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Conflicting Temporalities of Social and Environmental Change?
Abstract
This chapter explores how time and temporality—that is, the rhythms and tempos of social and environmental change—have been considered in social theory before going on to explore the conceptual frameworks and practices through which policy-makers seek to influence temporal processes in the specific context of climate change policy. The chapter highlights conflict between the temporalities of climate change and the temporalities of politics, as well as conflict between the temporalities of competing political and decision-making processes. While policy-makers advocate strategies to depoliticize climate policy in response to these conflicts, the chapter argues this is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, it advocates more democratic and deliberative approaches to the challenge of synchronizing ever more visible ecological temporalities with the multiple temporalities of the social.
... Recently, some scholars have begun to pinpoint the challenges of time inconsistencies in the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2009;Lockie 2014;Bensaude-Vincent 2016;Lockie and Wong 2018;Machin 2019). Yet little research has explicitly focused on a critical investigation of the inconsistencies between the temporality embodied in specific sociopolitical conventions around desirable socioecological change (e.g. ...
... Drawing on the work of scholars who developed a socioecological theorisation of time (e.g. Elias 1992;Adam 1998;Urry 2000;Murphy 2001;Newton 2003;Bansal and Knox-Hayes 2013;Bensaude-Vincent 2016;Lockie and Wong 2018;Semal 2019;Ruwet 2021b), the dichotomy between 'nature time' and 'social time' will be questioned, thereby highlighting the interrelations between the biophysical and the sociocultural realms. ...
This paper argues that, to tackle the issue of sustainability, we should pay more attention to the temporality of socioecological processes. Only thus can we better understand current subjective and institutional constraints, as well as envision new potential pathways for transformative change. Two main arguments are developed: (1) there is a uniqueness in the temporality of Earth system processes associated with planetary boundaries that deeply transforms our time horizon and the pace of change, and (2) this situation creates a disruption of the temporality embodied in dominant sociopolitical conventions such as the institutional definition and operationalisation of sustainable development. New research avenues and time policies are suggested towards responding meaningfully to the alarming current socioenvironmental trends.
... To answer this question, I will build on the work of scholars who developed a socio-ecological theorization of time (Elias 1992;Adam 1998;Urry 2000;Murphy 2001;Newton 2003;Bansal and Knox-Hayes 2013;Lockie 2014;Lockie and Wong 2018). They highlight the need to reconsider the dualistic distinction between 'social' and 'natural' time. ...
... Among the dearth of research which developed a socio-ecological theorization of time (Braudel 1972;Elias 1992;Adam 1998;Urry 2000;Murphy 2001;Newton 2003;Bansal and Knox-Hayes 2013;Lockie 2014;Lockie and Wong 2018), one of the key issues is to reconsider the classical dichotomy between 'natural time' and 'social time'. Yet the anti-dualism standpoint leaves the question of equivalence open. ...
This article aims to contribute to ‘bringing time back in’ environmental sociology. Drawing on the work of Michael Carolan and Henri Lefebvre, a new analytical framework is set forth. It connects an ontological social-biophysical stratification of time (what is time?) and a time epistemological quartet (how do we develop knowledge claims about time?). These analytical inputs open up new research avenues to overcome the epistemic barriers related to temporality as well as new insight on how to cross the great divide between ‘natural time’ and ‘social time’.
... Timeline perspectives (if not necessarily timeline tools) are beginning to see application in environmental and conservation science (e.g., Rehage et al. 2019), however, to our knowledge visual timeline methods have not previously been applied to human dimensions of weather and climate. This is perhaps surprising, considering climate is innately bound with temporality, both in terms of physical and ecological time scales and sociocultural time scales (Ruwet 2021;Lockie and Wong 2018). As such, timeline methods offer considerable untapped potential to collect and visualize climate narratives in a manner that emphasizes temporal aspects of climate and climate change. ...
