Movement Goals, Recruitment Strategies, and Stratification: How Mitigation and Adaptation Shape Inclusion in Climate Justice Projects

In this paper, we explore the role of mitigation and adaptation aims in the mobilisation strategies of practice-based movements, such as those working around local food and community energy. Mobilising participants is an essential task for social movements, and for practice-based movements this is no different. In particular, they often aim to scale up initially small-scale sustainability initiatives to increase their societal impact, for which mobilisation is crucial. Most studies in the diffusion and resource mobilisation literature have analysed how many participants movements can mobilise, and not so much at who. However, for practice-based movements working around climate change, this distinction is crucial. We expect that, depending on whether their main aim is climate mitigation or climate adaptation, their mobilisation priorities will shift. When climate mitigation is the goal, practice-based movements will likely focus on mobilising the largest possible number of participants to maximise carbon cuts. Given their limited resources, they would expectedly focus on mobilising the ‘low hanging fruits’ – i.e. those people who already have an intrinsic interest and concern for climate change, and who only need a relatively small push to get involved. Typically, this constituency is characterized as privileged, which from a mitigation point of view is convenient: It is the most privileged in society who have the most carbon to save from their lifestyle, and the greatest resources to do so. However, as the window of opportunity for the prevention of run-away climate change is closing, climate adaptation goals will expectedly emerge more centrally within practice-based movements. Promoting local food and community energy becomes less about reducing carbon footprints and more about increasing resilience for when climate change begins to compromise global supply chains for energy and food. Within progressive practice-based movements, principles of justice are commonly held high, and consequently, we should expect a concern with the adaption of particular vulnerable groups, rather than with that of the more privileged groups that are likely to get targeted to advance climate mitigation. Since vulnerable groups typically score lower on environmental concerns, mobilising them is relatively costly, and as such, suboptimal given a mitigation agenda. Hence, we expect that an emerging concern for adaptation should fundamentally shift the mobilisation priorities of practice-based movements. We explore these issues based on two ethnographic case studies of practice-based movement organisations in a city in the north of England; one focused on food, and one on energy. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, we analyse what role mitigation and adaptation play in motivating their work, and we analyse what impact this has on their mobilisation strategies. Our findings suggest that organisations tend to shy away from an adaptation agenda as it is considered defeatist, demotivating, and by extension, demobilising. As a consequence, mobilisation often remains focused on ‘low-hanging fruits’, which may have important consequences for the distribution of climate adaptation in society. Nonetheless, justice principles do motivate some forms of inclusive mobilisation, showing potential pathways to just climate adaptation.