0

Climate action research or Climate sleepwalk? Hilary Bradbury summer blog.

Hilary Bradbury shares a talk  she gave at the Academy of Management 2024 August symposium on Climate Action Research.

Choose your preferred medium: (1) the 7 mins video at the end; (2) the AI summary next or (3) the cleaned up transcript below that. 

2) Climate Action Research: A Participatory Approach to Addressing the Planetary Crisis

As an advocate for climate action research, I’ve dedicated my career to addressing the eco-social crisis our planet faces. After leaving my position as a professor in the United States, I rematriated to Ireland where I continue to lead the Action Research Plus Foundation and serve as editor-in-chief of the Action Research journal.

The core of climate action research is about engaging multiple stakeholders to respond to the planetary crisis. This crisis is not merely ecological; it’s an eco-social crisis when we consider its impacts on human migration and social polarization.

Why aren’t more scholars and practitioners actively responding to the climate catastrophe? I believe it’s largely due to our academic socialization, which emphasizes sensemaking over action-taking. The dominant paradigm of modernist science, with its focus on objectivity and certainty, has created a rigid approach to knowledge creation that may no longer be fit for purpose in today’s rapidly changing world.

To address this, we need to evolve our approach to knowledge creation:

1. Move beyond the non-relational approach of traditional science, which often ignores externalities and stakeholders.
2. Include postmodernism’s qualitative, dialogue-based constructivist approaches.
3. Integrate subjective awareness and participatory methods into our research.

Climate action research proposes working directly with stakeholders to facilitate transformations. For faculty this involves:

1. Co-constructing syllabi with students that address the planetary crisis across disciplines.
2. Engaging with local communities to understand and address their needs as part of the classroom work.
3. Shifting our self-identity from experts to facilitators.
4. Developing meaningful connections with stakeholders, including organizational leaders.

To implement this approach, we need to:

1. Provide all graduate students with training in action research methods.
2. Create spaces where institutional actors can trust one another enough to experiment with new approaches, e.g., using our classrooms.
3. Facilitate ecological experiments that repattern relationships within systems.

Ultimately, climate action research aims to create active, engaged citizens who can respond effectively to the planetary crisis. By working with youth and helping institutions become more responsive to these challenges, we contribute to a world that may continue to flourish.

As we enter a new academic year, I encourage scholars and practitioners to consider how they can incorporate climate action research into their work and help address the pressing eco-social challenges we face.

***

3) “I love to talk about the practice of climate action research. It’s something I’ve been devoting myself to for quite some time, also since leaving the United States to rematriate to Ireland where I now live.  In stepping away from being a Professor in the USA, I continue to lead the Action Research Plus Foundation, which, as the very name suggests, takes an action research approach to issues of planetary crisis.  I am also editor-in-chief of the premier action research journal Action Research (Sage Publications) that sits within a global matrix of universities and scholar practitioners in Global North and South. I would encourage you to take a look at the journal. In 2019 we said we really only want to develop papers that are responding to the planetary crisis. Happily that’s actually turned out to be very helpful for us as a journal (e.g., our citation index has risen) and, we believe, for authors who send their papers as both grow together.

At its heart, the climate action approach is about responding with more stakeholders to the eco-social crisis. But climate is not really just an eco-crisis. It’s an eco-social crisis when you consider all the refugees and all the social polarization that is arranging itself around climate catastrophe.

I have been pondering the important question of this symposium, namely why are scholars and scholar-practitioners sleepwalking on climate crisis? Why aren’t more of us, more scholar-practitioners, responding to the climate catastrophe in a way that’s meaningful? As I dig down I’d say it has something to do with how we have been socialized. In a nutshell, there’s been too much emphasis on sensemaking and not enough space making for action taking in our own education.