Climate perception is a growing area of study in the social sciences and one that has implications on the tools and strategies we use to communicate climate change risk information. However, the range of climate perception studies remains limited, focused primarily on perceptions of day-to-day weather, sudden-onset severe events, or long-term permanent change. Phenomena situated between these extremes (e.g., annual- to decadal-scale variability) are largely missing from social science of climate research. Whether this is due to limited perception by research participants, is due to limited research attention, or is a reflection of the methods commonly applied to human dimensions of climate research, this gap precludes analysis of the full range of complex climate experiences and their influence on climate perception and understanding. In this paper, we offer a proof of concept for the climate autobiography timeline (CAT), a visual timeline tool developed to assess climate perception while prompting an ordered consideration of time, with the goal of eliciting insights into complex and long-term climate experiences such as low-frequency climate variability. Results are based off a preliminary application of the CAT across focus groups conducted in Newfoundland and Labrador, a province of Canada that is subject to low-frequency climate variability and frequent high-impact weather. Results reveal three key findings: 1) weather and climate narratives are commonly anchored to two time periods, potentially obscuring perceptions of variability; 2) narratives focus on socially important weather and climate phenomena; and 3) the social and visual coconstruction of weather and climate narratives may yield more holistic representations of local climate knowledge.
Significance Statement
The purpose of this work is to highlight the utility of timeline research methods to the study of climate perception research. Specifically, the climate autobiography timeline (CAT) serves as a tool that can address limitations of research tools commonly applied to the study of climate perceptions, notably the inability for current methods to elicit and organize complex climate experiences. Failure to capture these experiences may prevent a holistic and socially grounded understanding of climate perceptions. Drawing from a preliminary application of CATs in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, we highlight how the tool can provide information complementary to, but distinct from, data collected through more commonly used methods such as interviews or surveys. This approach holds promise for analyses of long-term climate history, impacts of historical severe events, and cultural impact of weather and climate.
... The temporal and spatial discontinuities of climate change demand significant theoretical and methodological innovation of environmental sociologists. Of course there are existing theoretical frameworks that speak to the non-linear temporalities of environmental change (see Lockie and Wong 2018) just as there are useful threads to be found in the literatures on reflexivity, social learning, anticipation, materialism, and so on. While I have no desire to trivialise these contributions I think there is more developmental work to be done, nonetheless, on sociological frameworks capable of engaging critically and creatively with prospective action on climate. ...
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This paper initiates the discussion on the temporal dimensions of systemic risk, building on the pioneering work of Ortwin Renn and colleagues. Temporality is implicit in the key characterisations of systemic risk, but never addressed specifically as a concept or a framing devise in risk research. This paper, therefore, explores what a temporal approach to systemic risk might constitute at the conceptual level. An initial attempt at operationalising a temporal lens is applied to the example of green bonds, bringing to light how the processes of creating a bond structure and securitisation bundles together multiple temporalities into the network of the bond on the one hand, and multiples other temporalities on the other. This leads to higher levels of inter-dependencies and co-movements within and across systems, with greater risk that failure in one part of the network can quickly lead to systemic failure. This is not to dismiss the many strengths of green bonds in dealing with climate change but calls for a deeper reflection on synchroneity and better techniques and processes to improve time coordination among the different financial and non-financial actors. This opens up new avenues for future research.
Before assessing proposed solutions in the next section of the book, it is necessary to face up to the depth of the fossil-fuelled climate crisis and its socioeconomic causes. This chapter analyses the accelerating treadmill of carbon polluting social practices and market innovation as part of the problem. Apathy towards the scientific forecast of catastrophe, lucrative discounting of danger, top-down and bottom-up discounting of future harm are investigated. Backsliding, every man for himself cultures and free ridership practices are studied. Light is shed on the dark sides of adaptation and resilience building. The attachment to fossil-fuelled normality is probed. This section and this chapter illuminate how deeply societies are stuck in dangerous carbon polluting practices so as to help them free themselves.
