Climate Movement Research Articles

Climate change litigation and narrative : how to use litigation to tell compelling climate stories

The U.S. government has not taken sufficient action to mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change. Frustrated by the lack of action in the legislative and executive branches, climate advocates turn to the judicial branch and litigation to advance their cause. Litigation is important not only for its ability to create substantive legal change, but also for its power to generate media coverage and shape public and political discourse. Research from across the social sciences highlights key psychological challenges that can prevent the U.S. public from engaging with the science of climate change, understanding the risks posed by climate change, and feeling motivated to take corrective action. Research also shows that the way in which a public health issue is framed powerfully shapes the public debate and policy prescriptions for that issue. This Article examines how climate advocates can construct their litigation messaging in light of this research to most effectively advance the climate movement in the United States. If used effectively, the medium of litigation offers a unique opportunity to reframe climate change and overcome some of the public’s cognitive hurdles to perceiving the true dangers of climate change. The structure of litigation, which requires plaintiffs to trace their injuries—including economic, social, and health-related injuries—to the actions of defendants, allows climate advocates to leverage insights from the social sciences to make their climate change narratives as salient as possible.

Patterns of engagement: identities and social movement organizations in Finland and Malawi

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thevenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations.

Framing clean energy campaigns to promote civic engagement among parents

Civic engagement is one important way citizens can influence the rate of decarbonization in the electricity sector. However, motivating engagement can be challenging even if people are affected and interested in participating. Here we employed a randomized controlled trial to assess the effect of clean energy campaigns emphasizing cost savings, health, climate, or health and climate, or no additional information at all (control) on civic engagement behaviors (signing a petition or making a phone call). We targeted parents as they have been shown to be powerful agents of political and business practice change in other contexts, and hence, could play an important role in the decarbonization of the electricity sector. In Study 1, we recruited n = 292 parents already engaged in climate advocacy; in Study 2, we recruited a representative sample of n = 1254 parents drawn from the general public. Both studies were conducted in Michigan, Florida, and California, as these states have sizable advocacy group membership, divergent energy profiles, and strategic importance to the climate movement. In both studies, we find the odds of taking action are reduced by over 90% when participants are asked to make a phone call and leave a voicemail message, versus signing an online petition. Among the parents already engaged in advocacy, we observe a ceiling effect regarding attitudes towards clean energy and find the cost campaign produces unintended consequences. Among our public sample, we find that participants who believe the campaign to be credible and comprehendible are more likely to take action than those who discredit the campaign or do not understand its message. Additionally, we find parents who have children under the age of 18 negatively adjust their attitudes towards fossil fuels after being presented with health information. Ultimately, we find that campaign messages can influence energy attitudes and parents are willing to take action on the topic if the advocacy action seems like an effective approach.

The Climate Witness: A Visual Phenomenon Developed by the Climate Movement to Address Responsibility in Matters of Climate Change and Expand Experiential Space

NGOs involved in the climate movement try with the help of so-called "climate witnesses" to show a chain of responsibility from the victims of climate change to individual perpetrators. Through event-oriented images and the testimony of those affected, the dangers of the anthropogenic climate change should also, though, be conveyed to people in climatically-speaking less exposed parts of the world. The pictorial strategies associated with displaying the visible phenomena of climate witnesses can be seen as a response to the widespread but very short-lived thesis of the "non-representability" of climate change.

The ‘efficacy dilemma’ of transnational climate activism: the case of COP21

ABSTRACTThe transnational climate movement mobilized massively around the 2015 Paris Climate Summit (COP21) – despite a growing consensus within the movement that the UN was unable to solve the climate crisis. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork is the basis for exploration of the profound effect this consensus had on the movement around and beyond COP21. Firstly, it facilitated a historic degree of unification within a previously divided movement, around a desire to focus less on influencing official negotiations, although the degree to which negotiations should be ignored, and what actions should focus on instead, created new cleavages. Secondly, organizers experienced that mobilizing around a summit whilst trying to ignore it is problematic, thus limiting strategic options and presenting an ‘efficacy dilemma’. This, finally, limited the movement’s success, and fueled desires for a transnational climate movement beyond COPs. Whether those desires can be realized without the organizational benefits of summit mobilizations remains unanswered.

