I'd like to introduce our guest speaker for our fourth seminar in our psychology for climate
series this term.
We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Andrea Nightingale, and she's a professor in the
Department of Sociology and Human Geography.
She's interested in political ecology, socio-natures, feminist theory, and critical development
studies.
Her work is focused on three themes, climate change adaptation and transformation in a
development context, public authority, state formation, and collective action, and finally,
emotion and subjectivity in environmental governance.
She currently leads a Swedish Research Council grant project entitled Governing Climate Resilient
Futures, Gender, Justice, and Conflict Resolution in Resource Management.
This project explores the possibilities of deliberative learning and transformative pathways
towards social and climate justice.
Dr. Nightingale has worked in Nepal for over 30 years on questions of natural resource
management, gender, caste, and related environmental justice issues.
She's also done field work in Scotland, Nicaragua, and Kenya.
The title of her talk today is going to be Bounding Unruly Environmental Change.
I'm very pleased to welcome you today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
This is great because I have interests in affect and emotion, and whenever I write about
it I think, I should probably talk more with the psychologist.
I'm really, really delighted to be here.
I think what I'm going to do today is give you a little bit of a sense of how those three
themes that Charles just mentioned in my research actually come together, and what I do with
them in the context of climate change.
I'm going to get to the affect part at the end of the talk.
First of all, I'll take you through some of the other issues that I think are at stake,
and then why is it that I am turning towards affect as a way to understand transformative
change.
In 2018, a glacial lake outburst flood took place in a remote part of northwestern Nepal
called Humla District.
Glacial lake outburst floods are a predicted consequence of climate change, but in this
particular region was considered at low risk of such an event.
The flood that came down destroyed fields, killed some animals, and damaged homes.
It was probably just luck that nobody was killed.
But after the event, people were less concerned about the flood itself and the damage done
to their fields as they were by the sense that they had been tricked.
They had been told by the climate adaptation planning process that had recently concluded
that they were not at risk of this kind of flood, that instead drought, winter drying,
changing temperatures were their biggest concern.
So they felt that this process they had been through didn't in fact prepare them for the
uncertainties and what I like to think of as unruliness of environmental change.
At the moment, most of the concern with governing climate change is around prediction and management.
If we just build more models with more data that can give us a better prediction of how
environment will change, we will be able to create governance systems, infrastructures,
and social protections to shield ourselves from the impacts.
As a consequence, adaptation programs and planning have been implemented across the
world.
I'm positive that Comunas in Norway have some kind of an adaptation planning process in
place.
In Nepal, these programs have been implemented with support of donors and have been rolled
out in most parts of the country.
Their enrollment isn't, or these programs are intended to support transformative change
at the grassroots.
They're actually really often quite well liked by local people.
Facilitators come in, there's a whole participatory planning process for which Nepal has been
upheld as a global model of how to implement these things, whereby people identify the
changes in their environment that they've observed over the last 20 to 30 years, and
talk about the kinds of risks and needs for development and security in the future that
they want.
The programs also come with money, which is unlike a lot of programs, where they kind
of come in and they do some little pilot thing, and then they go, okay, well, this would be
great.
Now you all can find most of the money to do it.
Or they're just very top down and say, you need more vaccines, and in they come with
the whole vaccine program.
So these LAPA programs, as they're known, Local Adaptation Planning for Action, they
actually have a new name now, Local Adaptation Planning, but they're still known as LAPA
in Nepali, so I kind of call them LAPA, continue to call them LAPA.
So people really like them.
They see them as very helpful, and they've done stuff.
So in my slides here are some pictures of things.
One is a signboard.
You can see it's been supported by the EU, by UK Aid, and a couple other donors there,
including UNDP.
And the signboard sort of outlines this irrigation system, or sorry, drinking water system, and
some other sanitation things that have been implemented in this community.
In the slide below are greenhouses that were built to help grow vegetables in the off-season,
but also just kind of protect them from storms that were implemented.
Now these programs are not actually innocent interventions into making people's lives better,
and that's a core argument in my work.
They always rearrange people's relationships with each other, with their resources, with
the state, and with programs of governance and economic growth.
So whether they're positive or negative is something that we need to empirically investigate,
but at a theoretical level, they are not innocent.
At a theoretical level, they are highly politicized programs intended to create change in a way
that is almost always envisioned by people from the outside.
And so one of my big questions in my work is who is it that becomes authorized to govern
change?
Who is it that's imagined to have the right knowledge and the right capacities and capabilities
for making the changes that are required?
And who is it that's considered to require support and lacking in knowledge?
People at the grassroots in Nepal are almost universally considered to be vulnerable.
Soon as your caste is vulnerable, it means you lack adaptive capacity, means you lack
resources, and you don't have the knowledge you need in order to change.
And I am going to elaborate later in the talk on some resistances to this kind of classification
that we've seen in our research projects in different parts of the world.
So in my research, I've been working with something that I've been calling the socio-environmental
state as a way to try to make sense of change.
And I have to apologize if I'm a little bit sleepy today.
I turned in an ERC advance grant application yesterday.
It's called Unruly.
So you'll see the theme here.
But in the Unruly work, I'm interested in what I think of as boundary making.
And I'm going to elaborate on that a little bit more in this talk.
But basically, in an attempt to make sense of change, I'm arguing that we need to understand
how the different components of climate adaptation emerges being separate from each other.
Okay, so how is it that political authority emerges as separate from society?
And this is something I take this from work on the state in political science.
The point being that in climate adaptation, you get a whole bunch of new kinds of political
authority emerging.
You get it from at the very most grassroots level, you get new kind of leaders and whether
it's an irrigation project or a community greenhouse or a forestry project or whatever
it is.
And those kind of moments of authorizing people are really crucial moments of struggle.
And I think that the possibilities for transformation actually lie within those struggles.
So rather than us kind of being afraid or concerned about the conflicts that emerge
as we try to deal with a changing world, I think those conflicts are precisely where
the opportunities to kind of shape things in new directions lie.