Practices of remapping and rezoning land based on environmental risk are rapidly expanding worldwide. Designating certain urban areas as “at risk” in the context of climate change raises familiar conflicts over space and the fraught placement of borders and boundaries. It also gives rise to lesser-studied struggles over time. This article examines such temporal conflicts through a case of disputed risk mapping in New York City. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork over a four-year period after Hurricane Sandy, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was revising the city’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs. FIRMs divide land into zones of risk to set insurance rates and building standards. They dictate how high exposed homes must be elevated and who can afford to live in them. This article adds to work on the social consequences of risk mapping, which in FEMA’s case is occurring in conjunction with changes to the National Flood Insurance Program that portend rate hikes for many households. Foregrounding the lived experience of being mapped into a flood zone, the article analyzes conflicts over how FIRMs represent risk, redistribute uncertainty, and reorient collective action in ways that threaten to hinder movement toward more flood-adapted futures. While maps are key to rendering the risks of climate change vivid and local, their use as technologies of governing adaptation produces its own contested effects, centered in part on competing temporalities like the flood-zone temporalities examined here.
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Although the phenomena of prospection are embedded within cultural contexts, the impact of culture on prospection has not been subjected to systematic study. Drawing on theory and research in social and environmental psychology, sociology, and anthropology, we observe that time and space are heterogeneously organized and understood across different cultural settings, and propose that the cultural organization of time and space impacts the processes of prospection. We employ the construct of time–space distanciation (TSD), first introduced by Anthony Giddens, to describe the relationship between culture and understandings of time and space. TSD refers to the process through which cultural assumptions about the relationship between time and space change attributable to technological, economic, and social structural transitions. We present a diachronic account of changes in TSD (focusing on postindustrial societies), followed by a review of the applications of this construct for current prospection theory and research. TSD introduces a useful means for organizing broad social factors such as wealth, technology, and ideology, and bringing them into relation with individuals’ processes of prospection, by looking at the relationships between time and space presumed within cultures.
Free e-print available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ziWps54ABrdPBdvXiygm/full
The expansion of retailer-led food production standards over recent years has seen certification against such standards become a de facto condition of access to numerous supply chains. GLOBALG.A.P. standards, in particular, have extended the traditional focus of retailer-led standards beyond food safety to include compliance points addressing environmental protection and labour welfare. This has stimulated considerable research on the implications of standards compliance for small producers. However, little attention has been paid either to the relationships between so-called private standards and state-based regulatory regimes or to the implications of standards compliance for corporate farms, their employees and neighbouring communities. This paper examines these relationships and implications in the context of plantation banana production in the Philippines, focusing, in particular, on gaps that emerge between the ideals of social and environmental responsibility embodied in private standards and actual practices of regulation. It finds that while compliance with private standards is associated with comparatively favourable treatment of labour, deference to poorly enforced national legislation conceals ongoing human rights and environmental concerns.
Avoiding and/or adapting to dangerous socio-environmental transformation requires us to engage more reflexively with the conceptual frameworks, technologies and projects through which we attempt to grasp the temporal dynamics of Earth-system processes. This paper thus argues for a shift in focus for sociological analyses of time from the critique of modernity to the temporalities implicit in specific attempts at enacting environmental governance and the knowledge practices that inform them. Climate modelling and scenario building, for example, has proven a powerful means through which to comprehend the temporality of climate change; to bring the future into the present in order to plan responses and calculate responsibilities. The focus of IPCC assessments on scenario building has generated a sense of urgency around mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that has tended to crowd out serious attention to adaptation, other disruptions to Earth-system processes such as biodiversity loss, and the possibility that climate will change in ways that undermine predominantly market-based policy responses. Scenario-dependence contributes to a disjuncture between discourses of future climate change and peoples’ experience of adapting to an already variable climate. The challenge is to bring these temporalities together in meaningful ways and thus to avoid false choices between adaptation and mitigation.
