Searching for a Mobilizing Narrative on Climate Change

Separate, Intertwined, or Unified Debates?

The three major debates and discourses in focus here—development, sustainability, and globalization—emerged in different geopolitical contexts. Intellectually rooted in the enlightenment ideas of rational thinking and universal linear progress, development was launched by the West as a North–South political project in the late 1940s in the aftermath of the Second World War and with the United States as a frontrunner calling for integration of the world economy (Jönsson et al., 2012). Focusing on poverty, inequality, and underemployment, it brought together a range of perspectives and approaches into a rapidly expanding cross-disciplinary field, the essence of which is to understand and act on the “pressing ethical need to equalise” the poor and the rich worlds (Conway et al., 2012, pp. 3–5). Initiated as yet another international and visionary political project, the idea of sustainable development was launched at the UN Conference in Stockholm in 1972 on the Human Environment and further manifested in the Brundtland Report in 1987, the Rio Conference in 1992, the World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, and the Rio + 20 Conference in 2012. In the document from Rio 2012, sustainable development and poverty eradication are (still) the overarching issues, with poverty eradication seen as “an indispensable requirement for sustainable development” (United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development [UNCSD], 2012, p. 1). But except for the advice on economic growth and trade liberalization, widely known as core ingredients in modernization theory as the mainstream approach of development, there were few (new) suggestions for how to address increasing global and national inequality in wealth and income (Clémençon, 2012b, p. 331).

In style, development in theory and practice is problem driven and solutions oriented (Pieterse, 2001). This holds it together as a field despite its tendency to be “deeply politically and ideologically driven and divided” (de Haan, 2011, p. 899). As pointed out by Pieterse (2001), definitions of development vary not only over time but also across ontologies and epistemologies at any one time. Still, Sumner and Tribe (2008) describe it mainly in terms of three core aspects: focus (what), purpose (why), and approaches (how). Further, they underline that cross-disciplinarity between the social and natural sciences is now “absolutely essential” in development studies (Sumner & Tribe, 2008, p. 762). However, despite the importance of such knowledge integration it is not always manifested.

In terms of links and overlaps, sustainability entered the well-established development arena as part of a wider debate on economic growth, social change, and environmental protection (World Commission on Environment and Development [WCED], 1987). At that time, sustainable development was formulated as a compromise and “designed to reconcile competing pressures for economic development and environmental protection” (Dubash, 2012, pp. 48, 49). As such, it signaled that economic growth must be evaluated not only for its magnitude but also for its substance. Since Brundtland, environmental pressure and climate change, often spoken of as signs of global environmental change, have received much attention in the development debate, not the least through several major organizational reports focusing on climate change impacts and responses in relation to core development issues such as poverty alleviation, resource distribution (land, water), gender equality, human rights, and justice (UNDP, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2012; United Nations Children's Fund [UNICEF], 2007; World Bank, 2009, 2012). The plea for integrated approaches is also key in political ecology and sustainability science (Jerneck et al., 2011; Kates et al., 2001).

Globalization, unlike development and sustainable development, was not launched as a political project. It builds on several processes and a much longer history—centuries back in time (Therborn, 2000). Nonetheless, it was fueled by political decisions and international economic events in the aftermath of the world economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s (Guillén, 2001) and by the rapid rise of an economically strong East and Southeast Asia. At the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, globalization is believed to have intensified as a process, discourse, and research field.

Struggles Within and Between Mainstream and Critical Thinking

The many, continuously strong, and often abrupt pendulum swings in the argument between mainstream and counterpoints is a core feature of the development discourse with its emphasis on ideology, theory, and practice (Jönsson et al., 2012). Some analysts even call them ruptures (Bull & Bøås, 2012). This is most clearly seen in how development, as a grand narrative with internal tensions, is fundamentally contested by the postdevelopment discourse advocating not only economic de-linking from the West, as did the dependency theorists already in the 1970s in an attempt to overcome underdevelopment, but now also cognitive de-linking from Western thought, power, and dominating discourses (Escobar, 2011).