And other kind of very important boundary making moments are around society and nature.
How do we imagine, how do we conceptualize that distinction between what we think is
social, what we think is natural?
There's very significant implications for what we think we can and should control and
what is it that is just being imposed from the outside on society.
And also between citizenship and belonging, which again, it takes me very closely to my
interests and affect.
I'm getting all excited about what I'm going to talk about.
Hopefully it'll be gratifying.
OK, so for me, environmental change is a relational becoming.
It is both stochastic and unruly.
And by that, I mean that some of the uncertainties have probability, sorry, they have relatively
stable probability characteristics.
We can model them, we can imagine them, we can weight them quantitatively and think about
how they might influence trajectories of change.
But other uncertainties related to climate change, I argue, are inherently unruly.
They don't have stable probability patterns to them.
If we try to impose stable probability patterns, we just end up introducing yet more uncertainties
into our models as we fail to really understand the way those processes work.
And I'm very curious to hear it from a psychological point of view.
And I imagine there's some diversity in this room in terms of how you think about that,
but about how you deal with this question of a probability, how you deal with this
difference between chance and risk.
And what is it, you know, what happens when you're working, if you apply a stable probability
pattern to something that maybe empirically you don't observe that pattern?
And I know from I don't do a lot of this kind of work myself, but I know from my days of
dabbling in ecology that a lot of these models are are quite helpful at a theoretical level,
but they can be quite problematic when they then get applied to empirical problems.
OK, and importantly for me, this relational becoming, it shapes ecology, subjectivities
and resources as emergent with the social politics of governing them.
It's not so much that the governance of them is just impacting upon or changing them or
that changing resources impact governance, but rather they emerge together.
I don't know that we can separate the chicken and the egg here.
OK, I probably I'm going to kind of go through this fast because probably not what you're
interested in, but just just in case any of you have linkages into some of these
interdisciplinary conversations, the theoretical anchors for this work lie in science and
technology studies work on boundary making.
And this is very much about how objects and relations emerge as being distinct from each
other. There's been a lot of work on in society, environment in this domain in particular.
I'm inspired by early feminist work on the Enlightenment and critiques of the Enlightenment,
in particularly something that Donna Haraway calls the border war, or she says describes
this sort of epistemic border war between society and environment, how we kind of draw
that divide, the way that even the way our disciplines are divided.
And I know, you know, when I teach philosophy of science, it's a significant challenge for
me trying to teach it across the different sorts of ways of ontologies that exist in the
room, basically, you know, how they think the world operates.
And fourthly or thirdly, it's inspired by Timothy, the work of Timothy Mitchell.
He's a political scientist who long ago intervened in debates about the state to say
because there was a huge debate on what is the state.
And he was like, it's not so much interesting what is the state as it is about how the state
emerges as separate from society.
And he calls these state effects.
So what are the practices?
What are the moments?
What are the processes through which the state can actually distinguish itself from the rest
of society? Because, of course, ultimately, the state is society, right?
It's embedded within society.
People that work for the state, they go home and then now they're a citizen.
But so where where is that distinction lie?
And I find that, again, just it all kind of fits together with how I think about these
things. And then fourthly, work on affect.
And here in particular, in in geography and incognito disciplines, we've been thinking
about how emotions and affects flow between people.
So rather than conceptualizing emotions as something that's held in the individual,
conceptualize emotions as being something that occurs in encounters and flows within an
encounter.
OK, so I want to get back to Nepal here.
Do you know what I'm going to actually?
You know, let me stay with my original logic here.
OK, so getting us back to climate change adaptation and why all this matters.
In particular today, I want to focus on this relationship between citizenship and
belonging or subjectivity.
Within adaptation projects, one of the reasons why they're so successful is that a
recognition of citizenship rights is crucial to a sense of belonging.
For marginalized peoples who live in far flung parts of Nepal to have a project come in
and say, what is it that you need?
Let's build you a tank, a reservoir for water, a drinking water system.
It's a really important moment where in the state recognizes them as a citizenship.
It's crucial in terms of getting them to feel a sense of belonging in a nation, which
in terms of collective action is crucial.
If you feel like you're on the outside of something that you don't belong or your needs
aren't going to be recognized.
All of my data shows that people will violate collective action.
Whether that's, you know, vandalism in inner cities, whether that's harvesting forest
products when it's illegal, whether that's overfishing, etc., etc.
All the empirical context I've looked in, when people don't feel a sense of belonging,
they don't feel that their needs are being recognized, it's a sure bet that they're not
going to go along with what the collective has agreed to.
And so struggles over resources around climate change are also struggles over belonging and
vice versa.
The vice versa here might be one of the more important parts, because for me, again, I've
often seen that people will violate, this comes especially out of my work on community
forestry, so violate rules that are not in the law.
And so I think that's a really important part of the process.
This comes especially out of my work on community forestry.
So violate rules because they want to assert their belonging.
It's not so much that they want to wreck the forest as they feel like they also have a
right to being seen, to having a stake in what's going on in the local community.
And, you know, it's funny because years ago I was sitting at a local development meeting
in Grand Marais, Minnesota, which is a small town in North Shore Lake Superior where I'm
from. And about halfway through the meeting, I started giggling to myself because I thought,
wow, this is just like a community forest user group meeting in Nepal.
And most of the conflicts that were going on were not actually about the thing that was
being talked about. They were sort of multi-generational disputes between families.
There were old grievances.
They were all about kind of wider interpersonal and community dynamics that then would sort
of get fixated around whether or not you could build that road or whether or not you were
going to harvest firewood at this time of the year versus that time of the year.
And for me, this is absolutely crucial because whenever we talk about climate adaptation,
we are always thinking that everybody's going to be rational, that everybody's focused on
the bottom line, that we all really care about whether or not we're going to get the right
resources, the right things in place, the right infrastructures to deal with the future.
