Collective Action: What a Crisis Economy Teaches us About Governing During the Climate Crisis
Over the last decade, there has been a growing realisation: at the core of the challenges we face is not the need to find technical solutions, but to understand how to incentivise change and organise action. Despite years of scientific consensus on the causes and effects (current and coming) of the climate crisis, action has been slow and, despite efforts, insufficient as a whole.
Said simpler: we have a lot of ideas and solutions, what we need to understand is how to use them well. This relates to a second deafening consensus: no actor alone can make the scale of change needed. Governments cannot do it alone, nor can private companies and organisations, nor individuals’ lifestyle changes. What we need is to direct societal attention, resources, and effort — a collective, ongoing push in a common direction.
It’s quite easily said but how can many actors in society be organised towards a common direction? There are many places to draw from to look at this. One that has been playing on my mind is previous examples of significant, rapid re-organisation of society, primarily through the concept of a wartime economy. This refers to the reorientation of an economy towards supporting its war effort which often involves drastic new measures across all areas of society — in taxation, production, everyday ways of living and working, and more.
A caveat
When referring to this, it is perhaps wise to immediately give a caveat. By referring to wartime economies, I am not attempting to draw upon all elements of the concept or term. For example, this often involves state centralisation and usually difficult measures for private companies and citizens (from requiring production to contribute to the war effort to enforcing curfews and employee reallocation). It also has very different forms and connotations in different contexts.
Instead, I am interested in the broader governance components of the concept rather than individual policies or drawing militarised connotations. For the way I am considering it with the climate crisis, it would be better termed “crisis economy” and I will use this term in an attempt to differentiate from the militarised aspects of the term ‘wartime economy’. In short, this is referring to large-scale societal resource mobilisation in a directional manner towards a clear collective goal.
Rather than connotations of centralisation, this focuses instead on the principles of collaboration and collectivity that economies have previously enabled when strongly directed to a crisis. This directly links to the commonly recognised challenges with the climate crisis that I mentioned, suggesting there could be some elements of the concept that we could learn from.
Examples of large-scale, directional societal resource mobilisation
To help illustrate what this kind of large-scale mobilisation of society’s resources and activities towards truly significant challenges can look like, two examples immediately come to mind.
Example 1: WW2
During the Second World War, many countries drastically reoriented the way society worked in order to channel resources (including money and labour) and attention towards the war effort. Many manufacturers and engineering companies changed the products they made to help produce materials and supplies for the military forces. People profoundly changed the way they lived, adopting new jobs to support the war abroad and at home, as well as adopting new living habits from different diets to civil defence activities like during blackouts. New economic measures and taxation were used to generate needed resources.
Furthermore, there were new narratives across the whole of society. Across political speeches, radio stations, slogans and propaganda, there were messages making sense of the moment people were living in and stirring a sense of the need for collectivity and to ‘do your bit’ to contribute to the country’s efforts.
The need and narratives were also so powerful that they changed some of the core premises of how society was organised; the best example of this is the fact that women took a drastically different role, working in professions that were only occupied by men before the war and acting as a central part of the country’s security by keeping core societal activities functioning. After the war ended, there was discomfort in returning to previous ways; in the case of women, they had proven their equality and service to their country so being socially confined to their previous role seemed to ignore that. Although their role in the crisis was temporary, it arguably fed into a growing change in gender norms over the following decades. This shows that when the challenge is great enough and collectivity is seen as essential, the status quo can be overturned. Some changes may be temporary but some may lead to long-term changes in society.
Example 2: COVID-19
A second example is the COVID-19 response which, when looked at through this lens, bears some similarities and also helps us consider a “crisis economy” without warfare as its dominant function and without a similar extent of central economic management. Different times and challenges, similar whole society mobilisation. Many companies that were capable of doing so, began producing and distributing PPE. Individuals of all ages and demographics modified the way they lived, worked, shopped, and studied. Across countries, like in WW2 and all crises, there was great variance in the nature of the measures and how they were mandated or enforced, but all societies reorganised themselves temporarily to target the specific challenge and respond to the new economic reality it created.
New narratives also emerged, drawing on the sense of the nation coming together that echoed or directly referenced previous crises like WW2. Despite the fact that there was not a human enemy and instead a virus, a similar mobilisation and emotional narrative was created.
Lessons for the Climate Crisis
As said, when transposing elements of a concept beyond its original context, there are always some parts that remain relevant and some that do not. To explore this, we will first look at the ingredients I briefly outlined in the two examples above, and then ask how they relate to the climate crisis and why a similar response is not currently being produced.
Looking at the ingredients…
So what do these examples teach us? Put simply, that we can do it. When something is seen as urgent or threatening enough, common mindsets are overridden and society agrees to come together and work on a collective effort towards a collective need.
The key here is ‘society agrees’. As said, we’re not talking about authoritarian centralisation, instead, we need to understand the conditions that incentivise a private company or person to override the way they normally operate and instead prioritise collaborating towards a collective goal. At least, to a much greater degree than actors currently are for the climate crisis. Here is an initial hypothesis of a few components based on the examples I mentioned:
- Single goal — in both cases, there was a single compelling goal which was perceived as sufficiently threatening and urgent to warrant more drastic action than people would normally be willing to take. The three elements — compelling, threatening, urgent — were present.
