Catherine Walker

Telling 'moral tales'? Family narratives of responsible privilege and environmental concern in India and the UK

Contemporary discussions of climate change response frequently emphasise individual moral responsibility, but little is known about how environmental messages are taken up or resisted in everyday practices. This paper examines how families negotiate the moral narratives and identity positions associated with environmental responsibility. It focuses on families living in relatively affluent circumstances in England and south-east India to consider the ways in which the families construct their understandings of environment and take up identities as morally responsible. Our analysis focuses on a subsample of case studies involved in the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Family Lives and the Environment study, within the NOVELLA Node, using a multimethod qualitative approach with families of children aged between 12 and 14 years. This paper focuses on interviews with 10 of the 24 families in the sample, all of whom (in both India and the UK) discussed environmental concerns within moral narratives of the responsibilities of relative privilege. Findings highlight the potential of cross-world research to help theorise the complex and economic and cultural specificity of a particular morally charged framing of environmental concern, addressing the (dis)connections between moral tales of responsible privilege and individual and collective accounts of family practices.

Embodying ‘the Next Generation’: children’s everyday environmental activism in India and England

ABSTRACT The symbolic evocation of ‘the next generation’ might be considered as valuable in buttressing calls for concerted public and political action on climate change, whilst assigning to children a unique identity and role in engendering sustainable transitions. Yet does an identity that is in essence equated with futurity stifle possibilities for children’s own actions in the present, and conflict with policy expectations that children can be ‘agents of (pro-environmental) change’? Drawing on multi-method doctoral research carried out with children (aged 11–14) and their families in varying socio-economic contexts in India and England, this paper considers the use and utility of generational identities in prompting environmental concern and explores how generationally framed imaginaries of childhood feature in children’s and family narratives of everyday environmental activism. Building on theoretical arguments of generational interdependence and ethics of care, the paper argues for greater recognition of children’s actual and potential contributions to engendering sustainable futures, whilst drawing attention to the ways in which children’s agency to act on environmental knowledge is supported by – and interdependent with – that of adult actors, not least parents.