Motivating a “Thinkable Politics”

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-181
Author(s):  
Tim Christion ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Climate Response ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Dialectical Phenomenology

Climate change is one of the greatest collective action problems ever faced. The social and cultural barriers to intersubjectively motivating concern and agency are sweeping. It seems all but impossible to imagine politically viable solutions commensurate with the realities of the problem, and likewise find visionary ways of framing this problem to inspire meaningful solutions. One therefore perceives an abyss between ‘problem’ and ‘solution,’ as expressed in irreconcilable debates between problem-driven and solution-driven strategies for motivating climate action. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical phenomenology of motivation and class consciousness in particular, I argue that his call for a “thinkable politics” can help activists bring problem-driven and solution-driven motives for climate response into productive relation.

scholarly journals Norm-Based Governance for Severe Collective Action Problems: Lessons from Climate Change and COVID-19

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Leigh Raymond ◽  
Daniel Kelly ◽  
Erin P. Hennes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Behavior Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Individual Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Norm Internalization ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Political Governance

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper-partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to 1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, 2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, 3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and 4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policymakers to respond to these and future collective action challenges.

scholarly journals Influencing Attitudes and Preferences Toward Climate Change using a Multi-Player, Transportation Themed Board Game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Xiaoyi Kjorven
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Board Game ◽  
Life Choices ◽  
Board Games ◽  
Effective Combination ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Game Board

Traditional tabletop board games have soared in popularity in recent years, and used often as tools for education and entertainment. Board games are an especially engaging format for studying themes of collective-action problem solving. This study looks at one of the most complex collective-action problems of this generation, climate change, and evaluates how individual attitudes and preferences may be altered by playing a board game specifically designed to influence how people relate to an issue. The board game Wheels was introduced and taught to 18 participants, who engaged in five separate playtesting sessions where observation, survey and interview data were collected. The study evaluates participants' attitudes and preferences toward certain transportation and climate change topics before and after playing the game. The game showed promise in changing players' preferences toward certain modes of transportation - increasing preferences toward electric vehicles and cycling, and decreasing preference towards gas powered cars. These findings indicate that the effective combination of select climate change game mechanics in a highly personalized theme may produce an engaging and entertaining experience that has the potential to transcend the game board and impact players' outlook upon real life choices.

scholarly journals Return to the Isle of Ted: Simulating the Collective Action Problem of Climate Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-555
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Sage Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Common Pool Resource ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
Collective Action Problem ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
The Commons

ABSTRACTThis article modifies the classic “Isle of Ted” simulation to teach students about the collective action problems associated with climate change. Modifications include the introduction of a common-pool resource (i.e., fish) and increased pirate attacks to model rising climate threats and unequal distribution of risk. A return to the Isle of Ted enables a deeper engagement with specific collective action problems of climate change, including the tragedy of the commons and issues of global inequality. This article provides a road map for the incorporation of this modified simulation into active-learning classrooms.

scholarly journals Governing a Collective Bad: Social Learning in the Management of Crop Diseases

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Damtew ◽  
Barbara van Mierlo ◽  
Rico Lie ◽  
Paul Struik ◽  
Cees Leeuwis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Late Blight ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Learning Space ◽  
Units Of Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Crop Disease ◽  
Late Blight Management

AbstractThere has been strong research interest in designing and testing learning approaches for enhancing and sustaining the capacity of communities to manage collective action problems. Broadening the perspective from well-known social learning approaches in natural resource management, this study explores how social learning as a communicative process influences collective action in contagious crop disease management. A series of facilitated discussion and reflection sessions about late blight management created the social learning space for potato farmers in Ethiopia. Communicative utterances of participants in the sessions served as the units of analysis. The study demonstrates how and to what extent social learning, in the form of aligned new knowledge, relations and actions occurred and formed the basis for collective action in the management of late blight.

scholarly journals The Politics of Climate Change Adaptation

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 317-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nives Dolšak ◽  
Aseem Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Resource Allocation ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Climate Policy ◽  
Disaster Management ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Local Policy ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Adaptation Policies

Climate action has two pillars: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation faces collective action issues because its costs are focused on specific locations/actors but benefits are global and nonexcludable. Adaptation, in contrast, creates local benefits, and therefore should face fewer collective action issues. However, governance units vary in the types of adaptation policies they adopt. To explain this variation, we suggest conceptualizing adaptation-as-politics because adaptation speaks to the issues of power, conflicting policy preferences, resource allocation, and administrative tensions. In examining who develops and implements adaptation, we explore whether adaptation is the old wine of disaster management in the new bottle of climate policy, and the tensions between national and local policy making. In exploring what adaptation policies are adopted, we discuss maladaptation and the distinction between hard and soft infrastructure. Finally, we examine why politicians favor visible, hard adaptation over soft adaptation, and how international influences shape local policy.

