Finding Common Climate Action Among Contested Worldviews: Stakeholder-Informed Approaches in Austria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In many ways, this is an interesting article. It is based on ample empirical research, uses sophisticated methods, and -above all- is one of the few sustained, serious studies that attempt to identify ‘clumsy’ or ‘polyrational’ solutions (which, to my mind, remains a research gap).

But, apart from a number of linguistic issues, it has two main problems. First, it redefines Mary Douglas’s ‘group’ concept as ‘regulation’ (see for instance Figure 2). This is odd for several reasons. To start, Douglas’s other concept (‘grid’) is often also defined as regulation. (She herself defined grid as any restrictions imposed on voluntary transactions among people). Hence, by defining group in this manner, it becomes nearly indistinguishable from grid, which is highly problematic – given that grid and group are the two building blocks of Douglas’s (grid-group) cultural theory. In addition, as a result of this unorthodox definition of ‘group’, the article ends up with ‘decentralized regulation’, which to me seems a contradiction in terms. Finally, is it strictly necessary for this article (and the empirical research reported in it) to deviate so much from Douglas’s original definition of group? To my mind, this issue needs to be resolved one way or the other.

The second main issue is the paper’s depiction of the autonomous or eremitical voice. In the paper it is equated with a plea for local initiatives. But local initiatives to curb, or adapt to, climate change can be a hierarchical, individualistic or egalitarian preference – and not necessarily an eremitical one. (This is why the authors find that local initiatives can potentially be endorsed by several policy perspectives, i.e., can possibly serve as sites of ‘clumsy solutions’). I understand why the authors are tempted to equate the autonomous voice with a preference for local initiatives, but unfortunately it does not make sense in terms of Douglas’s cultural theory. Hence, it would be very helpful if the authors find a different way of formulating this.

Finally, a few small points: In the Abstract, the approach pioneered by Douglas and Michael Thompson is called ‘theory of plural rationalities’, whereas the paper itself uses the more commonly used title ‘theory of plural rationality’. Moreover, on p. 1 it is stated that:  “Human-caused climate change is altering weather extremes indiscriminately”. I do not understand the word “indiscriminately” here. Moreover, the IPCC’s position remains that it is not (yet?) statistically possible to conclusively link current weather extremes to the global climate change that has thus far taken place. (See for instance: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-says-about). I would advise the authors not to take positions in this particular debate – it is not necessary as it has long been crystal clear that human-induced climate change is a major, global environmental threat.

In conclusion, I believe that this paper can make a very valuable contribution to the literature. But, in my view, it can only do so when it addresses to two conceptual concerns raised above.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I would recommend quite a bit of copy-editing. Just to give a few examples:

• 6: “storylines, narratives, or information that does [sic] not conform with their values”;
• Figure 3: “inquire on”;
• Various places: “suss-out”;
• 8: “due it its use”;
• “egalitaristic” (why not use “egalitarian”?);
• “autonomistic” (why not use “autonomous”?).

Improving the English used in the paper would give it much more credibility.

Author Response

See Attached

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of Environments-3674468 “Finding common climate action among contested worldviews: 2 Stakeholder-informed approaches in Austria”

Recommendation: Revise & Resubmit

This is the fourth time I’ve been asked to review this paper, which is now at its third journal with me as reviewer. The good news is that this paper is improving and is now within striking distance of making a publishable contribution. This paper makes potentially promising advances in using Douglasian grid-group cultural theory (GGCT) or Plural Rationality Theory (PRT) to conceptualize and find policy solutions to climate change that do not necessitate agreement or consensus on a policy solution nor the values being advanced. The authors conducted Referential Social Network Analysis and several Participatory Impact Workshops guided by the theoretical claims and insights of GGCT/PRT to support their empirical analysis, potentially advancing both the application of GGCT/PRT to deliberative policy making generally and to climate policy specifically. However, to realize these potential contributions, the paper needs to be successfully revised to address the following issues:

1. While the paper now has an emergent rationale for why the authors conducted the series of activities and analyses they describe, and these are now more clearly motivated, described, and sequenced, there is still a need to sharpen, elevate, and tighten the presentation of these core elements of the paper.
2. A good practice is to lead sections and paragraphs with headings and sections that make the structure and progression of a paper’s argument crystal clear. A good test is whether just by reading headings and topic sentences one can understand the key elements of the paper, which is not presently the case.
3. I have identified some elements that need to be elevated to lead headings and paragraphs. The last paragraph in the introduction contains this statement: “Our goal was to identify and understand the different perspectives in the field of climate policy and find a common ground to support the implementation of climate protection measures.” This seems a good candidate for leading the paper and the abstract.
4. The next logical step would then be to explain how that goal was pursued and what results were achieved. On p. 6 under Approach and Methods, we begin to get a sense of steps taken to realize project goals: To describe the stakeholder network of the Austrian climate policy field, determine the different perspectives towards climate change and climate protection measures, and identify the key factors for the successful implementation of climate protection measures, we conducted a Referential Social Network Analysis based on snowball sampling techniques. Then, we ran several Participatory Impact Workshops to guide participants who represented the different rationalities and perspectives through a co-creative process to identify potential climate protection actions.” It’s fine to state these on p. 6 but it would help to outline both the project goals and steps taken to realize them in the introduction. Provide a roadmap for the paper up front.
5. Explain goals, motivations for the goals, and the methods used to pursue them up front. Then use this outline to organize your paper headings and lead sentences of your paragraphs. Then recap the goals, study motivations, and the ways the goals were pursued, and with what results. This advice for speakers is also good advice for writers: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”
6. Figure 3, p. 7 makes a good start at providing an overview of methods used to pursue the project goals. Not all of the cell entries in that figure/table are as clearly communicative as they could be. But what I’m needing from this table and from the subsequent description of methods used is to lead with a statement on what that method contributes to advancing project goals, followed by a description of the method, and then a more detailed description of how it was used to advance project goals.
7. I need a clearer statement of what was learned from this project. The sections of the paper reporting results contain numerous nuggets of interesting findings, sometimes signaled by statements like “What we found most interesting…: etc. Again it would be good if the most interesting results could be highlighted as lead sentences in paragraphs reporting results.
8. Finally, the section on inferences regarding clumsy solutions is potentially interesting and a highlight of the paper: a big take-away listing of the lessons of this project regarding the value of clumsy solutions that could motivate similar efforts in other countries re climate change and other issues. The problem I have with this listing is that it is based not just on the results of the project, but on the theory that motivated it. So, in this listing it’s hard to determine the extent to which the authors are taking out as lessons what they put in as theory. So, it would be helpful to distinguish more clearly between the theory that is the paper’s point of departure and the lessons learned from the project that represent the value-added of the paper.

Author Response

See attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for these revisions, which allow me to endorse the paper for publication. (This does not necessarily mean that I would not have a few disagreements, but this should be a matter of debate in the published literature).

Author Response

See attached

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Good job responding to my comments. The paper reads much better now, communicates its varied interesting motivations, methods, and results much more clearly. I recommend acceptance once these minor items have been addressed:

1. A recent article in PSJ shows how cultural support for climate policies varies across policies. This article should be cited here as part of the set up for this paper. Bretter & Schulz 2024 Climate policy support in the UK: An interaction of worldviews and policy types https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/psj.12570, argue that “Understanding predictors of climate policy support is important for tackling climate change. Previous research demonstrated that policy support is partially driven by cultural worldviews. Yet, treating policies as a homogeneous concept, this literature neglected the existence of different policy types. Making this distinction is important because each type implies a distinct solution to the same problem (i.e., carbon emissions) with varying degrees of retained freedom for agents. Given that diverging worldviews imply different preferences for individual freedom, we hypothesize an interaction between policy types and cultural worldviews on climate policy support: Policy support is stronger when the retained freedom of a policy type is aligned with the worldview-based preferences for such freedom. Using a representative sample of the UK population (N = 1991) and actual policy proposals of UK political parties, our results partly support our hypothesized interaction. Although communitarian-egalitarians, compared to all other worldview groups, indicated stronger support across policy types, contrary to our hypothesis they showed their weakest support for command-and-control and their strongest for information-based policies. Individualist-hierarchists, in contrast and in line with our argument, showed the weakest support for command-and-control policies and strongest support for voluntary policies.”
2. Section 2.3 on Drawbacks and Limitations should be moved down to the end of the results section, ahead of Section 3.4.
3. Update citation in note 40 from Swedlow et al 2016 SSRN paper to published version of the paper: Swedlow, Brendon, Joseph T. Ripberger, Li-Yin Liu, Carol L. Silva, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Branden B. Johnson, "Construct Validity of Cultural Theory Survey Measures,” Social Science Quarterly, 101(6), 2020: 2332-2383, DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12859
4. Go through paper carefully to clean up writing errors -- there are quite a few of them still!

 

Author Response

See attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf