Abstract
The fossil fuel divestment movement is altering the landscape of climate activism on US campuses. Student-run divestment campaigns are now pushing for college Boards of Trustees to withdraw investments from the top 100 public coal companies and top 100 public oil and gas companies. Despite student fervor, however, divestment has remained a controversial tactic. Why has the movement not enjoyed widespread success, despite heavy student pressure? This chapter examines the hypothesis that pushing for divestment alone will not achieve broad success because it does not appeal to a wide enough range of motives that may persuade people to engage in pro-environment behavior. This chapter will study the stated motives for why a selection of colleges have agreed or declined to divest. A detailed analysis of how these stated motives fall into a theoretical framework of motives for pro-environment behavior reveals the motives to which divestment successfully appeals, as well as the motives to which it fails to appeal. The purpose of detecting gaps where divestment fails to appeal is to identify areas that can be better addressed by a multi-pronged approach to climate activism. This chapter concludes with a brief suggestion of other actions that might be included in a holistic climate action plan.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive examination of all colleges that have made a decision on divestment. Rather, it examines a selection of colleges, building off of the work of Jessica Grady-Benson’s Fossil Fuel Divestment: The Power and Promise of a Student Movement for Climate Justice (2014), the primary existing scholarly work on the young divestment movement at the time of this chapter’s writing. Grady-Benson documented 24 rejections as of early 2014, and the number of rejections has continued to grow since then. Due to time constraints, this chapter does not examine a complete list of rejections, and instead chooses samples from Grady-Benson’s list. However, the number of successes is much smaller, so this chapter does examine a complete list of successes up to September 2014, drawn from the official list on Gofossilfree.org, available at http://gofossilfree.org/commitments/. The press releases and official letters themselves are publically available online and were found using a search engine.
- 2.
Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute defines fiduciary duty as “a legal duty to act solely in another party’s interests.” In this case, trustees are subject to a legal duty to act solely in the interests of the endowment on behalf of donors.
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Xu, R. (2016). Looking Beyond Fossil Fuel Divestment: Combating Climate Change in Higher Education. In: Leal Filho, W., Zint, M. (eds) The Contribution of Social Sciences to Sustainable Development at Universities. World Sustainability Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26866-8_3
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