| 1. |
- Bennett, Elena M., et al.
(författare)
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Bright spots : seeds of a good Anthropocene
- 2016
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. - : Wiley. - 1540-9295 .- 1540-9309. ; 14:8, s. 441-448
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The scale, rate, and intensity of humans' environmental impact has engendered broad discussion about how to find plausible pathways of development that hold the most promise for fostering a better future in the Anthropocene. However, the dominance of dystopian visions of irreversible environmental degradation and societal collapse, along with overly optimistic utopias and business-as-usual scenarios that lack insight and innovation, frustrate progress. Here, we present a novel approach to thinking about the future that builds on experiences drawn from a diversity of practices, worldviews, values, and regions that could accelerate the adoption of pathways to transformative change (change that goes beyond incremental improvements). Using an analysis of 100 initiatives, or seeds of a good Anthropocene, we find that emphasizing hopeful elements of existing practice offers the opportunity to: (1) understand the values and features that constitute a good Anthropocene, (2) determine the processes that lead to the emergence and growth of initiatives that fundamentally change human-environmental relationships, and (3) generate creative, bottom-up scenarios that feature well-articulated pathways toward a more positive future.
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| 2. |
- Broadbent, Jeffrey, et al.
(författare)
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Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse
- 2016
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Ingår i: Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. - : SAGE Publications. - 2378-0231. ; 1:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.
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| 3. |
- Karimo, Aasa, et al.
(författare)
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Shared Positions on Divisive Beliefs Explain Interorganizational Collaboration: Evidence from Climate Change Policy Subsystems in 11 Countries
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of public administration research and theory. - : OXFORD UNIV PRESS. - 1053-1858 .- 1477-9803. ; 33:3, s. 421-433
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Collaboration between public administration organizations and various stakeholders is often prescribed as a potential solution to the current complex problems of governance, such as climate change. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, shared beliefs are one of the most important drivers of collaboration. However, studies investigating the role of beliefs in collaboration show mixed results. Some argue that similarity of general normative and empirical policy beliefs elicits collaboration, while others focus on beliefs concerning policy instruments. Proposing a new divisive beliefs hypothesis, we suggest that agreeing on those beliefs over which there is substantial disagreement in the policy subsystem is what matters for collaboration. Testing our hypotheses using policy network analysis and data on climate policy subsystems in 11 countries (Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Sweden, and Taiwan), we find belief similarity to be a stronger predictor of collaboration when the focus is divisive beliefs rather than normative and empirical policy beliefs or beliefs concerning policy instruments. This knowledge can be useful for managing collaborative governance networks because it helps to identify potential competing coalitions and to broker compromises between them.
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| 4. |
- Lahsen, Myanna
(författare)
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Evaluating the computational ("Big Data") turn in studies of media coverage of climate change
- 2022
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Ingår i: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. - : Wiley. - 1757-7780 .- 1757-7799. ; 13:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Machine-assisted big data (MABD) research is enabling quantitative studies of large-scale social phenomena, including societal responses to climate change. The rise of MABD science is causing both enthusiasm and concerns. Reviewing prominent criticisms of MABD and their relevance for MABD explorations of macro-structural factors shaping media coverage of climate change, this article finds that the quality and contributions of such studies depend on avoiding common pitfalls. The review focuses specifically on MABD studies attempts to identify and make sense of correlations-or lack thereof-between climate vulnerability and climate coverage in different countries. The review draws on insights from a single, nationally focused, context-attentive, and relatively more qualitative "small data" study in the Global South (Brazil) to shed critical light on assumptions, claims, and policy recommendations made based on the computer-assisted macro-studies. The review illustrates why more narrowly focused and qualitative small data studies are complementary and indispensable. Besides providing vital understanding of causal relationships that elude MABD studies, more narrowly focused and context-sensitive qualitative studies can foster understanding of the consequential mediating roles of place-specific meaning-making and political strategizing in how climate and weather phenomena are framed by social actors and mass media in particular places. These are dimensions that escape the Big Data quantitative methods, but that are vital to sound policy advice, as illustrated by the Small Data research from Brazil. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice
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| 5. |
- Lahsen, Myanna
(författare)
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Media Reform as Transformation Tool: A Hegemonic Gap in Environmental Research and Policy
- 2024
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Ingår i: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. - : SPRINGER. - 0891-4486 .- 1573-3416.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sustainability researchers are writing much about levers for transformations towards sustainability but too little about the most powerful means available for obstructing and activating them: mass-reaching media systems. How media systems are structured and governed form a profoundly important meta-level layer of decision-making that ought to be central in the study of environmental politics and in environmental policymaking. A politics- and media-focused account of the rise of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil illustrates the essential role of media systems and the need for new principles, structures, and policies for their governance if the interlinked goals of democracy, equity, and environmental protection are to be achieved. The pervasive inattention to this in environmental research reinforces hegemonic forces and needs to be widely discussed, understood, and overcome to achieve much needed just transformations towards sustainability.
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| 6. |
- Lahsen, Myanna, et al.
