Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society II (CliCCS II)”(2026-2032)

In social science research, agency is generally understood as the “temporarily constructed engagement by actors” within structural environments, which reproduces and transforms these structures in response to specific problems. Agency is a collective phenomenon. Given the planetary nature of the problem and the global dominance of high-carbon ways of life, exerting agency vis-à-vis climate change represents unique challenges of power, scale and temporality. Assessing climate agency therefore begins from a paradox of societal and political inaction despite accumulating knowledge about ecological and climate destruction: the increase in climate action contrasts with a persistent lack of climate agency, understood as the capacity of societies to intentionally shape climate futures and realize desired ones, such as global deep decarbonization.

The project lays the foundations of a theoretically informed and empirically grounded understanding of climate agency by developing methods to assess its constitution, dynamics, and effects.

We define climate agency as temporarily constructed societal engagement with climate-relevant social dynamics and structures, which have the ability to shape climate futures.
 We ask: How do individuals and collectives build agency in the face of anthropogenic climate change, which forms does this agency take, and under which conditions does it successfully shape the plausibility of desired climate futures?
This question is derived against the recurring finding that an increase in societal ‘activity’ does not necessarily equal ‘agency’ capable of driving social change. We hence aim to identify what constitutes, enables and constrains climate agency and how this affects the realization of desirable climate futures. To this end, we define three research objectives:

1.    Developing an analytical framework to study varieties of climate agency.
2.    Mapping and analyzing climate agency at different empirical sites of global engagement.
3.    Identifying conditions for the densification of climate agency and for its effects on shaping the plausibility space of climate futures.

These research objectives are operationalized in three work packages:

Work package 1: Common Analytical Framework
Lead: A. Wiener

We focus on agency-types beyond the classical focus on policy entrepreneurs, advocacy or discourse coalitions and epistemic communities, to include forms of agency spanning temporal and spatial scales including networks of globalization from below, communities of practice, and new subject positions emerging in global discourses and nascent collective identities with distinct climate-related habitual and emotional features. As agency ‘materialises through contestation’, we expect to find types of agency that enact different climate futures, including transformative agency striving towards decarbonization and climate justice; adaptive agency aiming to build resilience in a warming world; and reactive agency attempting to protect the socioeconomic status-quo through denial, polarization or segregation.

Work package 2: Exploring and Mapping Climate Agency
Lead: S. C. Aykut

As agency takes different forms and evolves within broader geopolitical, epistemic, economic and social orders, our cases cover a variety of categorial (i.e., individual, collective, non-human), substantive (i.e., coalitions, networks, assemblages) and structural (i.e., cross-sectoral, intergenerational, planetary) dimensions of agency. They examine the role of ‘climate moods’ in building emotional agency among negotiators and activists at UN climate conferences, of experts and ‘epistemic agency’ in shaping policy preferences in parliamentary debates, of global treaties and transnational litigation networks in building ‘legal agency’ for individual, collective, and non-human litigants across national jurisdictions, of consultants acting as boundary agents and ‘translators’ between firms and climate science, of climate-related advocacy networks in newsrooms and counter-information sites, and of near-term, at most decadal prediction narratives, in multi-scalar adaptation policies.

Work package 3: Densification of Action into Agency
Lead: S. C. Aykut and A. Wiener

This research identifies and categorises conditions under which climate action ‘densifies’ into climate agency, and under which different forms of climate agency successfully enact desired climate futures. It develops a typology with reference to organisational conditions of agency-formation, drawing on ‘global’ (i.e., structural) patterns and ‘local’ (i.e., site-based) rules of engagement. The typology is expected to identify core dimensions of global climate agency including, for example, agency at the boundary of distinct sites of climate engagement (e.g., translation, communication) and their expected effects (e.g., policies, networks, treaties, judgements, norms).

Further information about CLiCCS II, participating researchers and institutions can be found on the project's official website.