A Public Action Approach to Knowledge and Intervention to Meet the Climate Challenge

Abstract

Lived experiences and science provide different but partial realities of climate change. Engaging lived experiences, however, does more than add another form of knowledge to the phenomenon. It adds further to our understanding of how people, as citizens, respond to the science, policy proposals and planned interventions. Lived experiences, moreover, are extremely diverse. This potentially allows for knowledge enrichment through engagement, but all too often it results in power dynamics between actors where the most powerful—which include national governments, international institutions and the corporate sector—do their utmost to define the truth of a situation and exclude much of the diversity of knowledge that actually exists. A public action approach to knowledge inherently recognises the diversity that arises from lived experiences and the power dynamics. It further illustrates how, in an interdependent world, no group’s power is absolute and even the most vulnerable are able to lever a place on the climate change agenda at all scales, through instrumental sharing for mutual gain and political legitimacy agendas, alliances with others, NGOs and value-based social movements. We recognise, however, the unruly, messy process of knowledge construction that makes public action what it is. There are possibilities for institutionalising it to some extent and making it less unruly, but they depend on policy makers engaging in a process that shares, rather than simply extracts, knowledge, and on engaging lived experiences from diverse social groups. The potential prize for productive engagement is a collective transboundary social imagination that enables citizens to establish the public agenda surrounding climate change.