New book chapter: Creating a Culture for Transformation

In the chapter “Creating a Culture for Transformation” which appears in the newly published book Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World, cCHANGE’s Karen O’Brien, Gail Hochachka and Irmelin Gram-Hanssen, discuss an individual behaviour change experiment conducted in an educational setting, and how it was used to trigger awareness of the collective challenge of sustainability.

They discuss how deliberately experimenting with change has the potential to support the emergence of cultural tipping points, particularly if carried out in a supportive setting that takes into consideration lessons from cognitive and developmental sciences.

Situating individuals as change-makers can be an important starting point for generating climate change solutions. In particular, activating individual and collective agency is a powerful lever for social change, and a potentially potent way to generate cultural tipping points needed to realize transformations to sustainability.

This chapter appears in the book, Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World (eds. Giuseppe Feola, Hilary Geoghegan and Alex Arnall), which explores how culture both facilitates and inhibits our ability to address and make sense of climate change and the challenges it poses to societies globally.

Written by an international team of experts, Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World presents a set of case studies spanning the social sciences and humanities. It explores the role of culture in relation to climate and its changes at different temporal and spatial levels. It demonstrates how approaching climate change through the cultural dimension enriches the range and depth of societal engagements; and establishes connections between theory and practice, which can stimulate action.