(författare)
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Politics of attributing extreme events and disasters to climate change
- 2022
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Ingår i: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. - : Wiley. - 1757-7780 .- 1757-7799. ; 13:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Climate change certainly shapes weather events. However, describing climate and weather as the cause of disasters can be misleading, since disasters are caused by pre-existing fragilities and inequalities on the ground. Analytic frames that attribute disaster to climate can divert attention from these place-based vulnerabilities and their socio-political causes. Thus, while politicians may want to blame crises on climate change, members of the public may prefer to hold government accountable for inadequate investments in flood or drought prevention and precarious living conditions. To be both strategic and moral, framing choices must therefore be sensitive to context-dependent political meanings and particularities, and to how the values implicit within analytic frames about the causes of disasters shape policy responses. Such sensitivity requires multicausal analysis of weather-linked disasters to illuminate a broader range of means to reduce the damages associated with climate change and weather extremes. Through examples from around the world, and especially Brazil, we discuss how and why climate-centric disaster framing can erase from view-and, thus, from policy agendas-the very socio-economic and political factors that most centrally cause vulnerability and suffering in weather extremes and disasters. We also offer a theoretical discussion of why attribution is not neutral. Analytic frameworks always embed choices about factors that matter, and thus are inherently normative and consequential for understandings of responsibility and action. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making Highlight Attributing crises only to climate is inadequate from a mechanical, moral, and strategic policy points of view.
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| 7. |
- Lahsen, Myanna
(författare)
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Steering signification for sustainability
- 2024
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Ingår i: Global Sustainability. - : CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS. - 2059-4798. ; 7
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Non-Technical Summary Powerful influences on societal knowledge, values, and behavior, artificial intelligence-infused media systems, new and old, currently reinforce the interlinked problems of inequality and unsustainable consumption. This problem is rarely discussed in environmental research and policy, and even less so how it might be overcome. Discussing this consequential blind spot and the power structures that underpin it, this article argues that sustainability researchers should centrally explore the need and possibilities for democratic reconfiguration of the political economies and charters of media systems to achieve sustainability and other broad, inclusive public goals.Technical Summary Powerful influences on societal knowledge, values and behavior, artificial intelligence-infused media systems, new and old, currently tend to reinforce the interlinked problems of inequality and unsustainable consumption. This problem is rarely discussed in environmental research and policy, and even less so how it might be overcome. Discussing this consequential blind spot and the power structures that underpin it, this article argues that sustainability researchers should centrally explore the possibilities for democratic governance and reconfiguration of the political economies of media systems to foster human wellbeing and just transformations toward sustainability.Social Media Summary Sustainability transformations require 'signification steering' and interventions in media systems' configurations.
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| 8. |
- Lahsen, Myanna, et al.
(författare)
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The role of unstated mistrust and disparities in scientific capacity : Examples from Brazil
- 2006
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Rapport (refereegranskat)abstract
- The objective of this report is to illuminate the complex ways in which science is produced, used or otherwise of importance to Brazilian climate policies and politics and how it is interlinked with culture, power and politics, including the large number of factors that variously constrain or facilitate climate-related policy. It discusses arguments and evidence ofhow geopolitics, socio-cultural and political perspectives, and trust or lack thereof, shape – orare perceived to shape various lines of knowledge production, contestation and mobilization related to climate change and the negotiations under the United Nations FrameworkConvention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It argues for the need to understand the existence and consequences of distrust between the global North and South (i.e., industrialized countries and the developing countries) in climate related affairs, including the causes ofmistrust and, in particular, connections between distrust and disparities in both power andnational capacities to produce and frame the knowledge used in climate negotiations.Many developing countries lack the knowledge and support offered by social and economic infrastructure, scientific and technological capability when facing international negotiation onclimate change, and there are indications that this – in addition to equity and participationconcerns – troubles leaders of such countries and affects general receptivity to agendas, processes and reports associated with the IPCC, the UNFCCC and associated institutions suchas the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) under the direction of the World Bank. The reportpoints out that it is necessary to investigate the role of such concerns on the part of Brazilianpolitical leaders involved in the climate negotiations. An important contribution lies in the mere fact of documenting climate-related knowledge, processes and politics in Brazil. By contrast to richer nations in the world, and perhaps alsosome less developed countries (LDCs), there is an astonishing small amount of actualdocuments produced by the Brazilian government about Brazil’s climate science capacity,knowledge gaps, and policies. The reasons for this need to be understood in terms of technicalas well as socio-cultural and political factors, as scarcity of studies and communicationconcerning such things as impact and vulnerability studies limits the mobilization of civilsociety on the issue of climate change, an important stimulus of social change and policy inLatin America.
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| 9. |
- Nobre, Carlos, et al.
(författare)
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ADDRESSING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE EARTH SYSTEM
- 2010
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Ingår i: Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society - (BAMS). - 0003-0007 .- 1520-0477. ; 91:10, s. 1389-1396
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 10. |
- Turnhout, Esther, et al.
(författare)
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Transforming environmental research to avoid tragedy
- 2022
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Ingår i: Climate and Development. - : TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD. - 1756-5529 .- 1756-5537. ; 14:9, s. 834-838
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- According to a recent article in this journal, the failure of policy action on climate change despite scientific consensus points to a broken science-society contract. To avoid this tragedy of climate science, the authors call for a moratorium on its production. As scholars of, and participants in, global science-policy interfaces, we recognize the authors assumptions and reasonings but also see an urgent need for a deeper understanding of the current limitations of environmental research, and the challenges of connecting knowledge to policy and society. Rather than a blanket moratorium, we argue that what is needed is a profound transformation of environmental research. This entails a shift in research priorities towards currently marginalized approaches in social sciences, humanities and participatory research, to generate a much-needed understanding of obstacles to action and just and equitable strategies for overcoming them with due consideration of issues of justice and equity. We also propose a new science-society contract that recognizes the politics of environmental knowledge. This is necessary to enable critical reflection on what interests environmental research serves whose knowledge needs are excluded, and with what consequences. We recognize that our proposal can be uncomfortable and that it challenges deeply held beliefs in the neutrality of science. However, deep reprioritization in environmental science and science policy are urgently needed to strengthen the contribution of environmental research to the transformative changes that it calls for.
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