Climate and Society

This course comprises a one-stop shopping centre for social scientific approaches to understanding and governing climate change. It provides participants with an understanding of the drivers and impacts of climate change, as well as knowledge of the multiple opportunities for accelerating mitigation and adaptation in ways that acknowledge dilemmas and trade-offs with social and other environmental concerns.

The course is centred on two key perspectives. First, that our understanding of climate change and our ability to act on it are shaped by different worldviews and beliefs in the power of markets, technology, behavioural change, and regulatory frameworks, as well as by economic and political interests. Finding sustainable and equitable responses to the climate crisis therefore requires an in-depth understanding of different worldviews, beliefs and interests, which influence both the definition of the ‘problems’ associated with climate change, as well as potential ‘solutions’. Second, that processes of mitigating and adapting to climate change are highly complex, involving concurrent changes in technologies, institutions, and behaviours. Conceptualising such socio-technical processes of change require interdisciplinary approaches.

Through the course, participants will be introduced to different social scientific approaches to understanding and examining how climate change comes to be known, analysed and governed. The course will illustrate that how we come to know and govern climate change is shaped by uneven power relations and struggles over worldviews and interests at global, national and local scales. The course also introduces students to different theoretical perspectives on climate change mitigation, conceptualising these as socio-technical change processes. This provides an understanding of the sources of stability and inertia that slow down the energy transition, but also potential intervention points for accelerating transition processes.

The course will offer students insights into several social scientific approaches to understanding and governing climate change, including discourses, knowledge politics, economics, geography, governance, transition studies, and justice. While social scientific theories and approaches structure the course, insights and results from natural scientific studies of climate change and related global ecological sustainability challenges will be an integral part of the course.

Some of the larger questions covered in the course include: How do our fundamental worldviews shape how we understand climate change and how we believe we should act on it? Why is it important to examine climate change in the broader context of socio-ecological sustainability, including in relation to environmental change, human health and wellbeing, human-made infrastructures, and social and political developments. How can we understand climate change mitigation as socio-technical change? How does knowledge production on climate shape how we act on it? What can different political economic perspectives tell us about the possibilities of mitigating climate change in ways that favour social justice and ecological sustainability? How is the climate governed in multiple different ways and at different levels of scale from the global to the local? What do different perspectives on policy tell us about effective and equitable climate change mitigation options? What are the possibilities and challenges to accelerate climate mitigation through (technical and non-technical) innovations? How can we simultaneously decarbonise multiple sectors, including electricity, food, mobility, and materials.