Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change

Climate change requires unprecedented cooperation across disciplines and worldviews, creating emerging experimental ‘cosmopolitical’ fields in climate negotiation, action and engagement. Intrinsically linked with human actions, climate change challenges the modern exclusion of nature from politics, and conceptual separation of the social and natural in academia. Cosmopolitics can widen communication among worlding practices, sparking re-conceptualisation of the relations between humans and their environments. 

Local communities and Indigenous Peoples have gained considerable recognition for their capacity to sustain low carbon food production and livelihoods within biodiverse landscapes, and such knowledge is increasingly seen as a vital aspect of international climate action. Contemporary cross-disciplinary research explores how communities can contribute to communicating climate change to a wider public; constructing adaptive strategies; and collaborating with scientists to document climate impacts and extractivist incursions in their territories. There remain however serious constraints to effective Indigenous leadership in climate negotiation and action. What are these constraints, and what changes would be required to enable Indigenous actors to scale up and expand successful collaborations and effectively contribute to international and state led climate politics? Cosmology can be a vital part of sustainable environmental strategies, but one that struggles to make itself heard within modern climate politics. How do Indigenous understandings of the relations between humans and their environments contribute to shifting the frontiers of scientific understanding and enabling sustainable climate solutions? We will explore how far local communities, Indigenous peoples, policy makers and scientific communities are establishing common grounds for climate action and ethical cooperative relationships. How can the social sciences contribute to the construction of cosmopolitical relations where Indigenous communities can legitimately and authoritatively take part in world forums, climate action, and scientific research?

This conference will consider the construction of a cross disciplinary and intercultural cosmopolitics in climate engagement and action that takes seriously indigenous and local community worlding practices and leadership. We will explore the challenges faced by Indigenous peoples and local communities in contributing to climate negotiation; collaborating with scientific communities; and in taking action to shape their environments. We will explore how local and Indigenous perceptions of climate change can converse with scientific understandings of the same, engaging the attention of a wider public and policy makers, and how far such understandings are enabled by contemporary states. Through interdisciplinary engagement the conference intends to facilitate collaborative knowledge production across scientific and Indigenous perspectives, enabling the creation of meaningful and impactful climate legislation and policy