It’s Our Fault: A Global Comparison of Different Ways of Explaining Climate Change

After the global COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and our long-term fieldwork plans were put on hold, it became apparent that we would need an engaging project that was possible to carry out from home. We initially intended to carry out our 1 year PhD fieldwork in India and South Africa on climate futures, however, due to the pandemic this was no longer possible and it became necessary to change our plans for the time-being. How can we, as anthropologists, conduct research on the perceptions of climate change when we cannot reach our field sites and interlocutors due to travel restrictions and health concerns? 

 This project materialised in the form of an extensive anthropological review of existing research on the ways in which different communities across the world explain the causes of a changing climate on a global scale. The aim of our analysis was to show how the scientific climate-change discourse interacts with other discourses of human knowledge about the climate. The idea was further motivated by the fact that such an ethnographic comparison had rarely been attempted. The term “climate change” is a commonplace term for those with access to the media, formal education, and NGOs, though there has been comparatively little effort to invesitage how the scientific discourse of climate change is being received globally. We set out to read  ethnographic case studies (n=28) from around the world and to compile research on how different actors conceptualised why the climate was changing and how they explained it. There are a few international surveys attempting to address how this message is being received.  Since 2005, the Gallup Institute, for example, has been conducting a poll in 160 countries that represent 98% of the world’s population. According to the 2010 poll, the awareness of global climate change differs drastically: while in some countries (e.g., Japan, Thailand, northern Europe) almost everyone knows about climate change, in others about one third of the population do (e.g., India, Bangladesh, Ghana). Moreover, about half of the world’s population acknowledges a human contribution to climate change (Ray and Pugliese 2011). However, the problem with such surveys is that they investigate evaluations of decontextualized “chunks” of knowledge (typically as agreements with statements) that hardly allow us to grasp the meaning people attach to the phenomena under consideration.

An agreement with the two statements that the climate is changing and that humans are the cause cannot tell us where, in the interlocutor’s view, the climate is changing, which people have caused it, and since when this has occurred. Depending on the answers, the meaning changes drastically. As we read and coded more ethnographic cases, we increasingly questioned whether people worldwide simply adopted the scientific climate change discourse. Our analysis was further guided by articulating more specific questions, such as is it changing globally or only where certain people live? Did members of my community cause it or were people somewhere else to blame? Is climate change due to people’s recent behavior or behaviors that occurred in the past? While an individual could agree to both example statements for a given question, it might be due to a belief that the climate is only changing in the place where they live because the people in their region have recently done something wrong.

What occurs when different ways of explaining climate change interact? A terminological distinction running through the literature we compared refers to both “scientific” and “local” knowledge. The latter can include all existing discourses (religious, observational, “indigenous,” “traditional,” etc.) whereas the former is, as Frederik Barth, defines it, the “academic prototype of ‘knowledge’” – something context-free, which “stimulates knowledge without knowers” (Barth 2002: 2) in its imagined, pure form. Both “scientific” and “local” knowledge are the result of embedded and embodied practices of producing it (Simonetti 2019; Schnegg 2019). To explore this relationship, we began with three overarching models of how these interactions have been described: hybridity, discursive domination and/or resistance, and pluralism. The three models we identified in existing medical anthropological literature illustrate the most “idealized” instances of knowledge interaction, which is important to distinguish as knowledge itself is a process (Ingold 2011). The first model is hybridity: two or more ways of knowing blend into one new, hybrid form. The second theoretical expectation is domination/resistance: one way of knowing might dominate all others. Here, we would expect the dominant discourse most probably to be the scientific discourse on climate change due to its position of prevalence and power. However, the local way of knowing may simultaneously prove resistant to such domination. Lastly, pluralism: we propose knowledge about changing weather conditions to be situational. Depending on the context or role actors find themselves in, they might access different explanations – and as such, a pluralism of knowledge can come into existence.

Our results confirmed a prevalence of hybridity in published case studies. 16 out of 28 cases could be identified as hybrid and an additional five cases showed hybridity in combination with pluralism and/or domination. In further unpacking the hybridity model, we highlighted two trends that people employed in order to make sense of less tangible scientific discourses – moralisation and self-blame – that contributed to the prevalence of hybridity’s localising effect and are part of its construction in particular and impactful ways. People seemed to localise and moralise these changes by locating them in the present and within their close social networks, thus producing an element of self-blame. In many communities, there is no separation between human action and the weather, and as Rudiak-Gould has effectively demonstrated.blame is allocated as a form of moral feedback within society (Rudiak-Gould 2014a, 2014b). Interestingly, in some cases, self-blame can also be used as a tool for self-empowerment and a way out of victimhood (Rudiak-Gould 2014b; Friedrich 2018).

