Leveraging collective action and environmental literacy to address complex sustainability challenges (original) (raw)
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Journal of Geoscience Education, 2014
In recent years, various climate change education efforts have been launched, including federally (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, etc.) and privately funded projects. In addition, climate literacy and energy literacy frameworks have been developed and deployed, and both have been reviewed and endorsed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This paper describes a communitybased effort to promote climate and energy literacy: the CLEAN Network (originally the Climate Literacy Network). We describe results from a member survey about the importance of the network to the members' professional lives and review the development and position of the network within the larger community of climate and energy literacy stakeholders. The CLEAN Network was first formed in 2008 to support climate literacy efforts, largely through voluntary efforts. It serves as a champion and rudimentary and unfunded backbone support organization, enabling first steps toward establishing the elements necessary for successful collective impact in achieving climate literacy. Among the elements that have been described to be essential for a collective impact, the CLEAN Network most effectively provides continuous communication for the broad community of climate literacy stakeholders. The network enables its professionally diverse members to learn of one another's needs and to begin identifying mutually reinforcing activities that will address the common agenda and shared system of measures (two other key elements of collective impact) once they are established. The CLEAN Network serves as a small champion group that continues to seek input from the larger climate literacy stakeholder community on how a backbone support organization might support and extend their efforts. The next steps in a collective impact approach to climate and energy literacy include defining and forming a backbone support organization to facilitate the development of a shared agenda and a shared system of measures, which has the support of all stakeholders, that is sufficiently funded and can help mobilize funding to scale what works in climate and energy literacy. Such an organization would have collective impact that is commensurate to the challenges and opportunities climate change present to the nation.
Place‐based civic science—collective environmental action and solidarity for eco‐resilience
Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Background: Educating children and young people (CYP) from marginalized communities about environmental crises poses a unique dilemma as educators strive to prepare them to deal with the climate crisis without compounding the stressors and fear of an unlivable future many already face. We explored how place-based civic science (PBCS) can provide opportunities to engage youth in environmental understanding and action through teamwork in which youth feel that they belong to a group larger than themselves and gain a sense of hope from working with others toward shared goals. We argue that combining PCBS pedagogies of collective action and collaborative learning spaces can help to buffer against distress as CYP grapple with global environmental crises. Methods: We drew from qualitative responses (student reflections and public presentations) of 486 6-12th graders (majority students of color) on what they learned from participating in PBCS projects. Projects involved egalitarian partnerships between adults from environmental organizations, teachers and student teams studying and acting together to mitigate problems and presenting their efforts in public venues. Results: Students' qualitative responses revealed an identification with their team and its goal forged through the work, respect for their voice, belief in their capacity and confidence to take collective action and even enjoyment of working together to address community concerns. Conclusions: PBCS through collective learning/action in student teams and nonhierarchical intergenerational partnerships, and connections that CYP forge with organizations in the broader community, can help to build CYP's agency and efficacy while addressing "emotionally heavy" issues such as climate change. Key Practitioner Message • CYP are capable of dealing with environmental problems as long as they see that they can be effective in collective action with fellow stakeholders and that a better environmental future is possible. • Education that combines learning about environmental problems, with giving young people the chance to build skills and participate in concrete collective actions that address these issues can help CYP to feel they do not have to solve these problems on their own. • Team building and relationships are an important base for exploring climate change issues, science, and activism, so that students feel safe to explore these issues on their own terms as well as empowered to act in ways that they find culturally relevant. • There is little research on the mental health effects of climate change on Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) young people, and future research should proceed cautiously in light of the potential compounding effects of eco-anxiety added to the challenges these youth face on a daily basis.
Revitalising embodied community knowledges as leverage for climate change engagement
Climatic Change, 2022
Human survival is threatened by climate breakdown and ecological collapse. This levies huge responsibility on society to address how present modes of living have created these problems. Citizens need to learn about the consequences that have been unleashed and find ways to live more sustainably. Yet, the scale of these crises and lack of wisdom to act can be overwhelming, so how will they become more informed and motivated to act? This paper proposes that cultivating communities of practice (Wenger) around low carbon citizenship can help generate discrete engagement strategies that rouse public attention towards changing attitudes and behaviours. To be effective, these engagements need to be relatable, values-oriented, and framed towards the priorities, knowledges, capacities, and lived experiences of the group who each share a passion for a practice and learn collectively how to do it better. Such an approach is explored in the case study, Grow Your Own Community, that sought to engage marginalised communities with decarbonisation activities through the strategic repositioning of their embodied community knowledges (ECK). This community of practice helped to motivate and mobilise local participation by integrating carbon literacy with the situated, practical capacities that already lay within the community. Key findings reveal that revitalising a community's existing body of knowledge to engage people with climate change knowledge creates the conditions for generating community-led mitigative action.
Sustainability Science
Overcoming complex environmental challenges demands different forms of stakeholder participation and collective action. While informative and relevant for participatory interventions, the literatures on collective action and participatory governance have largely remained disconnected. We illustrate how the institutional analysis and development (IAD), network of (adjacent) action situation (NAS) and social–ecological system (SES) frameworks can be combined to provide a coherent approach that integrates these literatures, applies their insights and bridges this disconnect. We compare two similar participatory interventions, one in Colombia and one in Peru, whose design and implementation we supported. Transdisciplinary in nature, both sought to foster collective action for watershed management. The frameworks allow us to demarcate, characterise and reflect upon the action situations (ASs) for the collective choice, coordination and knowledge generation that constituted each participa...