Advanced Review
Researching climate change and
community in neoliberal contexts:
an emerging critical approach
Gerald Taylor Aiken,
1
*
Lucie Middlemiss,
2
Susannah Sallu
3,4
and
Richard Hauxwell-Baldwin
5
Edited by Mike Hulme, Domain Editor and Editor-in-Chief
In a 2011 contribution to this journal, Walker examined the ways that commu-
nity is routinely employed in carbon governance, suggesting the need for more
critical approaches. Here, we characterize an emerging, critical approach to
researching climate change and comm unity in neoliberal contexts, focusing
attention principally on the global north, where this body of research has
emerged. This work recognizes communities as sites of contestation, difference,
tension, and distinction, in which action on climate change can be designed to
meet a range of political and public ends. It aims to uncover the political and
social context for community action on climate change, to be alert to the power
relations inside and outside of communities, and to the context of neoliberal-
ism, including individualism, the will to quantify, and competition. Further-
more, research in this space is committed to understanding both the lived
experience of the messy empirical worlds we encounter, and the potential
agency coalescing in community responses to climate change. Much of the
work to date, discussed here, has focused on communities working on climate
change mitigation in the global north, in which the idea of community as a
space for governance is gaining traction. We also comment on the positioning
of these arguments in the context of long-standing debates in the fields of
‘community-based’ development, natural resource management, and adaptation
in the global South. This discussion establishes a foundation from which to
progress learning across fields and geopolitical boundaries, furthering critical
thinking on ‘community.’
© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
How to cite this article:
WIREs Clim Change 2017, e463. doi: 10.1002/wcc.463
INTRODUCTION
I
n 2011, Walker reviewed the extant work on the
role of community in carbon governance. In his
analysis, he suggested the need for a more critical
response. He emphasized that:
… a critical perspective needs to be maintained
which recognizes that communities are not always
inclusive, harmonious and collaborative, or indeed
may not exist in any cohesive form ready to take
responsibility for climate change action.
1
*Correspondence to: gerald.aiken@uni.lu
1
Institut de Géographie et Aménagement du Territoire, Universite
du Luxembourg. Maison des Sciences Humaines, 11, Porte des
Sciences, L-4366, Esch-sur-Alzette, Groussherzogtum, Lëtzebuerg
2
Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environ-
ment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
3
ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, Univer-
sity of Leeds, Leeds, UK
4
Centre for Global Development, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
5
School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Nor-
wich, UK
Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of inter-
est for this article.
© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1of14
Walker’s call was a reaction to a rather naïve
tendency, among both academics and policymakers,
to attribute extensive power for change to commu-
nities, assuming that community is an unproblematic
entity through which people can come together to
deal with environmental problems. He characterized
this view of community as: ‘positive, productive and
contributing to the successful implementation and
social embedding of various forms of carbon reduc-
tion activity’ (Ref 1, p. 777).
Here, we identify a trend in research on com-
munity and climate change that has emerged in the
global north, which amounts to a response to Walk-
er’s call. This critical approach takes a distinct start-
ing point from the other literatures that engage with
climate change and community. It starts from the
premise that communities are internally complex,
and that relations between communities and other
institutions are potentially problematic. It also antici-
pates that community has different meanings for dif-
ferent institutions and for the various members of the
‘community’ concerned. This new body of work is
acutely alert to the politics and power relations pres-
ent inside and outside communities. This work also
recognizes communities as sites of contestation, dif-
ference, tension, and distinction. Finally, this work
tries to chart a course between an uncritical celebra-
tion of community and the dismissal of community
out of hand.
2
The critical approach we chart here has
emerged in reaction to mainstream, uncritical think-
ing about community prevalent in policy and prac-
tice. It may also be a sign of a maturing academic
response to the phenomenon of community action on
climate change, with the initial rush of enthusiasm
for these projects increasingly tempered by messy
empirical realities. As such it is not entirely distinct
from what goes before. For instance, work in the
field of political ecology, largely focused on the
global south, has a long history of advocating more
critical engagement with communities in relation to
development (see Box 1), while the body of work on
Grassroots Innovations has engaged peripherally
with the politics of community and critical
approaches.
3,4
In effect, critical approaches have
grown out of the existing research on community
and environment. Yet, we also argue that this critical
approach is becoming distinct from these other
bodies of research, at least in that outputs are
increasingly emerging that are strongly rooted in a
particular epistemology and ontology.
This paper outlines the key facets of this new
critical approach. First, we document how a critical
approach attempts to understand the multiple
meanings of community in a particular context, and
the ways in which those meanings structu re action.