In both grand development theory and counternarratives, there are struggles over definitions and whether to give up the whole development project. While some conflicts are supported by money and market forces or state capacity, others are backed up by political or moral weight (Scott-Villiers, 2011). Mosse and Lewis argue (2006) that dominant discourses can be sustained by tying supporters into certain interpretations where both messages and messengers matter. But who would these supporters, stakeholders, or subjects be? And how and by whom are they recruited and tied into certain conversations?

Poverty and inequality are core issues in development and serve as sites of contestation. In terms of changing perspectives, growth distribution has been discussed in the development debate at least since the time of the Kuznets curve in 1955, while empowerment and inclusiveness are more recent concepts (de Haan & Thorat, 2013). This means that current views on poverty are in contrast to (older) more conventional ways of dealing with poverty as resource distribution (having), agency (doing), and outcome (getting) in terms of benefiting from growth. An alternative discursive approach has shifted the focus away from what people have, do with, or get from employing resources, to how people think, feel, and talk about what they “have or do not have” and how they think, feel, and talk about what they “can or cannot do” (Steen, 2011, p. 836; Sumner & Tiwari, 2009). The policy implication here is to move beyond the sheer provision of resources and income opportunities, which is often stressed by economists (see Sachs, 2005), into discussions on ethics, norms, and values underpinning poverty and inequality (Sumner & Tiwari, 2009). Next, this may extend into the social relations of how people who are poor “engage with others and others engage with them” in immediate everyday life where age, class, ethnicity, gender, and space intersect and reveal issues of power and identity at individual or structural levels in society (White, 2010, p. 171).

According to some analysts, the study of people who are poor and how they perceive and experience their individual predicament and deprivation is not as important as studying how poverty reflects social and political processes of accumulation and distribution of wealth (D. Hulme, 2004). Such a structural approach may reveal how the poorest of the poor as an analytical category are continuously marginalized because of their poverty (Olsson & Jerneck, 2010). One should therefore analyze (all) structural inequalities that drive or result from these processes and indicate what needs to be done about it (D. Hulme, 2004; Kabeer, 2010). Given that the policy-driven principle of trickle down is unsuccessful in spreading national wealth fairly in society and often results in the reverse, it is necessary, says Pieterse (2013), to combine economic growth with social policies on capacitation, which will foster inclusive development much more effectively.

To summarize, agency-based, discursive, structural, and policy-based approaches all differ in how they define poverty, how they intend to address its dynamics, and whether poverty or riches are the main problem. Together, they can be used as an ensemble of perspectives for how to understand and tackle poverty (and riches) more profoundly. To that end, poverty as a persistent and multiscalar social problem could be measured and compared in aggregate terms across countries. Meanwhile, policies on capacitation (Pieterse, 2013), referring to the financing of and investments in education, health care, and infrastructure, could be implemented nationally, not only to expand individual capabilities but also to support global human development in the direction of inclusive globalization. Here, we may ask not only what to do about poverty and the poor but also what to do about riches and the rich.

Bridging Policy and Science—Whose Reality and Reason Counts?

Since the 1970s the interest in how science produces knowledge and interacts with policy has increased (Cetina, 2007). In the normative interdisciplinary field of development, much knowledge production concerns models of economic growth and social change for poverty alleviation, initiatives and policies on capacitation for enhanced human development (Pieterse, 2013) and freedom (Sen, 1999), and social contracts between citizens and governments for “placing civil and political rights on a par with social and economic rights” (Kabeer, 2010, p. 5). The equally normative field of sustainability science is not only interdisciplinary but also transdisciplinary in its approach to science–society interaction and stakeholder engagement with an ambition to locate pathways to sustainability based on climate change mitigation and adaptation (Kates et al., 2001; Sumner & Tribe, 2008).

Policies in response to climate change are, just like development policy, framed and formulated according to ideology and methodology ranging from reformist to radical, from utilitarian to egalitarian, and from top down to bottom up—and while some are broad and rest on coalitions, others are focused, narrow, or specific (Grist, 2008). With regard to interactions between science and society, analysts speak of a science–policy interface and a science–policy disconnect (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). In relation to global environmental change, civil society groups have raised concerns against political leaders who ignore scientific evidence on the seriousness of the matter (Clémençon, 2012b) or shy away from the fact that sustaining life on a warmer, stormier, and biologically less diverse “postnatural planet” requires research-based intervention management (Woodruff, 2012, p. 16). Politics and science will thus have to inform each other much more profoundly, as also argued for by Urry (2011), who calls for a postcarbon society informed by postcarbon sociology.

