Research–practice blog: A project of inclusion?

Dr Anastasia Badder writes:

BELIEVE is now well underway.  We have spent these recent months hammering out details, filling in gaps in project thinking and planning, recruiting project staff and interns, and mapping out our theory of change.  The ToC is crucial, both for me as BELIEVE’s ethnographer and for the project as a whole; it is meant to summarise the change the project seeks and should then form the basis for all project planning and evaluation.  At a recent day-long workshop devoted to such theorizing, the central team* spent hours trying to pin down precisely what it is we are aiming to change, how, and for whom.  The discussion involved, among many other things, extensive brainstorming about intern expectations and the changes we hope to see in and for them. While there were things we disagreed about and debated, there were also ideas to which the group kept returning, offering an apparent red thread for BELIEVE’s work. 

Prominent across the team’s varied hopes for interns was the prospect of inclusion.  Over the course of our discussion, the team proposed that BELIEVE seeks for young people to be included in local climate solutions, for people of faith to be included in climate planning, for youth to be included in national climate action, for values to be included in climate decision-making. 

And I wondered, as the conversation continued to unfold along these lines, whether we might not be hoping hope for more.  And whether BELIEVE is fundamentally aimed at something beyond inclusion.  (At one point, I directly asked whether we might be seeking more, a suggestion which mostly went nowhere and which I did not raise again.  The murky waters of ethnography, collaboration, and steering remain a relational and conceptual challenge, as addressed in my last post.) 

The other side of inclusion?

Inclusion implies being brought into the fold.  In the case of BELIEVE, it implies being made space for in preexisting conceptions of nature, meanings and means of sustainability, and already-established environmental relations.  It further requires a specific kind of legibility and recognition.  Like tolerance (e.g. Brown 2012), inclusion is not a neutral practice.  One group or individual is made the object of inclusion and their inclusion in a particular space, whose terms and borders are set by the majority, might be (is likely to be) conditional on their assimilation, whether to a given narrative, set of values, way of being, or otherwise.  There is, Fenigsen (2021: 414) notes, “a duplicity in inclusion” in that it can enable new modes of commensuration, erasure, and ranking. Using a spelling bee as an example, Fenigsen (2021) explains that a spelling bee will always result in ranking competitors.  No matter the specifics of the competition, in order to be ranked one must first be included in the category of spellers.  Inclusion links the people involved, which enables a comparison in terms of their connecting qualities, which can then be ranked; when the focus is solely on bringing more spellers into the fold, it is unlikely that the nature of the competition will change.  In other words, Fenigsen (2021) argues, inclusion does not lead necessarily to equity, and equity is not promised if systems are not changed. 

Extrapolating from this example, we might query the aim of inclusion for interns in the “green sector” and/or climate decision-making and action.  In emphasizing inclusion, are we in essence asking for interns to find their way into a system that locates young people and religious people (and young religious people) at the bottom of a hierarchy of possible thinkers and actors of and for climate change mitigation? 

Similarly, if BELIEVE, following climate scientists (Hulme 2014), engineers (Allwood & Davison 2026), activists (Graeber 2019), and many others, is calling for transformation via a focus on values, how can this be achieved by inclusion?  Should we not be seeking to upend those prevailing notions, rather than to be included in them?  In seeking inclusion, are we risking that religion becomes yet another resource to be extracted?  Do we not hope that surfacing other-than-economic values alters the meaning and form of human-nature relations and therefore decision-making dynamics and outcomes? 

Is religion already included? 

What is more, inspired by Jackson’s (2020) recent work on science’s (anti)blackness, I suggest that religion is already often included in climate action spaces – as antithetical to environmental thought and earth care.  In fact, this assumed antipathy surfaced during the induction week for this year’s intern cohort.  While discussing connections between faith and environment, it was argued that “Evangelicals” are openly against sustainable practice based on the idea that the earth was made by G-d for human use.  And, anecdotally, in my experience of describing BELIEVE to colleagues in and beyond the academy, this kind of relationship is often the first thing people think of when religion and climate are brought together.  This discourse reiterates the typical juxtapositions of religious ways of being and reason, religion and science, religion and the secular rational, the traditional and the modern, and so on that together locate science and secular government as the only possible sources of climate change mitigation.  Those juxtapositions, I suggest, help disguise or at least make it easier to accept the idea that the same systems, policies, practices, and knowledge production processes that further environmental degradation, ecological disaster, and climate change will also provide solutions to those problems.  In other words, it is not that religion has been denied a place in the normative climate story, but that it has been placed very specifically in the interest of upholding that story. 

Further, by interpreting this as exclusion and calling for inclusion as its corrective, I wonder whether we set ourselves up to overlook alternative conceptions of environment and human–environment relations that emerge from religious lifeworlds.  Perhaps such otherwise relations are not always framed as critiques of the usual modes of climate action and sustainability initiatives.  Perhaps they are not focused on the terms of recognition set by those usual modes, which, to become legible to economic and measurement-driven climate spaces, tend to require a reframing of otherwise ways of being. (The category of "traditional ecological knowledge" (e.g. Cruikshank 2012) comes to mind as an example). And perhaps some religious communities are already exploring how religious ways of being and climate action sit together beyond the usual frames (and it seems they very much are; for some examples, see Badder 2023). 

Hoping for something more

At one point in the induction week, the interns were asked to share any fears they had for their year with BELIEVE.  A common anxiety revolved around the scale of their impact; they worried that they would not be able to instigate meaningful change or build a far-reaching campaign within a year.  We returned to these fears throughout our ToC discussion.  Our expectations, the team thought, seemed very different from intern expectations and some felt badly for the stress this must be causing the cohort: “that’s horrible, they think they’re supposed to change the whole society”, one remarked.  There was a concern that interns were thinking too big.  The worst action project is one that is not achievable, as the team reminded each other several times across the day. 

Yet, to my mind, what BELIEVE seeks is an enormous shift, one that goes well beyond inclusion.  In its grandest visions, BELIEVE is about (re)building relations with nature, bringing other-than-economic values to the fore, and taking young people as current leaders of climate action.  These are, potentially, transformative changes.  In their most realized forms, they ask us to not only find institutional openings that enable us to shape climate decision-making and mitigation planning (see Arciniega 2019 on organizational inclusion) but to reimagine what those spaces could look like, how they articulate with other spaces of climate action, and from where and whom the driving force for climate action emerges.  We are hoping, in other words, not only for an expansion of the influences on climate decision making, but a fundamental shift in the assemblage of climate action. 

This is indeed a lot to put on the shoulders of four interns.  But we are not asking them to go it alone.  Nor of course do we at all imagine this shift will be a fait accompli by the end of BELIEVE’s four-and-a-half-year run. 

Climate change is an enormous moral problem that exceeds the bounds of the knowable (O’Reilly et al 2020) and which is experienced at different temporal and spatial scales.  BELIEVE responds to the fact that market-logic and economic value frames have also penetrated mitigation efforts across scales, to their detriment.  We therefore do not seek inclusion in relations and activities informed by those same frames, but a transformation of them that, we hope, also reaches across scales, beginning from the locally-grounded and community-led.    

The draft Theory of Change will be shared with cohort 1 mentors later this month, and workshopped with the BELIEVE Advisory Group in October, before a final version is confirmed. It is in the nature of these periodic blog posts that my reflections can themselves be an agent of change.

Notes

* By “central team”, I refer to the core staff at F&BF and myself. This does not include regionally-located interns nor wider delivery partners. I was also lone representative of Cambridge on this occasion. [Return to reading.]

Bibliography

Luzilda Carrillo Arciniega (2019) What does diversity and inclusion mean? Anthropology News 60 https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.1090

Julian Allwood & Andrew Davison (2026) Promise the Earth: A Safe Climate in Good Faith. Cambridge University Press.

Anastasia Badder (2023) Water in/and religious relations: A Cambridge study. Report for the project, Water efficiency in faith and diverse communities. Cambridge Interfaith Programme. www.interfaith.cam.ac.uk

Wendy Brown (2012) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press.

Julie Cruikshank (2012) Are glaciers ‘good to think with’? Recognising Indigenous Environmental Knowledge. Anthropological Forum 22.3 https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.707972

Janina Fenigsen (2021) Scaling language boundaries: Inclusion, commensurability, and a Caribbean coloniality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31 https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12348

David Graeber (2019) If politicians can’t face climate change, Extinction Rebellion will. New York Times May 1, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/extinction-rebellion-climate-change.html

Mike Hulme (2014) Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering. Polity Press.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020). Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press.

Jessica O’Reilly et al (2020) Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities. Annual Review of Anthropology 49 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-043113