When most of the time it's not about that.
Most of the time it's about other much more complex interpersonal community and I would
say sort of maybe local, national, political contestations around who's going to buy into
what. So imagine, you know, West Coast fishing communities.
Sorry, I haven't been following this enough in Norway.
Note to self to do that.
But in Scotland at the moment, they're trying to set up a whole bunch of marine protected
areas off the coast in order to rehabilitate the fisheries.
And they just have completely ignored the needs of the fishing communities.
So whereas I had participants from my research 10 years ago saying, you know, 20 years ago
saying no way, no way, no.
How are we ever going to have marine protected areas?
Ten years later saying I think the future is around protected areas.
We have to have some protected areas in order to rehabilitate the fishery.
Now that it's being imposed upon them, they're like, no, no, no protected areas at all.
OK, and so you don't you don't we don't end up where we want to go if we don't take account
of these kinds of struggles over citizenship, belonging and the way that people feel
attached to the state.
OK, so I theoretically I do that.
I do a lot of this work through the concept of subjectivity and I work with kind of
feminist conceptions of the subject, which in particular are important in the way that
they understand subjection to reflect the operation of power.
So as power operates, serves to subject people in particular ways.
We can think of gender, race.
We can think of citizenship here.
I'll use gender because that's the one that's most often talked about in the feminist
literature. Sexuality, of course, is another big one that Foucault also wrote about.
But this kind of power over is tempered by the way in which the subject internalizes and
resists that.
So Judith Butler argued that subjectivity captures the effect of power and recoil.
So as you cast people as vulnerable, that's a form of subjection.
You are vulnerable to climate change.
People internalize that in particular ways and they resisted.
In Nicaragua, a group was formed, facilitated by an NGO, that was called on the suggestion of
the NGO facilitators, the Vulnerables.
They were a women's only climate adaptation group.
They engaged in a variety of community activities to try to help themselves deal with the
climate changes.
And after about eight years, they were like, you know what?
We really don't like this name because we don't think of ourselves as vulnerable.
And in fact, we never have.
So we're going to call ourselves the St.
I can't remember what St.
Joseph group or something.
They named themselves after the local patron saint as a kind of act of refusal of this
notion of being subjected as vulnerable.
And I thought that to me, that's the subject right there.
That is how subjectivity operates.
So in many ways, they have accepted the fact that they needed support, that they were at
risk, all that kind of stuff.
They haven't rejected that completely, but they do internalize that and then rework it
into something that they find allows them to exercise power.
Within this work, which is known as a performative understanding of power, people would
argue that you can't act without power.
So it's not that power is always dominant.
It's actually more about these complex workings of power.
And so you need to understand the context and actions through which social difference
emerges and is repeated.
The meanings of these things are not stable.
They're always being recreated and usually often re-cemented.
OK, so we can think about them.
But to be honest with you, I find it much more empowering to imagine them as more dynamic.
When I think about gender and race and things that have kind of historically been very
strong axes of differentiation and power over within society, they're not the same.
And if I think that the way gender operated to subject women when I was 20 is the same
as the way it is now, it would be an utter failure for me to recognize what has in fact
changed. Because I think it's changed very, very profoundly.
And I think sexuality is probably the most dramatic one.
My gay friends at university were afraid of being out of the closet and they were out of
the closet in very kind of selective ways.
Whereas most of them now wouldn't even consider being in the closet for even any kind of
interaction. And or it just becomes completely irrelevant in their lives.
And not irrelevant, I don't mean that, but it becomes less of a statement that they need to
make and it becomes more of just who they are in their interactions.
And I think that's very, very different from when I was at university.
So if we want to understand the way power operates through sexuality, recognizing that
performative transformation, even in the face of continuing discrimination, especially in
the States right now to LGBTQ plus people, is to fail to recognize how things have
changed. And climate change is a very potent context.
So now I want to go back to Nepal and on the ground and what is happening in climate
change. Well, climate programs are creating new kinds of difference.
So in a context where gender and caste and age and education are probably the most
important ways, are sort of social relationships through which inequalities are formed
and solidified and play out.
Climate programs are creating new ones and they're intersecting with older forms of
inclusion and exclusion.
So in my slides here, I've got a picture of a young man in eastern Nepal who is tending
to some tea plants that he's planted on his land.
This is part of an adaptation program.
He convinced the community to put it on his land with the promise that the plants
themselves would be collective, collective property, even though he retains ownership
over the land.
And they're imagining what they're betting on here is that tea, which doesn't grow
particularly well in this area, is going to grow better as climate warms up and that's
going to become the new Darjeeling.
This is in top of the junctions, a little bit further higher in elevation from there.
And he told me that during the civil war in the early 2000s and late 1990s, that he was
a member of the lost generation.
They were people who couldn't go to school because the Maoists had closed schools, the
conflict had closed schools, and they fled abroad instead to work for wage labor in, I
think he was in Malaysia, and came back undereducated with no choices other than to be
farmers. But rather than being farmers in the way that their fathers were, which would
have been for him to be seen as utterly failing, he's becoming this new kind of farmer,
this entrepreneurial farmer, very much targeted by these climate adaptation programs as
somebody with adaptive capacity who they can give a little spark to, a few plants, and
then he will transform the community itself.
This was very different than the way the program treated landless people in the area,
people who'd lost their land to debt over centuries to higher caste and wealthier people
who were completely excluded from these programs.
And in fact, I was only in that place for a few days and they managed to keep me away from
them, too. So we were told at every turn when we went to try to go find them or to walk
up to their settlement, that it was too far, that we couldn't go there, that it was too
dangerous, that the trail was washed out.
They came up with ever increasingly dramatic reasons for why we couldn't possibly go
there. And I'd love to go back and I hope to one day to work in that area again.
But again, this kind of fracturing of what vulnerability means, this fracturing of who
has access to the resources and the programs of development, progress and adaptation, and
then who's excluded are very much being reformed through these kind of projects.