During more than six decades, development research has shown how complicated it is to bridge policy with science (Court & Maxwell, 2005). And while the ambition to link policy to science “is predicated on the notion that researchers have something to say” (Sumner & Tiwari, 2005, p. 791) policymakers may still act as if there is no consensus among researchers or no straight answers to scientific questions (Sumner and Tiwari, 2005). Moreover, international organizations often look for general advice from science, whereas national governments may look for context-based policy in relation to actual stakeholders in particular settings. Recent arguments in the development debate now propose that policy and action must reorient from domestic institutions toward globalized incentives (Sumner & Tiwari, 2009). Although the prospects of driving national change via global agreements may be unlikely in a multipolar and divided world, it can be argued that global and national institutional change should both support inclusive environmental governance (Dubash, 2012).

As an example, poverty eradication is central in development research and policymaking as reflected in the mission statements of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But despite (or given) its core status, there are huge disagreements among researchers on empirical, conceptual, and policy aspects of poverty, including the politics of its causes (why it exists), its dynamics (how it is reproduced and perpetuated), and its solutions (how to tackle it structurally and individually; Jönsson et al., 2012). There is a conventional wisdom, a mainstream view, shared by many observers on the positive effects on poverty reduction resulting from public expenditure, economic growth, and globalization. Meanwhile, the actual policy input is disputed in the debate on propoor policies where the mainstream perspective on income and equity in opportunities is contrasted against a critical perspective on equity outcome in terms of education levels, health status, and well-being (see Sumner & Tiwari, 2005). As an alternative, inclusive growth can be seen as a process that not only assumes and expands equal opportunities but also improves active participation in the economy rather than passive reception of benefits from social protection schemes (see de Haan & Thorat, 2013). With regard to well-being, there are several competing interpretations, but such differences can in fact be an entry point into a deeper understanding of development (White, 2010)—because “talk of wellbeing can be helpful in analysing differences in the way people think about development” (Copestake, 2008, p. 592). For causality, we can agree with Sayer that well-being “is unevenly achieved” within and between countries and that “the suffering and flourishing of different groups are frequently interdependent” (Sayer, 2011, p. 137).

Cash Transfer and Public Service—Is This a Good Strategy?

In the late 1990s, and in reaction to the incapacity of neoliberal policy to reduce poverty, the International Monetary Fund argued that fiscal policy is the most effective tool for redistributing income and reducing inequality (Seligson et al., 1998). Of late, a forceful alternative seen as a new cash transfer paradigm is emerging in the global south in reaction to the neoliberal component of many donor-driven poverty-alleviation initiatives. The system is meant to increase long-term state responsibility to deliver noncontributory and noninsurance-based support to people who are poor. As such it can be a critical complement to investments in service delivery and institution building. With evidence from several countries, development sociologists have identified certain challenges with the new transfer system while also showing convincingly how it can, indeed, be an affordable scheme wherein people who are poor use the money wisely to improve their livelihoods and prospects (Hanlon, Barrientos, & Hulme, 2010).

Climate Vulnerability in the Context of Hazard, Risk, and Uncertain Futures

Obviously, poverty definitions vary greatly over time and space. From an individual viewpoint, poverty often has both personal causes and solutions, whereas theory often sees it as tied to norms, structures, and institutional arrangements (D. Hulme, 2004) with institutions defined as power-laden distributional devices (see Mahoney & Thelen, 2010).

When risk is addressed in economic research on rural poverty in the global south, then findings show how people who are poor often have to resort to precautionary saving, which in turn lowers their chances to make investments, leaving them with relatively unproductive assets (Fafchamps, 2003). Research indicates that because neither insurance nor credit schemes really alleviate poverty, it is suggested that initiatives that encourage and facilitate savings in combination with efforts to support health status may be a more promising policy option (Fafchamps, 2003). Recent sustainability science research on small-scale farming in the Lake Victoria basin points in the same direction. Smallholders living with multiple stressors such as climate vulnerability, health hazards, and increasing dependence on the cash economy often end up in a situation without buffers, leaving them food insecure and with few long-term or sustainable options to save, invest, or create pathways out of poverty (Gabrielsson, Brogaard, & Jerneck, 2013; Jerneck & Olsson, in press, 2013).

