Climate victims, villains or both? Children’s narratives of environmental vulnerability and responsibility in everyday life

At its crudest, climate change as a ‘master narrative’ creates climate ‘victims’ and ‘villains’ – those seen as affected by climate change-driven vulnerability and those seen as contributing to the processes driving this vulnerability. In this crude narrative, an individual’s positioning as a climate ‘victim’ or ‘villain’ can be as much about where they live – their local and global positioning - as the things they do. This raises questions of agency in the ways that individuals make sense of their positioning and act accordingly.

In this paper I draw case studies from multi-method PhD research with 24 families in the UK and India, with varying access to resources and exposures to environmental events. I am writing up my analyses using a case-based narrative approach and use these analyses to show some of the different ways that 11-12 year old children in these families narrate their lives and practices in relation to perceived global and local environmental vulnerabilities and responsibilities. I seek to trouble binarised understandings of climate ‘victims’ and ‘villains’, particularly those linked to children’s positioning in the Global North and South, instead exploring how narratives of environmental responsibility and vulnerability are dynamic, negotiated and relational.

(Abstract on p.274 of conference programme).