Social change for climate change

The global challenges caused by socio-economic inequalities, climate change and environmental damage caused to ecosystems, require changes in human behavior at all organizational levels, including companies, governments, communities, and individuals. In this context, it is important to analyse how social and creative companies that work in the fashion and industrial design recycling sector can address sustainable social change. In this paper, we propose an analysis in the countries of the global South. To learn how grassroots innovations can contribute to the development of sustainable strategies, we perform the framework of Technical transitions. We analyze the three main areas of activity that constitute an effective niche construction: social networks, expectations and visions, and learning. A qualitative methodology is used, a video case study with six grassroots organizations in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Brazil. The results reflect the important role played by these grassroots innovations, contributing to the development of social and creative recycling companies that address socio-economic and environmental problems.

Download Full-text

Envisioning Climate Change Adaptation Futures Using Storytelling Workshops

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13126630 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (12) ◽

pp. 6630

Author(s):

Rachel Harcourt ◽

Wändi Bruine de Bruin ◽

Suraje Dessai ◽

Andrea Taylor

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Social Change ◽

Climate Change Adaptation ◽

Local Community ◽

Adaptation Planning ◽

The West ◽

Community Or ◽

Rebel Groups ◽

The Future ◽

The Government

Engaging people in preparing for inevitable climate change may help them to improve their own safety and contribute to local and national adaptation objectives. However, existing research shows that individual engagement with adaptation is low. One contributing factor to this might be that public discourses on climate change often seems dominated by overly negative and seemingly pre-determined visions of the future. Futures thinking intends to counter this by re-presenting the future as choice contingent and inclusive of other possible and preferable outcomes. Here, we undertook storytelling workshops with participants from the West Yorkshire region of the U.K. They were asked to write fictional adaptation futures stories which: opened by detailing their imagined story world, moved to events that disrupted those worlds, provided a description of who responded and how and closed with outcomes and learnings from the experience. We found that many of the stories envisioned adaptation as a here-and-now phenomenon, and that good adaptation meant identifying and safeguarding things of most value. However, we also found notable differences as to whether the government, local community or rebel groups were imagined as leaders of the responsive actions, and as to whether good adaptation meant maintaining life as it had been before the disruptive events occurred or using the disruptive events as a catalyst for social change. We suggest that the creative futures storytelling method tested here could be gainfully applied to support adaptation planning across local, regional and national scales.

Download Full-text

Evolution

Eco-Alchemy ◽

10.1525/california/9780520290051.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Dan McKanan

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Social Change ◽

Environmental Movement ◽

The World ◽

At Home

Anthroposophy, with its alchemical emphasis on the balancing of polarities, brings several gifts to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement. These gifts include a cosmic holism that challenges us to attend to ever-widening circles of interconnection; a homeopathic model of social change that invites us to use subtle influences to heal the world; an appropriate anthropocentrism that allows us to experience ourselves as fully at home in the world; and a vision of planetary transmutation that can resist climate change while embracing biological and spiritual evolution.

Download Full-text

The Principles and Practices in Action

10.1093/oso/9780198857457.003.0010 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 162-178

Author(s):

Cynthia Rayner ◽

François Bonnici

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Decision Making ◽

Social Change ◽

Problem Solving ◽

Business Leaders ◽

Racial Justice ◽

Top Down ◽

Slow Pace ◽

The Face ◽

Strategic Conversation

This book asks a rather simple but bold question: “How do organizations create systemic social change?” This question is growing in importance, becoming part of the strategic conversation for all types of organizations, not just those specifically focused on social change. Business leaders, politicians, educators, employees, and parents are grappling with the realization that complex social change can rapidly impact their everyday lives. As frustration at the slow pace of change grows, and the world’s wicked problems—such as inequality, climate change and racial justice—proliferate, people are increasingly recognizing that we need to find ways to tackle the root causes of these issues rather than just addressing the symptoms. In the face of these challenges, it is easy to default to our more traditional views of leadership and problem-solving, which celebrate an us-versus-them mentality, top-down decision-making, and aggressive power stances. Systems work—with its focus on the process of change including our day-to-day actions and relationships—may feel counterintuitive in this rapidly emerging future. Yet, as the authors’ research has shown, the future is demanding a different kind of leadership, one that emphasizes the ways we work as much as the outcomes we pursue.

Download Full-text

A Global and Intergenerational Storm

Climate Change, Consumption and Intergenerational Justice ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781529204735.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 13-38

Author(s):

Kristina Diprose ◽

Gill Valentine ◽

Robert M. Vanderbeck ◽

Chen Liu ◽

Katie Mcquaid

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Sustainable Development ◽

Social Change ◽

Social Science ◽

Environmental Justice ◽

Policy Making ◽

International Policy ◽

Original Contribution ◽

The Relationship ◽

Human Sense

This chapter situates the INTERSECTION programme of research within wider international debates regarding the relationship between consumption and climate change. It explores how this relationship is addressed in arguments for environmental justice and sustainable development, and how it is reflected in international policy-making. This discussion highlights how climate change is typically cast as both an international and intergenerational injustice, or the convergence of a ‘global storm’ and an ‘intergenerational storm’. This chapter also situates the original contribution of the book within recent social science scholarship that explores how people live with a changing climate, advocating a ‘human sense’ of climate and social change, and outlines the main themes of the subsequent empirical chapters.

Download Full-text

The role of social change in the US transport sector for climate change mitigation

Energy for Sustainable Development ◽

10.1016/s0973-0826(08)60458-5 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 39-46 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sudhir Chella Rajan

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Social Change ◽

Climate Change Mitigation ◽

Transport Sector ◽

The Us ◽

Change Mitigation

Download Full-text

The application of critical realism as a basis for agency in environmental education: The case of Roy Bhaskar

Australian Journal of Environmental Education ◽

10.1017/aee.2019.21 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 35 (3) ◽

pp. 230-238

Author(s):

Mehri Mirzaei Rafe ◽

Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast ◽

Afzal Sadat Hosseini ◽

Narges Sajadieh

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Social Justice ◽

Social Change ◽

Environmental Education ◽

Philosophy Of Science ◽

Critical Realism ◽

New Approach ◽

The Real ◽

New Materialisms ◽

Human Habitation

AbstractThis article will investigate the philosophy of science of Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) as a coherent basis for environmental education. The work of Bhaskar serves as an in-depth approach to understanding how to apply critical realism (the critical and the realist) to matters such as environmental education, because he concretely theorises the connections between science, social change and metaphysics. By mobilising key Bhaskarian motifs — that is, the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the laminated system as a means to understand reality, the ways in which inquiry may be organised through the real, actual and the empirical, and the positive application of dialectics — this article constructs a new approach to environmental education and positions it in the field of environmental education by comparing it to posthumanism and the new materialisms. This article contains inquiry-based study outlines for enhanced thinking around: (1) climate change and social justice; (2) movements towards a carbon-free economy; (3) water, food and population; and (4) the future of human habitation.

Download Full-text