Developing a minifesta for effective academic-activist collaboration in the context of the climate emergency

Recent years have been marked by a multiplication of justice-oriented climate activism across much of the world, including Fridays for the Future, school strikes, Green New Deal proposals and Extinction Rebellion. Demands for immediate action have been matched with a call for truth-telling about the scale and nature of the challenge. This sense that political leaders have failed to ‘tell the truth’ about climate change, and thus delayed and prevaricated on real action towards climate justice is shared by many academics. Many scholars aspire to deliver research that benefits activism. But measures of impact for research evaluation and funding purposes place little weight on the use of research by activists. We consider what the challenges of climate justice activism might mean in this context for scholars, beyond being a target for calls for truth-telling. How can academics and academia effectively support and enable climate activism? Rather than turning to academic studies of activism, we sought to engage with activists to deliberatively explore how academia could best work with climate activism. We convened a series of online deliberative workshops involving both activists and academics from several European countries to create space for discussion, sharing of experiences and the development of proposals for the future. This short paper revisists the context for our work, then reports the process used and a set of principles (a ‘minifesta’) for academic-activist engagement that the group generated. It also reflects on three particular issues raised in these principles, and the discussions around them. First, the focus on inclusion and the extent to which it might lead to transformative change. Second implications regarding the role of activism and activists in collaborative processes. And third, the inevitable incompleteness of this process.