Retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis: A study of two climate emergency declarations in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

In the last year, hundreds of climate emergency declarations have been made by local and national governments around the world. Instigated through grassroots activism, these declarations have become a focus of aspirations for radical climate action. However, concerns have also raised been about the desirability of emergency declarations in responding to the climate crisis, including at a local scale. In this paper we consider the enactment of emergency declarations by two local government authorities in Aotearoa New Zealand that have recent experience with multiple crises. Drawing on in-depth interviews with activists, councillors and officials, our findings show that adopting the ‘international language’ of climate emergency can be a source of hope but also tension. In particular, we highlight the struggle of local practitioners to overlay an emergency approach, something that is already contested in response to sudden onset disasters, with the scale, complexity and temporality of climate change. Our analysis suggests that retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis at the local scale has the potential to reproduce status quo politics, and calls for a greater understanding of the diversity of approaches to emergency in climate politics.

Keywords

Climate emergency climate action emergency politics activism

Introduction

Climate change activism has long evoked emergency claims that time for action is running out, alongside invocations of imminent catastrophism and promises of a better future with urgency (Bandt, 2009; Delina and Diesendorf, 2013). Recently, these narratives have escalated significantly. Extinction Rebellion rose to prominence, taking a disruptive strategy of civil disobedience to push the message of climate and ecological emergency. Their action initiated a wave of climate and ecological emergency declarations across the world (Climate Emergency Declaration, 2021; Farrell et al., 2019). The focus on emergency was further underscored by the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report, which was often reported as a timeframe of ‘12 years until the point of no return’ (Allen, 2019). These reports were taken up by climate activists, including Greta Thunberg’s (2019) call to global leaders: “I want you to panic”. It also coincided with the publication of books such as ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells (2019) and the ‘Deep Adaptation’ movement that advocates for preparing for the inevitable and near-term collapse of society (Bendell, 2018). “Climate emergency” was Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2019, following its increase in usage by 10,796 per cent in the space of twelve months.

The possibilities of emergency politics as a response to the climate crisis has been given further traction following the spread of Covid-19. A number of contested and controversial narratives have emerged at the intersection of the pandemic and climate change. Some have run the line that ‘humans are the virus,’ vitally misrepresenting environmental and social justice as oppositional goals and ignoring the layers of injustice which mediate oppression and environmental racism (Johnson, 2020; Sterlin, 2020). Others have made the case that the emergency response to the fast evolving global pandemic might provide a type of ‘blueprint’ for global climate action (Aotearoa Climate Emergency, 2020; Komanoff and Ketcham, 2020; Schleussner et al., 2020). Although governance responses have varied, many countries and regions have seen states of emergency and far-reaching emergency powers implemented with relative pace. And while outcomes have been mixed, elements within the emergency response are said to offer synergies with the type of action needed for climate change, notably proactive, expert-led governance and the potential for rapid state-led mobilisation or redeployment of resources.

It is in this context that we seek to explore and understand with greater nuance, and first-hand experience, how emergency politics might be provoked and enacted in the context of climate change. The differences between climate change and pandemics are numerous, as are the differences between climate change and other disasters or crises that might fall within the ambit of ‘emergency’. As such, now is an important time to explore in empirical contexts the multiple states of emergency and crisis governance, including at a local scale (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson, 2016). Drawing on interviews with local actors and document sources, we provide a situated analysis of how two local councils in Aotearoa New Zealand, who have recent experience with emergency governance, have sought to enact climate emergency declarations, and consider how different actors involved perceive its possibilities, limitations and potential long-term implications.

Our analysis demonstrates the tensions that emerge when different emergency approaches, stemming from very different types of emergency, intersect. As we discuss, adopting the “international language” of climate emergency at a local scale in Canterbury was a source of hope but also unease, given recent experiences of emergency in the region, but also the scale and temporality of the climate change response. In tracing how actors negotiated these tensions, our analysis suggests that to retrofit a concept as contested as emergency-style governance, to anticipate and respond to a problem as complex as climate change, has the potential to reproduce status quo politics. These difficulties did not appear to be a matter of insufficient effort on the part of the actors involved, but rather a question of the desirability of an emergency approach for instigating climate action at the local scale.

In undertaking this analysis, we sympathise with the desire for urgent and radical change, and have remained open to the generative possibilities the emergency declarations may create (Bond et al., 2019; Cretney, 2019). However, we are also cautious of the expansion of emergency approaches, particularly given the critiques from Indigenous activists and communities, and the scope for misuse of powers under emergency governance (Bargh and Hall, 2019; Gilpin, 2019). In this context, we acknowledge our position as Pākehā (people of New Zealand European ancestry) researchers in Aotearoa and the positionality this brings to our analysis. With a focus on how these declarations have sought to be enacted at a local, institutional scale, we seek to complement and add detail to wider discussions on emergency approaches and their tensions with climate justice (Cowan, 2019; Holmes, 2019).

