes rest on sand. This is the specific gap that the Solar Geoengineering Research Governance Platform — a collaborative effort among scientific associations, policy organizations, and civil society groups — is working to fill: shared governance infrastructure that makes responsible SRM research easier to conduct, easier to trust, and harder to misrepresent. By making credible research governance visibly possible, it changes what new entrants encounter — from opacity and competing claims to a process and credible structures they have reason to trust.

None of this resolves the underlying tension between those who want to move fast and those who want to stop. But it changes the terms — from a binary demand for allegiance to a landscape in which informed, legitimate participation is visibly possible.

What all this work produces may look less decisive than the alternatives — less visible than a forced conclusion. But forced conclusions that lack legitimacy are not actually decisions. They are positions that will be relitigated indefinitely. If the space for genuine deliberation collapses, the result is not a clean victory for either pole. It is a permanently contested landscape in which the communities most vulnerable to climate impacts — the ones with the most at stake — have the least voice in shaping what comes next.

The space to think, the agency to participate, the legitimacy that makes outcomes durable — these are not luxuries. They are the conditions under which the world can arrive at decisions about solar geoengineering that actually hold, whatever those decisions turn out to be.