Abstract

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.

Keywords

climate change; climate science; knowledge; plural ontologies; politics of adaptation; co-production; climate justice

Published in

Climate and Development
2019,
Publisher: TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

SLU Authors

• Nightingale, Andrea

  • Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • University of Oslo (UiO)

Sustainable Development Goals

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts


UKÄ Subject classification

Social Sciences Interdisciplinary


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1624495

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/101000