Constructing Security for the Twin Transitions

The Tragedy of EU Law at the Intersection of Climate and AI Governance

Abstract

As the European Union (EU) continues to pursue a strategy of twinning the green and digital transitions, heightened expectations have been invested in the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to combat climate change. Importantly, relying on AI to address the climate crisis gives rise to a range of security concerns. Yet, only rarely have such concerns been the focus of critical attention. Adopting a narrative theoretical lens, this paper critically examines the construction and contestation of security within three EU regulatory frameworks at the intersection of climate and AI governance – the Critical Raw Materials Act, the AI Act, and the Digital Services Act. The paper argues that these regulations fall within a genre of tragic governance. Each regulation romantically positions the EU as a heroic values-based actor, driven by green, rights-based and democratic ambitions. In practice, however, these ideals are undermined by the fatal flaw of restricted vision – security threats at the intersection of climate and AI governance are framed and addressed in terms that end up legitimating harmful dynamics of exploitation against local communities affected by resource mining, people on the move, and digital activists, whilst neglecting the logics of overconsumption, border externalisation, and data extractive informational capitalism that render such actors more susceptible to control and domination than protection and empowerment. At the same time, the paper also identifies a number of footholds within each regulation that provide a basis for dominant understandings of security to be contested. While such footholds are unlikely to completely overturn the dominant security narratives that underpin these regulations, they offer possibilities to construct counter-narratives that resist their inevitability – potentially creating space for future reimaginings of EU law beyond its tragic present.