Abstract
UK universities have been successively declaring a climate emergency, following the University of Bristol’s lead in 2019. Universities are key actors in climate change education, and potentially progressive organisations researching, teaching and implementing low carbon futures. Using universities’ sustainability strategies, we present a secondary analysis identifying neoliberalism’s significant role in influencing universities’ sustainability policies and practices. This plays out through university boosterism where universities use their sustainability work to claim sustainability leadership, representing a form of sustainability capital to attract funding and potential students. Furthermore, we suggest a cognitive-practice gap exists between those <em>researching</em> sustainability and those <em>implementing</em> sustainability in universities. Thus, we conclude that there are inherent tensions in universities’ sustainability governance, with universities embodying contradictory sustainability discourses and advancing a form of green capital. Entrenched neoliberal ideologies present challenges for those declaring a climate emergency and how such declarations are subsequently operationalised.
Highlights
The climate emergency notion, not new, gained rapid ground during 2019, following statements from the IPCC, the global youth climate strikes, and a growing number of climate-related events such as the extensive and devastating wild-fires in Australia (Gibbs, in press)
We explore how the act of making the climate emergency declarations by institutions such as governments, businesses, and universities may involve a reconfiguration of what such declarations mean
We have explored the recent climate emergency declarations and have used UK universities’
Summary
The climate emergency notion, not new, gained rapid ground during 2019, following statements from the IPCC, the global youth climate strikes, and a growing number of climate-related events such as the extensive and devastating wild-fires in Australia (Gibbs, in press). 623) discuss the discursive work that the term ‘emergency’ does in the advent and (re)production of existing and new forms, practices, and relations of power They point to research that focuses on what the act of formal declaration enables, and the kinds of action subsequently deemed possible. As Jackson (2020) suggests, emergency responses can lack reflexivity, a reflexivity that is greatly needed when dominant biophysical approaches to the Anthropocene are framed in Crutzen and Schwägerl’s (2011) terms: “We...decide what nature is and what it will be To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world.”. We explore how the act of making the climate emergency declarations by institutions such as governments, businesses, and universities may involve a reconfiguration of what such declarations mean
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