This paper addresses perceived difference in temporal pace within nature and considers how epistemological debate is conditioned by such difference, drawing on the work of Norbert Elias. The first part of the paper debates the equivalence of 'natural time' and 'social time'. The acceleration of human social pace is also explored, along with the human capacity for plasticity and change, and the contrast which such plasticity presents in relation to the seeming longevity of many natural processes. The epistemological implications of these arguments are considered in the second part of the paper, focusing on the difficulties which human plasticity creates for current social theory (with particular attention to critical realism). In the final part of the paper, the foregoing discussion is used to re-evaluate sociologies of nature through reference to the sociology of the body.
The article reviews two decades of scholars' claims that exposures to pollution and other environmental risks are unequally distributed by race and class, examines case studies of environmental justice social movements and the history and politics of environmental justice policy making in the United States, and describes the emerging issue of global climate justice. The authors engage the contentious literature on how to quantitatively measure and document environmental injustice, especially the complex problems of having data of very different types and areas (such as zip codes, census tracts, or concentric circles) around polluting facilities or exposed populations. Also considered is the value of perspectives from critical race theory and ethnic studies for making sense of these social phenomena. The article concludes with a discussion of the globalization of the environmental justice movement, discourse, and issues, as well as with some policy implications of finding and understanding environmental justice. One unique feature of this review is its breadth and diversity, given the different approaches taken by the three coauthors.
The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 years. This evidence presents enormous challenges for international climate change negotiation and regulation, which has thus far focussed on gradual change. It is argued that existing social theoretic engagements with physical agency are insufficiently geared towards dissonant or disastrous physical events. Wagering on the past and future importance of abrupt climate change, the paper explores a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less inherent vulnerability of the human body. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, it proposes a way of nestling the issue of environmental justice within a broader sense of immeasurable indebtedness to those humans who endured previous episodes of abrupt climate, and considers the idea of experimentation and generosity without reserve.
We explore the development of the Anthropocene, the current epoch in which humans and our societies have become a global geophysical force. The Anthropocene began around 1800 with the onset of industrialization, the central feature of which was the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels. We use atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration as a single, simple indicator to track the progression of the Anthropocene. From a preindustrial value of 270-275 ppm, atmospheric carbon dioxide had risen to about 310 ppm by 1950. Since then the human enterprise has experienced a remarkable explosion, the Great Acceleration, with significant consequences for Earth System functioning. Atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen from 310 to 380 ppm since 1950, with about half of the total rise since the preindustrial era occurring in just the last 30 years. The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality. Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.
Spatial frames play a crucial role in debates over environmental sustainability. Building on a social scientific understanding of space, we discuss key spatial frames in biodiversity and ecosystem management, including territory, social-ecological systems, global networks and flows, and sense of place. In evaluating these frames, we argue that the state with its territorial power has clear limitations in effectively and legitimately addressing ecosystem problems, even when it remains a crucial power-container and regulator. Adapting institutional arrangements to ecosystem scale, as advocates of social-ecological systems propose, is often inappropriate because of cross-scale socio-political dynamics. Given the importance of global flows, we argue that place-based or landscape approaches that bring together local ecosystem management and global value chains present an ambivalent, but highly relevant spatial framing.
This chapter clarifies the substantial impact of environmental justice on scholarship and policy-making by addressing the core questions of this volume. It reviews the assumptions and contributions of the concept of environmental justice, which are argued to be numerous and influential. The scholarly idea and the social movement of the same name are not going to disappear: environmental justice is being used more than ever in the scholarly and policy literatures. The economic, socio-political and racial discrimination explanations for why environmental injustices exist drive different explanations for existing patterns, and divergent policy approaches for addressing the issue. As it heads to the end of its fourth decade, environmental justice research has a vast open agenda with great promise, both within national and local realms, and at the international level as well.