To return to the focus on a mobilizing narrative, the question still remains on how to synthesize, translate, or simplify science into plausible narratives to be communicated to policymakers and to be anchored in society. If researchers, practitioners, and policymakers think and speak so differently, researchers need to “develop a specific and detailed understanding of the policymaking process, the nature of the evidence, the research policy links and the external influences” (Court & Maxwell, 2005, p. 715). Here, analysts often underline the importance of narratives, networks, and knowledge about the actual and particular political context (Court & Maxwell, 2005). Within the scope of this text, such reasoning could be translated into a sort of science of politics for a postcarbon society.

While some observers show that policy change happens most easily when researchers work together with government and civil society (Saxena, 2005), others stress that science and researchers must be committed, focused on high-level policy agendas, oriented toward comparative research drawing on evidence from several settings or countries, and skilled in communicating these findings (Court & Maxwell, 2005). High-level policy debates and international comparisons are important here, and the general advice for science is that researchers cannot expect to be influential unless they “set out deliberately to change policy” and, at an early stage, try to “win the argument” on how to frame the problem (Court & Maxwell, 2005, pp. 717, 718)—or reframe it. To exemplify, a series of responses and solutions to indoor air pollution—directly resulting from incomplete combustion of solid fuels from cooking and heating over open fire—illustrates how development interventions can be framed as anything from energy efficiency, health improvement, gender equality, or environmental justice, to a synergy between all of them aimed at solving a complex and multifaceted problem (Jerneck & Olsson, 2011, 2013).

Contract and Converge as a Critical Call for Action

When it comes to burden sharing, climate change research clearly shows that impacts are expected to be more frequent and forceful, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (Lobell et al., 2008), meaning that places and populations contributing the least will suffer the most from extreme weather events (Field et al., 2012). Based on high and increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in tandem with a continuously increasing global inequality gap, there have been calls for contraction and convergence (C&C), which refers to the need to reduce emissions while allowing developing and industrializing countries to increase their per capita emission up to a global universal ceiling.

In origin, C&C was an early attempt to create a global mobilizing narrative for how to mitigate climate change while promoting equality across regions and countries. It was formulated by the Global Commons Institute in the United Kingdom in 1990 as a serious call to reduce the overall global emissions of greenhouse gases to a politically defined tolerable level of climate change contraction—namely, the 2° target. Further, contraction should be achieved according to a global equity principle by which all countries, over a certain time period, should converge to the same per capita emission. (Böhringer & Welsch, 2004). However, after a peak in 2009, the debate on C&C slowed down—possibly due to the collapse of international climate negotiation at COP15 in Copenhagen (Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

Can a Crisis Narrative Be Reframed Into a Mobilizing Narrative?

Narratives may, intentionally or unintentionally, serve to naturalize social phenomena by downplaying their severity, diluting their radical dimensions, reorienting their focus away from critical aspects, and entering it into mainstream thinking. As an example of both environment and development, the concept of environmental refugee refers to a wider degradation discourse that for decades pointed at how population pressure may result in land pressure causing soil degradation followed by rural–urban migration and security risks in its wake (Hartmann, 2010). But such presumed causal chains may hide (combinations of) social, political, and economic drivers such as failed land reforms, weak distributional politics, or profound processes of land use change owing to agricultural commercialization, extractive industries, and infrastructural projects, thus de-politicizing the whole issue (Hartmann, 2010).