Second, we show how this body of work takes an
interest in neoliberal contexts for community action
on climate change, in particular focusing on the ten-
sions between community and individualism, and the
capture of community through numbers. Third, we
look at how issues of representation by community
play out in this body of work. In Box 1, we also con-
sider the connections between the global south and
north, adaptation and mitigation actions in the con-
text of critical approaches to community. Finally, we
think about the direction this work is taking, and
make some comments on the potential for
future work.
THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF
COMMUNITY AND THEIR
FUNCTIONS
There is a recognized tendency, particularly among
policymakers, to conceive of community as an instru-
ment of government, as a means of effecting govern-
ment policy, or of implementing the values and goals
of another institution, at arm’s length. Communities
or community-based initiatives are seen as a means
of communicating messages about government con-
cerns, and persuading people to act differently,
through ‘trusted intermediaries.’ In the UK, the
Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs’ (DEFRA’s) Sustainable Development Strategy
of 2005, for example, states that:
Community groups can help tackle climate change,
develop community energy and transport projects,
help minimize waste, improve the quality of the local
environment, and promote fair trade and sustainable
consumption and production.
25
DEFRA sees the function of community here as
complimentary to the work of government. Critical
research challenges this idea by observing the dis-
tance between government understandings of an
appropriate societal goal, and the aims and desires of
a specific community movement, or the lived reality
of any given community for its members. An instru-
mentalized community is problematic in multiple
ways: it depoliticizes the goals that a community is
being asked to meet, it risks government co-opting
communities to its own ends, it treats the community
(and indeed communities) as a unified and monolithic
group and it relies on often unpaid or poorly paid
community members for government work.
26–29
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Community here is what Eadson call s a ‘policy
object.’
30
Community has historically been linked to a
series of semantic meanings. From local community,
31
community as symbolic function,
32
imagined
community,
33
or a sense of loss that individuals collec-
tively pursue,
34
to choose only a few. The emerging
critical approach questions the semantic meanings that
are linked to community action on climate change.
35
Critical perspectives challenge the synonyms that are
implied wherever community is invoked, but we also
go further. For example, when government uses com-
munity there is scope for questioning the geographic
and scalar assumptions of what makes community,
and for unpicking normative assumptions about both
what makes a good community, and what makes com-
munity good. Critical conceptions of community move
beyond reified visions of a harmonious, local, small-
scale, utopian social form, as well as dystopian
accounts of present day communities as individualized,
antisocial and fragmented, or settled, bounded and
evaporating.
36,37
At this point, it is important to directly address
just what ‘being critical’ means, or may come to
mean. In this body of work, we observe an under-
standing of ‘being critical’ which evokes Horkhei-
mer’s famous essay Traditional Theory and Critical
Theory.
38
Horkheimer excoriates what he called ‘ the
savant’—the researcher who fails to realize the
underlying structural lineages of their theorizing and
BOX 1
CRITICAL COMMUNITY AND
PARTICIPATION IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Critical debates about ‘community’ in the
global south have a longer history, not neces-
sarily bound up in neoliberalism. Increasingly,
postcolonial stru ctural adjustment and interna-
tional donor support have resulted in many
developing nations in the global south being
heavily influenced by neoliberal policies. Critical
debates about community in the global south
have evolved in the literature alongside a set of
dominant, externally funded, designed, and
managed programmatic approaches to devel-
opment and natural resource governance: Com-
munity Development (CD, 1950s and 1960s),
Participatory Development (1980s), and Com-
munity Based Natural Resource Management
(1980s and 1990s). These approaches were
rolled out in postcolonial contexts perceived as
having weak state-centered policies.
5,6
Hold-
croft argued that ‘many leaders of developing
nations and external donors viewed CD as the
means to mobilize rural people as a resource
for and the objective of econo mics, social and
political development’ and saw it as an ‘appro-
priate democratic response to the threat of
international communism during the Cold War
era.’
7
CD was therefore urged upon British colo-
nial officers and applied in African territories.
7
Despite clear academic interest in commu-
nities, it was not until ‘participatory’ me thods
became popular in the global south,
8
that the
focus on ‘community’ gained prominence and
‘community participation’ in development and
later natural resource management and conser-
vation proliferated.
9
Widespread preoccupation
with a ‘mythic community’ that is, a community
that is small, composed of homogeneous
groups using locally evolved norms to live with
nature harmoniously and therefore manage
resources sustainably and equitably,
10
failed to
include and empower poor and marginalized
people in participatory processes. Evidence of
elite capture of program benefits, combined
with other critiques emerging from the failures
of community-based activities resulted in a pro-
lific critical literature.