Theorising climate emergency declarations

Climate emergency declarations have become a focal point of aspirations for instigating radical and rapid change in response to climate change. As of February 2021, nearly 1,900 jurisdictions in 34 countries have declared a climate emergency (Climate Emergency Declaration, 2021). These declarations are claimed by some activists and practitioners to offer a powerful means of communicating the urgency of the ecological crisis in a way that breaks the complacency of governments, organisations and individuals (Farrell et al., 2019).

That climate activists are drawing on the idea of emergency is not surprising. Ideas of emergency may be framed narrowly as a response to an impending or immediate hazard, but also in relation to highly uncertain and complex scenarios involving multiscale and multi-system impacts (Davidson et al., 2020; Handmer and Dovers, 2013). Central to these understandings of emergency is the implication that there is possibility to avoid at least some degree of harm, and that action taken in the present is meaningful and indeed necessary. Anderson (2016: 18), for example, describes emergencies as “activating” and providing a balanced demand for “immediate, urgent action.” In this sense, emergency can be seen as opening potential for empowering political actors to breach the boundaries of normal politics. The increasing use of metaphors of war-time emergency mobilisation by some parts of the climate movement is reflective of the desire to use emergency to catalyse climate action (Delina and Diesendorf, 2013; Kester and Sovacool, 2017).

Primarily enacted at the local scale, climate emergency declarations could also signal the possibility that local, and particularly urban, climate action may prove a productive site of experimentation and innovation (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Grandin and Haarstad, 2020). Urban contexts have long been seen as sites of progress on climate action in light of the ongoing failure of global and national governance to produce tangible results (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, 2016; Measham et al., 2011; Reckien et al., 2018). Movements like Transition Towns and community currencies have also situated climate action as local in scale (Aiken, 2012; Gibson-Graham, 2006). Driven by social movements and local activism, emergency declarations may further provide a productive and tangible focus for local climate movements to build awareness and engagement for action at the grassroots (Todd, 2019). In “Had We but World Enough and Time”, Bandt (2009: 32) argues the “silver lining” of climate change is that “we have no choice but to be in an emergency and suspend business as usual”, including the everyday of unpolitical life and its disengaged subjectivity (Bandt, 2009). In this light, Bonnie Honig (2014: 49) suggests emergency approaches provide potential not only as “a pragmatic politics of survival but, beyond that, to new forms of collective living.”

While climate emergency declarations might hold the promise of action, there are also important nuances within the concept to be recognised. Adey et al. (2015: 5) notes that emergency has “a quality to be otherwise” and to lead beyond the “immediate condition,” yet those outcomes remain uncertain and ill-defined. Emergency does not constitute a single technique, paradigm or narrative; as scholars like Bonnie Honig (2014: 47) remind us, there are a variety of approaches to emergency, just as there are a variety of emergencies, which shapes the subsequent social and political outcomes (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson, 2016). The uncertain quality of climate emergency declarations has led them to be described as an ‘empty signifier’ in that the multiple meanings ascribed to them are not only plural, but also act to reinforce different ideological projects (Bargh and Hall, 2019; Hall et al., 2020; Isoaho et al., 2019; Methmann, 2010). Thus, how emergency is actively framed and enacted, and by whom, is crucial in understanding the possibilities that may arise in adopting emergency language for climate politics.

Notably, emergency approaches engage important questions of climate justice. Core to a climate justice lens is navigating the ongoing grievances of intersectional oppression and discrimination and addressing the inequitable and unequal power relations which underlie the drivers and impacts of climate change and environmental destruction (Goodman, 2009; Routledge et al., 2018; Schlosberg and Collins, 2014; Whyte, 2020). Yet emergency approaches hold the potential for forms of governance that may exacerbate these climate justice concerns. In particular, the potential of emergency to consolidate the power of the state or other interests in the name of crisis - something that Hayes and Knox-Hayes (2014) note is attractive in light of the diffuse and collective nature of climate change - can enable securitisation and an excessive use or abuse of executive powers (Asayama et al., 2019; Derickson et al., 2015; Kester and Sovacool, 2017). These powers have acted as tools of oppression of Indigenous and minority communities, and emergency approaches may perpetuate and amplify this injustice (Bargh and Hall, 2019; Gilpin, 2019; Whyte, 2017).