Building a Climate Movement Through Relational Organizing

Community organizing is a process for achieving social change through the mobilization of resources and the formation of collective identity. Relational community organizing is a particular approach to developing new leaders and building organizational capacity for sustaining a powerful movement, and is especially relevant in the climate justice movement because relationships serve to bring actors from isolation and despair toward communal identity and hopeful action. Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light (MNIPL) is a community organization that is using relational organizing to activate faith communities to take action on climate change. This paper describes the design and first phase of evaluation of MNIPL’s Movement Builder Program, a networked distributed leadership model that uses peer mentors to increase the efficacy of new organizers. Can a peer-to-peer network increase the leverage of organizers? Will supportive relationships move people to increased action and to develop the leadership of others? We provide an introduction to this inquiry as well as the foundational frameworks and historical context of this new approach.

Book Review: Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World by Paul Hampton

Paul Hampton Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World, London: Routledge, 2015; 212 pp.: ISBN 9781138841420, 90 [pounds sterling] (hbk) This excellent book comes at a difficult time for the 'climate movement' in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Those paying attention to the science could be forgiven for despairing, while those who only see the headlines proclaiming the 'success' of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's Paris Agreement could be forgiven for thinking that matters are in hand. In addition, UK unions are largely on the back foot, and have had to cut back on environmental work. For example, the University and College Union announced in its May 2016 Annual Environmental Report that it had been unable to recruit sufficient numbers for the day release courses for its environmental representative training. Meanwhile one of the biggest unions, the GMB, the union for energy workers, has resolutely defended fracking, time and again. In the unlikely event of Labour forming the next government, fireworks will ensue! Hampton is offering a rich empirical story, not a dense theoretical treatise. As often is the case with PhD theses turned into books, the 'theoretical' chapter ('Climate politics and the potential for climate solidarity') is pretty heavy-going, and could easily be skimmed or skipped by a non-academic reader, with no loss of comprehension in later chapters, which are all clearly written and argued with a dazzling level of detail and precision. Hampton adopts a (non-Stalinist) Marxist interpretation of climate change politics. For Hampton, working-class self-liberation is at the heart of Marxism' (p. 4). As such, the main aim of the book is 'to articulate the valence of organised workers for climate politics' (p. 8) by critically assessing the dominant social science framing of climate change, investigating workers' climate interests and capacities, and 'extend[ing] Hymans (2001) model of trade unions operating between the market, society and class to understand their role in climate change politics' (p. 8). He seeks to examine whether 'workers organised in trade unions have the interest and capacity to tackle dangerous climate change' (p. 9). Hampton's history, based on close documentary reading and more recent participant observation (in the United Kingdom), starts in the late 1980s, and moves seamlessly through to and beyond the 2009 occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, which gets its own chapter. On the way, Hampton provides well-referenced scepticism about the more booster-ist notions of 'green jobs', often promulgated by people who will not be affected by a successful or unsuccessful 'transition'. For unions, the bread-and-butter of the coming months and years can never be hand-waved away with generalities. …

In Between Rhetoric and the UNFCCC’s Detachment from the Lived Realities of the People on the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the world’s main forum for climate change negotiations is in a deep and ever-growing crisis. Between the piece-meal and inadequate pledges on emission reductions by developed countries (historical high emitters) that threaten to quickly catapult us to a 3.5 degree global temperature rise that will disproportionately affect those in the Global South, to the undue influence by fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists both blocking and co-opting progressive action in the space, the UNFCCC almost seems completely incapable of delivering on its mandate. While it is clear that the international climate negotiations seem completely disconnected from the material realities of those on the front-lines of the climate crises, a growing transnational climate, food and energy justice movement(s) is stepping up to challenge the glaring incompetence of the international negotiating space while also providing real alternatives to the multiple and intersecting crises of climate change to local communities around the world.

