A BIASED STORY?
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NARRATIVES OF THE BAD COMPANY, FAILING GOVERNMENT, AND GOOD ORDINARY PEOPLESEP-NOV ‘19
PRESENTED AT THE IAPSS REGIONAL CONFERENCE
Paths towards Climate Justice
STOCKHOLM, 2019
Stories, whether fiction or factual, have always been attractive to the human brain to justify beliefs and behaviours. The public, politicians and even economists have been trapped to be too often motivated and impacted by narratives, even when addressing basic actions such as spending or investing.
In the trend of neoliberal environmental policies, many environmental advocates largely exclude the behaviour of individuals from the narratives they employ to explain and justify actions for climate change. Rather, the focus is placed solely on corporates and producers, such as plastic producers, which rely on international liberalised markets to exploit the socio-economically worse off. Certainly, these corporations contribute strongly to the climate challenges the world is now facing. However, a less heard side of the story tells about materialistic and consumptionist consumer behaviour prompting climate degradation. Such behaviour, while being influenced by producer actions, itself influences production as well, since producers adapt to consumers' needs. Failing to highlight this chain of causality in the current capitalist system, our understanding of economic causes leading to climate change remains incomplete and can only trigger partial and biased solutions. Therefore, the narratives of the powers that trigger climate change need to shift. We need to recognise materialist and consumerist attitudes as integral to economic governance as corporate behaviour and try to establish a framework to understand and judge upon both objectively.
(I haven’t reviewed this paper in a while and would do a few things differently if I were to write it again now.)