Over the last couple of months, I have discussed on how community contributes to addressing climate change related issues. With a primary focus being placed upon energy, I have found that community involvement / engagement is vital to develop the most appropriate mitigation and adaptation strategies because they are essentially 'the most affected and the greatest contributing actors all together'.
The primary idea first emerged when I wrote my post titled "Conceptualizing Global Climate Change As 'Our Struggle'", yet, I could not give theoretical explanation of the idea because it has recently emerged as social phenomenon. In order to understand these, I made a number of peer reviews on renewable energy development with Germany's Energiewende as a particular example. This is where I encountered contemporary theories that explain the emergence and development of community initiatives.
Among these is institutional arrangements theory that looks into the organizational structure of political economy. As I mentioned in the earlier post, it is a way of describing how politics is structured by non-political traits such as socio-cultural and economic aspects of the community. There are the four types of institutional logics the combination of which comprises the theory; market-oriented system; state-oriented system; community-oriented system; and corporatist association order (Oteman et al, 2014).
At this point, however, I realized that the extent to which community plays a role in developing local initiatives like RE cannot simply be examined through one spectrum like national politics or community capacity. Indeed, what is the best combination of the four logics above to the emergence and development of community initiatives is very different both spatially and temporally. In Germany, for example, the emergence of RE was achieved following nationwide community movement against nuclear power and fossil fuel economy whereas its development has been accelerated by the legal binding force like FITs that the government introduced. Now, the further development of RE in Germany is largely dependent upon how the Big Four compete / cooperate with community power, how they cope with the biophysical constraints in RE production, and the degree of government's intervention. To sum, the degree of community roles in deriving the most appropriate management solution is not constant but changes over time.
Therefore, engaging community in decision-making for climate change mitigation & adaptation (RE development as an example) requires to personalize climate change issues as their own struggle. I discussed how this can be achieved in my previous post as well, with an example of the LCCVP. This is a conceptual framework in which 'local' climate change scenarios are presented with visual aids. This community-based approach helps community members link the global climate change with themselves therefore changes their perspectives. In this way, people start to derive the incentives from their own values to engage in community projects for climate change. The title of my previous blog post 'Think Globally, Act Locally' reflects this idea. Indeed, this transition of individual's perspectives on climate change is a key to sustainable community action to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Photo.2 You cannot dismiss the importance of community in the era of global climate change (Reference: Craig Edmonds, 2016)
To conclude, community engagement in climate change mitigation and adaptation is necessary, yet, its sustainability is achieved only if community members perceive climate change as something affects their individual life. This leads to greater community participation in sustainable way. However, it is also important to note that the degree of the roles community play in developing climate change mitigation like RE development does not remain constant but changes over time. Therefore, we need to pay a great attention to what kinds of structural arrangements of the four institutional logics are required to develop the best possible management solution in climate change policy and projects, at a particular ‘space’ and ‘time’. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog posts over the last few months. Thank you very much for reading my posts and sharing some ideas and questions. It was a really enjoyable journey! Now that I will stop blogging for a while because I will focus on other University work. Hopefully, I will one day come back here and start writing on this topic again! Thanks all! x
Good work
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