Does Climate Change Impact Civic Engagement? Lessons from the Indigenous Arctic

• In Event: Environmental Politics in Developing Countries and Marginalized Societies

Abstract

How does climate change affect engagement in politics? A growing body of research documents the impacts of climate change on political participation, suggesting that limited exposure can temporarily increase belief in global warming and support for mitigation policies. Yet little is known about the community-level microfoundations of climate change and civic engagement, particularly among vulnerable populations that are already experiencing the maladies of anthropogenic climate change. This exposure is most acute in the Arctic, where environmental changes have been occurring for decades in the form of sea ice volatility, coastal erosion, melting permafrost, reduced freshwater levels, and dramatic variability in temperature and precipitation. These changes have profound consequences for the economic and cultural survival of subsistence-based populations living in the Arctic and of settlements physically displaced by geographic changes.
How have impacted communities responded? Have local responses positively affected community cohesion and civic engagement? Or have these responses been either lacking or incapable of keeping communities intact? Research on natural disasters suggests that vulnerability to hazards increases government spending on adaptive and preventive responses, which in turn promotes political engagement to support incumbent governments. However, communities most vulnerable to climate change often lack the fiscal resources for adaptation or prevention; such an inadequate response can lead either to the loss of public support for incumbent leaders, or to outright political disengagement if political competition is lacking. From a psychological perspective, experiencing the negative effects of climate change is believed to increase feelings of personal vulnerability, which can either strengthen one’s attachment to community or lead to a sense of abandonment and isolation from the communal space.
Answering these questions and deciphering which causal mechanisms drive these relationships requires a novel approach that combines environmental, infrastructural, and social data at a granular level. This paper will present findings from an exploratory study of indigenous communities in the Alaskan Arctic using administrative, ethnographic, and satellite data on direct exposure to climate change, community-level adaptive responses, and individual-level participation in an array of community governance activities. The results will provide the baseline for a wider experimental study on community resilience interventions among indigenous populations in the Arctic portions of Alaska, Canada, the Nordic States, and Russia. Broadly, these findings have implications for how and why local governments around the world respond differently to the global problem of climate change, and how these responses affect individual engagement in the political process.

Author

• Paasha Mahdavi, University of California, Santa Barbara