ERC Starting Grant for research on Climate citizenship
"Climate citizenship” explores how adapting environments to climate change can change the way people interact with each other and with government. It focuses on nature-based or 'green' climate infrastructure projects that make use of natural entities or dynamics. With an ERC grant, anthropologist Andrew Littlejohn will investigate how our notions of citizenship are disrupted, made and remade in the process of adapting local environments to global climate change.
States and citizens worldwide are experimenting with how to adapt to climate change. Some of these experiments work with existing infrastructure models like seawalls and dikes. But others are employing nature-based or ‘green’ approaches incorporating natural entities and dynamics into environmental management. In Louisiana, for instance, engineers are opening channels in federal levees so that sediment can flow into the delta, where it will buffer cities from sea-level rise. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, municipalities are expanding their ‘green infrastructure’. By planting trees, creating vertical gardens, and other initiatives aimed at greening public spaces, they hope to “climate proof” cities from flooding and heat risk.
These are just a few examples of what Andrew Littlejohn calls ‘climate infrastructure', meaning objects or systems that manage how local environments interact with trans-local climate change. As the impacts of climate change accelerate, government bodies, citizen groups, and scientists are increasingly experimenting with such infrastructures, from plants to soils, sediments and more. As they proliferate, however, they affect more than just environments. Many designers see them as opportunities to transform citizens and create new structures of governance. At the same time, green climate infrastructures often depend on citizen engagement for their implementation.
Green roofs and vertical gardens
"Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change" explores how adapting environments to climate change through nature-based projects can reshape people's relationships with each other and the state. Examples range from green roofs and vertical gardens to urban parks, flood plains and more ambitious efforts to transform coastal and peri-urban landscapes. Andrew Littlejohn: “The project treats these novel infrastructures as social and political as well as environmental experiments. When and how do they stimulate behavioural change, attract new audiences or create new alliances between stakeholders? Can they prompt people to redefine notions of the ‘social contract’, or the division of rights and responsibilities within a society?”
The potential of “green infrastructures in three coastal regions
While writing his forthcoming book on how people in north-east Japan are trying to prevent tsunamis, Littlejohn began to think about these issues. "After the devastating 2011 disaster, the Japanese government proposed a massive new system of seawalls and other defences. But many people living in the affected areas argued for more 'nature-based' forms of protection instead, such as planting coastal protection forests. Seeing people planting saplings to prevent tsunamis sparked my interest in the potential of 'green infrastructure'”. The research project will conduct a comparative ethnographic study of green infrastructure experiments in three coastal regions threatened by climate change: the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta in the Netherlands, the Louisiana Delta in the United States, and Tokyo Bay in Japan.
Rethinking citizenship in a changing climate
With this project, Littlejohn hopes to generate new insights into how states and citizens conceive, practice and interpret citizenship in a changing climate. "I also hope to create a conceptual and methodological apparatus that will enable new lines of enquiry into 'climate citizenship' and 'climate infrastructure' elsewhere. This can help us to address one of the key challenges of adaptation: its increasing entanglement with questions of political rights, relations and belonging".
"Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change" will be carried out by Andrew Littlejohn and three researchers: a post-doctoral fellow and two PhD students. Littlejohn and the two PhD students will carry out the ethnographic case studies. The postdoctoral researcher will help develop an 'ecographic' approach, which combines data collected using qualitative methods with data from the ecological sciences to track parallel changes in social, political, and ecological life.