Abstract
Contemporary discussions of climate change response frequently emphasise individual moral responsibility, but little is known about how environmental messages are taken up or resisted in everyday practices. This article examines how families negotiate the moral narratives and identity positions associated with environmental responsibility. It focuses on families living in relatively affluent circumstances in England and South East India to consider the ways in which the families construct their understandings of environment and take up identities as morally responsible. Our analysis focuses on a subsample of case studies involved in the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Family Lives and the Environment study, within the NOVELLA node, using a multimethod qualitative approach with families of children aged between 12 and 14. This article focuses on interviews with 10 of the 24 families in the sample, all of whom (in both India and the UK) discussed environmental concerns within moral narratives of the responsibilities of relative privilege. Findings highlight the potential of cross-world research to help theorise the complex economic and cultural specificity of a particular morally charged framing of environmental concern, addressing the (dis)connections between ‘moral tales’ of responsible privilege and individual and collective accounts of family practices.
Highlights
This article examines family understandings and practices that are crucial to theorisations of environmental concern, aiming to address criticisms of oversimplification in climate change policy (Shove, 2010) and the reduction of the study of environmentalism or consumption to ‘matters of moral adjudication or political stance’ (Miller, 2012: viii–ix)
Our research seeks a more complex understanding through analysis of the moral narratives of families living in relatively affluent circumstances in England and South East India (Andhra Pradesh/Telangana), in which environmental concern and environmental practices are framed in terms of responsible privilege
In particular,‘analysis of the small story enables attention on how people build their narratives and the performative work done by the narratives’ (Phoenix, 2013: 73), providing insights into how personal and‘canonical narratives’of socially and culturally accepted norms fit together (Bruner, 1991).Narrative analysis of family practices can illuminate the ways in which ‘moral tales’ of environmentalism and climate change are framed within small stories of everyday family lives.The analysis presented in this article examines how environmental concern features within individual and collective family narratives of responsible privilege among affluent families in India (Andhra Pradesh/Telangana) and England
Summary
Our research seeks a more complex understanding through analysis of the moral narratives of families living in relatively affluent circumstances in England and South East India (Andhra Pradesh/Telangana), in which environmental concern and environmental practices are framed in terms of responsible privilege. The study engages with the ‘social drama’ of climate change, where narratives of environmental concern often rely on the moral character of those making claims and define performative actions as worthy or unworthy (Smith and Howe, 2015). This moral framing can be seen in academic writing about environmental concern, in its reference to ‘virtue ethics’. A foundational aspect ... is what one sees as the good life
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