Faces of the Climate Movement

Faces of the Climate Movement

Effect of the Children's Health Activity Motor Program on Motor Skills and Self-Regulation in Head Start Preschoolers: An Efficacy Trial.

Self-regulatory skills are broadly defined as the ability to manage emotions, focus attention, and inhibit some behaviors while activating others in accordance with social expectations and are an established indicator of academic success. Growing evidence links motor skills and physical activity to self-regulation. This study examined the efficacy of a motor skills intervention (i.e., the Children’s Health Activity Motor Program, CHAMP) that is theoretically grounded in Achievement Goal Theory on motor skill performance and self-regulation in Head Start preschoolers. A sample of 113 Head Start preschoolers (Mage = 51.91 ± 6.5 months; 49.5% males) were randomly assigned to a treatment (n = 68) or control (n = 45) program. CHAMP participants engaged in 15, 40-min sessions of a mastery climate intervention that focused on the development of motor skills over 5 weeks while control participants engaged in their normal outdoor recess period. The Delay of Gratification Snack Task was used to measure self-regulation and the Test of Gross Motor Development-2nd Edition was used to assess motor skills. All measures were assessed prior to and following the intervention. Linear mixed models were fit for both self-regulation and motor skills. Results revealed a significant time × treatment interaction (p < 0.001). In regard to motor skills, post hoc comparisons found that all children improved their motor skills (p < 0.05), but the CHAMP group improved significantly more than the control group (p < 0.001). Children in CHAMP maintained their self-regulation scores across time, while children in the control group scored significantly lower than the CHAMP group at the posttest (p < 0.05). CHAMP is a mastery climate movement program that enhance skills associated with healthy development in children (i.e., motor skills and self-regulation). This efficacy trial provided evidence that CHAMP helped maintain delay of gratification in preschool age children and significantly improved motor skills while participating in outdoor recess was not effective. CHAMP could help contribute to children’s learning-related skills and physical development and subsequently to their academic success.

Die Bewegung für Klimagerechtigkeit und Energiedemokratie in Deutschland.

This article argues that social movement research must be renewed by a historical-materialist perspective to be able to understand the emergence and effects of the relatively new climate justice movement in Germany. The previous research on NGOs and social movements in climate politics is presented and the recent development of the climate justice movement in Germany is illustrated. In a final step two cases of climate movement campaigns are explained by means of the historical-materialist movement analysis proposed by the author.

Moving targets: Carbon pricing, energy markets, and social movements in Australia

ABSTRACTReporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of movement activity has been negotiations over climate policy. More recently, activists and communities are engaged in a struggle over the expansion of fossil fuels. A third contest has been waged over the present and future position of renewable energy technologies in Australia’s electricity market. In the wake of climate policy failure, energy campaigns have been deepened, and it seems that a broader energy justice agenda is being forged. New strategic dilemmas are visible in the field.

The Trojan Horse of the Paris Climate Agreement: How Multi-Level, Non-Hierarchical Governance Poses a Threat to Constitutional Government

