Critical Global Poverty: Framing research on development impacts of climate narratives

We aim to organise a collaborative and targeted research workshop related to the project “Development Impacts of Climate Narratives”. In this initial workshop, researchers will discuss appropriate choice of case studies, innovative research questions and methodological challenges. The aim is to design a collaborative research plan for investigating climate change discourse in relation to the poor. A key feature is to include voices both from the majority and the minority worlds in the project, and to integrate earth system science, social sciences and the humanities.

Climate change is one of the most crucial challenges for our generation. Actors at all scales struggle to create appropriate and fair agreements on both mitigation and adaptation. Different framings, agendas and policy prescriptions are rapidly emerging. There are many voices (often conflictive and contradictory) in this climate change debate; thus it is important to map and analyse what stakeholders on different arenas and at different scales are actually saying.

The project aims to find answers to the following overarching question:

How do climate change discourse of various actors, globally and locally, relate to the also pressing challenge of global poverty?

We seek to understand how the discourse of climate change is produced, diffused and used; and to generate scientifically based and policy-relevant knowledge for assessing to what extent this discourse prioritises, engages, or displaces rights-based perspectives on poverty. We ask how climate narratives affect approaches to the poor and their rights, welfare achievements, and particularly rights related to resources affected by climate change impacts such as water, food and health.

In addition, the core project (and especially the PI) builds on the ongoing work of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) pioneering integrated research; further, it draws on the work of the WUN Critical Global Poverty Studies Group (CGPS). Several of the project researchers are internationally renowned climate scholars.