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Welcome to the companion website for the upcoming Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s private program, Climate Justice and Energy Transition in Massachusetts Cities and Towns. We are very excited for this event, taking place on June 12-13, 2025, and we look forward to seeing everyone soon.  Please feel free to explore this website.  We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed. Thank you.
 

Executive Summary

The social impacts of climate adaptation and mitigation depend upon climate risks and community resilience. Both risk and resilience direct attention to the local climatic risks and the local capacities of communities to adapt to climate change fast and slow. How do communities on the frontlines of climate adaptation and mitigation mobilize to confront climate challenges, in context of other challenges? Are there ways to advance climate justice and other forms of justice simultaneously? What changes are needed to political institutions to build community capacities? What are the relational processes required to build trust between seemingly increasingly distrustful communities (e.g., scientists and publics, and publics and policymakers)? We propose to convene a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar of social scientists and community advocates to explore the radical idea that social processes can accelerate adaptation and mitigation through just energy transition in Massachusetts communities. Specifically, our seminar engages social scientists and non-academics to explore the ideas of (a) landscapes and place-based research on Cape Ann, (b) rethinking scales of governance to address risk and foster resilience, and (c) designing inclusive social processes to speed energy transition and strengthen resilience.

Narrative

The social impacts of climate adaptation and mitigation depend upon climate risks and community resilience. Both risk and resilience direct attention to the local climatic risks and the local capacities of communities to adapt to climate change fast and slow. And these climate problems are not the only problems people face. Democratic decay, distrust in science, populist politics, environmental racism, overdose deaths, gun violence, and economic precarity are just a few of the other social problems requiring attention, mobilization, and policy innovation.

How do communities on the frontlines of climate adaptation and mitigation mobilize to confront climate challenges, in context of other challenges? Are there ways to advance climate justice and other forms of justice simultaneously? What changes are needed to political institutions to build community capacities? What are the relational processes required to build trust between seemingly increasingly distrustful communities (e.g., scientists and publics, and publics and policymakers)?

We propose to convene a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar of social scientists and community advocates to explore the radical idea that social processes can accelerate adaptation and mitigation through just energy transition in Massachusetts communities.

Background

Energy transition blurs the boundary between climate mitigation and adaptation. Moving from fossil fuels to renewables and other less carbon-intensive forms of energy is essential to reducing carbon emissions and achieving climate justice. At the same time, new forms of energy production and transmission shape societal adaptation to climate change, given the necessity of energy for modern social life. For instance, renewable energy potential from the sun, wind, and water changes as the climate changes, and so new sites of energy production and transmission need to be adaptive. Energy transition also entails a large-scale shift in employment, requiring labor-market adaptation. Climate justice may be impossible without just energy transitions.

Research on energy transition – and especially its implementation dimension – very frequently but often vaguely alludes to “stakeholders.” Engaged scholarship can contribute to energy transition research through the application of sociological concepts and methods to understand more fully who these groups are (e.g., Viterna 2013). In confronting energy policy, the concept of stakeholder mobilization is helpful for understanding how stakeholders such as unions, energy executives, community organizations, and politicians may work to promote, delay, or obstruct the energy transition (Carroll, 2021; Huber 2022; Quadagno, 2004; Stokes, 2020). We must understand who comprises various stakeholder groups, their interests and concerns, and the power and cultural differentials amongst them.

Hochschild (2016) demonstrates how culture can serve as a barrier to energy transition. In examining communities in Louisiana that suffer from toxic pollution yet resist environmental regulation, Hochschild found that the high proportion of American fossil fuels produced in Louisiana served as a source of pride amongst the regions’ residents, who believe that they are looked down upon by other Americans. Many also believed that, by providing jobs that didn’t require a college education, energy corporations allowed them to achieve their full potential. This, in turn, fostered a strong sense of attachment to the industry. At the same time, however, those who felt loyal to industry were openly suspicious of and hostile to the government. In the eyes of these residents, the government erodes community ties, stunts their upward mobility through affirmative action policies, and is ineffective in protecting them from toxic pollution.

Communities vary in their adaptive capacity for many reasons. We think two mechanisms— fiscal capacity and what we call “collective social resources”— link the economic consequences of climate change and energy transition to community risk and resilience. Fiscal capacity refers to the resources that are available to local governments for funding local institutions and assisting residents in overcoming the challenges of transitions. We use collective social resources to refer to the broad set of sociological structures, characteristics, and processes at the community level that shape the responses of non-governmental actors to transitions. Much of what we know about these resources stems from research on the determinants of “collective efficacy”, defined as “social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good” (Sampson et al 1997: 918). Social cohesion comes from networks among people, and those networks are formed in and through local organizations and other places where people live their lives outside of work.

Motivation

Climate change is arguably humanity’s biggest existential threat, spanning scales from the global to the regional to the local, and challenging communities’ capacities to make difficult decisions today that would address the long-ahead future effects of long-ago past causes. Climate science convincingly demonstrates these cause-effect relations, and goes a long way toward identifying and inventing technological solutions to technical problems, but reaches its limits when confronting the social challenges of democratic governance, cultural change, and climate justice. These social, political, and cultural challenges are all central to climate risk and resilience in Massachusetts.

Engaged social science – collaborative research including sociologists, political scientists, historians, public health scholars, climate activists, and community advocates – holds the potential to identify the social processes that will be required to achieve climate justice. Currently, Massachusetts communities are among those on the frontlines of climate adaptation and energy transition as climate mitigation. For example, the Cape Ann Climate Resilience Collaborative since 2021 has pursued a series of studies and meetings to build capacity to anticipate, prepare for, manage, and recover from hurricanes and other extreme weather events.