We are all socialized to the powerful paradigm of modernist science with its emphasis on objectivity and its concern with definitional description and certainty. There’s a kind of rigidity built in with the desire to be very right. This allows modern science to prove itself extremely powerful. Modern science, as a social technology, though, is also extremely old. I’d say it’s not entirely fit for purpose today. Knowledge creation too transforms; the conventional paradigm is the creation of genius, non relational men. Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1643 and no doubt worried about Black plague as witches were burned.

As we come into the 21st century we are seeing very clearly a rapid unfolding of problems.  We’re seeing the real downsides of non-relational science,  for example the ways in which externalities and stakeholders have been ignored. At its heart science is a non-relational approach to knowledge creation. The expert is a lone genius about a specific phenomenon, extracted from its relational context.  Certainly postmodernism opens up the doors and windows of the Ivory Tower with its qualitative, dialogue based constructivist approaches. But I, as an action researcher say that’s not enough. We need to go further now. And at speed.

One of the projects that I’ve been up to since rematriating to Ireland has been working as an action researching facilitator in bringing together stakeholders from all the higher education institutions in Ireland. Particularly faculty members and administrators are being helped to think together about how to have universities respond to the planetary crisis.

As I listen in I’m hearing that two simultaneous actions are needed by faculty educators: 1)  to work more participatively, e.g., with students in co constructing syllabi which touches on planetary crisis no matter the subject; and with stakeholders from outside the Ivory Tower, from the local community. Start by asking them what are their needs. What are the community needs? How do we construct research so to be more in service of responding to crisis. But such a move requires a shift in self identity.

Self identity is part of an iceberg of often unconscious, frozen ways of making sense. A shift toward participation would entail unfreezing our expert and experimenting with being more a facilitator. These kinds of shifts are easy enough to talk about, but require hard and delicate conversations with ourselves. 

Yes, we need to build on the objectivity of science and bring the intersubjectivity of the qualitative postmodernist work. We also need to integrate a subjective awareness.  

We’re not just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Instead we’re valuing subjectivity also. And that may be the most difficult of all given our socialization.

Scholarly education is still a socialization that is largely oblivious to how the inner territory of self impacts being an agent of change, that is how we can actually touch into meaningful contact with stakeholders. Making meaningful contact with ourselves, with our own intentions, biases etc, allows for more ability to really listen and engage with others. For example, in the case of businesses, creating meaningful contact with business leaders means engaging what is of concern for them, not pushing your own research agenda. This makes action research noticeable, meaningful to them in a way that most management scholarship today is simply not. Yet as scholars who have been trained for objectivity  – and precisely not to be engaged with stakeholders – there is a bit of a mountain to climb. I acknowledge that and say we have to figure this out together. There is decades of good work that informs climate action research.  Please don’t think you have to start from scratch.

At the very least I would love to see every graduate student leave professional schools with at least some know how about the action research approach and therefore choice, working with stakeholders over their lives.

Before I leave I will define a bit more what I mean by climate action research that is this relational. The intention is to work with active stakeholders. We’re not just looking from a distance at climate crisis, but we’re actively helping transformations happen. We’re not making things happen either. We’re right in that middle Goldilocks zone of helping transformations happen.

Who are we helping and how?

The individuals as the institutional actors who constitute a particular shared space  – it might be something happening in a university space, in a policy space, in a village. It’s whatever space in which you’re working with the individuals who are also the institutional actors whose interactions and decisions make up that space. Our work is space-making to a large degree because this space must be one in which people trust one another at least enough to bring some new experiments that unfreeze the system that is producing eco-social crisis. 

Ultimately, it’s about facilitating ecological experiments that repattern the field of relationships.

We see in the journal that readers particularly love to read work that’s being done on this with youth. Action researchers helping the next generation not only help make specific changes in their current institutions (e.g., to be more responsive to the planetary crisis), more importantly they are making space with and for citizens who learn to be be active, to be agentic. To stop sleepwalking. That’s how climate action research contributes to a world that may continue to flourish

I wish us all the best as we turn to a new academic year.”

Hilary Bradbury is curator and director at Action Research Plus Foundation and Editor In Chief at Action Research journal (Sage).  More about Hilary here.