LAST UPDATE | 21 Jul 2022
IT IS BECOMING more evident with each passing day that radical action on an unprecedented scale is required to avert the worst impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. This week’s record-breaking temperatures and wildfires across Europe cannot be ignored.
We’ve heard variations of this message for at least 30 years and yet action has not been happening at anything like the speed or scale required – not even close.
Rather than call for more action, however, or simply blame people for not doing enough, perhaps we need to think more carefully about how social change actually happens.
Climate action and social change
In 2010, the sociologist Elizabeth Shove outlined one particular theory of social change that has dominated climate change policy in the UK. She called it the ABC framework – ’Attitude’, ‘Behaviour’, ‘Choice’.
The ABC framework rests on the assumption that responsibility for responding to climate change lies with individuals whose changing attitudes and behavioural choices will make the difference.
Shove is writing from the UK context, but the emphasis on individual behavioural change also dominates climate policy and mainstream media coverage in Ireland; discussions about climate action inevitably turn to behavioural analysts and economists, rather than looking to the rich and diverse perspectives on social change found across the social sciences.
Individual v system
Shove argues that the dominance of the ABC framework can be explained by its political function. The focus on individual action helps to obscure the extent to which governments maintain and foster unsustainable patterns of development through policy and investment, and the ways in which capitalist economic systems fundamentally structure our daily lives.
The point is that individuals operate within a highly constrained and unequal political and economic system. For mass individual behaviour to dramatically change, the system needs to change.
One of the risks with this line of thinking is that focus on ‘the system’ can be overwhelming, leading to apathy, cynicism and even an excuse for the more privileged to do nothing.
When we pit individuals against the so-called system, we can inadvertently flatten the possibility of social change.
For most, it isn’t a lack of awareness that prevents action, but the sense that change is impossible when confronted with the scale and complexity of the systems we are tasked with changing.
What is collective action and why does it matter?
What is often missing in these debates is the role that collective action plays in bringing about social change.
Collective action entails individuals coming together, creatively identifying ways in which they can use the resources they have available (often power in numbers), strategically identifying points of intervention where changes can be forced through, and carrying out actions to achieve this.
Collective action can be expressed in different ways – strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, popular education (including via independent media), and direct action (such as blocking strategic infrastructures).
These actions and activities are not spontaneous but arise from organising work that is often unspectacular, labour-intensive, and embedded in particular communities and places.
Engaging in collective action is empowering. It entails a fundamental switch from focusing on the scale of the problems we face, to identifying ways in which we, as communities acting together, can alter the conditions that mould our lives.
This involves a shift from critique to positive action, instilling hope and overcoming feelings of disaffection and cynicism, which are particularly common in the context of climate change.
This perspective also recasts people as capable, caring and intelligent, rather than a collection of self-interested individuals whose interests and behaviours need to be regulated and managed.
Collective action in history
Ireland’s social and political landscape has long been shaped by collective action and groups of people organising together to address their shared concerns.
The 19th century Land War involved coordinated mass withholding of rent. People recognised the power they held as organised tenants (their numbers and financial resources), using this effectively to force the introduction of a programme of land redistribution and reform.
Other movements we could reference include the struggle for Independence, for civil rights in Northern Ireland, workers’ rights, and, more recently, the campaign to ban fracking in Ireland.
We do not want to conflate these movements, but, in general, they all involved ordinary people coming together, identifying shared problems, organising themselves in their communities and workplaces, and carrying out actions that improved their lives and ultimately transformed social and political systems.
Climate in everyday social problems
Today, it is hard to identify where large-scale collective action might emerge in the context of climate change.
Terrifying climatic events like the ongoing heatwave across Europe remind us that climate change is not in the future. And yet, these catastrophic events are soon lost in the churn of the news cycle and do not tend to lead to collective action.
Climate change still seems abstract to many people and removed from their daily lives – at least in this part of the world. But this is a question of framing.
In reality, climate change is tightly interconnected with many other and more immediate social problems, including fuel prices and the cost of living, access to high-quality affordable housing and other public services, economic inequality, and the way work – including care work – is valued and remunerated.
Action on these issues has direct implications for climate change and should be considered a core part of the climate movement.
We saw these connections being made recently in the UK, where climate justice groups stood with striking railway workers on the grounds that well-funded, publicly owned and affordable public transport is good for workers, commuters and the climate.
By rooting the climate movement in the issues that concern most people, we can begin to see how and where popular movements of collective action could evolve – movements that are essential for the scale of social change required.
Dr Patrick Bresnihan is a lecturer in the geography department at Maynooth University, and Dr Fiadh Tubridy is an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the geography department at Maynooth University.
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