The Lived Experience of Climate Change ― Knowledge, Science and Public Action

This book explores the idea that daily lived experiences of climate change are a crucial missing link in our knowledge that contrasts with scientific understandings of this global problem. It argues that both kinds of knowledge are limiting: the sciences by their disciplines and lived experiences by the boundaries of everyday lives. Therefore each group needs to engage the other in order to enrich and expand understanding of climate change and what to do about it.

Complemented by a rich collection of examples and case studies, this book proposes a novel way of generating and analysing knowledge about climate change and how it may be used. The reader is introduced to new insights where the book:

‧ Provides a framework that explains the variety of simultaneous, co-existing and often contradictory perspectives on climate change.
‧ Reclaims everyday experiential knowledge as crucial for meeting global challenges such as climate change.
‧ Overcomes the science-citizen dichotomy and leads to new ways of examining public engagement with science. Scientists are also human beings with lived experiences that filter their scientific findings into knowledge and actions.
‧ Develops a ‘public action theory of knowledge’ as a tool for exploring how decisions on climate policy and intervention are reached and enacted.

While scientists (physical and social) seek to explain climate change and its impacts, millions of people throughout the world experience it personally in their daily lives. The experience might be bad, as during extreme weather, engender hostility when governments attempt mitigation, and sometimes it is benign. This book seeks to understand the complex, often contradictory knowledge dynamics that inform the climate change debate, and is written clearly for a broad audience including lecturers, students, practitioners and activists, indeed anyone who wishes to gain further insight into this far-reaching issue.

Dina Abbott is full Professor of Development Geography at the University of Derby. She is an active researcher who has published extensively in journals and books. Her research expertise is on gendered urban and rural poverty, including the impact of climate change, and she has worked in India, the Gambia, Senegal, Morocco and East Africa. Her special interest also extends to the methodological, philosophical and ethical implications of research. She was most recently a major contributor to the interdisciplinary European Union Erasmus project, ‘The lived experience of climate change’ where she worked closely with Gordon Wilson. Her personal contribution to this project was to create on-line Masters teaching modules on sociological approaches to the subject and interdisciplinary methodologies for investigation into the ‘lived experiences’ of climate change. She was also co-editor of a journal special issue arising from that project and is an editorial board member of online African Journal of Environmental Science and Technology.

Gordon Wilson was until his retirement in December 2011 full Professor of Environment and Development, and is now Emeritus Professor, at the Open University. He retains an active research interest in social learning and its potential to generate knowledge with respect to environmental issues in a development context. He has published extensively on the topic, including a Reader where he was the major editor and a book (co-authored with a colleague). He led the interdisciplinary European Union Erasmus project, ‘The lived experience of climate change’, where he pioneered the intellectual development of the concept through on-line Masters teaching modules, and as co-editor (with Dina Abbott) of a journal special issue.