Transitioning Societies:
Crisis, Art and Social Change
Dr Catherine Butler
c.butler@exeter.ac.uk
@drcbutler

Outline
• Opportunities and challenges
for achieving transitions
• Research Project – responses to
the winter floods 2013/14
(Somerset)
• Role the arts can play in
meeting challenges

Climate Change and Transitions
“Warming of the climate system is
unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of
the observed changes are unprecedented
over decades to millennia. The atmosphere
and ocean have warmed the amounts of
snow and ice have diminished, sea level has
risen, and the concentrations of
greenhouse gases have increased”.
“Most aspects of climate change will
persist for many centuries even if
emissions of CO2 are stopped. This
represents a substantial climate change
commitment created by past, present
and future emissions of CO2”

Climate Change and Transitions
• Climate change intangible, viewed as a distant and
future problem, difficulties in engendering changes in
ways of living associated with lack of direct localised
experience (Adam, 1998; Butler, 2008; Whitmarsh,
2008; Ungar, 2000)
• “analysts have pointed to the gulf that exists for most
people between the familiar preoccupations of
everyday life and an abstract future of climate chaos…
[meaning] people struggle to maintain the ethical
connections necessary to create imperatives for
change”. (Shirani, Butler et al, 2013)

Crisis as Opportunity
“…if the environment is experienced most intensely when
it connects to the personal domain of everyday life, this
points to a need to use people’s concern for themselves,
their families and localities as points of connection for
the wider ‘global’ environmental issues”
(Macnaghten, 2003)

Crisis as Opportunity?
• Surveys have shown increased concern about climate change and higher
expressions of willingness to take action amongst members of the public that
have been flooded (Spence et al. 2011; Capstick et al. 2015)
• Research has found that experiences of flooding did not result in differences of
understanding and response with regard to climate change (Whitmarsh, 2008)
• Studies also indicate that though concern about climate change is evident
amongst those affected by flooding, this does not automatically follow from
such experiences, and that implications for change are not straight forward
(Butler and Pidgeon, 2009; COIN, 2014)
• Questions remain about whether and how experiences of extreme weather
events consistent with climate projections could be important to action on
climate change

2013/14 Winter Floods Research
Research focuses specifically on processes of change
following extreme weather events to better understand
challenges and opportunities for change
Qualitative Longitudinal Research
Interviewing and
surveying members of
the public affected by
flooding (n=31)
Interviewing stakeholders
with professional roles
related to flooding (n=25)
First round interviews
Aug –Dec 2014
Second round interviews
March – April 2015

Building Community and Resilience
“Yes, bereavement really, the loss of
community that we’ve all suffered…
there has been a lot of ill feeling
actually and it’s quite difficult because
for a lot of people, there has been a
lot of inequality in what’s happened, it
does seem that some insurance
companies have done more than
others, the volunteers have helped
some people and not others so it has
made a lot of ill feeling and I think
some of it will never go. Some of it
will sort of subside but a lot of it will
never go and I think it’s a shame
because it’s a nice normal friendly
little place to live, you know…”(F2)
“I would say getting to know, when you
move somewhere new, it can take years
to get to know people, to feel part of a
community and that we were thrown
in head first, they are very a welcoming
community , we had met people, we
had met our neighbours but we were
suddenly thrust into this and we were
embraced by them”. (F3)

Memory and the Long-term
“Yes, and that’s (the community plan) all about how can we work
together to the benefit of all, which isn't something they were really
thinking about a year ago, but now they are … No, that will disappear!
Cynical! Well it will, for a start, if you stretch out the timescale,
people will move out of the area and new people will move in, people
who didn’t know those floods, who didn’t have that thing to hold them
together, to bring them together so no, it will disappear again”. (M1)
“There’s an awful lot of knowledge here, all the farmers here who
have managed this land since the dinosaurs wandered off, know
what they’re doing. It may not be scientific but it works… “ (M2)

Memory and the Long-term
“In the event of a crisis quite understandably the
governments’ focus is on providing the immediate help and
welfare and the support, and provide comfort… that things
are being done and things will get back to a sense of
normality. The challenge then is once the flood waters have
receded…conversations then being had which is about, okay,
actually in the long term we need do things differently.”
(SH1)

Engagement and Relationships
“…it’s quite clear I think in my mind that that’s the only way that we’re
going to reduce the need for being rescued because once we’ve put all the
adaptation and mitigation in place , then we just learn to live with it, we
expect it to come, our houses are dry because we’ve designed the schemes
which will do that, whether it means moving higher up or as I said, building
new ones that can move with the floods, then those are the kind of
solutions I’d like to see coming forward because it feels like this all
happened, people get fixed up and then suddenly what is going on? Like
they might be beavering away up there but you know …” (F1)
“I guess again what we thought was that the conversations that
have been taking place over the last five or so years, by Environment
Agency in the process of producing a catchment flood management
plan, that process and the thinking and the dialogue that’s been
happening with the local authority and the community, that all
seemed to be thrown away.” (SH2)

Engagement and Relationships
“Not really because they were being told what to
say, the EA was in denial, no doubt about it, they
just thought it would go away and they’d done what
they could and there was one particular chap who
came on television, I think people practically threw
something at their televisions, he was so arrogant
about the whole thing. …obviously didn’t have the
slightest idea what was going on and couldn't seem
to care less either, that was in the early days before
it all went horribly wrong”. (M3)

The Role of Art in…
• Building community and bringing people together
• Remembering and taking the long view
• Humanising and developing relationships across
disparate worlds
• Breaking silences about climate change and
connecting up

Dr Catherine Butler
c.butler@exeter.ac.uk
@drcbutler
Thank you