Despite continued calls for environments to be governed as dynamic socioecological systems, conventional environmental management continues to imagine humans as operating separately from ecological processes, holding discrete, pre-given and self-evident interests in either using or protecting an environment's resources and services. This downplays the contingent, fluid and ambiguous connections that people actually practice within these systems, overlooking important nuance when it comes involving communities in the governance challenges and sociotechnical transitions provoked by climate change. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach using a comprehensive body of qualitative research conducted with communities living and working in proximity to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice, we examine our participants' personal narratives about the Reef as accounts of participation in an overlapping set of social fields, tracing how these engagements involve different subjective dispositions, multiple interests, and the consolidation, mobilisation and cultivation of different types of capital. Our goal is to demonstrate the opportunities to be gained by practice-based approaches within environmental governance and the flexible, relational understandings of communities they offer. These understandings are imperative, we argue, when working to help communities negotiate complex change and build feasible and equitable environmental futures.
When it comes to climate change, some people may think that they bear no responsibility for climate change-related harms because their own behaviour does not make any difference to these harms - they will happen whatever they do or omit doing. In climate ethics, this issue is known as the problem of 'inconsequentialism': it seems that no emitter can make a morally relevant difference to climate harms by emitting greenhouse gases (GHG) - or by not emitting. If this is true, then it means that climate change is a case of causal overdetermination: no emitter's GHG emissions are sufficient nor necessary to bring about climate harms. In this article I explore the implications of climate overdetermination for the causal responsibility of GHG emitters: are they exempt from any such responsibility if they make no difference to climate harms? Provided a causal account meeting certain criteria can be identified, I will argue that this is not the case: a moral agent, whether individual or collective such as a company, contributing inconsequentially to climate change can be held causally responsible for the harms climate change brings about. These criteria - namely, being able to account for overdetermination and to differentiate degrees of responsibility without committing the pie fallacy - are intuitively plausible, and any causal account must satisfy them, especially when dealing with collective action cases such as climate change. I will make use of the NESS (Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set) account of causation as adequate for assigning responsibility in cases of overdetermination, since this account does meet both criteria. Its implication is that causal responsibility for climate harms is not contingent on whether emitters make a difference to climate harms or not. Since causal responsibility is, however, only a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral responsibility, this article merely paves the way for a fuller account of the latter.
In the context of growing affective polarization, climate backlash and emotionally charged climate mobilizations, this article argues that theorists of environmental democracy must take affect and emotions seriously. Drawing on early feminist and ecofeminist critiques of deliberative democracy as well as ecological agonism, we advance a theoretical and research-programmatic argument by exploring what might be gained by re-centring emotionality in our understanding of democratic responses to ecological crises. The argument unfolds in three steps: We first identify the underestimation of emotions as a persistent blind spot within environmental deliberative democracy. Second, building on this literature review, we highlight two ways in which taking affects seriously may reshape ecological democracy. At a practical level, centring emotions could reshape whose knowledge is recognized or excluded in the framing of ecological issues. At a theoretical level, attending to affects opens pathways to consider political agency in less anthropo- and androcentric terms. Finally, we turn to radical feminism to broaden the democratic imagination in response to ecological breakdown, exploring the example of feminist consciousness-raising as a method for politicizing emotions and fostering affective counterpublics as an alternative to deliberative mini-publics.
