Local climate change cultures: climate-relevant discursive practices in three emerging economies
Autor: | Valdiney Veloso Gouveia, Lorraine Whitmarsh, Stuart Capstick, Yuebai Liu, Nicholas Nash, Marie K. Harder, Xiao Wang, Rafaella de Carvalho Rodrigues Araújo, Monika dos Santos, Romeo Palakatsela |
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Jazyk: | angličtina |
Rok vydání: | 2019 |
Předmět: |
Atmospheric Science
Global and Planetary Change 010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Climate change Context (language use) Environmental ethics 010501 environmental sciences 01 natural sciences Article Politics 13. Climate action Political science Cultural diversity 11. Sustainability Narrative Construct (philosophy) Emerging markets Environmental degradation 0105 earth and related environmental sciences |
Zdroj: | Climatic Change |
ISSN: | 1573-1480 0165-0009 |
Popis: | 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 climate-relevant 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 semi-structured 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 climate-relevant issues in vernacular ways at the local level. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10584-019-02477-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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