Critics have also cautioned that emergency politics may provide fertile ground for other forms of regressive politics. A common refrain in the literature is that climate change, like many other aspects of modern politics, has been profoundly depoliticised by technocratic solutions, apocalyptic imaginaries and neoliberalised consensus on appropriate solutions (Swyngedouw, 2010). While this is not uncontested terrain (Kenis, 2018), the risk is that emergency may be used in a way that fosters depoliticised discourses on climate change. Such depoliticised approaches risk foreclosing space for democratic participation, narrowing the voices, perspectives and knowledge within climate politics, while reinforcing status quo ‘business as usual’ (Bond et al., 2015; Kenis, 2018; Swyngedouw, 2010). ‘Quick fix’ technocratic solutions can become presented as common sense against a backdrop of visions of climate apocalypse, without fully engaging with their ethical repercussions and the contentious and difficult terrain of inter- and intra-generational injustice and inequity (Goeminne, 2010; Hulme, 2019).

The scale and temporality of the climate crisis presents further tensions within emergency declarations. Emergency approaches are often enacted in response to sudden onset disasters with comparatively short recovery times, and often on a relatively local scale. Yet as a complex collective action problem, climate change requires coordinating widespread system change across an intergenerational timespan (Lewis, 2016). Substantial tensions remain where local authorities have assumed or been handed responsibility for climate action without adequate resourcing or jurisdiction to make change at a systemic scale (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; Castán Broto, 2017; Measham et al., 2011). Further, climate change challenges almost every aspect of our way of life and the way our societies are organised, and fundamentally involves negotiations around meaning, the future and our imagination (Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011). Yet emergency rhetoric may provoke counter-productive responses in human behaviour in the longer-term, contributing to a sense of hopelessness that perpetuates and fosters civic inaction, rather than narratives and stories of ‘slow hope’ (Mauch, 2019: 37; see also Nairn, 2019; The Workshop and Oxfam New Zealand, 2019).

Climate emergency declarations, then, sit at the intersection of hope in action and the promise of political space for change, on the one hand, and the risks that emerge from crisis-led approaches, on the other (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson, 2016; Honig, 2014). They hold the potential to depoliticise or narrow democratic space, but they may also cleave open spaces for new engagements with politics and the social landscape, particularly at the community scale (Bond et al., 2015; Cloke and Conradson, 2018; Cretney, 2019). Given the rise of these declarations, and the need for situated analysis of the multiple expressions of emergency, there are important questions to ask around how climate emergency declarations are being imagined and enacted at the local scale.

The study: The cases of Environment Canterbury and the Christchurch City Council

Like many parts of the world, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a rapid growth in climate emergency declarations. Local Extinction Rebellion chapters alongside other climate activists called on leaders of local governments to declare a climate emergency and initiate a society-wide mobilisation in response to escalating global ecological crises. Responding to the advocacy, local councils in Aotearoa New Zealand began declaring climate and ecological emergencies from mid-2019. There was a push for a national declaration, which was initially not successful, but was then adopted in December 2020 (Hall et al., 2020).

Our focus in this paper is on the emergency declarations of two local councils: Environment Canterbury and the Christchurch City Council. Both are situated in the Canterbury region in Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island. We carried out ten in-depth interviews with individuals involved in the emergency declarations in late 2019 and early 2020 - between six to nine months following the emergency declarations. Two participants were activists involved in advocating for the declarations; four were councillors from both councils; and four were staff members at both organisations. We did not attempt to gain an overview of the wider range of views on the emergency declarations in the region, but instead focused on understanding how actors involved reflected on their possibilities and limitations. Interviews lasted between thirty minutes to one hour, and were transcribed fully. Document analysis was also undertaken through the collection of relevant recordings of council debates, policy and media reports. These mixed qualitative sources allowed for a range of experiences of the emergency declarations, with some participants having advocated for the approach, while others were more reluctant, resistant or sceptical. Respondents had also been involved with the emergency declarations at different times: some had been engaged with the initial proposal; others only for its implementation. There was a local government election in October 2019, and the councillors we interviewed included both those who were no longer standing and those who would continue into the next term. Confidentiality has been a critical concern for this project, and so we have identified the organisation only where information is in the public domain, and obscured any details that might reveal the identity of participants.

For both councils, the process of declaring a climate emergency progressed very rapidly. Environment Canterbury was the first council in Aotearoa New Zealand to make a climate emergency declaration on 16 May 2019. The Council had been identified by activists as an “easier target” because of existing campaigns around water and resource management reform. Activists protested outside the council offices in April 2019, including chaining themselves to the building, cutting off the water supply and, in the words of one interviewee, “generally interfering with the place.” The Council Chair and Chief Executive met with activists outside the building, and made a decision to take the emergency declaration to the next Council meeting. As one participant recounted: “We looked at one another, and I said ‘look, can we do this?’ And he … said ‘yes, I think so.’ And that was that.” From there, participants described passing the declaration as straightforward: “we got there in two weeks, and it wasn’t that hard … We were first. And it kind of felt good.”

