Does Awareness of Climate Change Lead to Worry? Exploring Community Perceptions Through Parallel Analysis in Rural Himalaya

Ritodhi Chakraborty,Manish Kumar,Anne Sophie Daloz,A P Dimri

doi:10.1659/mrd-journal-d-19-00012.1

Abstract

Human dimensions of climate change (HDCC) research overwhelmingly presents community perspectives on climate change and its impacts through single epistemic frameworks. This limits the possible platforms that community voices can access within scientific scholarship. Many HDCC interdisciplinary collaborations pursue the goal of data triangulation and attempt to address complex social–ecological problems through analytical integration. This raises questions about the comparative validity of different epistemologies and often leads to unequal power sharing between the different disciplinary practitioners. Our research addresses both of these issues by operationalizing a plural epistemological framework that depends on parallel analysis. This framework consists of a quantitative approach, inspired by hazards theory and land-change science research, and a qualitative approach, from political ecology. We explored perceptions of climate change in rural households in Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayan region. While the results reveal a high awareness of climate change within the community, most individuals and households do not consider the impacts of climate change to be a significant worry. The results for each approach complement each other. They provide the community with more than one platform to voice their experiences and reveal the complex relationships producing climate change knowledge in the region. Future research should attempt such parallel analysis in other locations to validate its utility in addressing issues of equity and marginalization between research epistemologies, as well as between experts and local communities.

Highlights

Knowledge of climate and climate change has been constructed through various methodologies (Murphy 2011)
We followed the analytical trajectories of different routes of climate change knowledge production; and after the analysis we interrogated their points of convergence and divergence
The intensive ethnographic data collection, its coding, and trend analysis, along with the literature review, revealed that community worries and awareness of climate change in rural Uttarakhand were connected to certain discursive and material events/processes

Summary

Introduction

Knowledge of climate and climate change has been constructed through various methodologies (Murphy 2011). It provides multiple avenues of negotiation between experts and communities, beyond the commonplace practice of transforming embodied personal experiences into bounded ‘‘observations’’ to be statistically verified for significance (Cote and Nightingale 2012; Fernandez-Llamazares et al 2017) It brings the ideological assumptions about ‘‘social’’ and ‘‘ecological’’ processes underlying the different epistemologies together to construct an analytical framework that supports a range of methodological combinations (Ahlborg and Nightingale 2012; Yeh et al 2017). We visualized a plural epistemological framework, where individual approaches were not held accountable to each other’s philosophical traditions, but remained honest to their own assumptions and biases We argue that this addresses 2 issues: First, it allows HDCC research to be transdisciplinary, addressing interepistemological concerns of power inequalities (Murphy 2011). Our parallel analysis focused on this, exploring issues of equity, representation, and validity in the production of knowledge

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Results

Conclusion