‘Emotional tasks’ crucial for climate success, says Quaker
Rosie Robison said it was critical that policies are designed ‘as if people matter’.
The social aspects of sustainability are crucial to progress in tackling climate change, a Quaker professor said last month. Yet around ninety per cent of funding – ‘certainly at the EU level’ – goes towards technological projects, not social ones, said Falmouth Friend Rosie Robison, in her inaugural professorial lecture.
The talk – titled ‘Sustainability: How to change the things we can’ – focused on the ‘social causes, impacts and solutions’ involved in climate work. With much of her research ‘advocating for the role of social sustainability and humanities in the design of sustainability policy’, Rosie Robison said it was critical that policies are designed ‘as if people matter’. She also explored why ‘the role of emotions in our responses to policy’ is ‘crucial in making progress’. This is often neglected, she added.
Focusing on her decades-long research, Rosie Robison described the ‘emotional tasks’ that are highly important in teams working on climate solutions. These include: ‘taking responsibility’; ‘being there to support people if something is not working’; ‘having an open door when people want to discuss challenges’; being ‘open-minded’ to what they bring; ‘recognising everyone’s contribution’; ‘recognising that people have lives outside the project’; ‘acting with integrity’; and ‘good communication’.
‘If we do not take care of these aspects, then we can be working and talking at the top, but not really recognising what might be going wrong underneath,’ she said, which can ‘disrupt’ the project.
Drawing on her research into teams working on low-carbon projects, Rosie also talked about the ‘emotional work tasks’ needed when ‘it wasn’t easy to do these things’. These were: ‘stepping outside our defensive boundaries’; ‘empathising despite stress’; ‘continuing in the face of lack of acknowledgement’; and ‘containing anxieties’. ‘These skills are crucial in trying to work together to achieve change,’ she said.
Deborah Mitchell, a climate campaigner from Falmouth Meeting, told the Friend: ‘The lecture touched on Rosie’s Quakerism and a number of Friends attended online. Rosie is a professor of Social Sustainability at Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge.’
The lecture on 6 December is available on YouTube.
