Future imaginings: organizing in response to climate change (original) (raw)
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Climate change has rapidly emerged as a major threat to our future. Indeed the increasingly dire projections of increasing global average temperatures and escalating extreme weather events highlight the existential challenge that climate change presents for humanity. In this editorial article we outline how climate change not only presents real, physical threats but also challenges the way we conceive of the broader economic, political and social order. We asked ourselves (and the contributors to this special issue) how we can imagine alternatives to our current path of ever escalating greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth? Through reference to the contributions that make up this special issue, we suggest that critically engaging with the concept of social, economic and political imaginaries can assist in tackling the conceptual and organizational challenges climate change poses. Only by questioning current sanitized and market-oriented interpretations of the environment, and embracing the catharsis and loss that climate change will bring, can we open up space for new future imaginings.
"Social futures of global climate change: A structural phenomenology"
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2016
Despite compelling scientific research that affirms the reality of climate change, including global warming, social and political engagement with the issue remains highly contested. To identify the cultural and social structurations of alternative approaches to climate change, this study draws on a temporally theorized ‘structural phenom- enology’ of social action and organization. Through hermeneutic analysis, it examines selected prominent contemporary constructions of global climate change. The general framework of structural phenomenology, orthogonal to, yet compatible with, field theory, is used empirically to identify various wider social domains of action. The cultural structures of domain practices are described by how they operate through, span, or hybridically combine alternative registers of temporally structured meaningful action – each with its distinctive meaningful logic. The study examines cultural structures in four domains con- cerned with global climate change – science and policy analysis, conservative skepticism and denial, geopolitical security, and environmental movements. Climate-change con- structions within these four domains differ in the ways that they compose various regis- ters among diachronic, strategic, pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic social action temporalities. The general potential of structural phenomenology for re-envisioning institutional arrangements of modern societies is considered, as are the implications of the analysis for research on and social engagements with climate change.
Contested Imaginaries and the Cultural Political Economy of Climate Change
Levy, David L. and Andre Spicer (Forthcoming, 2013). Contested Imaginaries and the Cultural Political Economy of Climate Change. Organization., 2013
"This paper analyzes the evolving cultural political economy of climate change by developing the concept of ‘climate imaginaries’. These are shared socio-semiotic systems that structure a field around a set of shared understandings of the climate. Climate imaginaries imply a particular mode of organizing production and consumption, and a prioritization of environmental and cultural values. We use this concept to examine the struggle among NGOs, business, and state agencies over four core climate imaginaries. These are ‘fossil fuels forever’, ‘climate apocalypse’, ‘techno-market’, and ‘sustainable lifestyle’. These imaginaries play a key role in contentions over responses to climate change, and we outline three main episodes in the past two decades: the carbon wars of the 1990s, an emergent carbon compromise between 1998 and 2008, and a climate impasse from 2009 to the present. However, climate imaginaries only become dominant when they connect with wider popular interests and identities, and align with economic and technological aspects of the energy system to constitute ‘value regimes’. "
Beyond Technical Fixes: climate solutions and the great derangement
Climate and Development
Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.
Changing Climate, Changing Economy: how to think about Climate Change
The purpose of this article is to explore how the impacts of climate change can be best addressed through changes in economic systems, and in the macroeconomic theories used to help us understand and guide our economies 1 . What I especially want to spell out is the focus that climate change will put on issues of poverty and inequality.
Climate change forever: the future of an idea
Scottish Geographical Journal, 2020
The idea of a changing climate has been present in most cultural formations throughout recorded history, and yet the latter decades of the twentieth century animated the idea of climate change is new and powerful ways. This essay reflects on the possible future of this idea, comparing approaches to climate change that frame it either as an engineering problem, a new locus of politics or as a human predicament. The idea of climate change seems unlikely to go away – notwithstanding the success or otherwise of polices designed to stabilise the climate. It therefore warrants considered reflection on the possible ways in which this idea accompanies and guides future human development.
The Socio-Political Relations of Climate Catastrophe: Towards Systemic Transformation
Anthropogenic global warming is perhaps the most well-known crisis facing the human species, along with all other species, this century. Yet despite the gravity and urgency of the crisis, international attempts to prevent or mitigate climate change have so far failed dismally. This article begins by examining the recent scientific evidence on the scale of the climate crisis, arguing that conventional policy-making approaches fatally underestimate the reality of our predicament. While the latest studies indicate that we are in grave danger of breaching a global climate tipping point, the inadequacy of the human response is itself symptomatic of the deeper civilizational crisis of which climate change is merely one manifestation. The paper then interrogates this stark contradiction between official government recognition of the potentially devastating security implications of climate change and the continued abject failure to mitigate these security implications, by moving beyond a symptom-oriented approach, and confronting the following question: how has the present structure of the international system itself contributed to the acceleration of climate change while inhibiting effective national and international responses? This article thus investigates the systemic context of climate change using a combination of theoretical approaches, including Complexity Theory, Historical Sociology and Political Marxism. It argues that unless the structure of the global political economy, its ideology, and its value-system undergo are fundamental transformation, policy efforts to prevent, mitigate or even adapt to climate change cannot succeed.
Mapping the catastrophic imaginary The organisation of environmental politics through climate change
Environment and Planning E, 2023
Stories about the end of the world continue to pile up daily. There isn't any sense of respite from the litany of horrors we are presented with. The eerie atmosphere of ecological catastrophe colonises our political imaginations. Understanding how we collectively imagine the end of the world, and thus how we understand what is happening, why and how, as well as what we must and can do, is politically crucial. The vast tapestry of environmental crises makes the role of the imagination central; not only in terms of being able to know the crises, but in setting out what is concretely possible and what is cruel fantasy. This paper sets out to map the imaginary of ecological catastrophe as drawn from the body of non-fiction literature that fuels much contemporary environmental activism in the Global North. Taking up the work of a series of environmental writer-activists in order to outline the various refrains that comprise the core of the eco-catastrophic imaginary, I aim to sketch how the slow violence of the present is being narrated as a political event, and what possibilities for averting disaster appear possible. It is the argument of this paper that how we collectively imagine the cacophony of environmental disasters presently unfolding shapes the field of political action.
Reevaluating the Concern of Climate Change
International Journal of Environment and Climate Change, 2024
Climate change is inevitably a defining characteristic of this century, which is inattentively attributed to anthropogenic factors far beyond its actualities. The paper challenges the prevailing narrative, proposing that global warming and climate shifts are inherent to Earth's history rather than primarily driven by human activities. It argues that climate change policies impose unwarranted economic strains on nations and impede technological advancement. Scientific assertions of human-induced climate change are scrutinized, with a focus on manipulated data and selective presentation to reinforce the narrative of impending global catastrophe. The exclusive emphasis on curbing greenhouse gas emissions is critiqued for fostering costly and ineffective measures, ultimately stalling economic growth and job creation. The study challenges the prevailing discourse on climate change and socioeconomic challenges posed by climate migrations, advocating for a nuanced understanding that considers historical climatic shifts and questions the validity of current research methodologies, encouraging a more comprehensive examination of its multifaceted dynamics and potential societal impacts.