In most case studies, people adopted certain scientific explanations, but not all, and therefore aligned with the discursive hybridity model. It is important to note that the aim of this analysis is not to find “true knowledge” about climate change because the changes people experience and observe can be something ontologically different depending on the context in which they live (Goldman et al. 2016; Burman 2017; Schnegg 2019). These findings are not limited to “remote,” “indigenous” villagers, nor is this way of making sense of the weather limited to the Global South. Our analysis showed that a general agreement with a scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change is by no means an indication that people have fully adopted the scientific view of climate change. When people across the globe agree that human behavior is the cause of a changing climate, the meaning attached to that behavior and how human–environment relationships are understood in different contexts varies widely. This matters in light of the immense financial effort directed at climate-change education. For example, the UN alone spends millions of dollars annually to further “educate” people about climate change: for the year of 2019, the expenditures of the IPCC were expected to be approximately $9.6 million (IPCC 2017, Annex 11).

The why and how of anthropogenic climate change goes beyond arriving at the node of attributing responsibility to human action, which is uneven itself. Working on this paper in the paradox of a year of both social isolation, and overwhelming global interconnectedness, provided a contrasting backdrop to these findings. Relating to climate is a universal experience, yet can be something hybrid and ontologically different. We believe engaging with this understanding is useful to the conversation of communicating scientific climate change knowledge across varied contexts. 

 The full article can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10745-021-00229-w#citeas 

Schnegg, M., O’Brian, C.I. & Sievert, I.J. It’s Our Fault: A Global Comparison of Different Ways of Explaining Climate Change. Hum Ecol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00229-w

About:

Coral Iris O’Brian and Inga Janina Sievert are PhD candidates in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg. Their projects revolve around the social constructions of climate futures enacted through forest spaces in the US and Germany - another COVID related adjustment. 

They are working in the interdisciplinary project CLICCS (Climate, Climatic Change and Society) at the University of Hamburg. 

Works cited:

Barth, F. (2002). An Anthropology of Knowledge. Current Anthropology 43 (1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1086/324131.

Burman, A. (2017). The Political Ontology of Climate Change: Moral Meteorology, Climate Justice, and the Coloniality of Reality in the Bolivian Andes. Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1), 921–930.

Friedrich, T. (2018). The Local Epistemology of Climate Change: How the Scientific Discourse on Global Climate Change is Received on the Island of Palawan, the Philippines. Sociologus 68 (1), 63–84.

Goldman, M. J., Daly, M., and Lovell, E. J. (2016). Exploring Multiple Ontologies of Drought in Agro-Pastoral Regions of Northern Tanzania: A Topological Approach. Area 48 (1), 27–33.

Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. New York: ROUTLEDGE.

IPPC (2017). IPCC Trust Fund Programme and Budget. (Submitted by the Secretary of the IPCC). 46TH SESSION OF THE IPCC, 6 – 10 September 2017, Montreal, Canada.

Ray, J., and Pugliese A. (2011). Worldwide, Blame for Climate Change Falls on Humans. Americans Among Least Likely to Attribute to Human Causes. April 22, 2011 (Gallup). Available online at https://news.gallup.com/poll/147242/worldwide-blame-climate-change-falls-humans.aspx, checked on 2/11/2021.

Rudiak-Gould, P. (2014a). The Influence of Science Communication on Indigenous Climate Change Perception: Theoretical and Practical Implications. Human Ecology 42 (1), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-013-9605-9.

Rudiak-Gould, P. (2014b). Climate Change and Accusation. Global Warming and Local Blame in a Small Island State. Current Anthropology 55 (4), 365–386. https://doi.org/10.1086/676969.

Schnegg, M. (2019). The Life of Winds: Knowing the Namibian Weather from Someplace and from Noplace. American Anthropologist 121, 830–844. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13274.

Simonetti, C. (2019). Weathering Climate: Telescoping Change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (2), 241–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13024.