Navigating climate’s human geographies: Exploring the whereabouts of climate politics

The burning necessity of social science

While the impetus for integrated, interdisciplinary research on the global environment have periodically arisen over the past 30 years (Hulme, 2008), the scope and scale of the latest wave have been especially significant and has been particularly focused on (re)positioning the role of the social sciences in this agenda:

In this renewed push for inter-disciplinary global change research, the focus has fallen sharply on the social sciences, with natural scientists, sponsors and funders alike calling for more social science, better social science and, very importantly, for more attention to global changes challenges from mainstream social science disciplines. For the most part, these calls are driven by the simple recognition that if the fundamental causes and consequences of global change are social, then so must the solutions be. With the effects of human actions on global conditions seemingly snowballing, and the time we have for finding effective, sustainable solutions apparently running out, social science knowledge has become necessary knowledge; its full integration with the natural sciences no longer a choice but a burning necessity. (Hackman and Lera St Clair, 2013: 9)

From this perspective, the social sciences are proving particularly problematic. Now convinced of the importance of integrating the social sciences in the global environmental change agenda, research programmes are finding that there is limited appetite among social science disciplines to engage. Analysis conducted by the ISSC finds that relatively few disciplines have engaged in any sustained manner with global environmental change. Where this has taken place, it is argued, it is because of the ability of disciplines – the two most notable being economics and human geography – to be bought ‘seamlessly into these domains’ of scientific research. In other words, social science has been successful to the degree that they are (seen to be) compliant with the integrative approach to interdisciplinarity. For the report’s authors, the important finding is that the ‘more traditional, mainstream disciplines – political science, sociology, anthropology and psychology – lag significantly behind’ in their engagement with global environmental change research (Hackman and Lera St Clair, 2013). While not explicitly articulated, the lack of engagement from ‘mainstream’ social science is implicitly regarded as a problem because of the legitimacy this confers on certain kinds of knowledge (in this case, related to global environmental change) within and beyond these disciplines as well as because it suggests that there is a vast pool of relevant knowledge that has to date not come to be directed towards a significant societal challenge. To address these issues, the ISSC suggests a more explicit engagement with a series of ‘cornerstones’ of social scientific enquiry that have a high degree of relevance for global environmental change research, including the historical and contextual complexities that drive global change, the full range of consequences for societies, the ways in which individuals and institutions engage in subjective sense-making and forms of governance and decision-making. Flagged as a ‘charter for the social sciences, a common understanding of what it is that the social sciences must and can do’ in order to realize the integrated, transformative global change science, the ISSC effectively diagnoses the challenge as one of signalling to mainstream social sciences that their concerns are of relevance to global change research (and vice versa) and of seeking to foster more integration.

Yet delving beneath the surface of the ways in which social science disciplines have engaged with global environmental research reveals a more complex picture. Taking the field of political science, a recent survey by Green and Hale (2017a) of scholars of international relations (IR) finds that while most ‘IR scholars in the United States see climate change, along with conflict in the Middle East, to be the greatest global threat in the years to come just 7% of them describe their primary or even secondary research field as environmental politics…(and) fewer than 2% of the articles published in the top disciplinary journals (defined by impact factor) are on environmental subjects’. While their argument is that the marginalization of climate change is considerably less than other environmental issues, nonetheless the analysis points to a stark lack of engagement with the politics of climate change and where it does take place a particularly narrow framing of the climate issue – a result which left the authors feeling ‘shocked’ about the state of global environmental research in their discipline (Green and Hale, 2017b).