Ideological and intellectual separation between nature and society continues to limit our understanding of the world and impair our ability to address critical environmental problems. An increasing number of environmental and natural resource issues now require an integrative interdisciplinary approach. Using theoretical grounded frameworks and tools, sociologists have an important role to play in this work. This paper examines several theoretical approaches to cross the nature–society divide and guide sociologists participating interdisciplinary environmental research. These approaches include ecological Marxism, actor-network theory (ANT), social–biophysical stratification, and resilience theory. The paper examines specific strengths and shortcomings associated with each approach, areas for future application and development, and how each approach may be applied to support interdisciplinary environmental research. In addition, an example is used to illustrate how a specific theoretical approach can be applied to create a conceptual framework to guide interdisciplinary research. This paper aims to further the development and elaboration of nature–society theorization and to support sociologists who seek theoretical tools to apply to interdisciplinary environmental research projects.
Environmental justice has increasingly become part of the language of environmental activism, political debate, academic research and policy making around the world. It raises questions about how the environment impacts on different people’s lives. Does pollution follow the poor? Are some communities far more vulnerable to the impacts of flooding or climate change than others? Are the benefits of access to green space for all, or only for some? Do powerful voices dominate environmental decisions to the exclusion of others?
In this article, we argue that prior organizations research has contributed to the erosion of the natural environment by failing to discriminate physical materiality from sociomateriality. The time-space attributes of physical materiality are more immutable than sociomateriality, so the compression of time and space in and by organizations is disrupting the cycles of the natural environment. We illustrate this point through the example of carbon markets. The development of futures and other financial derivatives contributes to the compression of time, whereas the movement of capital worldwide contributes to the compression of space. This time-space compression disembodies financial instruments from their physical target, namely, carbon, leading to the distortion of the instrument's "real" value and hampering carbon emissions reductions. We call for organizational theories that more fully account for physical materiality.
In East Asia, climate change as a policy concern has been a late developer. The last decade, however, has seen the mainstreaming of environmental issues in core policy circles, but in the form of market-friendly, pro-industrial development framings. This paper problematizes such environmental
framings by looking at the politics of state-led ecological modernization and the institutional reforms that have emerged out of it. It argues that State-led ecological modernization necessarily leads to environmental framings that are too narrowly defined by state and industrial interests
– hence the focus on carbon emissions, energy security and the impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The State-driven assumption that society can modernize itself out of its environmental crisis through greater advancements in technological development also ignores the fact that this
process often leads to the creation of other environmental and social problems, which in turn undermines the fundamental goals of stability and sustainability. Civil society needs to be given greater space in the policy and framing processes in order to have a more balanced policy approach
to environmental reform in a more equitable way.
Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.
This essay seeks to explain the constitutive role that space-time plays in the dynamics of capital accumulation. Through a close reading of David Harvey's work, I show that time and space work together in ways particular to the capitalist mode of producing, distributing, selling, consuming and disposing of commodities. This does not, I argue, mean that space-time is reducible to capital accumulation — there are, to be sure, other forms of space-time that are relatively autonomous from the now dominant mode of production. My aim is not to provide a definitive account of space-time tout court but, instead, to show both the organic connection between space and time within capitalism specifically as well as the necessary — rather than simply contingent — role that space-time plays in the dynamics of accumulation. My argument is that capitalist space is inconceivable in abstraction from capitalism's temporal compulsions, and that space-time functions as a concrete abstraction that internalizes the whole gamut of contradictions that Marx identified over a century ago. The essay makes its analytical contribution by surveying previous Marxist and non-Marxist contributions to understanding space and time in the social sciences, en route to a close reading of Harvey's Limits to Capital. The political implications of paying careful attention to capitalist space-time are explored by counter-posing Harvey's work with Doreen Massey's recent writings about spatio-temporality.
It is widely recognized that globalization, contemporary technologies and environmental hazards pose problems for the political ideal of democracy. An explicit focus on time gives us a new point of access to these debates. No longer understood in the singular as the implicit context within political processes take place, time in its complex, multiple expressions can serve as a tool for reconceptualization. In its single and conglomerate forms it is lived and negotiated in conflict. This is nowhere more apparent than in globalized socio-political processes with their varied ties to contemporary technology, most specifically when these are concerned with environmental hazards. In such situations the conflict is not merely between different scarcities of and needs for time, but between temporalities that operate to different principles: the variable. rhythmic temporality of nature and the cosmos, on the one hand, and the industrial times of the machine, the laboratory and economic considerations, on the other hand. It is between new configurations of actors past, present and future where concerns, rights and duties extend beyond the present to peoples long dead and those whose future present is constructed by our contemporary political and scientific actions. Together, these temporal features and complexities present crucial conceptual and political challenges for the next century.