- “We’re in it together” — in both cases, there was near complete consensus that everyone needed to gather around this issue due to the interconnectedness and interdependence of society’s experience the crisis. This necessitated a similarly interconnected response. The conditions made private companies — typically self-interested — recognise that their own security and future depends on that of the state(s) in which it lies or operates, therefore they cannot separate themselves and cannot ignore societal challenges.
- Societal narratives — to help make sense of what was happening, the threat society faced, and the need for a collective response that overrides normal behaviour, both cases featured new narratives. These often referred to the collective common identity and desired way of living in order to maintain attention and efforts on the crisis response, even when it was difficult to live through. In some cases, this was propaganda — which more consciously tries to influence or persuade — but I also use ‘narratives’ to refer to forms of collective sensemaking and storytelling that hold more neutral connotations.
- Mutual accountability —in both cases, the experience of needed actions could be very hard which necessitated new measures for mutual accountability justified by the above three points. These could be hard measures (e.g. taxation, regulation, enforcement of blackouts, use of PPE, or social distancing) or soft measures (a sense of letting others down, endangering others, or not doing your part).
But why did these cases generate action but this mobilisation has not yet occurred for the climate crisis?
Although there are very many efforts to tackle the climate crisis, these are currently predominantly not interconnected and not involving such a large scale reorientation of society. Why is this? Let’s look at this question through the lens of the four components summarised above.
- Single goal — although the climate crisis is seen as a very large threat and needing urgent action, arguably societies have not yet managed to create a single goal in response to the challenge which is compelling. This lies in the multi-dimensional nature of the challenge and also as it is experienced to different degrees and in different ways even within countries. Additionally, the climate crisis is an intangible combatant so may seem less urgent than a direct military threat. Furthermore, unlike COVID-19, its threat isn’t as easily traceable, although increasing natural disasters and increasing reporting linking climate change to health threats like air pollution may begin to change this.
- “We’re in it together” — in both cases, there was a sense that all areas of society were equally dependent on a successful response to the crisis. Interestingly, although this is scientifically true in the climate crisis, it is perhaps not yet felt by rich and powerful individuals and companies so they are currently less incentivised to rethink how they operate. Additionally, effects vary drastically across countries so all have different things at risk, reducing a sense of equal interdependence (in level of risk and nature of dependence).
- Societal narratives — although there has been a colossal wave of dialogue and awareness around the climate crisis, the scale of the challenge and the above two components have meant a strong narrative has not yet been distilled in different societies. This may be for a few reasons. First and foremost is that the challenge itself is contested by some and overly complex for many to comprehend; in this manner, it has similarities with COVID-19 although with greater complexity and less of an illusion of a silver bullet. Although developing a vaccine was not the only important factor in combating COVID-19, it was significant and provided a clear source of motivation and hope. The climate crisis has no such equivalent.
- Mutual accountability — new ways of approaching accountability are emerging from climate lawsuits, various protests and collective movements, and new regulations being explored. However, these are not yet a comprehensive network of measures, and there has been resistance to transitioning many agreements made by states or businesses from voluntary to binding. Furthermore, there is not a sense of mutuality in accountability, likely because of the lack of a sense of the need for collectivity mentioned above.
There is also one marked difference between the climate crisis and crises such as WW2 and COVID-19. Although in both of these examples, the duration of crises was unknown, there was a sense that they were crises with ends. Even though WW2 profoundly changed the organisation of many populations and states, it did not do so globally. The climate crisis, however, is a crisis without end; instead of changing ways enough to endure and ‘win’, our societies will have to adapt and permanently reorient their activities. This increases the difficulty for us all to imagine what a positive future could look like (to a degree of accuracy), and determine actions to collectively move towards it with a strong narrative and mutual accountability. Perhaps the comprehension and sensemaking of this change and what it entails has not yet been reached as a whole.
What does this mean for governing in the climate crisis?
The reason this whole idea originally played on my mind is that I was thinking about the balance between seeing the climate crisis as a new challenge to our societies and how we govern (in terms of its nature, complexity, and scale) yet also striving to find elements of things we have already done that we could build on. Finding the root of a sense of possibility is highly important for decision makers, both practically and emotionally.
Of course, the examples I covered do not go deeply into different dynamics and contextual variations. But they do start to show some instinct of how we have faced difficult challenges before, gathered as societies, and formed some kind of response. This gives some indications of what is needed now, a thread to follow.
What it tells us is that governments need to act as leaders of society that help to convene actors, develop a common direction, enable different forms of collaboration, and provide different means to incentivise actors and hold them to account. The direction and path are not controlled by the state, they are determined by society with the government stewarding this process.
This has various implications and raises questions. For example, what does this role mean for how decision makers perceive their own role and the skills they need to fulfil it? How can we harness the power of societal narratives and communication to create change and make sense of a complex world in transition? What does this mean for the way we look at private companies, how they operate, how they are incentivised to participate in, and how they should consider societal challenges? These are only a couple of questions and as each is investigated, they will reveal more.
