A Commoners’ Climate Movement
Book chapter by Lucy Stone, Gustavo Montes de Oca and Ian Christie
Addressing the Climate Crisis: Local action in theory and practice—Edited collection by Candice Howarth et al | Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
Summary
The climate transition is already under way, under the banner of ‘net zero’—the aspiration to completely reduce (or offset) anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The oil industry is in crisis whilst the renewables industry speeds ahead, agriculture faces transition, whilst the car industry rapidly electrifies. These transitions and governmental action are welcome and necessary, but this top-down approach is still not generating effective measures fast enough to keep us within the level of global heating scientists deem ‘safe’.
These transitions largely exclude citizens, are not designed to avoid locking in existing inequalities and risk backlash over distributional consequences of climate transitions. All that could narrow the already tight political space in which elected representatives, governments and corporations operate. Many initiatives for citizens’ engagement in climate policy measures have been launched. However, they have not been effectively connected to policymaking and they tend to treat people as individual agents/voters rather than as members of collective movements for change. We argue that many climate solutions are based on outdated models both of ‘human nature’ and of management of collective action problems. This constrains the ‘possibility space’ for action by overlooking the ‘third pillar’ of civil society—cooperative community-based action.
Our chapter draws from Elinor Ostrom’s scholarship on managing commons and a wider literature review, and our reflections as practitioners in the domains of community energy, agriculture and transport.
The book is published online and all its chapters can be reached in open access format via the Springer website. If you have difficulties accessing the article, please get in touch: info@cusp.ac.uk.
Citation
Stone L, Montes de Oca G and I Christie 2022. A Commoners’ Climate Movement. In: Howarth C, Lane M, Slevin A (eds): Addressing the Climate Crisis: Local action in theory and practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79739-3_3
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