Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change

Introduction

This project investigates how altering environments to adapt to or mitigate climate change depends on and stimulates changes in social contracts. Comparatively and ethnographically, it investigates when and how material transformations implied by adaptation gather new publics and produce new forms of ‘climate citizenship.’

Concept of Climate Citizenship

By ‘climate citizenship,’ I refer to a form of situated globalism emerging from the articulation of existing, local social contracts (with their varying distributions of rights and responsibilities) and climate change as a global phenomenon.

Focus of the Project

The project focuses on green infrastructure projects where material changes in environmental management depend on and create new political communities (or ‘publics’), citizenship agendas, and subjects.

Hypothesis

It hypothesizes such sites as experiments where not only new ecological and material conditions but also forms of citizenship are being prototyped and sometimes resisted. By examining this, the project will show how addressing climate changes goes hand in hand with reshaping citizenry, political coalitions, and more, and how this is being negotiated.

Breakthrough Question

This leads to the project’s breakthrough question:
How do green climate infrastructures depend on and stimulate transformations in the social contracts that are locally embedded in environments?

Methodology

To answer this, the project will develop a collaborative ‘ecographic’ approach that combines data garnered through ethnographic methods and the ecological and other sciences.

Collaborative Efforts

By deploying this method in dialogue and collaboration with officials, scientists, and citizens in Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States, the project will develop an analytical framework and vocabulary characterizing emerging international trends whose contours are neither sufficiently conceptualized nor empirically researched.