Responding to the environmental crisis: Culture, power and possibilities of change

Environmental impacts stem from, and are embedded in, complex systems of production, consumption, influence and practice that need understanding at multiple levels. Responding to this challenge, social-scientific and interdisciplinary research on society-environment interactions has gained momentum over the past decades in different parts of the world. In particular, culturally sensitive forms of inquiry have opened up a very promising strand of environmental social science that has helped to advance scientific knowledge of socio-environmental challenges while also reshaping the fundamentals of scientific knowledge production (cf. Edmondson & Rau, 2008). However, more concerted efforts are needed to understand the challenges and opportunities involved in responding to environmental crises, especially those that relate to cultural differences in society and related gradients in (political) power and influence. This Special Issue was conceived of as a contribution to this debate.

Many current environmental challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss are framed as ‘wicked problems’, that is, highly complex issues that are embedded in a social context that harbours a diverse range of actors with multiple and potentially opposed interests (cf. Rittel & Webber, 1973). Yet, many contemporary debates in science and society tend to ignore the complexities of sociality in the context of pressing socio-environmental problems. For example, little attention has been paid to the fact that the reproduction of resource-intensive everyday practices such as driving a car or home heating is often directly connected to diverse forms of social interaction (Halkier, 2020). In other words, environmentally impactful activities such as domestic energy use tend to serve diverse social and cultural practices, including working, caring for others, or being hospitable.

Social-scientific approaches to society-environment relations have opened up promising avenues for understanding the root causes of environmentally impactful human activities such as excessive energy use. For example, the emergence of environmental sociology as a sub-discipline in the second half of the twentieth century has produced a rich and diverse landscape of conceptual and empirical work (Boström & Davidson, 2018; Redclift & Woodgate, 2010; Kropp & Sonnberger, 2021). Diverse conceptualisations of ‘nature’ (Macnaghten & Urry, 1998) have complemented structure-agency debates, including those that concern the ascription of agency to inanimate objects as part of actor-networks (e.g. Pellizzoni, 2018). The ongoing diversification of environmental sociology and its neighbouring (sub)disciplines has also meant that explanations for the effects of human activities on the environment have become much more varied, with wide-ranging consequences for knowledge production and use. This is exemplified by past and current trends in social-scientific energy research:

For example, the recent rise of theories of practice as a means of understanding the persistence of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption has provided new impetus for systematic inquiries into routine practices of households and organisations and their social and material elements (e.g. Sahakian et al., 2021; Shove & Walker, 2014). This renewed interest in the mundane (Rau, 2018) has also highlighted once more how social scientific efforts to understand and analyse the actions of individuals and groups need to move beyond the sole focus on attitudes, behavioural intentions and actual behaviour to include structural influences such as institutional and organisational rules, infrastructures and prevailing systems of provision (cf. Shove, 2010). Importantly, the idea that social practices are made up of different social, cultural and material elements has opened up a new sociological perspective on the root causes of environmental problems, especially those caused by the overconsumption of resources.

Complementing an emergent emphasis on social practices and their environmental impacts, investigations into the role of culture and manifestations of cultural difference in the context of society-environment interactions have gained traction, not least because of their role in environmental conflicts.

This interest has been further fuelled in part by international debates about the need for multilateral environmental policy and governance arrangements that acknowledge the issue of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (UNFCCC, 1992) for environmental protection. This logic continues to shape goals for global development and environmental protection such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that are intended to guide the developmental strategies and actions of the international community until 2030.¹ It has also drawn attention to variations in resource use within and between countries, including rural-urban differences and questions of privilege and disadvantage regarding geographically uneven access to key resources such as water, food or electricity.