Seeking to account for this state of affairs, they find two plausible explanations: there are few graduate programmes on environmental political science within international relations, and the bias in highly cited journals which serves to exclude female authors tends to also work to marginalize environmental politics as there are more women working in that subfield. Such an analysis begins to yield more insight as to the underlying issues that shape the absence of what the ISSC term mainstream social science within the global environmental change arena. From this perspective, even where social sciences may be addressing pertinent topics (as identified by the ISSC), the environment remains marginalized through disciplinary structures and cultures. Thus even if global environmental research communities would open up the possibilities of engaging with the underlying ‘social and cultural norms, practices and power relations that drive environmental problems in the first place’ (Lövbrand et al., 2015: 212), the extent to which the social science that engages with such dynamics is concerned with environmental matters appears moot. As Green and Hale incisively demonstrate, this is not due to a lack of concern for global environmental issues (and hence at least some degree of individual motivation to be engaged in this field), but rather because of the ways in which at least some disciplines may be structured such that questions of the environment are systematically marginalized.

Climate change’s human geographies

These findings raise interesting parallel questions for the whereabouts of climate change in human geography. Famously undisciplined about its boundaries, determining what is and is not human geography is a far from exact or fruitful pursuit. Nonetheless, as one of the social science disciplines identified by the ISSC as most involved with climate change research understanding how, where and with what implications these forms of engagement are emerging has consequences not only within the discipline but more broadly for the social sciences. Bluntly put, if human geography has been at the forefront of the social science response to climate change to date, we might expect the discipline to be central to any renewed calls for more social science to be engaged in the global environmental change agenda and, perhaps, to be in the vanguard of developing alternatives that can move beyond the ‘inevitability trap’. While human geography does not in any sense stand in for the social sciences, its experience in finding space for climate change can be seen to have potential consequences beyond its boundaries. For the authors of the ISSC report, human geography’s past success in addressing climate change is down to its capacity to be integrated with scientific research, reflecting the disciplines history (and external image) of occupying the middle ground between environment and society. However, as with the case of political science above, the story is more complex, and more intriguing. Rather than being a central preoccupation across human geography’s wide range of subfields, positioning climate change as occupying the ‘middle’ of the discipline leads it to be primarily a concern of those who (self) identify as ‘environment and society’ scholars. This reflects the ways in which climate change entered the discipline during the 1990s and has, arguably, been perpetuated by the continuation of disciplinary structures, agendas and practices that assume a distinction can readily be drawn between that which is natural and that which is social, despite the emergence of radical critiques of such a philosophy within the discipline.

While there has been no definitive history of the emergence of climate change research within human geography, it is possible to gather a partial picture of its whereabouts from the series of commentaries that have been written reflecting on disciplinary engagement with the issue (Hulme, 2008; Liverman, 1999; O’Brien, 2011, 2012) as well as by tracing its presence in core disciplinary journals. Initiated by a series of articles in Progress in Human Geography, geographers started to explore the importance of climate change in relation to a variety of topics and gathered momentum through research supported by The Global Environmental Change programme (UK ESRC 1991–2001). As climate change entered the arena of human geography, it did so largely through long-standing concerns for geographies of hazard/risk, particularly as they related to questions of development, as well as through geographies of environmental policy and planning that had developed through the 1980s. In relation to questions of hazard, risk and development geography, concerns for global environmental change were coupled to an already rich seem of work on (predominantly rural) vulnerability and its causes, broadly influenced by the notion of political ecology and a concern for the ways in which (global) production systems created forms of social, economic and environmental vulnerability (Liverman, 1999). Throughout the 1990s, this body of work sought to engage with the emerging issue of climate change to consider how climate impacts might reshape forms of vulnerability and the possibilities for resilience and adaptation, and geographers (including, for example, Bob Kates, Billie L Turner, Tom Wilbanks, Diana Liverman, Tom Downing, Neil Adger, Karen O’Brien) have been at the forefront of this area of research and central to the work of international research assessments including the IPCC, International Human Dimensions Programme and Future Earth.

