Working groups meet regularly and receive funding to coordinate these research efforts. To join a CSSN working group, CSSN members can contact the working group chairs listed at the top of each page.
This working group will bring together scholars from different disciplines, methodologies, and geographical locations to grapple with questions of discourse, power, and climate politics. We will analyze the role of media and other institutions in amplifying patterns of discourse that impede comprehensive and equitable responses to the climate crisis.
For over three decades, there has been a well-documented effort to obstruct climate action through the promulgation of climate misinformation. Its institutional makeup has been the topic of sporadic academic research. This working group aims to conduct a global study of this network.
Global South countries across the globe have markedly different endowments and dependencies on different natural resources. This working group will bring together scholars from different disciplines, methodologies, and geographical locations to focus on patterns of obstruction, exploitation, and repression in climate struggles in the Global South.
The Geoengineering Working Group of the Climate Social Science Network brings together scholars focused on the politics of geoengineering technologies. These technologies pose a range of novel questions for climate policy and climate justice. This working group aims to analyze and challenge the ways in which geoengineering technologies are being or could be deployed to enable climate delay and obstruction.
There is an expanding global effort to hold corporations and governments accountable for their actions in failing to address climate change. This working group focuses on the research related to the ongoing effort to uncover institutional actions to obstruct climate action and the nature of climate litigation efforts.
Stalemate at the federal level has led the 50 U.S. states to innovate climate policy, but initial gains are being increasingly resisted by private interests who stand to lose with the transition away from fossil fuels. This working group brings together researchers with diverse approaches to diverse states to develop comparative insights and improve methodology.
This working group will bring together scholars from different disciplines, methodologies, and geographical locations to grapple with questions of greenwashing and the role of PR in driving climate change. We will analyze the role and strategies of PR, corporates, NGOs, governments and other institutions in amplifying patterns of delaying real actions to the climate crisis.
Fossil fuel companies have joined other special interest groups in influencing academic research and other activities at universities in the United States and other Anglophone settler societies such as Canada and Australia. This Working Group examines the scope of this influence, its direct consequences for researchers, universities, and knowledge production, and indirect consequences for democratic governance and climate change action.
It is increasingly clear that net-zero is being used by different actors in ways that lead to delay or obstruction through ambiguity and deliberate misinformation. The CSSN working group on “net-zero” aims to track, explain, and analyze how net-zero relates to climate delay and obstruction, particularly the associated complexity and ambiguity involving policy, finance, and projects, as well as anti-net-zero partisanship from the right.
Continuing business-as-usual in emissions-intensive food production is not an option. Improving understanding of how agriculture, fisheries, and aquaculture companies are obstructing meaningful policy reforms is necessary to shape effective strategies to combat them. This CSSN working group brings together scholars from different disciplines to analyze the role and strategies of agribusiness in delaying climate action.
This working group identifies, synthesises and promotes effective strategies and tools to overcome climate obstruction across different sectors and scales, bridging scholarship on obstruction with research focused on advancing a just transition. We do so by developing, collecting, and sharing knowledge from across CSSN and by conducting original research about diverse strategies and efforts to counteract obstruction.
The non-democratic states differ in their sizes, geographical vulnerabilities, economic priorities and a range of social problems but they all have in common a noticeable restrictive presence of the state in all areas of life including climate change related policies and civil society actions (or a lack of them). The group’s missions are to explore the ways authoritarian and non-democratic states impact climate obstruction and to understand whether the political system itself can be an agent of obstruction.
The Nationalism and Climate Obstruction Working Group focuses and coordinates transdisciplinary research at the intersection of nationalism and climate policy and politics. The working group pays particular attention to the way nationalism informs and permeates the institutions and policies of countries whose populations are, and will be increasingly, affected by climate impacts.