The Christchurch City Council declared a “global climate and ecological emergency” a week later. The process was depicted by officials as “very quick” and “very much councillor-led”: “it came around fast - in Council timelines, which are very slow.” Activists met with some councillors and staff, with a “targeted” strategy that was retrospectively described by officials as “very effective.” Also recounted was a sense of “global pressure” and “rush” to declare an emergency. One staff member explained that the “best practice” would have been to declare a climate emergency “once we had a really good understanding of how we could solve it. But we couldn’t, because if we’d declared an emergency six months down the line everyone would just go ‘you were supposed to do that last May.’” Further, there was a belief that declaring an emergency was necessary to “release a pressure valve”: “we felt it was the right thing to do because it took away that pressure. They wanted us to do it, and … it was like, unless we did it, we couldn’t move on.”

Climate emergency declarations as hopeful (in)action

Particularly for the activists we spoke to, but also some of the councillors and officials, the climate emergency declarations were framed as a source of hopeful action. The potential pinned to the idea was multifaceted. For some, the declarations were considered a means to publicly recognise and accept the severity and urgency of climate change (6 respondents). Acknowledging that there was a climate emergency, with all the associated attention it brought, provided a disruptive “wakeup call”:

… for me, it was like blowing a trumpet, it was like shouting ‘Wolf’, it was like a clarion call to, to action. [ … ] I thought that if people, community, public, saw that a local authority was getting worried about climate change, it might help them to come to terms with it a little bit. So, basically, it was, for me, it was a wakeup call (Councillor 3).

In this sense, the declaration provided an acknowledgement - “the point is recognising the situation of this emergency, it’s as simple as that” (Councillor 4) - that would help inform and convince the public of the severity of the situation, while offering a sense of direction for local councils. Councillor 2, for instance, described the declaration as “a statement not just to the people of the city, but also to the organization that we want you to take it seriously.” Likewise, activists hoped the declarations might offer a “fundamental shift in the direction of everything” by giving “a kind of ideal” for institutions to work towards (Activist 2).

In the six to nine months since their implementation, interviewees offered some tentative indications that the declarations had encouraged climate action, including obtaining budgets (Councillor 2), explaining “what we are doing and why” (Staff 3) and demonstrating “the relevance of climate and biodiversity together” (Staff 2). There was also a belief that the declarations might become more significant over time, with interviewees noting that the declarations were best thought of as a “starting point” or “round one in a twenty-round scrap” (5 respondents). Further, declaring a climate emergency offered a “marker”, a “reference point” or a “line in the sand” that it was hoped would allow future leverage: “in a year or so someone will be able to say [bangs the table] ‘we declared a Climate Emergency in 2019!’, you know, ‘what has happened?’” (Councillor 3). The activists we interviewed, in particular, emphasised the scope for accountability, suggesting the declarations could become “a place where all policy can be looked at through that filter [of] does this meet the purpose of addressing climate emergency?”

Yet most councillors and officials we spoke to were also tentative in their evaluation of the impact of the declarations, at least in the months since their enactment. In these early days, many interviewees’ statements spanned the uncomfortable terrain between hope in the declarations but also a belief that their impact had been, and might remain, negligible (6 respondents). Participants appeared to hold both these beliefs simultaneously, emphasizing the incomplete nature of the emergency declaration in shaping outcomes for climate action. The forcefulness of statements made by those who in the interviews supported, but then also questioned the use of emergency declarations, could still be quite startling. For instance, after speaking passionately about the declarations as “blowing a trumpet”, Councillor 3 went on to summarise:

So, look: It was great to be part of that little piece of theatre, but that's all it was! [ … ] What does it mean? We go back to that question we find, really, honestly, I would say it doesn’t mean a great deal.

An absence of action was signalled from the outset in statements made in the media following Environment Canterbury’s declaration. When asked what would change following the declaration, the spokesperson’s response was “nothing spectacular happens from here, it’s business as usual as far as we’re concerned” (Mead, 2019). As one official commented, this response was “the opposite of an emergency, which is a departure from business as usual.” Reflecting on the subsequent months, the idea that “nothing has happened” at the level of council action was reiterated across both councils. Even though interviewees pointed to some changes, they noted it was largely work already underway. In fact, at one organisation the declaration had temporarily slowed climate action, with staff being pulled from existing work developing a climate change strategy in order to work on the declaration. Speaking six months after the declaration, one official summarised: “I think it’s absolutely clear that [ … ] it has had zero impact on anything we’re doing.”