And they create new forms of vulnerability.
The other slides here sort of show you a variety of different tropes of who is
considered vulnerable.
And one of the things I find interesting is this.
The bottom slide there is from Chum Valley in northern Gorkha.
Chum is considered a highly vulnerable area, mostly because it's in the high Himalayas and
agriculture is already precarious.
Winter drying is sort of leading to crop failures because they don't have enough runoff
in the spring to get crops going at the right time.
And yet people in this area, they go and they harvest medicinal herbs and they're quite
wealthy. That wealth is relatively new.
It has to be said they weren't necessarily wealthy in the past, but they also have access
to the Tibetan border and historically have been traders moving between Tibet and the
lowland areas of Nepal, as well as this area.
So, yeah, like who's vulnerable?
What are they vulnerable to?
They're probably, I know for a fact, at least at the moment, they're far more vulnerable to
the global economy than they are to climate change.
You know, the border closure of China during Covid has caused huge hardship up here, both
in terms of food supplies, but also a market for this medicinal herbs that they gather,
etc. So that I'll come to that at the end.
But what I'm trying to build up to is a sense of what is climate change?
What is it we're adapting to?
OK, I think I'm just yeah, the few other kind of examples here.
Just very quickly.
So the slide furthest over there, I guess it would be on your left, is a slide of
cardamom plantation.
So it's an understory plant.
People grow it mostly in the east, but increasingly a bit in the west.
And the adaptation program put in an irrigation system in order to take care of problems
that we're having from winter drying.
Again, very much appreciated by people in this area who are economically dependent on
cardamom as a cash crop, but excluded anybody who didn't have own land.
This other project here, this is from western Nepal and it's a yew plantation.
Taxus, if you know the scientific name.
I've seen you in Norway.
Yew is a very slow growing understory coniferous plant.
It has a very, very hard wood that's often of high value.
People in Nepal use it to put on their wooden plows as the part that actually goes in the
soil and does the digging.
But it's slow growing.
It also the bark has anti-cancer properties.
They can use it in cancer medications.
This adaptation program set up this greenhouse with green plastic to grow yew seedlings.
And it was pretty successful.
You can see quite a lot of them came up.
They're very slow to regenerate.
But people had no idea what they were supposed to do with it.
So, you know, they just like the plastic is broken and they were like, yeah, well, yeah,
I mean, we got this back.
We're going to use it.
They were like, yeah, well, I mean, we we got this going.
But I mean, now what?
And that, again, was very typical of, I would say, that logic that what was required for
adaptation was resources, income diversification, new kinds of farming without
recognizing that maybe there were other linkages that they were lacking in terms of
accessing markets or even just knowledge.
In fact, people in this community, a number of young men, they they said to us, they were
like, it's like we don't need this stuff.
We want training.
What's the point of putting in a hydroelectric system if you're not going to train us in
maintaining it? Because every time it breaks down, we got to get somebody in here from
the outside and it takes two months or longer.
And they're like, these programs should be training us to do this ourselves, not to just
put them in for us.
So that that has very much stuck with me, that sense that what is it we think that they
are adapting to?
What do we what what knowledge do we think who needs and who has the capacity to learn
it? Another big one.
OK, so for this kind of takes us to this idea of the social life of climate change.
We look at subjectivities and the frictions that that connect the everyday and lived
realities of climate change with wider scales of political, economic and environmental
change. I think we can begin to see why some of our climate adaptation efforts don't
work. OK, there's sort of this disconnect between how we imagine people, how power
operates to sort of situate people with not only culturally and socially, but also
political, economically.
Who is it that can access markets?
Who is it that can successfully get the kind of training they might want?
I think I think it's difficult because when I teach at the university, we're so
privileged, right?
Like all of us in this room are so incredibly privileged.
And I know people in Nepal who would just feel privileged to be able to sit in this
room and to listen to stuff like this.
And, you know, sometimes I'm in a seminar going, oh, please get me out of here.
And I think I have to remember that just being able to come into the room is a
privilege. And I think we forget that we're situated in these incredibly powerful
places within society, within the global economy, in relationship to our own lives,
where I, for one, feel a little bit disempowered at the moment with the kind of
choices that are being made, with the fact that it's not easier for me to take public
transportation every time, everywhere I want to go, with the fact that, you know, we
don't have good infrastructure for electric cars to go wherever we might want to go.
Norway is probably one of the few places you can go most places, but it's still
limiting at certain junctures.
And I feel kind of powerless to do anything about that.
But yet, you know, where I'm situated within this compared to some of the people that
are supposedly being taught to adapt in Nepal is very, very different.
And I think that when we look at how these practices work, it can open up some new
ways to understand how to inspire committed responses to the climate crisis.
OK, what I can assure you does not work.
This was hilarious.
So in the place of the tea plantations, we were talking to a group of Dalits who are
kind of considered at the bottom of the caste hierarchy by those on the top.
And so they're often considered vulnerable people by definition.
And so she was telling me about the problems from climate change in her village, and
she was reading out this list as if she was at school.
And my question had been, what are the changes you've observed?
And I said, have you seen those?
And she said, well, no, but that's what they tell us.
And so this was her being sensitized or sometimes in Nepali they use a verb,
aware over climate change and what's happening.
OK. Yeah.
So for me, this is where I turn to affect.
And for me, affect captures uncertainty.
Don't know how many of you know the word aleatory.
I had to look it up. It basically refers to chance.
It refers to patterns that emerge that are not expected.
OK, it's sometimes used in music.
But it helps me to think about the way that affects emerge out of embodied encounters.
So whether those are embodied encounters between somebody sitting in one of these Lapa
meetings and the facilitators and the kind of respect or lack of respect they show them,
the way that they feel when they walk out of there.
Do they feel that they've been heard?
Do they feel that their needs were addressed?
Sometimes they do.
You know, or do they feel that actually was just yet another kind of context wherein they became invisible?
