Finding Common Ground

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There are hundreds of community groups across Scotland tackling the climate change and developing sustainability initiatives on a local level. These groups often struggle to establish collaborative partnerships with other groups in the same region, particularly across religious differences. Launched with AHRC/ESRC funding in 2013, the Ancestral Time (AT) project is the most sustained empirical study of religious environmentalism to date. It was precisely with these barriers in mind that we sought to develop a more nuanced account of how and why religious groups mobilise around environmental issues in Scotland. Over the course of conversations with third sector practitioners we became aware that a lack of understanding around possible "common ground" served as a barrier to collaboration between secular and religious community groups on areas of common concern. These groups often have overlapping purposes and stakeholders, but can struggle to bridge differences in language and narrative concerning environmental care. We have also found that there is a significant desire to collaborate with community-level environmental practitioners by major British environmental charities (especially WWF and RSPB), Scottish government agencies and businesses targeting sustainability.This follow-on project seeks to mobilise the new knowledge generated in the AT project among new audiences. In collaboration with representatives from our project partner Eco-Congregation Scotland, we will seek to address the existing gap in understanding through a series of 7 separate regionally-hosted participatory workshops. Each workshop will draw together representatives in a different region from a range of local community groups for a participatory discussion in the form of "open space" (Owen, 2008; Chambers, 2011). At each workshop representatives from each practitioner group, including Eco-Congregation Scotland will be invited to share the story behind their work. Aspects of group dynamics will be illuminated through brief presentations by project researchers. The overarching goal will be to find common ground, bridging apparent differences and finding common language and strategic goals around which secular and religious groups can cooperate on environmental care. Participants will be invited to work together to identify resources, barriers, and 'shared ground'. The project researcher will keep a record of these discussions in order to generate a series of case studies which can provide the basis for a collaboratively authored summary of best-practices for community-level collaborations on environmental issues in Scotland, highlighting possible ways for secular and religious groups to find 'shared ground'.The final symposium, to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh, will draw on participants from the seven workshops and the research team to present case studies and best practices to an audience including scholarly researchers, civil servants, local authorities, leaders of environmental charities and representatives from the business sector who provide technology and finance to communities involved in sustainable initiatives. The symposium will emphasize participation and collaboration through select plenary addresses, "open space," short oral presentations, and world café style discussion. Not only will this project generate new partnerships to address climate change mitigation efforts in Scotitsh communities, but it will also help third sector groups to generate new understanding of roadblocks to collaboration and modes of environmental action which our team will feed back to the research community. By drawing academic practitioners into engagement with well-informed practitioner group representatives we expect to generate a new research nexus between the fields of religious studies, human geography, social anthropology, and sociology around grounded research of grassroots environmental activism in a religious context.