School of Sociology and Social Policy

A sociological investigation into the politics and ethics of different forms of public engagement with climate change

Submission date not yet agreed.

 

Climate change, arguably one of the biggest challenges facing (human) life on earth, is generating a range of social responses. These include the development of policies designed to help societies ‘adapt’ to climate changes and to ‘mitigate’ their severity.

A relatively narrow set of value concerns are seemingly being incorporated into governments’ policy responses to climate change, however: those which do not suggest significant changes to problematic social structures. A consequence of this is that the potential to move beyond the unethical and unsustainable social practices causing climate change is restricted. It is in this context that the current research is situated.

Emerging responses to climate change are interrogated in order to consider the following questions: what are the wider contexts shaping the ways in which responses to climate change are understood, and policies formulated? In particular, how do competing interpretations of the social and natural worlds; the public or private sectors; and the roles of different kinds of knowledge and expertise influence notions of climate change adaptation?

Through a series of in-depth case-studies the research explores the kinds of models of society imagined in different forms of ‘public engagement’ with climate change; in both state-sponsored, formal engagement exercises, and in more informal, ‘grassroots’ responses. The political and ethical implications of these different forms of response will then be evaluated.