In terms of work in human geography on questions of environmental policy and planning, research on climate change during the 1990s could largely be located in two main strands. First, work on the science–policy interface, including how expert knowledge is produced, the relation between knowledge and power, public responses to environmental risk and alternative forms of public knowledge. Taking some inspiration from sociology and the publication in 1992 of Risk Society by Ulrich Beck, as well as Brian Wynne’s important work on the nature of uncertainty, researchers including Steve Rayner, Gordon Walker, Sally Eden, Susan Owens and Karen Bickerstaff examined the ways in which climate change was being established and mediated as an environmental risk. Second, research which examined the ways in which individuals both responded to and were positioned in relation to climate change. On the one hand, this has involved geographical research on the factors that shape individual attitudes and behaviours and the ways in which these explain the willingness or otherwise to take up pro-environmental behaviour, for example, research conducted by Stewart Barr and colleagues. On the other hand, geographers have long taken a critical stance to policy approaches and political campaigns that position the individual as obligated to the global environment. Landmark papers in this area by Jacqui Burgess and Caroline Harrison, Gail Davies, Steve Hinchliffe, James Blake, Anna Davies, Rachel Slocum and Kersty Hobson established the ways in which the positioning of individual responsibilities more often than not entailed a shift of obligations away from those who might have the power and capacity to act and towards those who felt alienated and disconnected from the global environment as a category of either action or meaning.

In addition, climate change came to be attached to a third area of disciplinary concern – questions of geopolitics and security (Dalby, 2013). Since early interventions by Simon Dalby, work on climate’s geopolitics has found its way into the pages of Transactions, the Annals and Progress, along with key articles in Political Geography during the early 2000s by Jon Barnett and Neil Adger, Rafael Reuveny and Philippe le Bilion which are among those most frequently downloaded from that journal. Yet despite the strong engagement from political geographers with questions of climate change, other questions that occupy that area of the discipline – related to, for example, the nature of the state, identity, borders, citizenship and so on – have, with some exceptions (O’Riordan and Jäger, 1996), only more recently come to be considered in relation to climate change. Hence, through the 1990s and early 2000s when climate change was becoming established as a topic of research, it was primarily located within existing spheres of ‘environment and society’ research, rather than across the wide remit of human geography concerns (with the notable exception of some aspects of political geography). Placing climate change in the ‘middle’ of the discipline was made possible by, and served to reify, an ongoing distinction between nature (traditionally regarded as the domain of natural science) and society (the proper concern of human geography) and to further embed the notion that such forms of research should be, in some way, integrative – that is, they should span this gap and, optimally, serve to stitch it together. Rather than being produced solely through those institutions and research funds concerned with creating a global environmental change agenda, it appears that the structure and practices of geography as a discipline have also played a part in shaping the narrative that climate change social science is of a particular kind.

Growing presence and persistent absence

From these initial starting points, the extent and variety of geographic engagement with climate change has grown significantly, with topics including carbon markets, climate-induced migration, cities and climate change, alternative economies, climate and development, climate finance, corporate social responsibility, carbon sequestration, and many more now well versed across human geography. Yet for all its expansion, the position of climate change within the discipline retains a curious absent-presence: there is no doubt that climate change is firmly part of domains of inquiry with which human geography is concerned, yet the confluence of how climate change’s whereabouts in the discipline was initiated together with the global landscape for climate change research has meant that the issue has only a precarious toehold within the discipline. In considering this ambivalence, of both a growing presence and a persistent absence, two sets of dynamics seem particularly important.