In this context, social-scientific analyses of the influence of cultural factors on the use of resources in households and organisations have proved to be particularly promising, a fact that is also reflected in some of the contributions to this Special Issue. Recent research on energy demand in the EU and its potential reduction demonstrates this. As Fahy, Goggins, and Jensen (2019) show, energy demand challenges in Europe vary considerably both within and between countries, with wide-ranging implications for policy, planning and practice. Their work demonstrates how cultural norms, conventions and practices regarding thermal comfort and convenience play a key role in explaining similarities and differences between European countries regarding actual and potential reductions in domestic energy use. These are accompanied by variations in energy infrastructure and systems pf provision, including in the level of (de)centralisation of energy supply (Fahy et al., 2019). Importantly, all the contributions to the edited collection by Fahy et al. (2019) show more or less explicitly how differences in (political) power between those who produce energy (e.g. suppliers) and those who demand and use energy (e.g. businesses, households) shape the transformation (or lack thereof) of energy systems in different European countries. The resulting picture reveals profound intra- and international differences in how energy is viewed, supplied, and used. This is confirmed by recent conceptual and empirical work on the role of culture in advancing energy policy and practice, for example in the context of local energy retrofitting initiatives (Goggins, Rau, Moran, Fahy, & Goggins, 2022).

In addition to highlighting variations in norms and practices, culturally sensitive environmental social science has been particularly successful in making sense of conflicts that revolve around ideas and practices concerning the ‘right kind’ of resource use and that involve different social actors, ranging from politicians and bureaucratic institutions to businesses, NGOs and civil society organisations. Past and present conflicts related to the installation of renewable energy technology such as windfarms and solar parks reveal the significance of cultural factors, including perceptions of the landscape, shared notions of what is deemed to be ‘natural’ or aesthetic considerations that are connected with a sense of belonging (cf. Becker, Klagge, & Naumann, 2021 for a recent energy-geographical treatment of these issues, focusing on European experiences in particular). Current efforts by different European countries to end their dependence on imported oil and gas and to increase the share of renewables need to take seriously these concerns, to avoid fervent resistance from parts of their populations.

Thinking sociologically about everyday life, its social, cultural and material elements and its environmental impacts also harbours significant potential for a more or less radical reassessment of the nature of society-environment relations and related possibilities for change. However, this potential has yet to be fully realised. Instead, responses to environmental crises such as climate change continue to stress individual action, mirroring the dominance of conceptual and methodological individualism in scientific studies of society-environment relations. This has led to an under-appreciation of other modes of social organisation (e.g. households, companies), their role in the reproduction of resource-intensive practices as well as underlying power relations. For example, urging individuals to act places the burden of responsibility for environmental protection on those who are least able to influence prevailing systems of ‘actually existing unsustainability’ (Barry, 2012). It also means to lose sight of important issues of collective responsibility. Recent work by Kessler and Rau (2022) shows how public debates in Germany concerning climate action regularly reflect elite perspectives and practices, eclipsing the views and everyday experiences of large parts of the population. In particular, variations in the attribution of responsibility for climate action to different societal actors such as politicians, businesses, NGOs and individual consumer-citizens and related expectations of (in)efficacy ascribed to these actors are clearly discernible. Here, the concept of ‘climate cultures’ helps to capture these (oftentimes stark) differences in how issues of climate change and climate action are approached within the population (cf. Heimann, Sommer, Kusenbach, & Christmann, 2022).

Appealing to individuals to tackle environmental challenges, for example by choosing products that are deemed to be less harmful to the environment, is not only ineffective in terms of power, reach and social complexity; it can also lead to perverse consequences, as when consumers are urged to purchase ‘green’ products such as electric cars or energy-efficient household appliances whose environmental impact turns out to be less beneficial than expected. This problem has been further fuelled by the widespread application of impact assessment techniques that focus more or less exclusively on the quantification of greenhouse gas emissions, ignoring other environmental impacts such as high toxicity levels, or excessive demands for land, to name but a few. In fact, the growing dominance of carbon accounting at different geographical scales and levels of social organisation (e.g. nation-states, organisations) has led to an improper reduction of environmental problems to CO₂ emissions, with wide-ranging consequences for environmental debates and action (Rau, 2018). For example, reducing the environmental impact of cars to their emissions during use, as exemplified by the carbon footprint in CO₂ per passenger kilometre, ignores other major consequences of car-based mobility such as growing demand for urban space for driving and parking and urban heat island effects arising specifically from transport infrastructure such as roads and surface car parking spaces. Importantly, these types of assessment cannot adequately account for negative social and cultural effects such as the persistent exclusion of (voluntarily and involuntarily) car-free households from activities that depend on the availability of a car.

