Climate Actions

Transformative Mechanisms for Social Mobilisation

Laurence L Delina

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319918839
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319918846
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Climate change remains a challenge that needs to be addressed at its core, particularly the rapid reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This book discusses strategies for climate actions by synthesizing insights from a set of international 'contemporary social action group's' surveys. Based on these Delina introduces a synthesis of mechanisms for generating change, designed around 5 main themes: relationships (relating); value-based messages (messaging); alternatives (visioning); diversity (webbing); and communication (interacting). This book will be of great value to all academics and practitioners interested in the future development of our climate.

© The Author(s) 2019

Laurence L DelinaClimate Actionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91884-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Laurence L. Delina¹

(1)

Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Laurence L. Delina

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

While the Paris Agreement can be hailed as an important milestone for global climate action, addressing the climate challenge by curtailing future emissions remains an important agenda for climate activism. More than before, the climate action movement needs to be strengthened of its campaigns, tactics, and strategies. Despite the heterogeneity of the many actors comprising this movement and the variations in their campaigns, tactics, and strategies, each of these actors can be strengthened in its capacity for a series of and parallel climate actions, in terms of better understanding of climate-related issues, logical response particularly its solutions, and engagement through behavioural changes in consumption and supporting alternatives to fossil-based energy regimes.

Keywords

Climate actionsParis AgreementSocial movementClimate activism

End Abstract

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change—the result of a long journey that begun in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 with significant stops in Kyoto, Bali, Copenhagen, and elsewhere—ideally should have included a ‘legal instrument…to achieve…stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system…[which] should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner’ (Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (United Nations 1992). Despite significant advances in scientific understanding that inadequate climate change mitigation could increase ‘the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems’ (IPCC 2014: 8), the international ambition to mitigate climate change remains elusive.

The Paris Agreement is a vital step to meet this ambition, but it still misses on key areas of climate actions required to stave off the worst impacts. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) incorporated into the Agreement, even if attained, are still too weak to ensure that dangerous climate change is avoided (Climate Action Tracker 2015). Also missing is the strong review and enforcement mechanism to ensure the Parties are locked into meeting Article 2 of the UNFCCC and the 2015 aspirational, but not mandatory, contributions: ‘Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.’ Absent these, and just like its Kyoto Protocol predecessor, the Paris Agreement will fail to deliver the necessary climate actions and, without strong and active public engagement, it will also fail to pressure decision-makers in regional, national, and subnational jurisdictions.

Given how high the stakes are, strengthened climate actions remain vital in disrupting the current order. Peoples must be mobilised so they move from the balcony to the barricades, bystanders are transformed into activists, and adversaries are demobilised. Climate actions remain necessary until fossil fuels are kept in the ground, organised resistance from incumbent industrial actors and their allies in politics and the media is dismantled, vulnerable countries are provided necessary support to adapt to climate change and contribute to its mitigation, and a just transition to a sustainable economy—one that is not hinged on industrial capitalism, unfettered accumulation and growth, and the monetised terms of economic value—is addressed at a pace suggested by our improved understanding of climate science.

When governments fail to effectively mitigate climate change, the climate action movement must strengthen the pressure it places on power-holders. The climate action movement—comprise of diverse and heterogeneous peoples, climate action groups, networks, alliances, and coalitions (cf. Giugni and Grasso 2015)—seems to be the only hope to achieve this change. While this movement may be considered transnational because of the boundary defiance of the climate challenge,¹ it is still (and must be) grounded in the locality of individual’s and small groups’ social actions. Local actions are not only compatible with transnational climate action; they are also intertwined. Nonviolent strategies, tactics, and other campaign approaches must be strengthened and aligned to meet these unachieved goals.²

Climate activism has already driven climate actions. It was essential, among others, to bring the climate issue into popular understanding and mobilise peoples into climate actions. Examples of this activism include the 2014 People’s Climate March ,³ stopping the Keystone Pipeline project, applying pressure to universities, churches, and other institutions to divest from fossil fuels, and propelling the ongoing small-scale, local -based transitions through households, communities, and neighbourhoods, local governments and cities, and businesses. This cache of successes demonstrates that the social movement for climate actions has achieved change, albeit slowly. Indeed, the fossil fuel regime—industries and their supporters in governments and media—still occupy prominence in decision-making.

Studies about the climate action movement have already gained salience. The literature on its strategies (e.g. Delina et al. 2014; Klein 2014; Diesendorf 2009), ethnography (e.g. Rosewarne et al. 2014; Foran 2014), and solidarities and networks (e.g. Routledge 2012; Featherstone 2005, 2008; Cumbers et al. 2008), among others, has been enriched. These works have, in effect, also expanded the already established corpus of knowledge about social movements (e.g. Tilly 1995, 2002, 2008; Moyer 1987, 2001; Mann 1993; Ganz 2004), of which climate actions are part of. This book contributes to this corpus by highlighting the continuing relevance of climate actions—including the mobilisations of peoples and groups—to drive behavioral , sociotechnical, political, and economic changes.

Climate mitigation, indeed, has to be understood not only as a technological transition project but also inclusively, if not more importantly, as a work on social-political-economic as well as behavioral transformations. Acknowledging the sociotechnicality of climate actions, this book highlights the insights drawn from surveys of contemporary social change groups—whom I solicited for their experiential knowledge in 2014 and 2017–2018—as key complements to an already much richer literature on the technologies of the transition. Although admittedly climate action groups adopt different approaches and pathways to the transition to a low carbon future, their heterogeneous insights could generate new ways of thinking about making and producing effective climate actions. This book confirms some of the fundamental approaches in creating effective social mobilisation campaigns effective and, at the same time, underscores their continuing utility for spurring future climate actions.

Climate actions can be articulated as the campaigns, tactics, and strategies to achieve the active participation and engagement of publics, small groups, and communities primarily for, but not strictly limited to, collective climate mitigation. At the centre of this thinking are the publics, engaging in transformative climate actions. These actions need to go well beyond the traditional approaches of lobbying power-holders and voting in elections, and, instead, follow and extend what Gene Sharp (1973b) has conceptualised as citizen nonviolent actions. According to Sharp , these actions are classified into: (1) Protest and persuasion, non-cooperation, and intervention (e.g. active participation in mass rallies, teach-ins, media campaigns, strikes, boycotts, and street demonstrations); (2) Other forms of social, political, and economic non-cooperation (e.g. fundraising, communicating messages, and refusing to cooperate with governments); and (3) Community demonstrations of alternatives.

Peter North (2011) has developed a taxonomy to relate the concept of social mobilisations with climate actions. According to North, climate activists engage the public using two broad approaches: outward-focused and prefigurative . On one hand, ‘outward-focused’ climate activism is seen through confrontational protests, demonstrations, and lobbying marches to put pressure on political elites to act. This resonates well with the first two of Sharp ’s (1973b) classification mentioned above. On the other hand, ‘prefigurative activism’ engages beyond the ‘what needs to be done’ question and instead elaborates action that goes beyond diagnosis and prognosis (cf. Snow 2013). This focuses on the individual and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Relating
• 3. Messaging
• 4. Visioning
• 5. Webbing
• 6. Interacting
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter