Between Social Activism and Social Enterprise: Socio-legal Support Structures for Grass-roots Responses to Climate Change
State of the Art
Climate change is a field that is currently experiencing a paradigm shift. It no longer engages a narrowly and instrumentally defined policy sector, but provokes questions about a profound restructuring of our political economy and the ways in which we live. The ‘new politics of climate change’ have seen three significant changes in focus: advocacy focused on government is increasingly supplemented or even displaced by social mobilisation focused on communities[1]; an emphasis on social goals is augmenting the narrower focus on environmental goals[2]; and a largely instrumental preoccupation with institutional design is now insisting on the importance of values and identity[3]. These shifts are reflected in a strongly marked growth of interest in ‘grass-roots’ responses to the problems posed by climate change: responses that reflect a desire to act from the bottom-up rather than to wait for governments to legislate or make formal policies. This socio-legal project that will illuminate the diverse ways in which formal law blocks or encourages these kinds of efforts. It will significantly develop the foundations for designing effective governance structures to support ethically-motivated citizen initiatives aimed at carbon footprint reduction, and will help policymakers who aim to encourage and expand such efforts. Intellectually it will forge novel links between the study of social movements and of enterprise as well as contribute to theories of changing habits and practices in relation to climate change, in both cases through an innovative socio-legal framework of analysis focused on rights and regulation.
The study will fill two gaps in the academic literature. The first gap relates to linking the study of social enterprise and social movements. Although there is growing interest in environmentally-responsive social enterprise[4] and a re-ignited focus on social movements in relation to climate change[5], these tend to occur as separate strands of scholarship. Social enterprise studies relate more readily to business, management and corporate social responsibility strands of research, while social movement literature grows out of political mobilisation research and encompasses a more explicit focus on politically motivated social change. Yet there are fascinating activities taking place in increasingly hybrid sites that blend aspects of both social movement and social enterprise, as I describe below in the empirical focus outlined in my methods section. And even where the differences remain stark, given the aspiration to move climate-responsive habits and practices from ‘alternative’ niches to the mainstream of mass society, there is much to be gained in research terms by applying the same methods to both kinds of activities in a single project. One socio-legal scholar has taken some preliminary steps along this path[6] but overall, approaches that link social enterprise and social movements are rare, and socio-legal studies that do so even rarer.
The second gap in the literature relates to the exploration of changing habits and practices in the context of climate change. This is a crowded field, particularly the portion that comes under the banner of ‘behavioural change’ literature. Through different lenses, diverse disciplines all emphasise the role of information, reflection and deliberation in social learning[7], whether focusing on economics (carbon is a commodity and usage changes in response to price signals), psychology (carbon use is changed by stimulus-response mechanisms and engaging attention), or education (carbon footprint reduction is a skill learned through experience in specific situations). While this recent literature has helpfully embraced the shift away from formal government policies and narrow environmental goals that characterises the ‘new politics’ of climate change, the predominantly rationalist frame has shortcomings. As Elizabeth Shove has argued,[8] it is vital in studying climate change policy to move ‘beyond the ABC’. By ‘ABC’, she means ‘attitude, behaviour and choice’, a trilogy that she argues dominates rationalist models of behavioural change, and which misses the importance of taken-for-granted assumptions, deeply embedded habits, and the invisibility of much energy use in daily life.
By adopting an interpretive socio-legal perspective rather than drawing on economics and psychology, this project will focus on how rules and institutions influence everyday life in ways that are missed by a focus on attitude, behaviour and choice. It will focus instead on rights, regulation and legal consciousness. Many of the most important rules and institutions that social movements and social enterprises are likely to encounter are encoded in rights or regulation, operating at multiple scales. For example, the regulatory structures of local planning processes, of carbon trading markets or of the monitoring of climate change adaptation finance, are all important determinants of how social movements and social enterprises fulfil their goals. Equally important are judicial interpretation of such laws[9], ‘soft law’ initiatives,[10] voluntary regimes,[11] and even more diffuse influences such as legal consciousness:[12] taken-for-granted assumptions about the meaning of law in social relationships.
Taken together, this diverse range of legal support structures supplement traditional conceptions of law as a general constraint with an appreciation of law’s capacity to support and facilitate social activities, as well as of ways of working ‘outside the law’ altogether. To explore this, the project will build a dialogue between legal consciousness literature and my extant work on the intersection of rights and regulation,[13] where I have looked at the ways in which social movement activism relates to technocratic regulatory reform. Applied to grass-roots responses to climate change, this dialogue will connect formal institutional authority with everyday life, illuminating how law works on the ground.
Goals, Aims and Objectives
The broad goals of the project are to bring to the study of climate change a socio-legal perspective which focuses on the empirical study of local, community-based initiatives as a way of helping both policymakers and ordinary citizens understand better how formal laws block or facilitate social initiatives.
The more specific aims and objectives that will secure these goals are:
1. To identify and document a spectrum of grassroots organisations, from social enterprises to social movements, that are responding to climate change challenges in Australia and the UK
2. To map the key regimes of rights and regulation, at multiple levels of governance, that form background legal support structures for the activities of these organisations.
3. To clarify, on a national-comparative basis that also takes into account local and transnational regimes, how these diverse regimes of rights and regulation indirectly block or support the social goals of these organisations.
4. To identify typologies of different governance options that help support ethically-motivated initiatives in ways that are sensitive to their commitment to ethical values and social goals
Methodology
The conceptual framework for the project uses the analytical tools developed in my earlier research to shed light on the range of community-based responses to climate change, categorising those responses on a spectrum from agitation to incubation. Four main types of organisations that represent a full spectrum between social movement and social enterprise will be studied in comparative perspective, through the lens of four sets of research questions focusing on the intersection of rights and regulation and the limits of law:
Research Questions
1. What forms of expertise and knowledge are deployed in the evolution and choice of organisational form made by each organisation? In particular, what role does legal expertise play at this stage?
2. What are the principal regulatory structures governing organisations responding to climate change on a spectrum between social enterprise and social movement? How do they block or support the ways in which the organisations pursue their social goals?
3. What kinds of rights claims are made by the organisations in pursuit of their social goals? What techniques are used to pursue these claims?
4. What are the limits of law in governing these organisations? Are there ways in which working outside (not against) the law is more effective for achieving the social goals of the organisations?
The overall methodology rests on the cumulative results of four linked projects: building an organisational database, mapping formal rules (via literature review and surveys), studying legal consciousness via open-ended unstructured interviews, and studying specific legal disputes (essentially a case study analysis).
References
[1] Hale (2008) The New Politics of Climate Change (Green Alliance, http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/grea_p.aspx?id=3400
[2] Hale, op cit; Gilding, Paul (2011) The Great Disruption (Bloomsbury)
[3] Crompton, Tom and Tim Kasser (2009) Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity (WWF-UK)
[4] Borzaga, C. and Defourny, J, eds (2001) The Emergence of Social Enterprise (Routledge)
[5] Della Porta, Kriesi and Rucht (eds.) (2009) Social Movements in a Globalizing World, 2nd edition (New York, Macmillan)
[6] Shamir, R. (2004) 'Between Self-Regulation and the Alien Tort Claims Act: On the Contested Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility’, Law & Society Review 38: 635-64
[7] Janda, K. B. 2009. "Exploring the social dimensions of energy use: a review of recent research initiatives", in Proceedings of the ECEEE Summer Study, June 1-6, (Colle Sur Loop, France), 4, 1841-1852. European Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
[8] Shove, Elizabeth (2010) ‘Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social Change’, Environment and Planning A 42(6): 1273 – 1285
[9] Epp, Charles (1998) The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago University Press); Morriss, Andrew, Bruce Yandle and Andrew Dorchak (2008) Regulation by Litigation (Yale UP)
[10] Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate (Oxford University Press)
[11] Potoski, Matthew and Aseem Prakash (2007) The Voluntary Environmentalists: Green Clubs, ISO 14001 and Voluntary Environmental Regulations (MIT Press)
[12] Silbey, Susan (2005) ‘After Legal Consciousness’, Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 1: 323-368
[13] Morgan, Bronwen (2007) The Intersection of Rights and Regulation: New Directions in Socio-Legal Scholarship (ed. Bronwen Morgan), Ashgate Press; Morgan, Bronwen (2011) Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
State of the Art
Climate change is a field that is currently experiencing a paradigm shift. It no longer engages a narrowly and instrumentally defined policy sector, but provokes questions about a profound restructuring of our political economy and the ways in which we live. The ‘new politics of climate change’ have seen three significant changes in focus: advocacy focused on government is increasingly supplemented or even displaced by social mobilisation focused on communities[1]; an emphasis on social goals is augmenting the narrower focus on environmental goals[2]; and a largely instrumental preoccupation with institutional design is now insisting on the importance of values and identity[3]. These shifts are reflected in a strongly marked growth of interest in ‘grass-roots’ responses to the problems posed by climate change: responses that reflect a desire to act from the bottom-up rather than to wait for governments to legislate or make formal policies. This socio-legal project that will illuminate the diverse ways in which formal law blocks or encourages these kinds of efforts. It will significantly develop the foundations for designing effective governance structures to support ethically-motivated citizen initiatives aimed at carbon footprint reduction, and will help policymakers who aim to encourage and expand such efforts. Intellectually it will forge novel links between the study of social movements and of enterprise as well as contribute to theories of changing habits and practices in relation to climate change, in both cases through an innovative socio-legal framework of analysis focused on rights and regulation.
The study will fill two gaps in the academic literature. The first gap relates to linking the study of social enterprise and social movements. Although there is growing interest in environmentally-responsive social enterprise[4] and a re-ignited focus on social movements in relation to climate change[5], these tend to occur as separate strands of scholarship. Social enterprise studies relate more readily to business, management and corporate social responsibility strands of research, while social movement literature grows out of political mobilisation research and encompasses a more explicit focus on politically motivated social change. Yet there are fascinating activities taking place in increasingly hybrid sites that blend aspects of both social movement and social enterprise, as I describe below in the empirical focus outlined in my methods section. And even where the differences remain stark, given the aspiration to move climate-responsive habits and practices from ‘alternative’ niches to the mainstream of mass society, there is much to be gained in research terms by applying the same methods to both kinds of activities in a single project. One socio-legal scholar has taken some preliminary steps along this path[6] but overall, approaches that link social enterprise and social movements are rare, and socio-legal studies that do so even rarer.
The second gap in the literature relates to the exploration of changing habits and practices in the context of climate change. This is a crowded field, particularly the portion that comes under the banner of ‘behavioural change’ literature. Through different lenses, diverse disciplines all emphasise the role of information, reflection and deliberation in social learning[7], whether focusing on economics (carbon is a commodity and usage changes in response to price signals), psychology (carbon use is changed by stimulus-response mechanisms and engaging attention), or education (carbon footprint reduction is a skill learned through experience in specific situations). While this recent literature has helpfully embraced the shift away from formal government policies and narrow environmental goals that characterises the ‘new politics’ of climate change, the predominantly rationalist frame has shortcomings. As Elizabeth Shove has argued,[8] it is vital in studying climate change policy to move ‘beyond the ABC’. By ‘ABC’, she means ‘attitude, behaviour and choice’, a trilogy that she argues dominates rationalist models of behavioural change, and which misses the importance of taken-for-granted assumptions, deeply embedded habits, and the invisibility of much energy use in daily life.
By adopting an interpretive socio-legal perspective rather than drawing on economics and psychology, this project will focus on how rules and institutions influence everyday life in ways that are missed by a focus on attitude, behaviour and choice. It will focus instead on rights, regulation and legal consciousness. Many of the most important rules and institutions that social movements and social enterprises are likely to encounter are encoded in rights or regulation, operating at multiple scales. For example, the regulatory structures of local planning processes, of carbon trading markets or of the monitoring of climate change adaptation finance, are all important determinants of how social movements and social enterprises fulfil their goals. Equally important are judicial interpretation of such laws[9], ‘soft law’ initiatives,[10] voluntary regimes,[11] and even more diffuse influences such as legal consciousness:[12] taken-for-granted assumptions about the meaning of law in social relationships.
Taken together, this diverse range of legal support structures supplement traditional conceptions of law as a general constraint with an appreciation of law’s capacity to support and facilitate social activities, as well as of ways of working ‘outside the law’ altogether. To explore this, the project will build a dialogue between legal consciousness literature and my extant work on the intersection of rights and regulation,[13] where I have looked at the ways in which social movement activism relates to technocratic regulatory reform. Applied to grass-roots responses to climate change, this dialogue will connect formal institutional authority with everyday life, illuminating how law works on the ground.
Goals, Aims and Objectives
The broad goals of the project are to bring to the study of climate change a socio-legal perspective which focuses on the empirical study of local, community-based initiatives as a way of helping both policymakers and ordinary citizens understand better how formal laws block or facilitate social initiatives.
The more specific aims and objectives that will secure these goals are:
1. To identify and document a spectrum of grassroots organisations, from social enterprises to social movements, that are responding to climate change challenges in Australia and the UK
2. To map the key regimes of rights and regulation, at multiple levels of governance, that form background legal support structures for the activities of these organisations.
3. To clarify, on a national-comparative basis that also takes into account local and transnational regimes, how these diverse regimes of rights and regulation indirectly block or support the social goals of these organisations.
4. To identify typologies of different governance options that help support ethically-motivated initiatives in ways that are sensitive to their commitment to ethical values and social goals
Methodology
The conceptual framework for the project uses the analytical tools developed in my earlier research to shed light on the range of community-based responses to climate change, categorising those responses on a spectrum from agitation to incubation. Four main types of organisations that represent a full spectrum between social movement and social enterprise will be studied in comparative perspective, through the lens of four sets of research questions focusing on the intersection of rights and regulation and the limits of law:
Research Questions
1. What forms of expertise and knowledge are deployed in the evolution and choice of organisational form made by each organisation? In particular, what role does legal expertise play at this stage?
2. What are the principal regulatory structures governing organisations responding to climate change on a spectrum between social enterprise and social movement? How do they block or support the ways in which the organisations pursue their social goals?
3. What kinds of rights claims are made by the organisations in pursuit of their social goals? What techniques are used to pursue these claims?
4. What are the limits of law in governing these organisations? Are there ways in which working outside (not against) the law is more effective for achieving the social goals of the organisations?
The overall methodology rests on the cumulative results of four linked projects: building an organisational database, mapping formal rules (via literature review and surveys), studying legal consciousness via open-ended unstructured interviews, and studying specific legal disputes (essentially a case study analysis).
References
[1] Hale (2008) The New Politics of Climate Change (Green Alliance, http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/grea_p.aspx?id=3400
[2] Hale, op cit; Gilding, Paul (2011) The Great Disruption (Bloomsbury)
[3] Crompton, Tom and Tim Kasser (2009) Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity (WWF-UK)
[4] Borzaga, C. and Defourny, J, eds (2001) The Emergence of Social Enterprise (Routledge)
[5] Della Porta, Kriesi and Rucht (eds.) (2009) Social Movements in a Globalizing World, 2nd edition (New York, Macmillan)
[6] Shamir, R. (2004) 'Between Self-Regulation and the Alien Tort Claims Act: On the Contested Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility’, Law & Society Review 38: 635-64
[7] Janda, K. B. 2009. "Exploring the social dimensions of energy use: a review of recent research initiatives", in Proceedings of the ECEEE Summer Study, June 1-6, (Colle Sur Loop, France), 4, 1841-1852. European Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
[8] Shove, Elizabeth (2010) ‘Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social Change’, Environment and Planning A 42(6): 1273 – 1285
[9] Epp, Charles (1998) The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago University Press); Morriss, Andrew, Bruce Yandle and Andrew Dorchak (2008) Regulation by Litigation (Yale UP)
[10] Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate (Oxford University Press)
[11] Potoski, Matthew and Aseem Prakash (2007) The Voluntary Environmentalists: Green Clubs, ISO 14001 and Voluntary Environmental Regulations (MIT Press)
[12] Silbey, Susan (2005) ‘After Legal Consciousness’, Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 1: 323-368
[13] Morgan, Bronwen (2007) The Intersection of Rights and Regulation: New Directions in Socio-Legal Scholarship (ed. Bronwen Morgan), Ashgate Press; Morgan, Bronwen (2011) Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)