Justice in a Changing Climate? Inclusion and Representation in Environmental Expertise

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How can societies address climate change in ways that are socially just and inclusive? This urgent concern facing scholars, policymakers and citizens is motivated by the projected intensification of climate change and its disproportionate effects on marginalized people and is reflected in mounting demands for environmental justice on the global climate agenda. This research examines implications of an increasingly popular approach to this issue - the collaborative creation - or "coproduction" - of environmental knowledge by experts and publics. Despite mushrooming on the climate governance agenda in recent years, this approach has faced challenges when implemented in practice, often generating unwanted outcomes such as "maladaptation" - expertise that exacerbates rather than addresses climate vulnerability.This research seeks to expand knowledge about how the needs of local vulnerable people can be reflected in expertise about climate risk and thereby create policies that are more just, inclusive and relevant. It will analyse frameworks and strategies of inclusive climate governance (for example by examining strategies such as reflexive learning, deliberative democracy, and community-based adaptive management) that can inform governments, NGOs and community organizations developing climate adaptation policies. By studying the experiences and risk-framings of vulnerable fishing communities it will provide critical inquiry into how climate expertise can be made more relevant and accountable to local people. It will also advance academic knowledge in three key areas. First, there is a growing call among Human Geographers for "transformative" climate policies - those which look beyond incremental solutions to "reconfigure the meaning and trajectory of development". Understanding how climate expertise can reflect the needs and voices of local vulnerable people is key to structurally transforming climate futures by facilitating intervention in how they are imagined and developed.Second, Disaster scholars increasingly debate the extent to which climate vulnerability lies in geo-physical change or the socio-economic ways this change is experienced. This research will contribute to these debates by developing a new conceptual framework for examining how vulnerability and environmental expertise mutually inform and shape one another. Third, research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) increasingly seeks to understand how diverse groups attach meaning to environmental risks, yet has hitherto largely studied socio-economically robust communities in established democracies. This research will contribute to these debates by analyzing how marginalized communities are able to shape climate expertise.