The Climate Activism project was funded by a small research grant and involved working with colleagues in three UK universities. The aim was to conduct a systematic literature review to critically explore the state of international climate activism.
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The context for this research is existing state-led global climate policy becoming increasingly disconnected from ‘bottom-up’ climate protest and politics emerging in different places and across spatial scales. Such policy is dominated by mainstream economic priorities, including ongoing dependence on fossil fuels and global financial markets, and is perpetuated by weak climate mitigation and adaptation mechanisms within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) global governance regime.
The wave of civil climate protest across the world in the past few years could well represent a governance backlash to state-dominated climate politics and policy. Climate activism is taking an increasingly important role in state and non-state governance and this project explores how this emerges across space and in diverse policy contexts.