The UK duo Let’s Eat Grandma understand the power of punctuation. Omitting a comma makes their name seem macabre and all the more compelling when compared to their harmonious voices. In the same way, Climate Action Research might be climate: action research or climate action: research, each inviting a different focus.
climate: action research
Aside from making connections to climate issues, action research has a dynamic, if fairly recent history. The term action research was coined by Kurt Lewin in the 1940’s as a development in social psychology, addressing how to conceptualize and promote social change. Lewin’s education and experience led him to see action research as an intervention that ‘unfroze’ some long-term behavior to make people open to modify their actions which then ‘refroze’ in a new pattern.
By the 1970’s the desire for more democratic involvement of workers in organizations and industry brought a new focus on participation in action research. By the 1990’s, what became known as participatory action research (PAR) was seen as a continuous and participative learning process (Greenwood & Levin, 2007).
The active involvement of people who are also being studied in a research project, or who might benefit as stakeholders in the outcomes, has also connected action research and the co-production of knowledge. Rather than just a subject of research, participants are increasingly seen as part of the process, actively co-producing knowledge, partly in a response to complex and socially relevant emerging environmental, economic and social challenges (Norström et al., 2020). As a participatory process, action research is well suited to better understand and influence how we manage climate issues.
climate action: research
On the other hand, research into climate action can take many different forms. Listed as #13 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Climate Action calls for “urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. According to the recent IPCC report on adaptation and impacts, 196 countries have developed over 2,315 laws and policies that address climate change and private investors as well as city and state governments have increasingly launched climate actions (Ara Begum et al., 2022).
In mid-March 2022, I searched the SCOPUS database for published research connecting ‘climate action’ and the SDGs. The topic areas cluster first in Environmental Science (267), Social Sciences (198) and Energy (114), then dip into Engineering (72), Earth and Planetary Sciences (65), followed by Agricultural and Biological Sciences (60) and Business, Management and Accounting (55).The research approaches range across statistical analysis and modelling comparisons, spatial and influence mapping, and practical case studies.
So when you consider conducting climate action research, your emphasis is important in both how you shape your questions and the kind of research methodologies that can find useful answers.
References
Ara Begum, R., Lempert, R., Ali, Benjaminsen, T. A., Bernauer, T., Cramer, W., Cui, X., Mach, K., Nagy, G., Stenseth, N. C., Sukumar, R., & Wester, P. (2022). Chapter 1: Point of Departure and Key Concepts. In D. C. R. H.-O. Pörtner, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (Ed.), Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Greenwood, D. J., & Levin, M. (2007). A History of Action Research. In Introduction to Action Research (2 ed., pp. 13-34). SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412984614
Norström, A. V., Cvitanovic, C., Löf, M. F., West, S., Wyborn, C., Balvanera, P., Bednarek, A. T., Bennett, E. M., Biggs, R., de Bremond, A., Campbell, B. M., Canadell, J. G., Carpenter, S. R., Folke, C., Fulton, E. A., Gaffney, O., Gelcich, S., Jouffray, J.-B., Leach, M., . . . Österblom, H. (2020). Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2