Implementing Rapid Climate Action: Learning from the ‘Practical Wisdom’ of Local Decision-Makers

Abstract

A global goal to limit dangerous climate change has been agreed through the 2015 Paris Accords. The scientific case for action has been accepted by nearly all governments, at national and local or state level. Yet in all legislatures, there is a gap between the stated climate ambitions and the implementation of the measures necessary to achieve them. This paper examines this gap by analysing the experience of the following three UK cities: Belfast, Edinburgh, and Leeds. Researchers worked with city officials and elected representatives, using interviews and deliberative workshops to develop their shared understandings. The study finds that local actors employ different strategies to respond to the stated climate emergency, based on their innate understanding, or ‘phronetic knowledge’, of what works. It concludes that rapid climate action depends not just on the structures and mechanisms of governance, but at a deeper level, the assumptions, motivations and applied knowledge of decision-makers.

Why is didactic transposition in disaster education needed by prospective elementary school teachers?

“…It implies that disaster risk reduction can be made through increasing knowledge, disaster knowledge, and mitigation. Knowledge, disaster knowledge, and disaster mitigation are components of disaster education [ [41] , [42] , [43] ]. Thus, disaster education can provide knowledge about disaster knowledge, and knowledge of disaster mitigation as a form of disaster risk reduction efforts [ [44] , [45] , [46] ].…”

From Ecophany to Burnout? An Anthropologist’s Reflections on Two Years of Participating in Council-Citizen Climate Governance in Eastbourne

“…Although the unorthodox approach to research and writing adopted here was thus initially born out of necessity, it was also a deliberate methodological choice. I chose a largely auto-ethnographic account to present more authentically from the perspective of a participant rather than academic analyst; and I wanted to foreground and explore a different kind of learning and thinking, one deriving primarily from active engagementthe limited amount of 'practical wisdom' [7] I have gained along the way. Indeed, having never done this before, I found this approach extraordinarily rewarding.…”

“…(b) People and Personalities. I am learning to recognise, respect and work with different qualities, strengths and weaknesses in others and myself, and to identify different 'types'-bureaucrats, researchers, campaigners, doers; or crusaders, entrepreneurs, pragmatists and weavers, i.e., the key 'types' Yuille, Tyfield and Willis identified [7]. Most importantly, I am learning and thinking about the limits to our capacity to fully engage with climate change.…”

The role of funding in the ‘performative decarbonisation’ of transport in England

“…The changing and increasingly central role of local governments in climate mitigation and adaptation has been examined widely in the governance literature (Bulkeley, 2010;Eckersley, 2018), and increasingly in transport research (Marsden et al, 2014;Walker et al, 2015;Yuille et al, 2021). Given the place-based nature of transport emissions, local government action is key to achieving climate targets.…”