scholarly journals The European Media Portrayal of Climate Change: Implications for the Social Mobilization towards Climate Action

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 8300
Author(s):  
Alexandre O. Tavares ◽  
Neide P. Areia ◽  
Sinead Mellett ◽  
Julia James ◽  
Diego S. Intrigliolo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Media Portrayal ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
The Media ◽  
Climate Crisis

Beyond other social actors, such as policymakers and scholars, common citizens are also expected to actively engage with climate change, by adopting sustainable actions and supporting environmental policies. However, and despite the actual growing of environment-related social movements, a kind of inertia still prevails in the social climate of our society. The media should play a key role in promoting, among common individuals, the adoption of new and more sustainable practices. However, it is argued that the media seems to be failing to effectively address the climate crisis. As such, this study aims to identify the main weaknesses of climate change media communication to further discuss possible opportunities of communication improvements. For that, 1609 news articles published between 2017 and 2018 in five European countries were analyzed in-depth, through quantitative content analysis. The news’ general characteristics, specifically reported themes, and the specificities of actors’ discourses were taken into account for the analysis. It was verified that the European media tends to report climate change by using distant (e.g., future-focused) and outcome (e.g., threatening messages) framings, based on non-resilient, scientific, and political narratives, whilst overlooking the role of civil society on adapting to climate change. These results demonstrate that instead of promoting society’s climate action, the media may be contributing to a widespread social apathy about the climate and the disengagement of individuals regarding environment-related matters. Evidence-based forms of improving the media’s communication on climate change will be further discussed.

scholarly journals Better Than Rational: A Naturalistic View of Economic Governance

2017 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
J.W. Stoelhorst
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Human Organization ◽  
Naturalistic Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
The Face ◽  
Better Than

The purpose of this paper is to present a recently emerging evolutionary approach to the study of human organization that I will refer to as ‘naturalistic’, and to highlight its integrative potential for the social and administrative sciences. This naturalistic approach considers the various forms of human cooperation as products of gene-culture co-evolutionary processes, and in doing so goes to the heart of the collective action problems that are central to explaining the human condition. Moreover, in building empirically grounded explanations of human behavior and organization, it also offers an alternative to the traditional view of governance in economic theory, with its emphasis on decentralized exchange and rational self-interested choice. The naturalistic approach both explains why human nature has evolved to the point where we often can do ‘better than rational’ in the face of the social dilemmas underlying collective action problems, and why modern forms of social, economic, and political organization are nevertheless always prone to being undermined by these same dilemmas.

scholarly journals Empirisk analyse af kollektiv handling: Nobelprisen i økonomi 2009 til Elinor Ostrom

Politik ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mogens K. Justesen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Action Problems

This article provides an introduction to the work of Elinor Ostrom, focusing on those parts of her research for which she awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. Ostrom received the Nobel Prize mainly for her analyses of how groups of individuals organize and develop institutions to handle collective action problems. Ostrom also identifies a set of conditions that affect the likelihood that individuals successfully solve collective action problems. In this way, Ostrom provides a major contribution to the study of collective action in the social sciences. 

scholarly journals Influencing Attitudes and Preferences Toward Climate Change using a Multi-Player, Transportation Themed Board Game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Xiaoyi Kjorven
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Board Game ◽  
Life Choices ◽  
Board Games ◽  
Effective Combination ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Game Board

Traditional tabletop board games have soared in popularity in recent years, and used often as tools for education and entertainment. Board games are an especially engaging format for studying themes of collective-action problem solving. This study looks at one of the most complex collective-action problems of this generation, climate change, and evaluates how individual attitudes and preferences may be altered by playing a board game specifically designed to influence how people relate to an issue. The board game Wheels was introduced and taught to 18 participants, who engaged in five separate playtesting sessions where observation, survey and interview data were collected. The study evaluates participants' attitudes and preferences toward certain transportation and climate change topics before and after playing the game. The game showed promise in changing players' preferences toward certain modes of transportation - increasing preferences toward electric vehicles and cycling, and decreasing preference towards gas powered cars. These findings indicate that the effective combination of select climate change game mechanics in a highly personalized theme may produce an engaging and entertaining experience that has the potential to transcend the game board and impact players' outlook upon real life choices.

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