To Support a Stronger Climate Movement, Focus Research on Building Collective Power

Abstract

Building public will to address the climate crisis requires more than shifting climate change opinion or engaging more people in activism. Despite growing activism, the climate movement still needs to do more to translate public action into the power needed to effect meaningful change. This article identifies the kinds of research questions that need to be answered to bridge the gap not only between opinion and action, but also between action and political power. We draw on discussions from a conference that brought social scientists together with climate advocates in the United States. At this conference, movement leaders argued that to better support building a robust climate movement, research should move beyond traditional public opinion, communications, messaging, and activism studies toward a greater focus on the strategic leadership and collective contexts that translate opinion and action into political power. This paper thus offers a framework for synthesizing research on movement-building that demonstrates ways to focus research on power, and emphasizes the importance of organizing collective contexts in addition to mobilizing individuals to action.

Youth Mobilization to Stop Global Climate Change: Narratives and Impact

“…Discussing, and even trying to measure the impact of, social movements is an elusive task, as acknowledged in the earlier section. The efficacy of various social movements, including protests to leverage change and force climate change action onto the mainstream agenda, remains to be seen [91,92]. Therefore, this section examines the short-term responses that the youth climate mobilization seems to have elicited in the biographical, social, and political domains and discusses its limitations.…”

Individualism, Structuralism, and Climate Change

“…For political representatives who occupy positions of structural power, this kind of issue salience translates to reliable votes. The NRA created a constituency by promulgating a gun culture and a social identity for individuals to take up, and then gradually but strategically leveraged the reliable voting habits of those individuals into ties to political elites and leaders of the Republican Party (Han & Barnett-Loro, 2018). How to create social identities and leverage identity-based thinking to effectively pressure politicianshow to bridge the "value-action gap" on climate change-remains a key strand of research in environmental communication (Akin et al, 2020;Dannenberg et al, 2012;Fox & Frye, 2010;Hestres & Hopke, 2020;Jaspal et al, 2014).…”

“Tied to the Land”: Climate Change Activism Among U.S. Hunters and Fishers

“…Finally, much of this research focuses on individual-level behaviors, and primarily those having to do with consumption and lifestyle, rather than the "political fabric of climate change" (Carvalho et al, 2017), which civic movements endeavor to affect. As scholars of environmental communication examine social movements, scholars have pointed out the need to go beyond the typical analysis of individual actors to understand the formation of collective power within these movements (Han and Barnett-Loro, 2018).…”

“…As the impacts of a warming climate are increasingly felt around the world, a number of social movements have arisen to address the urgent need for action. Scholars of the environmental social sciences have thus become more and more interested in describing environmental social movements and civic action on several levels: their demographics (Tindall et al, 2003), the framing and other rhetorical strategies used (Alkon et al, 2013;Levy and Zint, 2013), the cognitive and affective precursors of activism (Roser-Renouf et al, 2014;Bamberg et al, 2015), and their efficacy (Han and Barnett-Loro, 2018). This research on climate change activism, however, has often focused on large movements, or those receiving the most media attention (Cox and Schwarze, 2015;Doyle et al, 2017).…”