Contrasting with appeals to individuals to ‘do the right thing’ for the environment, efforts have also been made to promote actions by governments or ‘humanity’. However, expectations that the international community will act with unity of purpose to tackle pressing environmental challenges such as climate change have been mired in problems, not least because of a diffusion of responsibility and subsequent inaction. Global inequalities between countries in terms of both their responsibility for environmental damage and their capacity to address environmental challenges loom large in this context, requiring a detailed understanding of their root causes and consequences. For example, less privileged countries and sections of society tend to bear the brunt of environmental destruction, despite their limited capacity to respond effectively as well as their below-average environmental impact. Importantly, responses to environmental crises tend to reflect the dominant (political) culture of a country or region, leading to significant variations in environmental policy and practice. For example, EU policy efforts to tackle the overconsumption of natural resources have had to handle vast differences between member states regarding the status of environmental protection vis-à-vis other policy areas (cf. Knill & Liefferink, 2021 for a detailed discussion). In this context, culture-specific perspectives on what it means to use certain resources and resulting positive or negative reactions to efforts to regulate their use play a very significant role, warranting further sociological and interdisciplinary research in the future.

Calls for a profound and wide-ranging social-ecological transformation have been growing louder, with a sense of urgency being attached to efforts to address the rapidly accelerating ‘climate emergency’. The language of the Sixth Assessment Report published in 2022 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) clearly demonstrates this.² In particular, IPCC AR6 has highlighted demand-side measures as a key element of effective climate change mitigation (as well as adaptation). This places social-scientific knowledge of (un)sustainable consumption and its links with everyday practices, aspects of sociality and forms of social interaction at the centre of climate change policy and practice. Organisations such as the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI)³, an international network of consumption scholars and practitioners, could make significant contributions to these efforts in the future.

This said, current interlocking systems of governance and domination continue to foster exploitative relationships with the rest of the natural world. The challenge of changing political systems to effectively address ‘wicked’ environmental problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss thus remains significant, a fact that is well reflected in the contributions to this Special Issue. Large international organisations such as the United Nations struggle to retain their relevance, especially in times of resurgent nationalism and populist politics that place national (economic) interests over and above global concerns about social inequality and environmental destruction. At the same time, we see novel forms of tactical environmentalism ‘from below’. New social movements such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion have shaped public debate in significant ways, partly because their membership has shown surprising levels of zeal, fervour and radicalism. By inserting emotions into previously cerebral debates on environmental topics, these movements have been able to mobilise significant numbers of people, effecting election outcomes and environmental policy and governance in their respective countries and globally. At the same time, the dominance of elite perspectives that reflect the culture and everyday experiences of well-educated and economically secure social groups continues to limit the appeal of public debates about environmental challenges such as climate change (Kessler & Rau, 2022). Fridays for Future activist Greta Thunberg’s speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 exemplifies these observations.⁴

Still, progress in achieving a deep transformation of consumption to lower demand for natural resources will depend on the capacity of the international community to explicitly recognise, accept, and work with cultural variations in how people view and use environmental resources. As is evident from the more culture-centred literature on society-environment-relations, nothing less than a deep cultural and political shift is needed to transform current environmentally exploitative practices.

Understanding potential responses to environmental problems is heavily shaped by local and communal imaginaries, ways of knowing and practices. In particular, socially negotiated and culturally rooted knowledge and related affective and emotional reactions have been central to environmental action on different scales, requiring a new understanding of ‘knowledge’ that moves beyond cognition and the accumulation of information. Yet, assumptions that gathering knowledge and informing the public are key to policy change continue to hold considerable currency, notwithstanding decades of questionable results accruing from knowledge-centred campaigns rooted in information-deficit models. Not only are links between knowledge and action complex and many-sided, not only are there strong social variations even in recognising what action-relevant knowledge is, but this type of discourse ignores many layers of mid-range social interactions, not least people’s engagement in resource-intensive everyday practices such as driving, eating meat or heating their homes. As will be shown in this Special issue, the latter are particularly useful as an object of sustainability research in the social sciences because they tend to be the target of culturally significant prescriptions concerning how to do things, and why, and because they demonstrate the ways in which different forms of resource use, including seemingly wasteful activities, fulfil important social functions. Challenging such resource-intensive practices thus requires a detailed understanding of the cultural processes that underpin their concerted (re)production in everyday life.

