Cluster 2

Climate change is a major challenge for social cohesion, as increasingly extreme weather and disastrous weather events put pressure on our natural habitats, food and water supplies, and living practices. Climate change is already driving significant migration and fuelling conflicts over resources throughout the world. On a global scale, this implies that people need to move or flee due to climate change. As a consequence, social relations are disrupted and people arrive at places where they have few relations. On a local scale, people dispute the appropriate mitigation or adaptation behaviour to cope with climate change. Such disputes can be so strong that they destroy relations between people, reducing interpersonal connections and eroding trust in institutions that propose certain measures. Therefore, mitigating climate change is essential for maintaining social cohesion. Furthermore, the process of addressing climate change relies on rapid social change, which requires significant cooperation. Yet the process of addressing climate change itself brings challenges to social cohesion; in turn, breakdowns in social cohesion threaten our ability to respond adequately to the climate problem. Mitigating climate change calls for a rapid transition towards new energy sources to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Adapting to the warming that is already taking place requires adopting new ways of life. Part of the challenge is to maintain and enhance social cohesion during a wide-ranging transformation of norms, social institutions and regulatory frameworks to support the needed social changes.
At the same time, the problem extends to our information environment. Fossil fuel interests are deliberately driving disinformation and influence campaigns designed to undermine social cohesion and slow down collective action on climate mitigation. This cluster aims to understand the mechanisms underlying threats to social cohesion arising from climate change and to devise and propose possible solutions.

Three overarching questions are:
1. Under which conditions do people recognize the problem of climate change and act?
2. Which individual-level and contextual mechanisms help achieve cooperative behaviour and practices related to climate change while maintaining social cohesion?
3. Which contextual and individual factors impact the nexus between social cohesion and cooperative behaviour that addresses climate change issues?

Question 1 focuses on the relation between beliefs and acting and question 2 adds the social network dynamics to the picture, while question 3 adds additional circumstances, including institutions and historical context that might strengthen or weaken some of the relations in Figure 1.

The three PhD projects will focus on these questions and the links between beliefs about climate change, cooperation in addressing climate issues and social cohesion (and intergroup relations). The projects aim to inform each other and develop overarching theoretical arguments on how these dynamics are interconnected.

Many aspects of the social context are relevant here, such as social networks but also norms on appropriate behaviour in the light of climate change and institutional regulations on what kind of behaviour is allowed or financial incentives to adapt climate-related behaviours. Social networks are important for spreading information and behavioural influence mechanisms, but they are also part of the social fabric that might break if people disagree on the truth or the desired societal and individual changes, harming social cohesion. Norm variations might relate to differences in normative expectations that can affect cooperation on environmentally friendly behaviour, which in turn may strengthen trust between people and thus cohesion. Institutional regulations and regimes can promote environmentally friendly behaviour. However, they might also inhibit searching for collective solutions and could be perceived as unfair in terms of how costs and benefits of societal changes are distributed, nurturing distrust between groups and citizens as well towards institutions. For example, top-down or bottom-up approaches can be more or less effective, depending on contextual features. In this cluster, we want to study the multilevel interdependent dynamics from microlevel psychological mechanisms linked to both cohesion and cooperative behaviour, through mesolevel network influences and macrolevel institutional context, including historical and global south contexts.