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Conference Implementation crisis in climate protection and -adaptation and possible ways out Social science perspectives on freedom, democracy and transformation
Climate policy is (still) failing to bend the global emissions curve. What do we know in the social sciences, the humanities and economics to make sense of this major failure? Where do these disciplines see grounds for optimism and levers for change? And how can they co-produce transformative knowledge with and for society, social movements and decision makers? These questions were addressed at a three-day conference hosted by the Deutsches Klima-Konsortium e.V. in cooperation with Zentrum für Klimaresilienz // Centre for Climate Resilience, led by Prof. Dr. Angela Oels, that just concluded with a final declaration. The conference was funded by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung. Stefan Ouma participated in the conference as a panelist for an interdisciplinary dialogue on “barriers to transformation” and as co-prganizer of the disciplinary panel on Human Geography/Anthropology. The programme can be found here.
The final declaration adopted by social scientists, economists and the humanities scholars highlights four points why transformation has failed so far:
1. Knowledge generation of the past decades was dominated by natural science, engineering, and economics. This valuable knowledge must be urgently supplemented with insights from social sciences and humanities to take into account important social dynamics. Climate politics should not be reduced to the “implementation” of presumably objective planetary boundaries. Instead, we need to open up, pluralise and democratize our discussion about which (climate) futures we want.
2. A major factor are path dependencies and (carbon) lock-ins in infrastructures, institutions, but also in behaviour and discourses. Social sciences and humanties are best suited to research particularly the latter three, and suggest ways to overcome them.
3. We share the concern that technology alone will not be able to “fix” the climate crisis. Instead, addressing climate change requires a fundamental transformation of how we run our societies and economies.
4. The transformation process itself bears winners and losers. The social sciences, economics and ethics argue that conflicts between competing social goals need to be democratically resolved. This will require compensation and redistribution for the poor.
Hear voices from the conference in the Deutschlandfunk contribution.