Finally, communicating research on environmental problems remains a key challenge that many scientists need to grapple with. For example, environmental social scientists tend to struggle with the challenges of effective science communication when attempting to convey their ideas about highly complex society-environment-relations. This is exemplified by the continued dominance of public climate change communication that presents well-rehearsed scientific facts but that ignores social, cultural and affective aspects of climate change and climate action (Kessler & Rau, 2022). This said, new digital opportunities and much greater awareness of the need for scientists and their institutions to regularly and effectively engage with the public have laid the ground for novel formats of science communication, ranging from science blogs and virtual exhibitions to new types of science museums. Accompanying these developments, there is a discernible move away from unidirectional models of knowledge transfer from science to society and towards more dialogic and multidirectional modes of science communication. Michael John Gorman’s (2020) reflections on the future of science museums and new models of engaging the public with science and technology capture this trend very well. Critiquing conventional views of information transfer, he argues that

In a similar vein, attempts have been made to increase participation by non-academics in scientific research, as demonstrated by the rise of transdisciplinary research and citizen science. Social scientists have been at the forefront of these challenges to conventional modes of doing science. In fact, their commitment to advancing ‘post-normal’ or ‘Mode Two’ science that creates ‘socially robust knowledge’ (Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001) has transformed the science-society-policy interface in key fields of environmental social research. Transdisciplinary sustainability research on major socio-environmental issues such as domestic energy use, mobility, or food consumption reveals the potential of this new way of doing science, as is exemplified by the contributions to this Special Issue. Engaging citizens in the production of scientific knowledge, for example by interactively investigating the social and material elements of their everyday practices or by asking them to share observations of their daily routines, has opened up new avenues for sustainability research, policy and practice.

Overall, enhancing the effectiveness of governance and policy for a social-ecological transformation requires a much higher level of awareness of the role of differences in culture, power and knowledge in current and future environmental crises. More work is thus needed to examine the roles, responsibilities and modes of conduct of actors in key decision-making positions such as political and business elites whose views and actions have profound consequences for society and the environment. This Special Issue clearly demonstrates how environmental sociology and cognate social science disciplines such as environmental politics and governance and policy studies are ideally equipped in terms of both conceptual tools and methods for empirical research to make a major contribution to scientific and public knowledge in this important area.

This Special Issue brings together three empirically grounded analyses that take specific account of cultural and political features of resource-intensive socio-environmental practices, not least the effects of interconnected imbalances in equality and power on how different groups in society view and use natural resources. All three contributions demonstrate in new and innovative ways how cultural influences such as collectively negotiated meanings ascribed to particular environmental actions shape societal responses to environmental crises. Importantly, they vividly illustrate the unique capacity of environmental social science to identify the root causes of environmental problems by linking social, cultural and material aspects of human activity. The transformative potential of this type of analysis certainly cannot be overestimated, complementing its contribution to scientific knowledge.

In their contribution to this Special Issue, Senja Laakso, Kaisa Matschoss & Eeva-Lotta Apajalahti analyse a change initiative aimed at transforming domestic energy use by challenging the social norms and cultural conventions that drive unsustainable consumption. Focusing on the reconfiguration of everyday practices, the article sheds light on the kinds of deliberation, experimentation and reflection occurred during the attempts to transform heating and laundry practices in 37 Finnish households. Their work reveals how deep-seated cultural conventions regarding comfort, cleanliness and ‘normality’ shaped people’s engagement in everyday heating and laundry practices, creating both opportunities for, and barriers to transformative change of energy-intensive household practices.