And it helps me to focus on the effects of not only on interconnections, which I think are crucial and
calming, but also some of the unpredictable effects of rupture.
And here is where myself and Naomi Glenda have been thinking about something we call affective adaptation.
We've argued that data doesn't inspire action.
We're not going to change.
We are not going to fundamentally do what's required to deal with climate change by data.
If we were, we would have done it 20 years ago because we've known what's going on for a long time now.
We know more now, but we knew the basic conclusion back in the 90s.
But rather, we see more potential in the shared emotions that can emerge around loss, uncertainty and fear related to climate change.
In Nicaragua, Naomi's work has shown how a group of farmers who a project was trying to encourage them to think
differently about coffee production, a coffee collective, they weren't especially interested in the kind of
investments that people were trying to get them to do at a collective level.
What brought them together in the end was not political economy, was not a sense that this was the best thing for them to do in terms of their household livelihoods.
What brought them together was a shared sense that they all wanted their children to be able to farm on that land when they were there, had grown up.
And they were able to find common ground around the shared sense of hope or vision for what they wanted in the future.
In other places, we've seen people come together over the shared sense of grief and loss after hurricanes or floods,
the sort of ruptures in people's everyday lives that are supposed to be kind of disruptive, disturbing,
unempowering.
But when people are able to come together and rebuild, connecting to each other and what the priorities ought to be over that shared sense of loss,
they are able to form more effective coalitions than those that are based on rational choice and economy.
And all the things that we think are the way that people make decisions.
And I'm not saying people don't make decisions that way.
They do. But we're just finding that collective action is better cemented through these affective encounters and shared sense of how we can change the world for a better place.
And so we've argued that as scientists who work on climate change, we have to figure out how people can feel more invested in climate change at an affective and emotional level in their everyday life,
even when we're not coping with some kind of disaster or big change.
Because if we all every day kind of held that as part of our emotional and political space of being, I think we would have a lot more collective action.
OK, I'm going to conclude with just two quick slides here, which are not quick in terms of what's on them.
But you'll have the record to look at.
You can hit pause later in the recording.
But so for me, one thing that comes out of all this work is that how we frame climate and climate change is crucial.
OK, so climate change is carbon, which is the way it mostly is framed at the moment.
We end up with a bunch of efforts to put carbon back in the ground.
And more worrying for me is we get trading schemes to move carbon.
So somehow we can like plant trees in Malawi and that's going to be OK when I take a flight in Europe.
OK, and it totally it does the opposite of investing me emotionally in the impacts of climate change and the fact that I'm getting on a flight.
When climate change is framed as a problem of modern economic systems.
This is for me a slight improvement.
It leads to new thinking about transportation and energy provision.
It can focus on reducing consumption.
It says to us, OK, we have a fundamental problem in the way that our political economic system is organized and we need to do something differently about it.
OK, I think the framing of carbon is really scary because it is it again, it's not only is it not taking us where we need to go, but it's actually distracting us from where we might need to go.
OK, and the kind of thinking that might need to happen.
But if I think of climate change as boundary making and not realizing that some of the stuff I started to talk with got lost.
So here we come back. The end.
OK, so if I think of climate change as boundary making, we see how new resources and new vulnerable populations and new threats emerge.
So climate change is not about climate.
It's about these kinds of changes.
We can focus on how governing change creates unruly and inadvertent effects, exclusions, authorizations and ecological transformations.
We're not intending to further marginalize landless people in eastern Nepal through local adaptation planning projects.
I can assure you nobody wants that outcome.
But that's been one of the effects of the project.
And I think we can we don't even have to look that far.
I think there's some of my colleagues have done a bit of work on how in Norway in particular, the structure of the state tends to make adaptation initiatives from the local level very, very difficult to get off the ground and implement.
OK, so it's sort of creating this.
And for me, especially because climate change is seen as this big problem that needs big solutions from the top, from the nation, from the globe.
It makes it really hard.
It's actually limiting the space of innovation and diversification and action coming from more grassroots and self-generating collectives.
I would say that struggles over authority and recognition, as well as emotions and affect, hold the keys for transformative change.
That's where that's going to come from.
Probably not from planning or models.
They're important. We need them.
But I don't think they are the number one tool we need.
But they're the number one tool.
OK, that's enough.
All right, I'm going to end on that side.
OK, thank you.
I think we have to promise that we do like to get discussions started.
I think we can sit here.
I usually write down questions, but I didn't bring any paper today.
It's OK. I don't remember.
I'll ask to repeat.
Yeah, can you just hand me this paper?
It just helps me keep track of.
So, so Charles asked us to start the discussion with some.
This role of comedy.
I feel this was so interesting and so much that I have trouble forming one question now.
So maybe just like a feeling or an observation.
I feel like this is what I was waiting for.
So it's like this other piece of the puzzle or maybe a better metaphor is that this feels like a bridge being built from the other side.
So in psychology, the thing that we always struggle with is that our theorizing about climate change is much too individual.
So we are focusing on how do I get people to not eat meat anymore and drink from the reusable cups.
And then it kind of ends, which is completely insufficient.
But what you describe as communities changing collectively and adapting and being intervened upon and reacting in interesting ways.
So I think this is the part that I, as a social psychologist, always think about.
But I start from the individual level and kind of come from the other.
So that is what I what I recognize as the bridge.
And I think this is totally what we need.
More in terms of the topics that you talked about.
We also have a lot of theorizing on collective action.
And what I immediately picked up on was your list of emotions that you see at play, which were loss, uncertainty and fear.
Which is interesting because they're not the ones that are talked about in our collective action literature.
There, the focus is 95 percent on anger.
OK, interesting.
Which is seen as being fed by injustice.
So I don't know the history of how this literature singled out anger.
But I think it's worth going back and seeing how did this happen?
Does that at all apply to these situations?
And do we need to rethink those collective action models?
Because they were maybe designed for a particular kind of conflict in Western societies.