A particular frustration was that the declarations lacked depth or significant meaning. As an official told us, the declaration provided “quite a nice dramatic statement that we can use on a climate change report” but “unless there is substance, unless there is a policy behind it that says ‘and as a result of this you have to do such and such’, it doesn’t mean much.” Interviewees signalled a lack of “follow-through” in the months since the declarations, reflecting: “I don’t think there has been any translation from what a climate change emergency means and then what we should be doing any differently.” Further, despite hopes of longer-term accountability, in the meantime the declarations were said to “lack teeth.” As an official summarised, “it doesn’t have legal backing, it doesn’t force people to change the way they behave, it doesn’t force council to change the way it behaves.” Interviewees at both councils gave examples of debates shortly following the emergency declarations where decisions were made that would increase emissions. They noted with frustration: “there is nothing to say ‘woop, woop, woop’, you declared a climate emergency last week and this week you are literally adding to our carbon footprint.”

Tensions enacting the “international language” of climate emergency

Although interviews were conducted relatively soon after the declarations, the doubts and scepticism expressed by interviewees are nevertheless striking. One possible interpretation of these perspectives would be to say that the declarations represented a symbolic act to placate community calls for action, while avoiding more substantive responsibility. This might be seen to be part of the broader de-politicisation of climate politics in which contentious issues are brought ‘into’ a consensus in order to stem dissent and maintain the status quo (Swyngedouw, 2010). This reading, however, does not align well with comments made in other parts of the interviews. Overwhelmingly, the practitioners we spoke to recognised the urgency of acting on climate change. And while hesitant, interviewees were not necessarily opposed to the emergency declarations. Even among the most reluctant, there was a willingness to explore and experiment with the declarations, presenting a type of local creative engagement with the possibilities of climate politics (Bond et al., 2019; Cretney, 2019). For example, one councillor said their first reaction to the emergency declaration had been “I’m not supporting this, this is silly, it’s not addressing the issue, and it’s potentially a bit of a circus”. Yet they went on to explain how they sought to remain open to what the declarations might offer as “a different way to approach an issue that has not got any traction” and which “might help to shift the dial” (Councillor 1).

A closer reading suggests the apparent lack of substance within the declarations, at least in the initial period after their implementation, is a symptom of a more complex dynamic, which builds on the multiplicity of ways in which emergencies are mobilised and actioned (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson, 2016; Honig, 2014). Interviewees described a number of tensions that emerged when they tried to enact the “international language” of a climate emergency declaration within a local context, one that already had significant experience of disaster. Three tensions stood out in particular, which we discuss in turn: (1) how a climate emergency could be defined in relation to other emergencies; (2) how a global emergency could be responded to within the boundaries and limitations of local government; and (3) whether a language of emergency might enable long-term, inclusive community transitions.

Defining a climate emergency relative to other emergencies

The Canterbury region has experienced a number of traumatic events in recent years. A severe series of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 devastated large parts of the city and sparked a slow recovery process. This event resulted in the introduction of unprecedented legislation that shifted power to the central executive to enable a swift recovery, restricting opportunities for democratic engagement and the power of the local council (Cretney, 2019; Hayward and Cretney, 2015; Thomas and Bond, 2016). In the decade since, the city and region was affected by a variety of other disasters, including fires, floods and drought. Then, a few months prior to the climate declarations in 2019, two terrorist shooting attacks at mosques in the city killed 51 people and injured many more.

This local experience of emergency was prominent in how practitioners responded to local advocacy for a climate emergency declaration. In interviews, several officials and councillors described a sense of conflict between the pressure from the global movement and their support for what activists were “trying to do”, on the one hand, and their reluctance to use the word emergency in the local context, on the other. At Environment Canterbury, a primary consideration was how to reconcile the climate emergency declaration with the council’s existing responsibilities for emergency management planning and response in relation to rapid-onset disasters like earthquakes, fires or floods. An official explained it in this way: “the language isn’t right. Declaring an emergency for this Council with its responsibility for civil defence and emergency management is not comfortable, it is not the right term”.

These concerns were also present at the Christchurch City Council, but officials and councillors additionally spoke about wider impacts of a language of emergency, particularly following the shootings at mosques in the city two months earlier. This recent history was described by one official as the main reason for the council not to declare a climate emergency: “the terrorist attack had only just happened and there we were trying to use the word emergency. It was a huge consideration.” Also of concern was the potential of emergency politics to centralise power and undermine participatory engagement, which had been especially stark in the wake of the earthquakes nearly a decade earlier (Amore et al., 2017). The worry was that a “top-down” declaration of emergency would provoke feelings of helplessness, lack of control, and “like you can’t do anything because it’s an emergency.”

