Warsaw, Klagenfurt, and Ljubljana are among the 100 cities that are expected to act as experimentation and innovation hubs to pursue climate neutrality goals by the year 2030. The project’s scientific goal is to explore and interpret how urgency is defined with regard to climate change, how climate change urgency, to which the cities subscribed, competes with other urgencies, and how a sense of urgency is generated, communicated, and realized politically and culturally. We are thus interested in the socio-cultural and political life of climate urgency.
Within this overarching research interest, the projects’ particular objectives are: (1) to conduct a cultural analysis of urgency, revealing how it relates to the temporal and societal factors, (2) to follow cities’ transition to climate neutrality and to analyze mechanisms whereby the EU policies are translated to national and local levels, (3) to compare different national and local conditionings of these translations, (4) to advance the anthropology of climate change. We hope that the resulting innovative knowledge will have an impact on just transitions to a climate-neutral future.
Methodologically, the project employs an anthropological epistemological lens. A joint research design that binds together our three case studies is crucial for the project’s objectives as it allows comparisons as well as cross-fertilization of academic sensibilities, experience, and expertise.