There is little novelty to be found in the Paris Climate Agreement. Nevertheless, it may have serious implications for climate policy-making. It establishes an international framework for decentralized climate policy-making by states, which should aim to achieve an ambitious collective objective of limiting global average temperature increase to well below to well below 2 °C or even 1.5 °C. The agreement does not set any mechanism, methodology or criteria, however, for assigning individual mitigation obligations to party states. It does not impose any significant substantive obligations on the parties, and, from a legal, as opposed to political or moral, viewpoint, it seems to be virtually non-binding. This gap is destined to become the Paris Agreement’s Trojan horse, because, under the guise of direct democracy in a system of multi-level, non-hierarchical governance, it grants not only credibility but also de facto authority to climate activists, thus posing a threat to constitutional government and representative democracy. The agreement demands that nation states explicitly acknowledge that their efforts are inadequate, while setting them up for failure, thereby changing the political environment in which climate policy is made. The ambition-obligation disparity creates a large arena for climate activism at international and national levels, effectuating a transfer of power, or at least of influence, that is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of constitutional government. If the collective efforts appear to fall short of achieving the Paris Agreement’s objectives, the judiciary is likely to be dragged into climate policy-making. Climate action groups or executive governments supporting ambitious action will charge the body politic with impotence, declare “government failure,” and seek the help of the courts to get governments to “do the right thing.” To support their claims, they can invoke the admissions and objectives set out in the Paris Agreement. Thus, in demanding that the signatories acknowledge explicitly that their efforts are inadequate, the Paris Agreement paves the way for the new international climate governance. Its implicit reliance on political activism by the climate movement and the related non-hierarchical governance by the courts constitute a threat to constitutional government, the rule of law, and representative democracy. It risks an unconstitutional usurpation of power by activist groups and unelected and unaccountable judges that could undermine legislative power and the role of positive law in deciding legal disputes. This risk of subversion is not well understood by politicians and governments. Nations should protect themselves against these threats. After all, signing away control over climate policy to unaccountable and unelected actors is not in the public interest. Nor is it, under even the most optimistic of circumstances, a viable path to rational, effective and sustainable climate policies. Indeed, the future of representative democracy may be at stake. Climate policy-making should not be left to the UNFCC secretariat, the climate movement and the judiciary. Now is the time for national legislatures to assert and defend their prerogatives.

Fossil Fuels Off Campus

The campus movement for divestment from fossil fuel holdings is but a few years old, barely 2 percent of the time gone by since human beings, having discovered how to extract stupendous amounts of energy from the buried remains of extinct life, started clogging the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. One way to frame these facts is to say that the climate movement—of which fossil fuel divestment is a part—started late. Another way to frame the same facts is to say that fossil fuel divestment has come a long way in a hurry.

A Study on the Climate Movement in South Korea : the Case of the Climate Activists

A Study on the Climate Movement in South Korea : the Case of the Climate Activists

Democracy, Localism, and The Future of The Climate Movement

The accelerating disruption of the Earth's climate systems is the defining issue of our time. The persistent failure of international climate diplomacy has encouraged local, regional, and some national-level solutions and spurred an emerging global movement for climate justice, mainly rooted in communities that bear disproportionate impacts from climate change. This article discusses the ways in which movements from below, seeking economic and energy democracy, are shaping our responses to the crisis. How can the imperative for immediate climate action and the ethical agenda of climate justice be furthered by movements seeking democratic alternatives and a more genuinely ecological future?

Life trajectories of youth committing to climate activism

This article draws from a study investigating the life trajectories of 17 youth climate activists from 14 countries through semi-structured, life memory interviews using Internet-based methods. The interpretations of the interviews focus on the ways in which participants constructed the meanings and functions of experiences and how they represented the nature of the process of their committing to climate activism. Included in the interpretations are the nature of moments of consciously committing, the role of both concern for nature and for social justice, the dynamic and ceaseless process of committing, and the role of the youth climate movement. The discussion highlights the uniqueness of youth and of climate change in the process of committing. The research contributes to the limited but important literature on the life trajectories of youth climate activists.