Practitioners spoke about putting “a lot of thought” into how a climate emergency might be articulated, with consideration given to how to “frame it and word it” in ways that were not too “inflammatory” or that might “trigger people,” and instead be more “gentle.” Yet in practice, this process of defining a climate emergency relative to other emergencies created declarations full of caveats. The officials we spoke to were very upfront about this dilemma, particularly within the scope of the declarations’ “rushed” development. One explained: “We went to Council and said, don’t quibble about [the wording], we’ll note in the paper that there is not under the Civil Defence Act or under the Local Government Act a true emergency.” Likewise, at the other council an official commented that “we wrote ‘it’s not a civil defence emergency, it’s not this, it’s not that.’” The outcome, they reflected, was that “we down-scaled what it meant in order to completely differentiate it. So, it [ … ] splatted a whole lot of water over it.”

Responding to a global emergency within the boundaries of local government

Echoing wider issues of capacity identified with local-scale action (Measham et al., 2011; Reckien et al., 2018), a second tension raised in Canterbury was how a local council, with limited jurisdiction, might respond to the “global emergency” of climate change. Most of the councillors and officials interviewed appeared to be acutely aware of the limitations of local government’s scope and capacity in responding to the climate crisis (7 respondents). Within the region, councils were described as being “only one player. We have a leadership role. But we are still one player.” And while there was acknowledgement of the symbolic potential of the declaration, councillors and officials cautioned that local councils were “not all that powerful” and had “limited levers to pull,” not least given the global political economy and the power of producers. Against that backdrop, an interviewee summarised that the declarations were: “obscure, academic, pie-in-the-sky stuff” (Councillor 3).

For both councils, questions of jurisdiction loomed especially large. In Aotearoa New Zealand’s unitary political system, the roles and functions of local government are set by central government, including at the time a definition of local government’s role in climate change as being one of adaptation but not mitigation (Rennie, 2020). What that meant, from the perspective of many of the councillors and officials, was that “we can’t just go off and do things in our own right” and that “our hands are tied.” One official summarised that even though they had declared an emergency, “we’re still required to make decisions which we know are actually harmful in the long term, because that’s the legislative framework we’re working with now” (Staff 3). There were hopes that the declarations might help to encourage or enable local government to gain more traction in the space of climate change mitigation, resonating with accounts that position local scale action as important drivers for more systematic change (Hosking and Palomino-Schalscha, 2016; Measham et al., 2011). For instance, interviewees framed the declaration as a means to signal to a “responsive” central government that “we weren’t just happy doing adaptation - we want to say things, we want to be leaders.” In this light, the declaration provided a signal that councils “wanted to be involved” in discussions about climate mitigation: “We didn’t want someone pie-in-the-sky up in Wellington coming up with how to do that” (Staff 4).

However, in the meantime, officials and councillors tended to take a pragmatic approach that the declaration needed to be framed within the existing boundaries of the local government environment. Interviewees described a number of ways they consciously narrowed the scope of the declarations to ensure the councils did not “step beyond” their legislative mandate or capabilities. At the Christchurch City Council, the word ‘global’ was added to the declaration to acknowledge the emergency was on a world-wide scale, and not something that a local council could address on its own. At Environment Canterbury, focus was given to staying within the legislative boundaries of local government, with one official explaining the declaration was defined as:

… to continue to do your job in adaptation, to continue to lead as an organization on reducing our footprint, and to signal that you’d like to be involved in the mitigation discussion that the government is going to have.

The framing gave the emergency declarations a restricted scope - notably excluding the possibility of undertaking climate mitigation activities, beyond reducing the organisation’s own emissions profile: “we were very clear that we are not adopting that declaration such that then every subsequent policy decision we make, you’re going to try to hoist us on that [climate mitigation] card.” This framing appeared to be taken seriously. In a council debate shortly after the declaration, a councillor had suggested that given the declaration, the council should consider other less emission intensive options. However, “All of the councillors just turned around and said, ‘that’s exactly what we just agreed not to do’. And shut her down, and shut her down hard. It was very interesting to watch.”

Enabling long-term, inclusive community transitions through emergency

The third tension discussed by interviewees related to the appropriateness of an emergency declaration in supporting long-term climate transitions within the city and region. These concerns were multifaceted, and speak to the complexity of navigating climate transitions. In Canterbury, although the declarations were considered by some participants as a starting point for further climate action, others worried that, in practice, the declarations had come to be seen as an end in themselves. One official for instance suggested the declarations were “telling us how to do things, instead of telling us what to achieve.” Also highlighted was the risk that the declarations might isolate climate action. According to one official, the declaration was considered “a one-off decision” and “dealt with very much in isolation,” when “climate change should affect pretty much everything we do” (Staff 2). Another agreed: “it’s treated like, ‘we can declare it and then get back to business as usual’, as opposed to, ‘there is a crisis and we need to change the way we are doing everything’” (Staff 3).