First, despite the growing variety of climate-related topics addressed, its reach remains limited beyond those areas of the discipline that are regarded as being occupied by avowed ‘environment and society’ scholars of one kind or another (Castree, 2014). No systematic survey of the type conducted for International Relations by Green and Hale (2017b) has yet been conducted, but an overview suggests that the prevalence of climate change within geography journals in other subfields remains limited. For example, there have only been 26 articles in the Journal of Economic Geography where the term ‘climate change’ appears in the abstract or the title, the first of which was published in 2002 and 20 of which have appeared since 2010. This suggests at least a growing engagement with the topic over the past decade. For sure, human geographers have been prolific in contributing to the growing debates concerning climate change in specialist environmental journals (e.g. in Global Environmental Change, Global Environmental Politics, Local Environment and so forth). Yet this reinforces the sense that climate change is something to be dealt with as an environmental problem, first and foremost, rather than, for example, as a matter of power, the global economy, identity or inequality. Indeed, the separation of the environment as a particular domain has recently become further institutionalized as publishing houses seek to create distinct spaces for this kind of research. Notably, Nature has launched a series of journals focused on Climate, Energy, and most recently Sustainability, while a journal that historically provided a space within the social sciences to bring environmental concerns together with those of politics and governance, Environment and Planning C, has been reoriented to focus on ‘politics and space’ while a new separate journal, Environment and Planning E, now provides a demarcated space for environmental research. The result of both disciplinary concerns and publishing practices is that climate change’s human geographies are often to be found beyond core sub-disciplinary fields – such as economic, urban, political, development or social and cultural geography. In a relatively fragmented discipline, where teaching also mirrors key subfield structures, this means that climate change is only partially to be found on the research and teaching agendas, and where it is remains firmly located in the environment/society arena.

A second set of dynamics is intimately connected to the first, such that the positioning of climate change as a matter for the ‘middle ground’ of geography has served to reinforce the integrative impulse present in the global environmental change research agenda that at once seeks a form of interdisciplinarity that is concerned with overcoming ‘gaps’ between disciplines and which positions social science as facilitating the uptake of scientific knowledge in policy and society. Perhaps most powerfully articulated by Castree et al. (2014), this frame serves to ‘position researchers as metaphorical engineers whose job it is to help people cope with, or diminish, the Earth system perturbations unintentionally caused by their collective actions’. As Castree (2015) further argues, to date the engagement of human geography with climate change and wider global environmental/Anthropocene concerns has been largely undertaken through this epistemology and associated assumptions: that there is one ‘interconnected’ world whose problems need to be diagnosed; that this knowledge can be created by bringing the integral capacities of human geography to bear; that this knowledge is necessarily problem-orientated and can be addressed to the articulated needs of policy-makers; and that the mode of knowledge production should primarily be responsive, working in the service of society’s problems (Castree, 2015: 7). While there is plenty of evidence of human geography that has not fallen into this ‘inevitability trap’, it continues to dominate the ways in which social science research agendas are articulated by research institutions and funding organizations and has proved seductive to those seeking to advance narratives concerning the relevance of geography to society at large. For many at work in this field (Castree et al., 2014; Lövbrand et al., 2015), one consequence has been that research that takes a critical perspective tends to be eschewed in favour of that which appears to have a more practical application. While agreeing with the direction of this argument – that there are important parts of human geography (and the social sciences more generally) that have yet to be seen to have value in relation to the agendas of research institutions shaping the global environmental change agenda – it is equally important to recognize that this has in part been made possible by a continued ontological separation of nature and society within our own discipline. It is also evident that as human geography’s climate change research extends and diversifies, it has been precisely into these realms of critical inquiry that it has travelled, even if this remains under the radar of global research institutions and agendas.

Taken together, these dynamics point to an undercurrent within human geography which serves to stubbornly separate matters of nature from those of society and in so doing reinforces (and indeed contributes to) the particular positioning of climate change as an object around which societal responses should be formed (Hulme, 2008). In short, as if climate change were a given thing, and the task of social science, in this case human geography, is to seek to analyse society’s responses towards it. That, in the face of many attempts to overcome the nature–society dualism within and beyond human geography (Mansfield and Doyle, 2017), this kind of precept can have survived so long is somewhat remarkable. For several decades, we have been used to the idea of the social construction of environmental issues, to their political ecologies and increasingly to their new materialisms. Each of these conceptual perspectives tell us that global environmental issues do not have the status of an pre-given entity, but rather have to be made, remade, held together, contested, is always in a state of unbecoming and so forth. As Esther Turnhout and colleagues argue ‘biodiversity knowledge does not simply mirror biodiversity but brings a specific version of it into being and it does so in ways that fit with a specific scientific, cultural, and political context’ (Turnhout et al., 2014: 585).