Recent developments in systems theory have replaced the paradigm of the whole and its parts with the paradigm of system and environment. System differentiation, therefore, has to be conceived as the reduplication of the difference between system and environment within systems. Differentiation is the reflexive form of system building. In the special case of the society as the encompassing social system, this approach makes it possible (1) to analyse different types of differentiation (i.e. segmentation, stratification, and functional differentiation) within a common conceptual framework, (2) to elaborate on internal problems of differentiated societies, basing the autonomy of subsystems on the multiplication of system references for functional orientation, performance, and reflexion, and (3) to prepare the theoretical integration of systems theory and the theory of evolution.
The creation of carbon markets is one of the solutions currently envisaged to meet the widely recognized challenge of global warming. The contributions in this special section of Accounting, Organizations and Society show that many controversies nevertheless exist on the ways in which these markets are organized, the calculative tools that are devised to equip them, and the role that they are supposed to play, especially in relation to other types of intervention which favour political measures or technological research. In light of these controversies, the article considers carbon markets as on-going collective experiments. It is argued that carbon trading is an exceptional site for identifying the stakes involved in such experiments and for identifying better what the dynamics of civilizing markets could be.
The argument. Preface. Acknowledgements. Part I: The Passage from Modernity to Postmodernity in Contemporary Culture: . 1. Introduction. 2. Modernity and Modernism. 3. Postmodernism. 4. Postmodernism in the City: Architecture and Urban Design. 5. Modernization. 6. POSTmodernISM or postMODERNism?. Part II: The Political-Economic Transformation of late Twentieth-Century Capitalism: . 7. Introduction. 8. Fordism. 9. From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation. 10. Theorizing the Transition. 11. Flexible Accumulation - Solid Transformation or Temporary Fix?. Part III: The Experience of Space and Time: . 12. Introduction. 13. Individual Spaces and Times in Social Life. 14. Time and Space as Sources of Social Power. 15. The Time and Space of the Enlightenment Project. 16. Time-space Compression and the Rise of Modernism as a Cultural Force. 17. Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition. 18. Time and Space in the Postmodern Cinema. Part IV: The Condition of Postmodernity:. 19. Postmodernity as a Historical Condition. 20. Economics with Mirrors. 21. Postmodernism as the Mirror of Mirrors. 22. Fordist Modernism versus Flexible Postmodernism, or the Interpenetration of Opposed Tendencies in Capitalism as a Whole. 23. The Transformative and Speculative Logic of Capital. 24. The Work of Art in an Age of Electronic Reproduction and Image Banks. 25. Responses to Time-Space Compression. 26. The Crisis of Historical Materialism. 27. Cracks in the Mirrors, Fusions at the Edges. References. Index.
Assumptions about the pace of life speeding up abound in contemporary social theory. While many factors are contributing to this phenomenon, information and communication technologies are seen as the main drivers. This article considers the way social theorists analyse the concepts of time and speed and then examines how these claims might be assessed in the light of empirical research. Such research shows that time compression has multiple dimensions, and that the effect of digital devices like the mobile phone is not simply one of acceleration. In particular, I suggest that the social studies of technology offers a richer analysis of the reciprocal relationship between technological innovation and changing time practices. My argument is that while the hitherto neglected temporal dimension in sociological theory is now being addressed, there is an urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies. Without this, we will continue to have difficulty distinguishing social science from science fiction.
The Problem of Time in Sociology: An Overview of the Literature on the State of Theory and Research on the ‘Sociology of Time
- W Bergman
- J May
Agrobiodiversity and Sustainable Farm Livelihoods: Policy Implications and Imperatives
- S Lockie
- D Carpenter