Polysemic, Polyvalent and Phatic: A Rough Evolution of Community With Reference to Low Carbon Transitions

Middlemiss

Sallu

et al. 2017

WIREs Climate Change

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In a 2011 contribution to this journal, Walker examined the ways that community is routinely employed in carbon governance, suggesting the need for more critical approaches. Here, we characterize an emerging, critical approach to researching climate change and community in neoliberal contexts, focusing attention principally on the global north, where this body of research has emerged. This work recognizes communities as sites of contestation, difference, tension, and distinction, in which action on climate change can be designed to meet a range of political and public ends. It aims to uncover the political and social context for community action on climate change, to be alert to the power relations inside and outside of communities, and to the context of neoliberalism, including individualism, the will to quantify, and competition. Furthermore, research in this space is committed to understanding both the lived experience of the messy empirical worlds we encounter, and the potential agency coalescing in community responses to climate change. Much of the work to date, discussed here, has focused on communities working on climate change mitigation in the global north, in which the idea of community as a space for governance is gaining traction. We also comment on the positioning of these arguments in the context of long‐standing debates in the fields of ‘community‐based’ development, natural resource management, and adaptation in the global South. This discussion establishes a foundation from which to progress learning across fields and geopolitical boundaries, furthering critical thinking on ‘community.’ WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e463. doi: 10.1002/wcc.463 This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Social Movements

Section: The Multiple Meanings Of Community and Their Functionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Researching climate change and community in neoliberal contexts: an emerging critical approach

Middlemiss

Sallu

et al. 2017

WIREs Climate Change

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“…Community transitions have emerged in harmony with a variety of actor's vested interests. State deployment of community to meet low carbon legislation and targets emerge because community is seen as cheaper, more 'effective', and delegates environmental responsibilities away from the state to society at arms length [14,69,70,28,29]. For volunteers and activists, atomisation in western society and weakening of formal civil society social institutions-churches, trade unions, neighbourhood associations-can leave community movements as a more attractive means of finding concrete connection and belonging with others [71,52,23,24,72].…”

Section: Applying Spatial Theory To Community Transitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As often as community is suggested as being capable of enabling shifts in energy production and consumption, increasingly evidence is emerging that tensions exist within community transitions. These tensions include: a disconnect between community policy and community action in this area [10][11][12][13]; community adopted by states as a 'policy object' used to enroll citizens for their (energy) agendas [14], within the diverse, multiple and complex ways that community forms part of governing climate 'beyond the state' [15,16]; that place attachment can serve as a motivator and barrier for engaging in community renewable energy projects [17]; the multiple roles of justice [18][19][20][21] and cultural drivers within community energy [22]; the ways these initiatives are measured and evaluated causing frustrations for those involved [23,24]; the unevenness and difference in the communities enacting energy transitions, meaning some are far more trusted than others [25]; and what 'community' itself even means whenever applied in this area [26][27][28][29][30]. These aspects regularly accompany each other too.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

One-way street? Spatiality of communities in low carbon transitions in Scotland

Energy Research & Social Science

2018

Community low carbon transitionsstudies of the ways in which community is used to pursue environmental aims and objectivesare closely linked to arrangements of energy production and use. Community is used as a way to pursue particular energy agendas. Yet, as is often pointed out, the trajectory of transitions imagined, the ambitiousness of the envisioned transformation, and especially the implied community invoked within this, all remain gloriously inconsistent. Within community transitions attention increasingly focuses on the tensions emerging or smoothed over as competing agendas are brought together through capacious words and concepts: for example between so-called top-down government deployed community, and so-called bottom-up emergent community action. This paper offers one way to explain and explore these tensions, where they come from and, thus, help in understanding ways in which they may be overcome. Using the case study of an attempt to target one 'street community's' environmental footprint in Scotland, the paper argues for taking an explicitly geographical and spatial lens to analyse these processes. The paper uses three forms of space-perceived space, conceived space, and lived space-to outline how three distinct but overlapping communities were spatialised. The contention of the paper is that tensions in community transitions often result from different spatial imaginaries, informing one's approach to, and 'common sense' understanding of, community. In reflecting on the spatial implications different forms of community produce (and are in turn produced by), the article argues for greater appreciation of the imbrication of space, community, and energy as mutually co-constitutive.

“…Movements such as Transition use intentional forms of community, actively chosen, opted into and desired, in order to generate an involving feeling of solidarity within the group, a supportive context and increased agency and capacity to achieve their low carbon aims and ambitions. Community policy, however, has often used the particular social configuration of community -settled and static, rooted and reified -as a means to guide, arrange and contain populations (Middlemiss, 2014;Taylor-Aiken, 2016b;Creamer, et al 2018;Holstead et al, 2018). Thus, Zuhanden and Vorhanden -spatialised as involvement and containment -comprise a powerful explanatory framework to understand the separate subjectivities involved wherever community is used to meet low carbon challenges.…”

Section: Spatialising Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit In Community Low Carbon Transitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community as tool for low carbon transitions: Involvement and containment, policy and action

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

2018

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