More generally, there were reservations about the language of emergency as a means to assist the difficult transformations required in a changing climate. Resonating with ideas of climate as a ‘long emergency’ (Kunstler, 2006; Rode, 2019) there was often a temporal aspect to concerns raised by practitioners: how the implied “immediacy” of emergency might interact with the long-term transitions required within the region in a changing climate (3 respondents). As one official summarised, “It’s not like you’re fighting fires and once the fire is out the emergency is over and you’re pretty much back to business-as-usual. It is going to be a long-term, consistent change.” Another suggested: “It’s very easy to declare an emergency, but actually making a plan for how we’re going to reduce those emissions over the next ten to twenty years is quite difficult.” These officials were cautious of a “rushed” response, and pointed to the absence of “quick wins” and “low-hanging fruit” in climate mitigation. One gave examples of immediate “bright ideas” to respond to a climate emergency that might in the long-term have negative effects. “There’s a lot of ground work that needs doing”, they summarised, “so that we actually get it right.”

There was also wariness among some interviewees that the lens of emergency may compromise collaborative and collective social change in the long term. At an institutional level, some interviewees expressed unease that emergency framing might affect relationships with other entities in the region. In particular, there were concerns about minimal engagement with Ngāi Tahu (the iwi with tribal authority in the region) in the initial lead-up to the emergency declarations, and official records of the emergency declaration meetings at both councils do not describe in any great detail involvement of Ngāi Tahu. For example, the report to council on the declarations from the 16 May 2019 meeting of Environment Canterbury simply states that Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu and other partners were advised that the council was considering declaring a climate emergency. This is particularly important because, as Maria Bargh has highlighted, there are significant ongoing and historical implications of emergency governance for Māori communities (Bargh and Hall, 2019).

Practitioners in Canterbury further raised concerns that the emergency declarations might alienate citizens. This apprehension was often discussed in the context of the “limited levers” of local government, discussed earlier, which interviewees suggested required councils to “bring people with you” and ensure that citizens were “on board” and “encouraged to change.” The risk highlighted was that the language of emergency might make people feel helpless, and “if they throw up their hands, you can’t make those changes.” It also was questioned whether an emergency declaration would be helpful in negotiating significant social justice issues provoked by climate change. These interviewees emphasised the importance of civic engagement in climate action. Giving the example of a family in a poorer area of the city, an official commented: “we can’t tell [them] that they have to be in a state of emergency, we can only really declare one on behalf of ourselves.” Summarising the difficult decisions ahead in the context of a changing climate, a councillor put it bluntly: “I’m not sure emergency is the right frame to have that discussion.”

Discussion and conclusion

Climate emergency declarations have become an increasing focal point for climate activism. Through examining two case studies in Aotearoa New Zealand we have explored how local actors involved perceived their possibilities and limitations, in the context of a region that has experienced multiple crisis events in recent years. In the Canterbury case studies we can see that climate emergency declarations, like climate change itself, are complex and multifaceted. From the perspective of activists and some of the local government councillors and officials, the declarations were seen as an important statement of the urgency of the climate crisis, and a means for local action to help set a global agenda. These actors acknowledged the incomplete nature of the emergency declarations and considered them as a hopeful starting point, and as a source to hold future governments to account.

Yet alongside these hopes, many of the practitioners in Canterbury were hesitant if not outright sceptical of the declarations, at least in the early months after their enactment, suggesting that they did not have significant depth or meaning. The declarations at both councils tended to be perceived as something that had been catalysed in response to demands from the community, but lacking substance and accountability, and in many regards part of the status quo of climate action being taken by the councils already. In some cases, concerns were raised that the declarations had taken resources away from existing action, and may have induced increased anxiety in a community that has experienced multiple crises over the last ten years.

What is striking about the reflections of these actors is that they are, in many ways, something of an antithesis to understandings of emergency. The idea of action is central to emergency claims (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson, 2016), and yet the climate emergency declarations in Canterbury did not seem to have prompted any systemic shifts, at least in the six to nine months since they had passed. The declarations may have been new, but for the most part they appeared to support existing work rather than radically overhaul them. At the same time, neither were concerns about misuse of power, authoritarianism and securitisation (Gilpin, 2019; Kester and Sovacool, 2017; Oels, 2012) apparent within the region. Despite a sense of “pressure”, practitioners at both councils sought to give meaning to local activist calls cautiously and thoughtfully, navigating the potential for negative associations following the recent crises in the city and region. In fact, care was taken at both councils to explicitly differentiate the climate emergency declarations as different to other forms of emergency style governance.