Specific Ideas to be Explored

1. Landscapes for Climate Adaptation: Place-Based Research and the Case of Cape Ann

The climate crisis is now readily evident, rather than a future possibility. After decades of failing to mitigate our impacts, we must now adapt to survive in the context of a rapidly changing climate. Adaptation requires enlightened planning and reconceptualization of our urban environments. The engineering solutions inherited from the nineteenth century are obsolete. These single-purpose civil-engineering systems are brittle and prone to catastrophic failure. Climate adaptation demands that we replace those obsolete systems with landscapes for human adaptation. This process demands the best available scientific knowledge, experiments, and evidence in support of projects supporting landscape adaptation. On these topics, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Office for Urbanization has developed a range of place-based scenario planning projects with a particular focus on the coastal communities of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

The future of Cape Ann, and coastal communities like it, will be shaped, in large part, by the effects of climate change. These effects will reach well beyond sea level rise and increased storm events. They will ultimately challenge and disrupt the housing, transportation, public services, and economic health of these communities. In light of these challenges, the Office for Urbanization has joined with local organizations — the Cape Ann Climate Coalition, Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation, the City of Gloucester, and the Town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, to begin to envision a sustainable future for the region. In recognition of the reality that Cape

Ann’s interwoven ecologies, geographies, and economies transcend municipal boundaries, the scope of the project includes the entire region: Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester-by-the-Sea, and Essex.

This study includes a range of scales of investigation: territorial, regional, municipal (public infrastructure and public realm), and individual (private ownership). The project has identified unique challenges, opportunities, resources, and recommendations relevant to the City of Gloucester, and Towns of Rockport, Essex, and Manchester-by-the-Sea. The project recommendations include reference to the relevant local, regional, state, and/or federal resources or agencies implicated in such changes over time. It further identifies recommendations and roles for private citizens, the business community, and civic organizations, among others. Many of these recommendations are now being implemented, making 2024 an ideal time to reflect on the progress and explore lessons learned.

2. Rethinking Scales of Governance to Address Risk and Foster Resilience

One element of our project is a concern with which scales of governance are best suited for mitigating climate risk and fostering resilience. Governance as a concept not only assumes a relationality between citizens and representative authorities, electoral or otherwise; it also offers an opportunity to frame questions about constructive action in the context of an ethical framework where equity and justice are as relevant even as is the introduction of technical solutions. As we address climate-related ecological challenges facing communities, we must think carefully about which territorial scale(s) of action will be best suited for mobilizing sufficient human, financial, and administrative resources to remediate or compensate for losses associated with climate disasters. We must also ask whether certain territorial scales of action will exclude versus include relevant stakeholders in the governance process.

Among the questions we will engage are the relative contributions of actions at the neighborhood, city, state, regional or federal scale to constructively addressing climate change and the ecological crises that it has produced. It may be that certain scales are better positioned for adaptation versus mitigation. Likewise, some scales will be more or less constrained by electoral mandates and bureaucratic procedures, and thus and in a better (or worse) position to build new forms of decision-making, engagement, and solidarity in delimited territories based on shared interests. Finally, we will seek to assess the positive or negative spillover effects between action at one scale of governance an yet another.

The scalar mismatches between climate risk, community resilience, and democratic governance grow in complexity considering that local communities, states, and the federal government all rely on tax revenue to support a range of public services. In many places, public finances are substantially supported by taxes on the extraction, processing, and usage of fossil fuels. Eliminating these tax revenues without thinking through how to replace them will have large local impacts. Renewable energy sources, and the use of electricity for things like transportation, are slowly replacing fossil fuels. Figuring out how – and where, and at what scales – these new energies might feed public finances is urgent.

3. Inclusive Social Processes Speed Energy Transition and Strengthen Resilience

In Gloucester the climate community has been using sociologist Damon Centola’s book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen as something of a bible. Our own ongoing research on energy transition, as well as Centola’s Change, identify inclusive social processes as pathways to the sorts of large-scale shifts required in energy transitions and climate resilience. How can we envision such processes?

In many communities in Massachusetts, fishing metaphors make sense. For instance, Gloucester has operationalized Centola’s work as a fishnet of connections, with bridges between the knots, as being superior to a message coming from just one group in the center. The Cape Ann Climate Coalition is building explicit bridges to the following fairly defined constituencies in Gloucester:

the fishing industry, the arts and culture groups, faith groups, neighborhood organizations, downtown residents, environmental justice communities, conservationists, historians, Sicilian and Portuguese groups, and other immigrant groups.

The goal is to develop a strong “fishnet” of relationships that raise the level of empathy, familiarity with others, and commitment to ultimately what will be needed: difficult choices made and transformative actions taken. Choices like these are classic governing-the-commons­type decisions. Choices like how much money to spend on the energy transition or climate adaptation, public good vs. private property rights, managed retreat, land use for ecosystems or solar fields or new housing.

Why Radcliffe

A Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar is the best venue to explore these ideas because the Radcliffe Institute prioritizes engaged scholarship, facilitates conversation and exchange across disciplinary boundaries, and maintains an energetic culture of intellectual innovation and risk-taking. While such engagement promises the kind of intellectual brokerage that leads to better ideas, there are reasons why such brokerage is required. Academics speak their own languages. Community activists have pressing problems to solve. Policy timelines mismatch publication schedules. With its space, its people, and its material resources, Radcliffe offers an ideal place and an ideal cultural context for collective goal-setting, the expression of vulnerability in question-asking, and an awareness of historical context.

Co-Proposers

Jason Beckfield, climate sociologist and energy transition scholar

Diane Davis, expert on urban governance and governance case studies

Valerie Nelson, Radcliffe alumna, Cape Ann Climate Coalition

Dustin Tingley, expert on energy transition

Charles Waldheim, expert on landscape, ecology, and urbanism