Anne Müller and Elisabeth Süßbauer use the empirical example of disposable food packaging to demonstrate the wide-ranging influence of routine practices in everyday life and their persistence over time, resulting in hard-to-change patterns of unsustainable consumption. Adopting a practice-theoretical approach to consumption, their study treats food packaging as an integral material element of food consumption practices that interacts with other elements such as diverse social meanings of packaging and particular food preparation skills (or a lack thereof). This article shows how a range of socio-cultural considerations and practices related to food preparation and consumption feed directly into the use of environmentally harmful food packaging, offering important lessons for future efforts to reduce or phase out completely the use of single-use packaging.

The contribution by Berit Skorstad and Tina Mohus attends to the issue of public discourses and storylines regarding development, focusing on the Norwegian city of Bodø, a city that seeks to transform itself from a former international military base to a smart, zero-emission city. Through a detailed discourse analysis of official documents and interviews with local actors, the study captures the emergence and reproduction of a dominant storyline that incorporates the logics of competition and growth-oriented development to tackle climate change. At the same time, it reveals how nuances of local (political) culture shape the speed and direction of the planned socio-ecological transformation of the city.

All three contributions to this Special Issue adopt a culturally sensitive approach to investigate their respective topics, focusing on socially negotiated norms and views, different types of embodied knowledge and their connections with everyday routine practices as well as power relations in domestic life and urban sustainability governance. They thus show the potential of this approach for advancing social-scientific work on environmental issues, including variations in the conceptualisation and use of natural resources within and between countries. Moreover, they succeed in highlighting the central role of culture-specific domestic and political practices in the (re)production of society-environment relations.

This Special Issue was initially conceived off during one of the many video conferences that Ricca Edmondson and I had after my move from Galway in the West of Ireland to Munich in Southern Bavaria. During my time in the West of Ireland (1997–2015), Ricca had been my PhD mentor before becoming my colleague in the School of Political Science and Sociology at NUI Galway, Ireland. We worked very closely together for more than a decade across the whole spectrum of academic activities. We wrote about environmental issues and their social causes and consequences (e.g. Edmondson & Rau, 2008; Rau & Edmondson, 2013), travelled together to international conferences to present our work and co-taught classes in environmental sociology in Ireland, Germany and Austria. At NUI Galway, we ran a workshop series entitled ‘Society, Culture and the Environment’, which presented us with many opportunities to discuss environmental topics with social scientists from all over the world. One of these workshops led to the publication of ‘Environmental Argument and Cultural Difference: Locations, Fractures and Deliberations’ (2008, Peter Lang). In the introduction to this book, we developed a series of arguments for a culturally sensitive analysis of society-environment relations.

Ricca was very happy for me when she heard about my decision to relocate to Munich to take up a Professorship in Social Geography and Sustainability Research at LMU Munich. She knew Bavaria very well, having travelled there with her husband Markus Wörner on many occasions, and she was delighted about the prospect of me being able to experience all facets of Bavarian culture, and her being able to visit me there. In spring 2017, Ricca stayed as a visiting researcher at LMU Munich’s Centre for Advanced Studies, which gave us an opportunity to work together once again. And I travelled back to the West of Ireland in 2018, and again in spring 2019 (on that occasion with my daughter Clara who was six months old at the time), meeting Ricca during those visits. The onset of the Corona pandemic in spring 2020 put an end to our mutual visits and we moved our exchanges to the virtual world.

Ricca’s untimely death on 28th June 2021 was an enormous loss for her family, friends and colleagues. She is greatly missed by everyone who knew her. She has made major contributions to various sociological subdisciplines, including environmental sociology. In particular, her ground-breaking work on the sociology of rhetoric and her conceptual and empirical inquiries into aspects of cultural diversity and modes of interculturality have profound and wide-ranging implications for the study of society-environment relations and cross-cultural variations in environmental views and practices, a fact that has yet to be fully appreciated. It has been a great honour and privilege for me to have worked with Ricca Edmondson on many research, writing and teaching projects, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to finish this Special Issue of the European Journal of Political and Cultural Sociology.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).