Thammasat University students who are interested in political science, history, cultural studies, economics, business, education, sociology, cultural and social anthropology, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
Haste: The slow politics of climate urgency is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/60320
The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of climate change activism.
The publisher’s description of the book notes:
What does it mean politically to construct climate change as a matter of urgency? We are certainly running out of time to stop climate change. But perhaps this particular understanding of urgency could be at the heart of the problem. When in haste, we make more mistakes, we overlook things, we get tunnel vision. Here we make the case for a ‘slow politics of urgency’. Rather than rushing and speeding up, the sustainable future is arguably better served by us challenging the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. Transformation to meet the climate challenge requires multiple temporalities of change, speeding up certain types of change processes but also slowing things down. While recognizing the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, Haste directs attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in climate and sustainability politics. It addresses several key issues on climate urgency: How do we accommodate concerns that are undermined by the politics of urgency, such as participation and justice? How do we act upon the urgency of the climate challenge without reproducing the problems that speeding up of social processes has brought? What do the slow politics of urgency look like in practice? Divided into 23 short and accessible chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars from different disciplines, Haste tackles a major problem in contemporary climate change research and offers creative perspectives on pathways out of the climate emergency.
The book’s introduction states:
Climate change now tends to be talked about in terms of pressure for time. Climate emergency declarations in cities and parliaments worldwide stress the need for urgent action to avoid irreversible environmental change. At the same time, the actual politics of the sustainability transformation remain a slow affair. Despite the impressive proclamations of new, ground-breaking policies and technological innovations promising a sustainable future, concrete action on the ground is implemented far too slowly to make any substantive impact. Climate action in the present appears haphazard and ephemeral, postponed by social and technological inertias. Action is held back both by deliberate politics of delay and by legitimate justice concerns. The increasingly turbulent climate, causing wildfires and other disruptions, is not met with the urgent action needed. The central challenge facing urban policymakers and activists is now how to integrate rapid climate action with the need to accommodate justice in complex and contested transformations. In other words, there are good reasons to call for more haste in the politics of transformation towards sustainability. In one sense, we are clearly running out of time. But in a different, and perhaps more profound sense, this particular understanding of time – the need to speed up the transition, to change faster, of urgency of action – could be at the heart of the problem. Perhaps haste is precisely what we do not need. When in haste, we make more mistakes, we overlook things, we get tunnel vision. Instead, is there a case for what we call a ‘slow politics of urgency’? Rather than rushing and speeding up, maybe the sustainable future is better served by us challenging the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. Transformation to meet the climate challenge requires multiple temporalities of change, speeding up certain types of change processes but also slowing things down. That is the argument of this book, where we explore ‘the slow politics of urgency’ around climate change. While recognising the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, we want to direct attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in this field of political practice. There are several critical issues on urgency that need addressing. What does it mean politically to construct climate change as a matter of urgency? How do we accommodate concerns that are undermined by the politics of urgency, such as participation and justice? How do we act upon the urgency of the climate challenge without reproducing the problems that speeding up of social processes has brought? In short, what do the slow politics of urgency look like in practice? The city is for us a critical lens for thinking through the ways in which rapid and radical change is made possible, lived and challenged. Many of the chapters in this book use the urban as a context for their discussions of climate politics. Urban-scale actions are widely seen as critical to meeting the global sustainability challenge. At the same time, cities are contradictory creatures. They are sites of infrastructures and spatial layouts that survive centuries, as well as sites of rapid transformations that change landscapes almost overnight. They are epicentres of socio-economic divides, with rapid urbanisation leading to both the proliferation of high carbon lifestyles and increasing precarity. As addressed by chapters in the book, cities are sites of both gradual and incremental change, as well as short-term experimentation and protest action. They illustrate well the interplay of the different temporalities of change, often occurring simultaneously in particular sites. By investigating the ways in which cities are also firmly situated in time, we can shed light on the different temporalities of the sustainability transformation.
The contributions gathered in this book respond to this challenge of haste by critically assessing opportunities and risks connected to rapid sustainability action. In different ways, they pick up the tensions between different tempos of politics and change, the relationship between experimental interventions and longer-term change, and the implications of different future imaginaries and emergency politics in the present. In this Introduction we will discuss the perspectives and arguments they bring to this discussion of the slow politics of urgency. But first, we will provide a conceptual foundation by elaborating on the temporal dimensions of transformation underpinning this book project.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)