How Members of Parliament understand and respond to climate change

Abstract

Action on climate change, to meet the targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, requires strong political support at the national level. Whilst the political and governance challenges of climate change have been discussed at length, there is little understanding of how politicians, as influential individuals within the political system, understand or respond to climate change. This article presents findings from 14 qualitative interviews with Members of the UK Parliament, to discuss how politicians conceptualise climate change, and their deliberations on whether or how to act on the issue. First, it reviews an interdisciplinary literature from sociology, political theory and science and technology studies, to investigate how politicians navigate their work and life. Second, it presents 'composite narratives' to provide four different MPs' stories. Last, it draws conclusions and implications for practice. It highlights three crucial factors: identity, or how politicians consider the climate issue in the context of their professional identity and the cultural norms of their workplace; representation, how politicians assess their role as a representative, and whether proposed political action on climate is seen as compatible with this representative function; and working practices, how day-today work rituals and pressures influence the aims, ambitions and engagement of politicians with climate change.

How Religion, Social Class, and Race Intersect in the Shaping of Young Women’s Understandings of Sex, Reproduction, and Contraception

“…To facilitate presentation of the full complexity in these young women's expressions of their sexual and religious projects, we constructed composite narratives, which allow us to describe one composite person to represent each group. Recently, scholars have used composite narratives as an additional step to protect participants' confidentiality and identity, particularly when studying public figures (Willis 2017) or vulnerable interviewees who could face serious harms should they be identified (Elizabeth 2017;Piper and Sikes 2010); however, this technique also facilitates more complete and holistic comparisons across groups, especially when the nature of the interview (in this case a highly structured, but open-ended, interview) results in shorter responses per question, but greater range across domains. Willis (2019) identifies several key practices for methodically constructing composite narratives, which we follow here to ensure rigor, precision, and integrity in this form of data presentation.…”

Enabling Reflexive Decision-Making Towards Transformative Adaptation

“…Politicians' framing their concern for the climate change in terms of personal gain (re-election) has been alluded to in other countries. For example, UK politicians have claimed that climate change is "an abstract, long-term issue, which makes it hard to talk about" in the media and to the electorate (Willis 2018). This seemed not to be the case in Bengaluru where both politicians and property developers have been critiqued for viewing water as a barrier to industrial expansion: The preservation of lakes is the antithesis of economic growth because, despite being an eco-system service, they take up valuable space that could otherwise be developed (Nagendra 2016).…”

The use of composite narratives to present interview findings

“…I chose the final groupings as they seemed to me to best convey the range of positions and views that the data revealed. A full description of the method, and the final composite narratives, each of a length of around 500–600 words, is presented elsewhere (Willis, 2017a) and summarized below. The composites mix interviewees of both genders, but in order to tell the story in a readable way, a gender is assigned to each, roughly representing the gender balance of the House of Commons as a whole (71 percent male in the 2015–2017 administration).…”

“…The results of the study are published in an article in the Sociological Review (Willis, 2017a). This research note discusses one aspect of data analysis and presentation: the use of what I term ‘composite narratives’, in which a number of interviews are combined and presented as a story from a single individual.…”