Energy Cafe: Climate activism in a repressive world
Climate activism in a repressive world: a mixed-methods approach to understanding the psychological antecedents of taking climate action
Hosted by Sunniva Davies-Rommetveit
Since the late 2010s, climate protest groups have used a variety of tactics to demand an acceleration to the green energy transition, ranging from normative (e.g. legal marches), to non-normative (e.g. blocking roads). Contemporaneously, climate activists in western democracies have been confronted with repressive new laws criminalising disruptive protests. Meanwhile, the impact of differing activist tactics on non-activists remains underexplored in the literature, with mixed findings for the (dis)advantages of disruptive actions. This event features activist survey and experimental research conducted by Sunniva Davies-Rommetveit and Dr Nicole Tausch on the psychological antecedents to taking climate action in increasingly repressive contexts. The talk will firstly introduce data collected from the Extinction Rebellion UK mailing list, on the differing affective pathways to taking normative and non-normative collective action when perceiving repression. The talk will continue discussing experimental work on the impacts of repression and political effectiveness on protest intentions, which adds causal evidence to these findings. Finally, we will discuss future plans to build an international database assessing the best predictors of taking different types of climate action.