Individualism, Structuralism, and Climate Change

ABSTRACT

Scholars, journalists, and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern choices individuals can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g. eating less meat). The latter concern changes to institutions, laws, and other social structures. These two approaches are often framed as oppositional, representing a mutually exclusive forced choice between alternative routes to decarbonization. After presenting representative samples of this oppositional framing of individual and structural approaches in environmental communication, we identify four problems with oppositional thinking and propose five ways to conceive of individual and structural reform as symbiotic and interdependent.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural change
• individual action
• mitigation
• decarbonization

Acknowledgements

For their extremely helpful and generous feedback on this project, the authors wish to thank Zeynep Altinay, Corwin Aragon, Donal Carbaugh, Tovar Cerulli, Eugene Chislenko, Steve Depoe, Katherine Gasdaglis, Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Guy Grossman, Sally Haslanger, Andrew Iliadis, Robert O. Keohane, Ewan Kingston, Neil Levy, Sunny Lie, Leigh Raymond, Joshua Rottman, Samy Sekar, Gregg Sparkman, and Jason Turcotte. We are also grateful to participants of the Columbia Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Workshop, Group for Empirical Approaches to Morality and Society, Philosophy and the Climate Crisis conference hosted by Philosophers for Sustainability, Workshop on Individual and Structural Change at the CUNY Graduate Center, Yurtfest 2021, Cal Poly Pomona Ethics, Environment, and Society event, and students in Michael Brownstein's spring 2021 seminar, “Climate Change and Social Change.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Council of Learned Societies.