Invitation for a call on systemic transformations towards climate resilience

Research Network Workspace
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There is an interesting consortium building up around the call HORIZON-CL5-2023-D1-01-09: Behavioural change and governance for systemic transformations towards climate resilience.
Deadline 18 April 2023 17:00:00 Brussels time

@marina and I have been contacted by one of the co-leaders of the potential consortium who we met during the seminar on SSNA last year and I had a short call with her to hear the proposal.

The call aims to support the implementation of the EU Adaptation Strategy and the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change by providing the decision makers with instruments to understand/influence behavioural change toward systemic transfomation.

The research should focus on:

  • social tipping points,
  • leverage points
  • key governance interventions

They would like to include ER in the partnership because:

  1. importance of semantic analysis of the text (the field already in that direction)
  2. ER capacity to scale quickly

Their rough idea consist in building climate adaptation points/groups “cafés” in the areas of systemic risks, link them to different scales of governance & root them in the communities.

They should serve as seeds for triggering conversations and explore their evolution (maybe focusing on visual tools - social learning videos - and emotional engagement).

The general goal is to understand the logic and the mechanics of what is happening on the ground in such communities and what does that mean for governance.

It would include:

  • comparison of different locations in
  • different moments in time (with caffes as snapshots and people maybe traveling between places and sharing insights & experience) with
  • the focus on what triggers the reactions and what happens after the trigger (so perhaps also the analysis of the social/regular media before and after etc.)
  • understand what are the self-generating moments in a conversation
  • capacity to follow the paths in case of unexpected directions in the conversations,

There is a consortium building meeting on 22 December and a final decision on participation or not should be taken by 9 January 2023.

IMO - it sounds like a good match IF we have the capacity to follow it through? It would certainly include the ethnography part, but might require quite some community management (depending on our level of engagement). It might be interesting to some degree also for the JEDI crowd.

What next?

They are looking to understand needs, motivations & capacity to participate in the call, asking direct questions:

  • What is your “dealbreaker” for this project? What are the outcomes/processes that should be a part of this proposal that are absolutely necessary for me to be a part of this consortium. Without this, it wouldn’t be worth it for you.
  • What would be an ideal outcome for you in this project? This could be in terms of a particular type of output, or something intangible, such as personal learning and development.
  • What role do you envision playing in this consortium? What do you think you can contribute to this call that is particular to your individual strengths? (This could be professional and/or personal qualities).

The topics to cover:

  • Social tipping points and leverage points in climate adaptation
  • Features of good governance for systemic transformations to climate resilience
  • Transformative conditions, capacities and learning feedbacks need for systemic change
    …and the outputs expected:
  • Concrete recommendations of operational nature to accelerate systemic change
  • General guidance (including interrelations, alignment and coordination of stakeholders) at all scales leading to transformative tipping points
  • Science for Policy operational framework and indicators for assessing potential and progress in behavior change and governance

Let me know what you think and who should we bring onboard in case we go for it @alberto, @nadia, @Nica, @marina, @hugi, @matthias

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I really like it. The call is great. For me, the money quote is this:

The role of individual or community behavioural change in this societal transformation is to be approached as embedded in changes of informational, political, economic and technological systems. Shifts from individual values and community behaviour need to be seen as integrated with societal changes in governance, implying a combination of cultural changes and shifting social norms, alongside interventions by institutions and through the market, communications and media.

I also love their intuition. I assume that “caffes” means “cafés”, listening posts geared for deep conversation, and in this sense this is exactly what Edgeryders does best.

  • What is your “dealbreaker” for this project? What are the outcomes/processes that should be a part of this proposal that are absolutely necessary for me to be a part of this consortium. Without this, it wouldn’t be worth it for you.

I’d say we would want to have a rather large say in establishing the listening posts. For example, Messina could host one; there, we could be looking at their energy company, and see how individual behavior and cluster-level governance interact to produce (or fail to produce) a different outcome around energy production and consumption. Another example could be cohousing: the cohousing movement is generally very climate-aware, and is all about coordinating individual behavior into some collectively beneficial outcome. Also, it is embedded into multiple layers of regulation, governance, supply chains etc.

