1,721,171 research outputs found
‘Citizen-practitioners’: the critical path for a low carbon transition?
No full textThe consumer-citizen is widely identified as a key agent of environmental change in political discourse: individuals are framed as consumers and environmental change as a matter of consumer choice (e.g. Hobson, 2002). Much attention has focused on shaping consumer preferences, targeting individual attitudes and values on the assumption that this will lead to desired behaviours and choices. More recently, there has been a shift in focus towards facilitating the consumption of a range of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies in the home through policy mechanisms such as CERT, CESP and the proposed Green Deal. Criticisms of extant models of behaviour change, and the associated assumptions about individual agency and the drivers of consumption, are now well rehearsed (e.g. Shove, 2010). Yet recent calls for situated accounts of the practices, contexts and material settings of everyday life that enable or disable social transformation have seen only limited empirical application and debate. In this paper, we follow a number of socio-technical (energy efficiency) "experiments" in homes in England and Wales, and explore their consequences for domestic practices and for wider social (and political) transformation. We consider the ways in which a practice-based understanding of the consequences of technological change offers new and productive insights for engaging household(er)s as political subjects and delivering reductions in domestic energy consumption, which may in turn support a transition to a low carbon energy system
The politics of urban climate futures: Lessons from urban agriculture
No full textTaken together, this volume constitutes a systematic mapping, exploration, and interrogation of the nature of agency and empowerment in urban climate politics and action. It brings together contributions from scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds whose research focus on a variety of geographical areas and political positions. The breadth and depth of these contributions– theoretically, conceptually, empirically, and methodologically– speak to the driving questions outlined in the introduction to the book: who are the novel agents in urban climate governance; how are they empowered; and what is the empowering effect of increased agents and agency in urban climate governance? In this brief concluding chapter, we reflect on these contributions and synthesize the main arguments presented. This leads to key lessons on agency and empowerment in urban climate politics and opens upchallenging perspectives for a future research agenda on these themes in the politics of urban climate futures
Promises and concerns of the urban century: Increasing agency and contested empowerment
No full textStressing the relevance of urbanization in social, economic, and environmental
developments, the twenty-first century is frequently referred to as ‘the first urban
century’ or simply ‘the urban century’ (Gilbert et al. 2009; Hall & Pfeiffer, 2013;
Heynen, 2014; Nijkamp&Kourtit, 2013). The numbers speak for themselves: as of
2008 the world’s urban population was larger than the world’s rural population.
By 2050, some 6 billion people are expected to live in cities and urban areas – twice
as many as in 2000. Most rapid urbanization will take place in Asia and Africa,
where urban populations are expected to grow from around 30 per cent at the start
of the century to more than 50 per cent by mid-century (UN-HABITAT, 2016).
Already more than 70 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) is generated
in cities, and with increasing urbanization cities will become even more dominant
in the world economy (McKinsey Global Institute, 2011; World Bank, 2009b).
Some 70 per cent of global resources are consumed in cities (including energy and
potable water) and they account for 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions
– mainly as a result of the high consumerist lifestyle that characterizes
modern urban life (Dodman, 2009; UN, 2016)
Conclusions
No full textThere is a well-known story in climate change circles about the campaign run by opponents of action on climate change in the United States in the run-up to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. A prominent ad in the campaign featured a stereotypical soccer mom, who declared: “The government wants to take away my SUV” (Schneider 2002). The ad is usually read in terms of the fossil fuel corporations’ strategy to undermine Kyoto, and action on climate change more generally, and the use of AstroTurf initiatives - corporate front organizations claiming to represent the grassroots - to advance that strategy. But there is another possible reading of this campaign, and this specific ad, which the framework developed in this book helps to illuminate. That is, contained within its narrative is the intertwining of devices, desires, and dissent in ways that help us understand how and why high-carbon practices and economies are so robust. It is precisely the intertwined sets of affective desires (motherhood and social obligation, as well as possession itself, as in “my SUV”) and the devices that are the objects of those desires (the SUV and its embedding in automobility as a whole, the soccer game) that serve to organize dissent against action on climate change. Many of the chapters in this book have shown, in diverse and often mundane ways, similar combinations of devices, desires, and dissent that operate to block low-carbon transitions. These ways are deeply socially and culturally embedded. Thus, the chapters in this book underscore how difficult it is to produce change, and how much work is involved. The high-carbon world is robust. Our framework is useful in helping us understand how this world comes into being, the forms of culture and politics that hold it together, and the processes through which it might fall apart. This is an important conclusion because much of the contemporary discourse on climate change policy and governance seems to assume that if certain barriers were removed, then a low-carbon transition would start as a smooth and manageable transition, from “here” to “there.”
Introduction
No full textThe footprint of climate change is now clearly visible within the culture industries. Museum exhibitions are held, newspaper headlines constructed, novels are written, films are screened and various art forms are provoked by and around the themes of the changing climate and its societal implications. This explicit cultural dimension, alongside the complex scientific, economic, social and political facets of climate change, is attracting increasing academic attention (Hulme 2009; Crow and Boykoff 2014). Yet despite the growing interest in climate change across the social sciences, the cultural domain is often reified, limiting its scope to these cultural industries and thus treating it as a separate sphere of social life analyzed in isolation from other dimensions of the climate problematic. Equally problematic are analyses that tend to relegate the cultural dimensions of climate change to a relatively simple set of factors that can be used to explain the more important questions of, for example, how and why individual behavior will or will not shift in relation to energy consumption, or why actors take certain positions within the international negotiations. In this book, we seek to take a different approach, one in which the cultural responses to climate change are considered as also economic, social and political. In short, we seek to explore the cultural politics of climate change. In this book, we want to build on initial attempts to think about climate politics as cultural politics. Adopting this perspective requires that we think of the nature and workings of power as always and already cultural, and of culture - the meanings, artifacts and practices that animate society - as intimately political. Previous such attempts include works on social practices surrounding energy use (Shove and Walker 2010; Shove and Spurling 2013), some of the literature on carbon market politics (Descheneau and Paterson 2011; various contributions to Newell and Boykoff 2012; and contributions to Stephan and Lane 2014), some of the work on media and communications (Crow and Boykoff 2014) and cultural representation more broadly (Boykoff et al. 2010). Nevertheless, we aim to go beyond the important and useful contribution of these works in a number of ways
Promises and concerns of the urban century : increasing agency and contested empowerment
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The rise and fall of the global climate polity
No full textWhereas most of the chapters go ‘down’ to the micro-practices of climate governance, this chapter aims to take a step ‘up’ to elucidate a clearer picture or model of what a global climate polity is in terms of its totality: how are the elements of a global polity structured and what makes a polity a polity? In this chapter, first the question of whether analysis of localized governmental techniques needs an accompanying consideration of a bigger picture or context is considered. Next the global climate polity is theorised beyond the models of hierarchy and anarchy using a generic theory of what constitutes a polity via an elaboration of Foucault’s ideas about how changing objects of governance become central to political entities. The third part looks back briefly asking when a global climate polity thus conceived could be said to have evolved. The final section peers forwards to consider differing visions of the demise of the global climate polity as we know it: will it be superseded by a more encompassing ‘Earth System polity’ centered on governing not only the climate but also other interrelated geophysical systems? Or could it splinter as it is recognized that the climate is too complex and feral to be a governable object
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