A particular problem that is not the one that we're not talking about.
Yeah, just really quickly, a colleague of mine, Marian González, Hidalgo González, has some really excellent work on collective action and anger.
And she worked with conflicts on forestry in Chile and also in Latin America.
But I'm not going to say where because I'll get it wrong.
But yeah, that works really excellent.
And she has some more of a background.
I think she's actually trained as a Gestalt therapist.
So she has a little bit more of a bridge, I think, between the work that goes on in psychology and the kind of work that I do.
But that's actually really interesting also, because I taught this PhD course two weeks ago on anti-colonial and decolonial thinking.
And anger came up really, really strongly in the course as just sort of, yeah, for me, it was emerging as an important kind of emotion.
So that would be worth exploring where and when does anger come into play?
And the other way around, where are loss and fear and uncertainty felt as collective emotions?
Yeah, probably much more.
Maybe it's a difference between intergroup processes, intergroup conflicts, where anger is the one that is important.
While for adaptations to changes that are inevitable that you're just confronted with, then loss and uncertainty and fear are more interesting.
I'm also kind of interested in joy, you know, like, like, I don't know, because one of my colleagues, sorry, just be fast.
One of my colleagues who works at Vestland's Foreskinning is also a mountain guide.
And he's been trying to see if, like when they're guiding, if there's any sort of effective experiences that happen that might invest people more in sustainability or climate change or whatever.
And I'm actually curious about whether, you know, joy, like joy of being on a glacier or going skiing or, you know, whatever.
If those things, those emotions are also maybe something that can feed towards more collective action.
Thank you.
Thank you. Excellent.
That's open floor maybe?
I think this was fantastic talk.
And it's also, as Thomas said, it's very interesting to position the whole topic from a community perspective towards collective action.
And I think I had a few remarks and also some questions.
I really feel that, like, you know, this positionality as a researcher, how do you define vulnerability?
But also, how do you define it for others?
So especially, let's say in this case, with your background and with your own positionality, how do you figure out these dynamics of looking at other populations or other communities or other geographies as vulnerable or not so vulnerable?
And how do you design and define that language?
Because even as like person of color, when I went to Kenya and worked in Caidera, it's very difficult.
Even if like, you know, you become languish, it's still who are we as people who pollute, people who do all these things, take all these flights, land in these landscapes.
So how do you negotiate those vulnerabilities and also your own positionality of having the agency to do all of that?
Your other side, the participants don't have, if it makes sense.
Yeah, totally. It's an excellent question.
Did you have another question?
Yeah, just one more, sorry.
So regarding this emotional expressions, in our own work in Karachi and in Sri Lanka, we have noticed that religion comes up as a huge element, especially in these diverse communities.
And it's not just religion.
It's also the cost dynamic.
And I think you mentioned about the cost.
So this whole element of who expresses what emotion, it also depends on who these people are.
So I know that when aid work or these climate adaptation movements don't reach to communities where we have predominantly Muslims living in Pakistan, they get angry, they get frustrated.
They make sure that they avoid speeches to the government, the state.
But if it's the Hindus in the southern or the desert part, no one cares.
So their expression of when we talk to these communities, you hear much more agony, pain, sense of loss, sense of being destroyed.
And like, you know, but you don't see anger.
And it's not that they're not angry.
Right.
They just don't have the agency or the capacity to express those emotions without being vulnerable, because if they do, the state is much more violent towards these minorities.
And I think we saw the similar but opposite replication in a Sri Lankan context.
So I was really curious, do you have any reflection on how these emotions are ready and how they're expressed differently in these qualitative and very nuanced contexts?
Yeah. Wow.
Two fabulous questions.
I know there's some more questions, so I'll try not to be too long winded here.
First of all, I think, yeah, I mean, navigating these positionalities of power has been a challenge my whole career.
I think, to be honest with you, one thing that really has helped me, I think, has been in an awkward way, sort of not actually seeing myself as that powerful.
So like we had a lot of talks in the 90s when, you know, about taking responsibility for the ethics and the power relations and the research.
But for me, it was so, it gave no agency to the people I was working with.
And yet when I was out in the field by myself in western Nepal, like I saw what they wanted me to see or what particular people wanted me to see.
And I felt like it was really important for me to acknowledge that I wasn't all powerful, that they also, people on the ground also have power and they do exercise power in relationship to me.
So I know that sounds kind of weird because it almost seems the inverse of it.
But I think, again, it relates to your thing of vulnerability because I would never call somebody vulnerable.
What I'm curious about is what are the moments or the aspects of their life where they feel vulnerable?
And same for myself, that like, because being called vulnerable, you are a vulnerable person.
You are a vulnerable person.
Is this incredibly, you know, like dominating kind of positionality and subjectivity?
It's like, you know, there's a real violence in that, actually, because it just erases every way in which they are not vulnerable, every way in which they manage their context.
And, you know, I mean, I kind of, yeah, I don't, this is recorded, so I won't use this example.
It's a little bit relevant.
But, you know, but I do feel like, I do feel like that when I'm out in western Nepal and I'm dealing, like, I have had more insights to wisdom, what I would think of as real wisdom from people who are poor,
illiterate, you know, untraveled, whatever, than I've ever heard from, you know, half my friends here.
Like, you know, it's like the, so I think I, I think kind of coming in with respect and recognizing that people do have knowledge, they do have agency.
And that vulnerability is something that is not, doesn't happen to them, is something that they negotiate in particular aspects of their lives.
And part of our job as climate researchers is to understand how climate change and the policies and programs being put in to deal with it are reshaping what those negotiations might be for people on the ground.
Which isn't to sort of negate the very real violence of those moments of vulnerability for them.
But rather, it's almost like disability, right?
You're not disabled, you're, or you're disabled, you don't have a disability.
It's like that moment of, you're, you know, you have vulnerabilities, you are not vulnerable.
And so then we have to unpack those.
Did you want to follow that up?