  • What would be an ideal outcome for you in this project? This could be in terms of a particular type of output, or something intangible, such as personal learning and development.

Producing an exciting study on “bottom-up policies for resilience”, with practical implications. In an ideal world, its results would empower people to step into the fray to use individual behavior as a lever to produce collective outcomes. For example, if I understand how to build a climate-aware cohousing, I can not only directly do so, but also make the path easier for those that will come after me. This way, the whole system evolves towards a tipping point, where cohousing becomes a solution for a cluster of problems, including improving the insulation of the housing stock.

  • What role do you envision playing in this consortium? What do you think you can contribute to this call that is particular to your individual strengths? (This could be professional and/or personal qualities).

Collect and analyze ethnographic data, on a relatively large scale. Tap into social innovation-minded milieux to do so.

For me it’s a go.

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This looks up our alley and we should definitely go for it @ivan

  • A large enough budget to hire one full time administrator and one full time assistant dealing with logistics etc.
  • A serious budget for a fellowship program to incentivise key people actually doing work on the ground/ embedded in communities to participate.
  • Some kind of scope and resources for building/ engaging formal partnerships with a range of organisations including media/ journalists or academics.
  • Financing for a kind of AMA helpdesk of experts (scientists, economists etc ) that people can consult for answers to specific questions.
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This looks a bit ad hoc. What you mean, I guess, is budget and autonomy. No need to discuss this kind of detail in the first call.

Is this an all-day thing? Would be hard for me.

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we need to make the interaction with academics/ people in our orbit a useful service that supports work people are doing. In tangible ways. Which can also act as a differentiating/innovative “impact” enabler/guarantor.

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Sorry I missed this. I am always interested in anything climate related. My head is 110% in the final stretch of the POPREBEL report for another week, but please keep me posted on whether this moves forward. I will respond in greater detail when I have a little bit of time.

Incidentally (since it’s kind of topically related) – I just had an article published about how we might use the cultural response to Covid-19 to predict cultural responses to climate crises down the line. It’s in Anthropology Today which is a kind of general audience British anthropology journal published by Royal Anthropological Institute. If anyone is interested, it’s here and not very long :slight_smile:

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Likewise.
I collected all of your responses and summarised them in an answer to the mail.

Three things to do in the next days:

  • fill this form and return it to them
  • think who would we want to invite to the table (JEDI, Messina, Methos?)
  • participate to the meeting on 13th January (11 AM CET). The link is in the ER calendar.

ping @alberto , @nadia, @Nica (a very interesting article, thanks for sharing), @marina, @hugi, @matthias

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for some reason the link to the form doesn work for me @ivan

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For some reason it didn’t work for me either. Fixed now :slight_smile:

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Today I participated to the consortium building call, introducing our work & ideas to the rest of the partners.

The text of the call is here and some spurry notes are here.

The confirmed partners of the consortium are:
WIP, Renewable Energies (D), Joanneum Research Life (A), Bern University of Applied Sciences (CH), University of Helsinki (F), Delft University of Technology (NL) - leader, Research Institute for Sustainability (D), Th!nk-E (B)

The meeting concluded with three points to tackle before the following call:

  1. Preparation of the concept itself – clear view of what we mean as “the tipping point”
  2. Understanding the issue of scaling from local to global (who is involved in creating the empirical view - from the specialists on the ground to policymaking)
  3. What is the empirical basis of the data we are building and how does it fit in the future projects

I introduced the angle of inequalities which was welcomed.
Considering it is the cluster 5 call, the energy element is vital and I think we should have a chat with the JEDI crowd and FdCM at this point.
FdCM in particular, would be great because of the social innovation in energy production/distribution element.

Logistically, the communication goes on Teams and I will ask them to include at least @Nica, @alberto and @nadia plus anyone else interested.

The next appointment is on Friday 20 at 11 (link in the calendar).

The agenda for the call is here.

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