Indeed, the social sciences have become central in making the argument that the ways in which we do science (and social science) matter a great deal for how particular kinds of issues come to be understood and space created for intervention. And further, that it is not only the production of knowledge that matters for how problems and their solutions come to be circumscribed, but a whole host of entities, practices and forms of agency that are assembled and configured in particular ways (Li, 2007). A growing body of research across the social sciences is concerned with just this problematic: with the ways in which climate change comes to be constituted and configured. Yet to rethink the place of climate change within human geography it will not be sufficient to only recognize global environmental change as ‘manifestations of modernity, symptoms of dominant patterns of development, outcomes of social relations, and products of short-sighted visions, which are closely linked to beliefs, values, and world-views’ and subsequently change the terms of engagement with climate change (O’Brien, 2011). Rather, what is required is a greater engagement with the ways in which climate change comes into being, and what in turn it creates, entangles, undoes and removes with it. To acknowledge ‘the inconsistencies and ambiguities that stalk the phrase’ (Brace and Geoghegan, 2010: 285), the multiplicity of meanings, forms and relations to which it gives rise, and its radical nature, requires that we start from a different place.

Climate community: Berwick’s wind turbine

Throughout the 2000s, governments and various non-state actors have sought to generate community renewable energy projects as one means through which to change the composition of electricity generation and hence atmospheric concentrations of climate change. Examining such projects in detail it becomes apparent that none of the categories deployed – community, renewable, energy, climate– are predetermined, but instead come to be formed as interventions are configured and realized. The case of the single wind turbine that came to be formed as Berwick’s community energy project provides a case in point. The ambition of generating renewable electricity in Berwick, a small town on the border between Scotland and England, was first articulated in 2007 through the formation of Berwick CoRE, a social enterprise formed by the partnership of Community Renewable Energy (CoRE) and Berwick Community Development Trust. This involved multiple forms of translation and calculation, as the turbine and its situation came to be determined through measures of wind speed, finance and the political capital that could be leveraged from diverse groups including the city council, the Berwick Freemen, national funding programmes and consultants. Once the parameters of the turbine came to be configured in this manner, it gave rise to new formulations of what it meant for Berwick to be low carbon as the project sought to enrol different parts of the community in pursuit of the resources available through the United Kingdom’s Low Carbon Community programme. All too mindful of the emphasis of the Challenge on the effectiveness of ‘integrated community support packages’ the Berwick wind turbine became reconfigured as part of an amalgam of low carbon interventions designed to support Low Carbon Berwick, including the installation of photovoltaics on community housing and measures to reduce energy demand and tackle fuel poverty. As community energy circulated through Berwick, so too were new notions of what constituted the community and its purpose in relation to climate change forged, while all the time what climate change as community meant came to be configured.

Though initiated by the wind turbine, the resources secured for Low Carbon Berwick were not of the right kind to secure the capital investment it required. Traditional capital finance from high street banks was difficult to secure because of the variety of forms of calculation (and risk) involved from ‘planning permission, a lease, a grid connection, [to] a power purchase agreement, all that sort of thing’ (Berwick Interview B, 2011) before the project would be considered feasible. Alternatives were, perhaps ironically, deemed incalculable. On the one hand, it was not legally possible to give away shares in a community-owned scheme but rather they would need to be bought, potentially limiting the participation of those on low incomes and in so doing refiguring that it was that a low carbon community in the town entailed. On the other hand, the limits on the size of such investments meant that in a small community such as Berwick, the possibility of leveraging the required capital was limited. In 2012, funding for the turbine was announced in the press. Verco-Baxendale, a climate change and energy consultancy, decided to invest in the turbine at a cost of approximately £1.45 m with financial backing from the Co-operative Bank and Baxi Partnership. The resulting income will be split, with a 39% share of the profits going to Verco and the other 61% to the Trust and CoRE (which have since been amalgamated) (Berwick Advertiser 2012). In May 2014, the Trust announced that the Turbine had finally been installed:

On the 14th January the turbine was finally completed, it was commissioned in April and officially launched by the Mayor of Berwick on the 7th May 2014. After seven years of work by the Trust and all its partners the turbine is operating and generating clean sustainable electricity and an income to support the Trust’s work…The turbine will generate over the next 25 years an income of more than £2.3 m at today’s prices. The 50-metre high 500 kilowatt turbine has a blade-span of 24 metres and will generate annually the equivalent of 450 homes consumption. Extensive testing over some 15 months established that the windy site over looking the North Sea is ideally suited as a location for ‘green’ energy generation with above average wind flows. Sixty one per cent of the lifetime income generated from the turbine will go to Berwick CoRE – a company now wholly owned by the Trust – with the remainder shared by the bank and other partners. The Trust will then use 80 per cent of Berwick Core’s income to support its work in Berwick and 20 per cent will be used to support a grant fund enabling community energy projects across the North East. (Bulkeley, 2016)

Climate corporation: Tesco’s low carbon store

Positioning themselves as one of a leading group of corporate actors in the United Kingdom responding to the Stern Review and aligned both with the non-governmental organizations orchestrating a response, including The Climate Group and WWF, as well as with the United Kingdom’s international position, during the 2000s UK supermarket Tesco’s sought to govern both themselves and their constituencies through the setting of targets and a host of techniques, practices and devices designed to calculate and commensurate climate change within the business and its wider sphere. Particularly intriguing was the process through which carbon came to be made commensurate with the very design of Tesco through the development of what were termed ‘low carbon’ or ‘zero carbon’ stores. A key target for Tesco’s was that their new stores built between 2006 and 2020 would emit, on average, half as much carbon as that of a standard store designed in 2006. The building of low carbon stores provided a space within which Tesco could both demonstrate its intention to meet low carbon targets and experiment with the different means through which this could be met. In 2006, a new store at Diss, Norfolk, achieved a 50% reduction in carbon emissions, and in 2007 a store with 70% less emissions was opened in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, followed in 2009 by the first zero carbon store in the world at Ramsey, Cambridgeshire. Each of these stores incorporated features aimed to reduce carbon footprints, for example, by building with wooden frames instead of steel, using natural light, alternative heating, cooling and ventilation systems that recycled air within stores, technical and behavioural measures to reduce energy and water consumption, on-site energy generation and different types of refrigeration technology minimized energy use and leakage of greenhouse gas emissions (Tesco, 2010). From the outset, the technology within the stores was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. For the designers, the intention was not to draw attention to carbon – to make it stand out – but rather to make it fit within the existing Tesco store concept and experience. Yet at the same time, the low carbon features of the store are literally on display. Large glass frontage, wooden frames and low carbon technologies frame the entrance to the store, while inside the internal pipework of the Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system is laid bare, the usual chill of the fridge isles are tempered by the doors, and signs proclaim its low carbon credentials. At Tesco’s low carbon stores, climate change is not only a problem to be solved but a mean through which what it means to be a supermarket is reconsidered.

Yet not all forms of being low carbon could be made to fit and such agreement was often either temporally or spatially limited. The presence (and absence) of fridge doors is a case in point. Tesco, as is the case for most supermarkets in the United Kingdom, has traditionally used refrigeration units without doors. The low carbon stores in Cheetham Hill and Ramsey trialled new units with doors included, an adjustment that had to be accounted for not only in carbon terms but also through the management and working practices of the business:

The company predicts how long everyone should take for a certain job. In this store, we have a higher number per cage [of products to be stacked on the shelves] because of the doors and that accounts then in our budgets for wages. We might have a slightly higher wage budget for the exact same store without doors. And they account for that. (Tesco Interview E, 2011)