Al Gore and the Climate Reality Project Down Under: The Up Market of the Climate Movement

In terms of applied work, anthropologists have been working on climate change issues at two broad and quite distinct levels, namely in the formulation of climate policies and by becoming involved in climate action groups and the climate movement that supports social, economic, and technological changes in the interest of mitigating climate change, a phenomenon that an increasing number of observers view as the most profound environmental problem ever faced by humanity and one that will continue to play itself out during the present century. In her list of issues that engaged anthropologists examine, Warren (2006:213) includes "social justice, inequality, subaltern challenges to the status quo, globalization's impacts, and ethical position of our field research in situations of violent conflict." Ironically, many of these issues are related in one way or another to anthropogenic climate change. I maintain that more anthropologists need to become involved as observers and engaged scholars in applied initiatives seeking to respond to climate change on the local, regional, national, and global levels.

From Climate Crisis to Climate Movement: A Conversation with Robert van Waarden

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On September 3, 2014, in the lead-up to the People's Climate March of September 21, the Concordia University Student Union, the Students' Society of McGill University, Divest Concordia, and Divest McGill hosted the People's Climate Tour in Montreal, which was organized by 350.org and featured a lecture by Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of the international environmental organization, as well as by Ellen Gabriel, a human rights activist from Kanehsata:ke. Also present on the tour was Robert van Waarden, a young Montreal-based photographer, whose recent project, Along the Pipeline (2014), documents the stories of people who live along the 4,600 km path of the proposed Energy East pipeline, which, if realized, would transport more than one million barrels of diluted bitumen from Alberta's tar sands to Saint John, New Brunswick, where it would be refined and exported. (1) Van Waarden is a professional photographer whose work focuses on climate change as well as the social movements involved in climate change projects. He has photographed four United Nations summits on climate change, wind energy across the globe, coal plants in Tennessee, villages in the Arctic, and protests in Southeast Asia. For Along the Pipeline, he photographed and interviewed more than eighty individuals whose lives could be directly impacted by this pipeline project. With funding assistance from an Indiegogo initiative as well as Greenpeace, the Council of Canadians, and Environmental Defence, he interviewed city mayors, native elders and chiefs, fishermen, ranchers, and people from various walks of life to uncover the ways that people are making sense of yet another environmentally damaging proposal. I interviewed van Waarden at his home in Montreal on September 8, 2014, to discuss this project and the growing climate change movement. MARC JAMES LEGER: Tell me about your new project, Along the Pipeline. ROBERT VAN WAARDEN: The proposals for the Energy East pipeline hit the airwaves sometime around April of 2013. I found out about it while I was living in Europe--yet another pipeline. When I came back, I realized that this was something I could work on from a photographic and journalistic perspective. I knew some people who were interested in working on the pipeline issue already, so I approached them first. A few of those organizations put in some funding for the project. I then got a 4 x 5 film camera--a camera made in the 1970s for black-and-white film, with bellows. The travel time was about two months on the road. I started in New Brunswick, since I was already in eastern Canada. I spent ten days in New Brunswick and then came back to Montreal for a few weeks to figure things out. I then drove all the way to Alberta and worked my way back along the line. We put about seventeen thousand kilometers on the car, so there was a lot of driving. We interviewed about eighty people- mostly individuals--but there was one group, in Quebec. The idea was to find people from different walks of life to get a better idea of what's going on, whether that meant politicians, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, First Nations groups, or activists and supporters. MJL: Do you think that all of these stories put together create a coherent picture? Do you think that collectively we have a solution to the tar sands aspect of the crisis of global warming? How do you see individual will connecting with scientific knowledge and with political will? RVW: My decision to photograph individuals comes from my previous work as a photographer and understanding how imagery is often used in the environmental or climate-related context. What you often see is landscape imagery or natural world imagery with polar bears or tigers. These are emblems that are used to raise awareness. What's often missing, at least from a communication perspective, is the fact that people relate to other people and their stories. In that sense, I thought that a focus on the stories of people along the pipeline would help the audience pay closer attention. …

Facing the diversity crisis in climate science

The climate movement is failing to engage a diverse set of stakeholders in efforts to address climate change, and a lack of diversity within the climate community itself may be, in part, to blame. Research-informed solutions are urgently needed to address the problem and help build a more inclusive and influential movement.