Just one quick element, because I also feel that sometimes when we talk to women, especially about resilience and resistance, they also get really annoyed.
Yeah.
They say that, OK, you know, you know that this is miserable, how our climate is changing because of where you are coming from right now.
Right.
I'm from Pakistan, but like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So in some ways, when we don't negotiate that vulnerability on their terms or in sense of vulnerability, we're also romanticizing.
Yeah.
Their misery.
So I think there are, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There are elements to that.
So.
Yeah, yeah.
No, thank you for that, because I think that's, I think that's really important.
But I mean, in some ways to me, I guess I would read that as speaking back to power.
Right.
So again, rather than just saying, look, these poor people, they have no agencies, it's more like, well, they're putting the responsibility back on me.
And I've had that happen a few times in Nepal as well.
Like one Red Plus group, you know, they sell carbon credits by sequestering it in their forests, saying, you know, come on, like, we don't like.
So what's going on?
We've you know, we've heard that the market price for this carbon we're sequestering might crash.
So, you know, all you people over there, you're you're like messing with us.
You know, you're telling us we're supposed to do this, so we're doing it.
But hey, where's our payback?
You know, and so I think that like really needing to amplify that is important.
And then just on the ground for myself, because this is a very challenging aspect of this kind of research is that, you know, people are like, so what's in it for us?
You know, what are you going to do for us?
And I'm really honest.
I'm like nothing.
I'm like, you know, what I do is I come here and I listen to you and I take your stories and I and I amplify them at the global level and try to have them make a difference in those contexts that were otherwise, you know, you were invisible.
And it might not be perfect and it might not be great, but it's the thing.
It's the one thing I can offer you.
And I've been surprised at how many people are OK with that.
They're like, yeah, I know that's good.
And they they do kind of realize that that's also a positionality thing.
It's really important to like sit in the dirt, right, to like not be to sit there and eat food with them and not act like you're somehow separate.
And then they feel like, yeah, their story will be taken care of and compassionate listening.
Your second question.
I love this one.
Yeah, because for me, what I was thinking of it when you were talking about this emotional expression, who can express what was.
It feels very much linked to subjectivity, how power operates, right, like so what is the space within which you can exercise power through emotion and that that's actually different for different people.
But I was also reflecting on how we put words on emotions.
Right. Because maybe for them, like talking about loss is the way that they express anger.
And, you know, I don't know.
And so I yeah, I love that.
I just think there's way more to unpack there.
But it's such a great insight.
Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah, thank you.
It was very mind opening for me.
And then I was listening to the presentation.
I couldn't stop myself thinking about my conversation with my Italian colleagues a few days ago.
And I saw my place.
I was living on the water like a few months ago.
I was living there. And the first thing I felt was frustration and anger.
And then it replaced itself with some guilt, some how to say.
I guess it's really hard to define it as one emotion.
But I can say it's kind of a modern time sadness that I was thinking how alienated I was and how the next generations will be less lucky compared to us.
That they will have so much of it.
I read in one article that they have echo anxiety, very prevalent in the elementary schools.
So I didn't have that when I was a kid.
So I thought about the guilt part of it.
What can I change and how it can be different?
Then I realized as much as you invest more on getting rid of the guilt and try to do something individually or with a community, it gets it's replaced itself with more anger because you feel like you at least try.
But there are things that you cannot fix or you cannot change.
Like most of the governments are planning in short term and visible actions, not investing on the large term and things that will not be seen by citizens, the voters.
So I just wanted to share this experience.
Thank you.
Yeah. No, thank you for that.
I think just the one thing I'll sort of pick up on there is about emotion because that is something we've been talking about in my research team and how we deal with it, which is that I would argue that emotions aren't a thing.
You know, they tend to change over time.
And so that's where kind of a focus on affect, which is more about what happens in encounters, seems to be more helpful.
But then I don't really have a good theorization or a good way to deal with what remains because there is something in the individual that they feel.
And that feeling can be joy and anger at the same time.
It can be loss and grief and connection.
You know, funerals are famous for that.
Right. Like my family, whenever somebody dies is great because the entire extended family gathers and we all have fun together.
You know, I mean, and fortunately, most of the people have been passing away at very advanced ages, so it hasn't been tragic.
But nevertheless, like that, those are real things, right?
That connection and belonging and grief go together.
And so, yeah, so I don't I don't have a good understanding of that or theorization of that.
But I think there is something very important in terms of us recognizing that the emotions don't stay stable.
So they maybe start as anger and then they turn into commitment, right, to fight for something or whatever.
So, yeah. Thank you.
Any other? Yeah.
Yeah. I want to throw in another similar emotion to what you mentioned, like compassion, solidarity, what we call camaraderie, or being moved.
We have found that also plays a role in wanting to mitigate climate change.
And I think there's, from what you've talked about, boundary management and understanding or bringing the perspective of those who have to adapt to climate change here.
I think they have actually a lot of what you say is similar to the mitigation efforts where we see in Boston, for example, there's also struggles on who decides
the difference between the megalomaniac projects by large companies and often local wishes for more self-determinacy, more power in the decisions, ability to build their own windmills, for example.
So I think there lies a chance in connecting these sides, that we are not the guilty ones here doing the damage and they are the vulnerable ones having to live with it,
but that we are on all sides trying to mitigate and adapt at the same time.
And that's the common denominator is to try to do something with the community where people live, involving them.
Yeah, I think I would really agree with that.
And I think that is our challenge, right?
That's sort of what is going to be the basis of global, maybe not solidarity, but at least cooperation.
How are we going to come up with a shared vision?
Because whenever I have lots of wonderful colleagues who work on carbon trading and biochar and this kind of stuff, and we just don't share the same vision for how we can go forward in a more climate,
a less climate risky world, let's put it that way, right?
Like that they can retain some, have far fewer disruptions to people's everyday lives, but also our political economies and infrastructures.