11–16
This literature was
heavily influenced by political ecology
approaches
17–20
that argued for greater consid-
eration of politics in the environment-
development field at this time. These critical
debates provide a foundation for newer
approaches, for example, community-based
adaptation (CBA),
21–23
an approach that aims to
empower communities to plan for and cope
with the impacts of climate change. However,
calls for further critical study of CBAs to exam-
ine the tensions and chall enges that it brings
illustrate the challenge of a more critical
approach filtering into policy and practice.
22
While much communities and climate change
focus in the global north has been given to mit-
igation, in the global south, where significant
negative impacts on develo pment are expected,
attention has focused on adaptation through
CBA. With the proliferation of payment for eco-
system services programs in the global south
and moves from piloting to implementing
REDD+ (climate change mitigation), commu-
nities will remain central.
24
There is currently
untapped potential for learning across adapta-
tion and mitigation, global south to north and
vice versa, rural to urban and back again.
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© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 3of14
empirical object of study, or their own involvement
or complicity with what they purport to be separa te,
distant processes. For Horkheimer, the savant is a
‘traditional theorist.’ Conversely, the ‘critical theorist’
avoids false universals and is alert to ideological pre-
suppositions and unquestioned shibboleths. In apply-
ing this thinking, we take the premise that
researching alternatives is not in itself critical. Fram-
ing community as an object of study, or even identi-
fying community in the first instance, can reify
community, setting it apart, and risk precluding
many of community’s nuances and idiosyncrasies, or
alternative viewpoints. In this new body of work,
questioning what community actually does is more
critical than questioning what community is. This
applies as much to government attempts to instru-
mentalize community, as it does to civil society or
private sector attempts to enlist community
affectively.
A critical approach, we argue, begins with
awareness of community’s polysemy—the various
semantic links the concept has in specific contexts.
Walker,
1
for example, points to six common mean-
ings of community, when invoked in environmental
contexts. Critical scholars of community are also
aware of how it can be used as a meaning-less term,
that community performs a phatic function.
35
The
concept can be used for its gestural effects, as, among
others, energy companies employ community to gen-
erate acceptance from local residents,
39
or as a ‘sym-
bolic resource’ to galvanize participants.
40
The very
word community has performative aspects. Transi-
tion Towns groups for example aim to ‘unleash the
power of community’ to meet environmental and
social aims.
41,42
Consider the affective technology of
community here: any other related synonym would
not carry the same force. This is more akin to what
Bauman said of community: ‘Some words have
meaning, others have a feel.’
34
Critical scholars of climate change and commu-
nity, regularly engage with the multiple meanings of
community, and the question ‘what does community
do.’
43–51
Or, as in Phillips and Dickie’s account of
community stasis and inaction, what community
doesn’t do.
52
Wright
36
for instance, who is critical of
community’s persistently positive associations, also
points to the variegated exp eriences of and pursuit of
community within the everyday lives of suburban
dwellers, which often include a positive vision. Van
Veelen and Haggett
53
show how multiple forms of
place attachment form the basis of disagreements in
the context of rural renewable energy projects. While
locality is one important aspect of community land
movements, the community invoked is fundamentally
multilayered and multiscalar.
54
Braunholtz-Speight
also outlines the power relations across multiple
scales within community land initiatives.
55
Markan-
toni and Woolvin draw attention to the variety of
communities that are implicated in the transition to
low-carbon futures, which go beyond intentional and
active community movements. They argue for a ‘spa-
tially sensitive approach’
56
in understanding commu-
nity transitions, drawing particular attention to rural
and urban differences in unintentional communities.
Büchs et al. notice how low-carbon lifestyle projects
in community tend to frame their activities conserva-
tively in order to avoid excluding broader audi-
ences.
57
In each of these studies, and many more
besides, community is neither dismissed out of hand,
nor blindly assumed to be known, but met on its
own terms.
As a counterpoint to the form of community
we are discussing here—social arrangements emer-
ging and deployed in response to environmen tal
challenges—community also has the capacity to
‘jump scales.’
37,58
Here, it should be noted that com-
munity sometimes means, or relates to, humanity as
a whole. While the community discussed here is often
focused on a specifically placed intervent ion (in a
neighborhood, city, business, identity group, etc.),
there is regularly, at least at a discursive level, a link
to global climate change, global emissions, or global
environmental impacts. This scalar splintering and
vicariousness (action at one scale on behalf of
another) is a central part of the community we
discuss here.
When community responds to environmental
challenges, much of the latent—and uncriticized —
appeal of the term is its capacity to jump scales. The
assumption is of a (local) community responding to
(global) environmental challenges.
37
Likewise, work
on community low-carbon transitions often assumes
a transition toward a localist, and positive, future.