In another example on development and environment, artisanal mining in the context of small-scale farming in sub-Saharan Africa rarely receives the political recognition it deserves as a much needed extra source of income in poor farming households and as such an important livelihood issue (Hilson & Banchirigah, 2009). On the contrary, it is often condemned by development organizations for being an illegal and environmentally problematic activity (Hilson, 2011). That serves as yet another illustration of the wider degradation discourse mentioned by Hartmann (2010) wherein people who are poor are blamed for how environmentally detrimental their much needed cash-generating activities are. In contrast, a more critical approach would point at how economic policy fails to create income opportunities for low-income groups and how (large and commercial) industrial extraction might cause even bigger damage than the sum of dispersed smallholder activities, again pointing at politics and higher order processes of class and gender in society.

Such crisis narratives, blaming people who are poor and vulnerable or victimizing them, can be deconstructed and reframed into alternative understandings and critical narratives (Bettini & Andersson, 2013). A reframing process would embrace other assumptions, facts, interpretations, or values, enabling us to revise knowledge about and the roots of the actual problem, suggest insights for how to act on it, and thus take us beyond a sustainability impasse (Jerneck & Olsson, 2011). Reframing may bring new alternative narratives that accommodate historical and contemporary aspects of poverty, inequality, and injustice, while mobilizing environmental dimensions such as just sustainability in times of climate change.

In his comprehensive article on globalizations, Therborn (2000) identifies globalization as a contested, historical, and substantial socioecological phenomenon with cognitive, civic, and governance concerns. He speaks of a polarization between the “reckless global capitalist” and the “concerned cosmopolitan citizen” and between “boundless globalism” and “local fundamentalism” (Therborn, 2000, p. 176). Further, and in that same context, he refers to normativity and the need for a global norm, or simply sustainability, “in favor of the planet, the species and the fundamental equality of all individuals” (Therborn, 2000, p. 175).

Searching for Storylines and Input for a Mobilizing Narrative

In this final section of the analysis, I build on the three transnational discourses discussed throughout the text and draw on sociological thinking to bring insights tighter together for the mobilizing narrative. Historically, sociology has been critical of policy but keen on offering alternative narratives, imaginaries, and future scenarios while also scrutinizing the institutionalization and naturalization of social action and interaction in everyday life (Redclift, 2009). As a starting point, I see the physical and the social world as socionature (Swyngedouw, 1999) and as “utterly intertwined,” meaning that any separation of the two would be “an ideological construct to be overcome” (Urry, 2011, p. 8).

With regard to work in sociology on climate change, it may, among other things, serve to “identify the social structures and dimensions of agency that will facilitate transitional pathways to a low carbon society” (Grundmann & Stehr, 2010, p. 908); in practical research, this would imply that we study, more in depth, the interplay between nature and society in terms of

social values relating to nature, the environment, and the climate;

In their article on sustainability indicators, Martens and Raza (2010) point at the complexity of any planning for or implementation of sustainability in relation to globalization, precisely because, according to them, it requires new paradigms and innovative methods that hold a potential to balance the certain with the uncertain, the objective with the value laden, and the short-term with long-term practices and strategies. It reminds us of the difficulties involved in studying scales and in accommodating tensions among epistemologies as mentioned by Manson (2008). In addition, ontologies may be clearly differentiated. They may be socially stratified and thereby vary widely between stakeholders and between local and global understandings, as in the cognitive gap between international organizations and smallholders in the case of agroforestry adoption (Jerneck & Olsson, 2011, in press, 2013).

In two further examples of mobilizing narratives provided by sociologists, Giddens (2009) speaks of a “positive model of a low-carbon future” (p. 2) linked to existing patterns and practices of everyday life, while Urry (2011) calls for a postcarbon sociology facilitating the transition to a postcarbon society beyond the dominant economic model of a carbonized modern world. In times of climate change, Giddens (2009) argues for an ensuring state with the capacity to plan for uncertain futures while being the vanguard of low-carbon initiatives. For a solid grounding in society of such an ensuring state and its activities, there would first be a need for a social science interpretation of climate change, says Urry (2011). To that end, he proposes that we get involved in a sociology of resources to help us explore how path-dependent systems and sociotechnological relations came about, how they operate, and how they can be changed into new social relations in a low-carbon society. Thus, a form of theory on institutional change recognizing that “institutions are fraught with tensions because they inevitably raise resource consideration and invariably have distributional consequences” (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010, p. 8), which ties directly into the core of political ecology and its discussions on power.