Local climate change cultures: climate-relevant discursive practices in three emerging economies
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Local climate change cultures: climate-relevant discursive practices in three emerging economies Nick Nash 1 & Lorraine Whitmarsh 1 & Stuart Capstick 1 & Valdiney Gouveia 2 & Rafaella de Carvalho Rodrigues Araújo 3 & Monika dos Santos 4 & Romeo Palakatsela 4 & Yuebai Liu 5 & Marie K. Harder 6 & Xiao Wang 6 Received: 9 May 2018 / Accepted: 18 June 2019/ # The Author(s) 2019
Abstract In recent decades, greater acknowledgement has been given to climate change as a cultural phenomenon. This paper takes a cultural lens to the topic of climate change, in which climaterelevant understandings are grounded in wider cultural, political and material contexts. We approach climate-relevant accounts at the level of the everyday, understood as a theoretically problematic and politically contested space This is in contrast to simply being the backdrop to mundane, repetitive actions contributing to environmental degradation and the site of mitigative actions. Taking discourse as a form of practice in which fragments of cultural knowledge are drawn on to construct our environmental problems, we investigate citizens’ accounts of climate-relevant issues in three culturally diverse emerging economies: Brazil, South Africa and China. These settings are important because greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are predicted to significantly increase in these countries in the future. We conducted semistructured interviews with a range of citizens in each country using a narrative approach to contextualise climate-relevant issues as part of people’s lifestyle narratives. Participants overwhelmingly framed their accounts in the context of locally-salient issues, and few accounts explicitly referred to the phenomenon of climate change. Instead, elements of climate changes were conflated with other environmental issues and related to a wide range of cultural assumptions that influenced understandings and implied particular ways of responding to environmental problems. We conclude that climate change scholars should address locally relevant understandings and develop dialogues that can wider meanings that construct climaterelevant issues in vernacular ways at the local level.
This article is part of the Special Issue on “Everyday Climate Cultures: Understanding the cultural politics of climate change” edited by Goodman, Doyle and Farrell. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-01902477-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Nick Nash [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Climatic Change
1 Introduction Material impacts from climate change place huge stresses on the planet’s biophysical systems (Nolan et al. 2018), necessitating wide-ranging shifts towards the decarbonisation of societies in order to limit these impacts (Dubois et al. 2019). In addition, climate change is also a cultural phenomenon, whereby understandings of, and responses to climate change are interpreted in relation to wider soc
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