Critical approaches do not just repeat Williams’s
quote that community is ‘never used unfavourably,’
59
but investigate why this multiple placeholder retains
such positive affectations. It is the digging deeper, in
this case digging deeper into the scalar implications of
community and environment that reveals critical
aspects.
Policies on community and climate change often
adopt such scalar jumping.
60
Critical approaches, in
mobilizing this understanding both of how meaning
plays out across the different scales, and why commu-
nity is held as a positive force, can help understand
policy failure in this area. As Creamer
61,62
has
pointed out, policies promoting community to control
climate change can often be counterproductive to
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their aims of utilizing community for environmental
aims. The formation of community policy can
counter-intuitively, and counterproductively, trans-
form and damage the very community experience or
activity it purports to promote.
CRITIQUING COMMUNITY IN
WESTERN NEOLIBERAL CONTEXTS
A critical approach sees the ways these processes
come into being and function —how community is
used in pursuit of environmental aims and objectives
in the global north —as understandable only against
the backdrop of an increasing neoliberalism in states
(and hence policy) but also concurrently in civil soci-
ety forms and ways of acting.
Understanding community in this way, to some
extent fits a standard analysis of neoliberalism’stwo-
pronged modes of operation: rollback and rollout.
Rollback neoliberalism involves withdrawing state
provision and formal support to achieve national
aims and ambitions. Here, community groups and
movements are expected to do the work of govern-
ment in meeting nationally defined carbon reduction
targets, as implied in the DEFRA quote above.
Rosol
63
outlines the ways in which community
volunteering forms a bridge between rollback
neoliberalism—doing state legwork—and rollout
neoliberalism—doing so under neolib eral principles.
Rollout neo liberalism pushes market techniques,
individualism, and abstraction onto more-than-state
actors, asking community groups and movements to
compete for resources. In neoliberal environmental
policy, there is a fine line between attempting to
green behavior while also holding the freedom of
choice of the individual sacrosanct, as can be seen in
applying recent discussions of liberal paternalism to
these contexts.
64–66
This understanding of commu-
nity is symptomatic of a broader link between liber-
tarian or neoliberal beliefs in a small state, with more
anarchic, small-scale motivations and worldviews of
grassroots activists.
5
Critical understandings of community
responses to environmental challenges have evolved
in a complex, sometimes contradictory, world how-
ever; often among scholars who see the value of these
initiatives as somewhat countercultural, not purely as
a subservient form of neoliberalism. Agyeman
et al. fuse environmental justice movements, NGO,
religious and community action in this area into the
notion of ‘Just Sustainabilities’; ‘thought of as a
counterbalance, an infusion of ideas of equity and
justice.’
67–69
Some critical work in this context also
emphasizes and explores counter-cultural aspects of
grassroots action.
46,68,70,71
Government or sponsored
accounts of community marry the relative inexpen se
(at least in how these things are currently measured)
of community policy with neoliberal rollback. But,
neither radical or neoliberal ambitions for commu-
nity should be totalizing. Critical research ought to
be aware of the potential for coercion through neo-
liberal governance, but also be alive to what commu-
nity looks and feels like to those on the inside.
Community activists or members can participate in
these initiatives for a range of reasons, from the co-
opted to the progressive. Critical approaches to com-
munity and clim ate change aim to understand this
range of actions, intertwined in more or less intimate
ways with the neoliberal state. Indeed, they attempt
to outline the tendencies of the neoliberal state, and
what this means for community. For instance,
Wright
72
found that in the UK, the pursuit of a small
state in the context of austerity measures has had
repercussions for community resilience, weakening
communities’ abilities to cope with risk, without dis-
missing community, or the motivations of those valu-
ing community.
Critical approaches also acknowledge two cen-
tral aspects of what community does environmentally
in neoliberal contexts: first, playing on the relation-
ship between community and individualism, and sec-
ond, intervening in the relationship between
community and forms of knowledge.
Community versus Individualism
Neoliberal societies seem to prize the experience of
the individual above the collective. Community activ-
ism and belonging can therefore be countercultural,
as are sustainable development aspirations to collec-
tive action.
73
Certainly, some community groups and
movements, particularly those associated with envi-
ronmental issues, present themselves as attempting to
create collective agency in an individualized world.
The rise of neoliberal ideology is concurrent with
New Social Movements: the post- ’68, post-fordist,
broadly liberation movements witnessed in Western
societies, in which community is often either inten-
tional, active and an agent of change, or a collective
retreat from mainstream society. Under neoliberal-
ism, individuali sm is not the antithesis of community;
rather, the two acco mpany each other. The reasons
for this are variously postulated: there is a perceived
need to reforge social ties (Bauman highlights this
need for community); identity-based social together-
ness can emerge as a preferable form of community
to ‘community of place’; community reflects
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