I think that that's going to, and my sense is that as some of those impacts become more real, it's going to be easier to form those coalitions.
And that's the sad part, that somehow that there's just been this collective failure of imagination.
But I do feel that some of that collective failure has come from the scientific community.
You know, I mean, there are statistics, like, I don't know, I mean, how many of you actually make decisions based on statistics?
Like maybe when I'm looking at the energy price, but, you know, like most of the time, you don't make important decisions in your lives based on statistics.
You might make a decision based on the emotional reaction you have to those statistics.
But for the vast majority of the world's population, statistics don't mean anything.
They can't, they can't like make a lived empirical understanding of what two degrees warming means.
Right. And so then it's like it hasn't been a good basis of collective action.
So, yeah, I think trying to connect, and I like that, because also the definitely like, I'm sure that if I could, well, I could see in the future,
Sámi communities wanting to have wind farms on their land and make money from it or whatever, get power from it.
But they definitely don't want them put there by somebody else and the energy being sent and sold by someone else.
So, thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have a question which relates to the two previous ones, and I think you've partly answered it already.
But my question is relating to one of scale.
I find your argument extremely interesting, and I think, you know, affect and emotion are key somehow in transformation, large scale or small scale.
And what you're talking about here, at least in your presentation, seems to be primarily located on the community level and also giving examples of the possibilities,
but also pitfalls of adapting on the local community level.
So my question is related to what extent can we upscale that logic to a more global perspective?
Because what can be done on the local level might actually, you know, it might not be too provocative.
It might fit into the NGO type of logic.
It might fit into a local capitalist economy and everybody becomes a little bit more happy.
But what happens if one applies this?
You were talking about, you know, making greater coalitions.
Because as you mentioned on the previous slide, there is definitely a large scale problem with the way we organize the global economy.
And until that is solved, we cannot really get to the basis of this problem.
So I was wondering, do you have any reflections on how much can we upscale the type of logic you are presenting?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I think I just want to start with two examples from Norway.
Because so Oslo Komune is become, wants to be the greenest Komune in the world.
And one of my colleagues who lives on a farm out near the airport assures me that that green city, inner city, is displacing a lot of its sort of environmental impact out on the outskirts of the city.
It's like, you know, the traffic is just escalated out there.
You know, as cars become banned from the city center, they don't go away.
They just move to somewhere else.
So I think even that, but then for me also, I think I love your example, because I think Norway as a country is a good example.
You know, the more that we try to become a green nation, the more that we off, you know, we push a lot of our pollution to somewhere else.
Whether that's in the mining for electric car batteries or sending our recycling away.
I'm sure we don't do that here in Norway.
Yeah. So I think those questions are very, very important.
And I guess this is, you know, in a sort of naive way, I tend to think of all levels within the global community and economy as local.
So we need people in those global negotiations of the COP to be connecting in around these same shared emotions or affects or, you know, imagine future imaginaries as we do people at a community level.
And so I guess I see it as maybe a set of interconnecting scales of localized communities of decision making, if you will.
But, you know, how we get, it seems to me that the big, our biggest challenge here is corporate boardrooms.
I just do not understand what goes on in those spaces, because I can't believe that they're all evil, but they make evil decisions and they make evil decisions all the time.
And I just don't understand how they can go home and live with themselves.
And I guess it's a case of making that connection.
You know, how do we create the context wherein that becomes real for them?
The decision that they just made is destroying the lives of, you know, millions of people somewhere else in the world.
So, yeah, I don't, it's a great question, but I still think understanding it more as interconnected, localized communities is going to get us there.
Thank you.
Other questions?
I was curious about the position psychologists might have in this new way of looking at climate change, climate change.
Because as we look at it through the glasses of affection, then psychologists and psychology are about managing, mediating, handling emotions and affections.
And could potentially be a good way to step between these conflicts in between communities, for example, or just top down politics or, you know, all the decision making processes between groups.
So I was wondering if you have any thoughts about that?
I think here you're talking in particular around like kind of social psychology in terms of like counseling and psychoanalysis and that sort of kind of way.
Yep. Yeah, I would totally agree with you.
I don't have any intellectual stance on that other than to say that I think the number one most important skill that I have in my professional life are things I've learned in therapy that I use in staff meetings and with students and handling departmental conflicts and whatever, you know, like just languages to diffuse conflict, ways of active listening, you know, whatever.
So I think that hugely important.
I used to say that I thought the department should pay for my therapy sessions because of the way that I was using what I learned there every single day in my job.
But yeah, I think so.
I think there's a really important role there, especially because I become really, really interested, which obviously now living in Norway is particularly interesting.
In the importance of conflict for change, I just think that conflict is an incredibly productive space.
And so, you know, as a cultural society in Norway, people tend to run from conflict, right?
Like it's very, very uncomfortable and very can lead to people completely cutting off any relationship.
I've watched this happen amongst friends and stuff.
And I think that kind of giving people better tools for conflict resolution, for sitting in disagreement and conflict is something that's super important for collective action and just, yeah, better functioning society in general.
So, yeah, I'm very interested because I think conflict's important as well as like anger and these moments where people are able to.
I don't know, because like I guess what's difficult about anger is that in most societies, when people get angry, the person who's expressing the anger is often ostracized.
So it can often be a very exposing and a difficult place and can sever relationships with a person who expresses anger.
But oftentimes that affect in the room or in that network is exactly what was needed.
You know, where that moment of anger is when things get said or things get opened up or, you know, things have to be dealt with that aren't being dealt with because of this outburst of anger.
And and how you deal with that tension between the person expressing the anger, then becoming ostracized, having put themselves in a more difficult position, being more on the outside or whatever.
Whereas that expression was crucial for the group functioning.
I don't I don't know how you deal with that, but I see it all the time.
Staff meetings. I don't know about you guys, but.
Thank you. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.
It's been wonderful. Thanks.
Great questions.
Thank you.
We should have. I know that was great.
Those such great questions.
Thank you.