No Agency and Responsibility for the Privileged? Perceptions of climate action among high socioeconomic status citizens in the United Kingdom.

Resumen

Addressing climate change requires significant individual behaviour change, as well as deep societal transformations to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It has been argued that people with high socio-economic status (SES; i.e., with relatively higher levels of wealth, income, and education) have an important part to play to deliver these changes. This is due to not only disproportionate levels of emissions resulting from their carbon-intense consumer lifestyles, but also increased power to mitigate climate change via their other social roles (e.g., investor, role model, organisational participants, and citizen). Therefore, the present study sought to understand how individuals perceive these roles and opportunities. We recruited 81 high SES individuals in the UK to take part in an online qualitative study. We performed reflexive thematic analysis and generated 5 main themes; (1) Shifting responsibility to others in the system, (2) Seeing oneself mainly as a consumer, (3) Failure to recognise power within upstream social roles, (4) Climate change is perceived as a distant threat and, (5) Climate action is a positive experience. These findings suggest that to unlock the transformative potential that high SES people can bring to climate change mitigation, targeted policy and tailored education is required.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Duncan, S., Hjelmskog, A., & Papies, E. K. (2023). No Agency and Responsibility for the Privileged? Perceptions of climate action among high socioeconomic status citizens in the United Kingdom.. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8zweh