Gavin Sullivan
Who resists the future? The role of reactionary orientation and collective emotions in opposing recognition of a climate emergency
Contact at: gavin.sullivan@ipu-berlin.de
As Kim Stanley Robinson (2020) explores in his fictional account (鈥淭he ministry for the future鈥�) of possible collective, international responses to climate change in the near future, vested interests and collective identity-dependent (often national) stances contribute to resistance towards attempts to address climate change in the present. Support for a New Green Deal framework to COVID-19 recovery and recognition of a climate change emergency are two recent political examples that show how the future is no longer conceived as a distant, unpredictable possibility, but instead can and should be changed through future-focused thinking, feeling and action. Building on insights from political and social psychological analyses of reactionary political orientations, this paper outlines a theoretical model of resistance to progressive climate change policies which combines work on political reactionism with concepts of collective emotions and explores evidence for related environmental and contextual determinants of support for 鈥渃hange backwards鈥�. Results from the second wave of a two-wave survey of English citizens conducted in 2020 are used to highlight the factors that predict resistance to future-focused climate policies. Practical suggestions are made for attempts to potentially engage with citizens who might actually have strongly ambivalent feelings about the past that are preventing full consideration of the needs of future generations (i.e., they are not simply suffering from collective narcissism nor experiencing a na茂ve collective nostalgia).
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