Mapping Community-Based Climate Solutions

Project summary

This project aims to establish new global long-term research and impact cooperation on planning for the future community action in view of the climate crisis. It starts from the observation of proliferation of resilience-based approaches to dealing with climate crisis whereby the 1990s motto of ‘think globally, act locally’ aimed to encourage local community solutions. The past decades have been marked with the skyrocketing academic and practical experimenting with the so-called bottom-up and participatory approaches in response to the climate crisis. Participatory bottom-up elements have been written down into the majority of the international climate projects of community engagement. The practice and the outcomes, however, have been criticised in the literature for a merely formal approach, attempt to continue with the one-size-fits-all policies, creating dependencies, responsibilising the local communities etc.

In addition to this mixed record, the large volume of practical experience and academic studies generated since 1990s still lack systematic understanding of local climate solutions. The ample experience has often been generated in silos – not only in terms of academic disciplines, but also in terms of divides between Global North and Global South, academia and practitioners/communities. A systematic understanding is therefore needed for a future-oriented actionable local solutions, especially in view of the emerging pluriversal world, i.e. the world of fragmenting development models. We argue that what is needed today is taking stock of this ample experience, systematising the insights and boosting the new generation of future-oriented community-based approaches to climate crisis.

To this end, the project aims to develop a comprehensive mapping of three interconnected areas:

• mapping the main academic assessments and conceptualisations of local community-based climate action;
• mapping the main approaches in the local and bottom-up solutions to climate crisis implemented in the past decades (1990-2020s);
• mapping of the locally-attuned solutions for the future, putting ecosocial aspects at the heart of development programmes. In other words, identifying how the role of the communities is imagined to be developing in the future.

To address the silos mentioned above, the project draws insights from global and local academic literature, as well as practical knowledge in localities of the Global South, namely Venezuela and Uzbekistan. These two localities are selected for their rich traditions of ecosocial thought and practice, strong community philosophies and geographical variety of Latin American and Eurasian traditions. Such mapping will fill the gap of systematising local-based approaches to climate crisis and outlining the main approaches to future.

Principal investigator

Dr Irina Petrova, UCL SSEES

Co-investigators

Dr Akram Umarov, Institute for Advanced International Studies (IAIS) at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy (UWED), Uzbekistan
Mrs Liliana Buitrago, Political Ecology Observatory of Venezuela, Venezuela

The project is supported by UCL Global Engagement Funds (GEF).