This does not diminish the contributions and concerns of the existing literature. It is early days for the declarations, and their meaning - like emergency approaches more generally – remains open-ended and contested. It is possible, for instance, that the emergency declarations may inspire more radical change over time, and that was certainly the aspiration presented by some interviewees. Supporting these hopes has been recent signs of further climate action being undertaken by local governments in Canterbury, often signalled as part of a response to the ‘climate emergency’ (Environment Canterbury, 2020). However, it is also conceivable that the climate emergency declarations may yet enable more regressive forms of politics. While the declarations in Canterbury were in many ways defined by what they were not, their flexible nature could be used to extend other discourses within climate action, for instance with the rise of green authoritarianism globally, and the shift towards populist and divisive politics (Eckersley, 2020; McCarthy, 2019). While in this study we did not find any context in which climate emergency declarations were being used in a manner to extend authoritarian approaches to climate change, other contesting discourses may adapt or extend the concept further.

The Canterbury case studies are further intriguing because they point to the tensions that emerge when different emergency approaches, stemming from very different types of emergency, intersect. The declarations appeared as part of a wider landscape of political contestation in which radical and urgent system change has struggled to gain traction against more incremental approaches (Swyngedouw, 2010; Termeer et al., 2017; Wise et al., 2014). The activists we spoke to sought to re-appropriate the idea of emergency to disrupt and rework status quo politics to respond to climate change. Yet despite genuine efforts, practitioners found it difficult to overlay an existing and already contested emergency approach to climate change. These tensions did not appear to be a matter of insufficient effort on the part of these actors, but rather a more fundamental challenge of retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis.

What the experience in Canterbury suggests is that to overlay a concept as contested as emergency-style governance, to anticipate and respond to a problem as complex as climate change, has the potential to reproduce status quo politics. Apart from having legislative responsibilities in these areas, many of the councillors and staff, often through direct experience, were acutely aware of the negative effects of an emergency approach in relation to sudden onset disasters and hazards (Honig, 2014; Pelling and Dill, 2010). Further, many councillors and officials struggled to apply a local emergency for approaching the unprecedented scale, complexity and temporality of climate change. There was also hesitation, even reluctance, among practitioners to adopt the “international language” of climate emergency, with its potential to alienate and exclude, in negotiating the long-term response to climate change. As such, local officials and councillors took pains to frame the climate emergency as not an official civil defence emergency; not a change in legislative scope; not a centralisation of power. Yet in distinguishing the climate emergency relative to other emergencies, the declarations became defined largely by what they were not.

These difficulties provoked in retrofitting an emergency approach raise concerns about the desirability of climate emergency declarations at the local scale for instigating climate action. The tensions faced by practitioners in overlaying an emergency approach were not superficial tensions that can be resolved through ‘better’ implementation, nor should they be read as a suggestion for ‘more emergency.’ There is strong resonance, for instance, with the hesitation of many practitioners and communities that emergency-type approaches to climate change may continue to entrench existing systems of injustice and inequality (Bargh and Hall, 2019; Gilpin, 2019; Holmes, 2019). This too links with the complex temporalities of climate change which require any approach to climate action, including emergency, to grapple with past and future intergenerational equity and injustice (Whyte, 2020).

Of course, these are only two case studies, and early days since their implementation, but we hope this work will prompt further investigation in other contexts. As scholars like Adey et al. (2015) and Honig (2014) among others have argued, there is a need for more varied empirical research into how emergency approaches are being adapted and retrofitted for climate change governance and activism, including at a local scale. For instance, our study resonates with calls by Simon et al. (2020) that there remain considerable challenges with the existing suite of local government policies and planning tools for facilitating the necessary transformative change on climate issues. Also needed is to explore possibilities for different sets of relations between the state and social movements in ways that integrate climate justice and generate participation while addressing the urgency of climate change (Routledge et al., 2018). Perhaps the climate emergency declarations will serve as a seed of future action, but our findings are suggestive of the wider challenge that lies in re-designing and re-imagining our political and social systems from the community to the institutional scale in order to create the transformations required to tackle climate change.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants for contributing their time and opinions to this project, and Leila Figueiredo for her research assistance. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was supported by a grant from the Lincoln University Faculty of Environment, Society and Design.

ORCID iD

Sylvia Nissen

Sylvia Nissen is a senior lecturer in the Department of Environmental Management, Lincoln University, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research centres on young people’s engagement in social and environmental issues. She has published books and articles on student debt and political action, and is currently leading a project examining the legacies of a youth mobilisation following a disaster.

Raven Cretney is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research approaches the politics of grassroots participation in environmental and social issues, particularly following disaster and crisis. She has published widely on radical articulations of resilience and the role of community-level organisation in disaster response and recovery.

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