Religious Transnationalism And Climate Change

This book examines the role of religious actors in the field of climate change and especially in the international mobilization and negotiations to address the issue. It analyzes the mode of action and their discourses on multilateral platforms such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The international Climate Change Framework Convention is primarily a process that can best be understood by analyzing the various steps taken by the international community, and specifically by different religious groupings, here, in the project manuscript, mainly Christians but also Muslims and Buddhists, in raising environmental consciousness through their programs. The interfaith dimension also plays a major role and needs to be studied in terms of the international realm of international liberal theories based on reciprocity, interdependence and cooperation but also within the framework of Sustainable Development Goals. Sadouni Samadia is Associate Professor in Political Science at Sciences Po Lyon, Université de Lyon, France, and member of Triangle, UMR 5206 CNRS. Her last book published by Palgrave Macmillan is about transnational religious mobilisation of Muslims in Southern Africa (Muslims in Southern Africa. Johannesburg's Somali Diaspora, 2019).

​This book examines the role of religious actors in the field of climate change and especially in the international mobilization and negotiations to address the issue. It analyzes the mode of action and their discourses on multilateral platforms such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The international Climate Change Framework Convention is primarily a process that can best be understood by analyzing the various steps taken by the international community, and specifically by different religious groupings, here, in the project manuscript, mainly Christians but also Muslims and Buddhists, in raising environmental consciousness through their programs. The interfaith dimension also plays a major role and needs to be studied in terms of the international realm of international liberal theories based on reciprocity, interdependence and cooperation but also within the framework of Sustainable Development Goals. ​

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

A growing chorus of voices has suggested that the world’s religions may become critical actors as the climate crisis unfolds, particularly in light of international paralysis on the issue. In recent years, many faiths have begun to address climate change and its consequences for human societies, especially the world’s poor. This is the first volume to use social science to examine how religions are helping to address one of the most significant and far-reaching challenges of our time. While there is a growing literature in theology and ethics about climate change and religion, little research has been previously published about the ways in which religious institutions, groups and individuals are responding to the problem of climate change. Seventeen research-driven chapters are written by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and other social scientists. This book explores what effects religions are having, what barriers they are running into or creating, and what this means for the global struggle to address climate change.

How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion is an edited collection that explores the diverse ways that religion shapes climate politics at the local, national, and international levels. Drawing on case studies from across the globe, it stands at the intersection of religious studies, environment policy, and global politics. From small island nations confronting sea-level rise and intensifying tropical storms to high-elevation communities in the Andes and Himalayas wrestling with accelerating glacial melt, there is tremendous variation in the ways that societies draw on religion to understand and contend with climate change. Climate Politics and the Power of Religion offers 10 timely case studies that demonstrate how different communities render climate change within their own moral vocabularies and how such moral claims find purchase in activism and public debates about climate policy. Whether it be Hindutva policymakers in India, curanderos in Peru, or working-class people's concerns about the transgressions of petroleum extraction in Trinidad—religion affects how they all are making sense of and responding to this escalating global catastrophe.

Focusing on the dilution of state sovereignty, this book examines how the crossing of state boundaries by religious movements leads to the formation of transnational civil society. Challenging the assertion that future conflict will be of the “clash of civilization” variety, it looks to the micro-origins of conflicts, which are as likely to arise between states sharing a religion as between those divided by it and more likely to arise within rather than across state boundaries. Thus, the chapters reveal the dual potential of religious movements as sources of peace and security as well as of violent conflict. Featuring an East-West, North-South approach, the volume avoids the conventional and often ethnocentric segregation of the experience of other regions from the European and American. Contributors draw examples from a variety of civilizations and world religions. They contrast self-generated movements from “below” (such as Protestant sectarianism in Latin America or Sufi Islam in Africa) with centralized forms of organization and patterns of diffusion from above (such as state-certified religion in China). Together the chapters illustrate how religion as bearer of the politics of meaning has filled the lacuna left by the decline of ideology, creating a novel transnational space for world politics.

Though currently only partially understood, evolving interactions among Latin American communities of faith, governments, and civil societies are a key feature of the popular mobilizations and policy debates about environmental issues in the region. This edited collection describes and analyses multiple types of religious engagement with environmental concerns and conflicts seen in modern Latin American democracies. This volume contributes to scholarship on the intersections of religion with environmental conflict in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides comparative analysis of the manner in which diverse religious actors are currently participating in transnational, national, and local advocacy in places such as, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. It also considers the diversity of an often plural religious engagement with advocacy, including Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal perspectives alongside the effects of indigenous cosmological ideas. Finally, this book explores the specific religious sources of seemingly unlikely new alliances and novel articulations of rights, social justice, and ethics for the environmental concerns of Latin America. The relationship between religion and environmental issues is an increasingly important topic in the conversations around ecology and climate change. This book is, therefore, a pertinent and topical work for any academic working in Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies.