Environmental justice analysis to advance rural landscape transformations in the face of climate change – Just-Scapes

Climate change is stimulating calls for land-use change. But whilst there is much technical research into the physical potential for land-based contributions to decarbonisation, there is less understanding of how rural people think about these possible future landscapes, or how their views define the societal potential for rural transformation pathways. We will explore this societal potential, initiating a new research agenda to understand ‘just transformations’ in rural landscapes (Just-Scapes). We see justice as a desirable and necessary condition for transformation because it facilitates the acceptability of climate practices and provides a platform and motivation for shared vision and action.
We have formed an interdisciplinary team with expertise in environmental justice, environmental psychology, environmental creative writing and environmental scenarios. This combination of social sciences and humanities will enable us to conduct novel and rigorous investigation of rural stakeholders’ normative concerns, and to facilitate a transdisciplinary process for deliberating norms and co-producing manifestos for just transformations. We do this in selected rural landscapes in the Czech Republic, France and the UK.
We address the call topic of ‘Social justice and participation’, by exploring how plural perceptions of climate justice shape receptivity to rural transformations, and how this knowledge enables the pursuit of ‘just transformations’. We also address a secondary call topic of ‘Sense making’ by researching the multiple meanings of climate justice that are produced and how these are associated with receptivity to climate actions. A key lense that we employ is ‘deliberating norms’, through creative multi-stakeholder ’justice labs’ to co-produce shared Just-Scapes manifestos.