Abstract
With growing awareness of the adverse impacts of anthropogenic climate change, it is essential to understand whether and how societal transformation can be achieved. Future society’s ability to transform depends on how human agency can develop within evolving socioeconomic contexts. Scenarios, therefore, provide different enabling conditions and challenges for transformative agency in the short-term and long-term. To this end, we advanced and applied the capacities framework to analyse high-end scenarios, based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), from an agency perspective. Agency capacity analysis has shed light on the potential for transformative action that would not be otherwise captured solely with socioeconomic scenario trends. Different potentials to achieve sustainability emerged for the different scenarios and for same SSP across different case study areas. Capacities lead to trade-offs or unexpected opportunities for transformation, such as in socially fragmented SSP3. Social inequality hampers potentials for transformation, even when challenges to mitigation are low.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Transformative Climate Governance |
Subtitle of host publication | A Capacities Perspective to Systematise, Evaluate and Guide Climate Action |
Place of Publication | Cham |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 359-380 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-030-49040-9 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-3-030-49039-3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 27 Aug 2020 |
Externally published | Yes |