Competing Climate Cultures in Germany: Variations in the Collective Denying of Responsibility and Efficacy (Soziologie der Nachhaltigkeit)

Despite frequent protests and abounding discussions about the subject, climate action measures to counter human-made climate change have so far remained largely ineffective. By identifying profound climate-cultural differences, Sarah Kessler offers an explanation to this issue and shows that conventional assumptions of an implicit consensus on the need to prioritise climate action should be reconsidered. She uncovers climate-cultural variations in (implicit and explicit) denial of climate change and thus challenges existing approaches that treat the German public as a unified entity waiting to be activated by the right kind of rationally convincing information.

Sarah Kessler (Dr.) is a social scientist at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. She obtained her doctoral degree at the Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich, Germany. She works on topics spanning environmental sociology, sustainability research, practice theory, science communication and digital ethnography. Currently, she investigates group-specific societal receptions of climate change, climate-cultural diversity and issues of responsibility, efficacy and knowledge regarding climate protection.