Thread by @bec_colvin

‼️ New paper ‼️

So, I did some analysis on the social identity dynamics wrapped up in 2019’s “Stop Adani Convoy” & it has just come out in Energy Research & Social Science.

You can read the piece here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1airj7tZ6Zqx…

And for a walk through the study please read on ⬇️

This study examined social-political conflict (& the place of social identity) surrounding Australia’s energy transition, using the Convoy as a focal point for analysis. I wanted to know how significant are social identity divides & what does this mean for the transition?

So as context, the energy transition is political. We can’t pretend otherwise. Wrapped up in it are changes to the distribution of resources and power. We know there will be changes for regional communities (e.g. see @dflemingm et al.’s recent work onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…)

And not all people will be affected in the same way; not all people will have the same priorities and desired outcomes. Everyone will benefit from efforts to alleviate the worst impacts of climate change, but that doesn’t mean how we get there will be free from contestation.

We have ‘just transitions’ approaches that are intended to minimise socially inequitable outcomes of necessary societal transitions in response to climate change. (e.g. ask @jwiseman3 and see ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/publication/cc…)

But, the energy transition in Australia is wrapped up in the party-politics of climate and energy more broadly 🏛️🥊

This means we are working in an already polarised and challenging space...

...and, to borrow from great work by @ChloeTas (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23…), we can fall into the same conflict ruts over and over again.

One of the implications of this is that 'we' use our social-political identities as shortcuts for deciding which 'side' of an issue we are on. 🤜💥🤛

And social-political identity tensions can shape debates about energy transition more significantly than substantive issues like those to do with livelihoods, climate change, economic diversity…

And once a debate becomes a “groupish” conflict like this, we see predictable dynamics in how people and groups interact:

So, there's value to be gained from digging into the weeds of social-political identity conflict to learn more about the dynamics that will shape the energy transition. I used the Social Identity Approach (very, very useful for understanding social conflict) for this analysis.

Specifically I applied the Situated Identity Enactment model by Tegan Cruwys et al. from @PsycANU as a tool for this analysis. It emphasises the dynamic nature of social identity, being in a state of constant negotiation and refinement based on the interactions between…

…social context (what’s going on around us), social norms (what are people doing, and what does this mean we should do), and social identity (who do we think we are 😊 AND IMPORTANTLY who do we think we are not 😡).

Back to the Stop Adani Convoy. I applied this Situated Identity Enactment (SIE) model to the series of events that were reported as constituting the Convoy as a distinct ‘episode’ of social-political conflict in the context of Australia’s energy transition.

This involved building a chronological narrative of key events & representations of the Convoy (via news media analysis) then analysing this narrative through the lens of the SIE model. So, I was looking for factors associated with social context, social norms & social identity.

The narrative was dominated by representations of and from political elites. Here’s a summary of the media narrative – note the emergence of the counter movement.

Let’s get to the interesting stuff now...

The social identity analysis showed that for the ‘us’ of the Convoy, there had to be a ‘them’. This led to a division characterised as between:
🔴Activists, Greens (&/or “Greenies”), conservationists, elites
🟢 Everyday workers, regional Queenslanders, proud mining communities

The Convoy participants were immediately bounded to an in-group. If you were in the car and part of this action, you could be pointed to and labelled as part of that social identity. It took more time, though, for convoy opponents to develop into an in-group.

The Convoy opponents were categorised into an in-group based on distinctiveness from characterisations about the Convoy participants. The Convoy opponent in-group identity therefore was centred on:

1⃣ Queensland (versus everywhere else)
2⃣ Regional (versus city)
3⃣ Mine workers (versus elites and non-hard workers)

Now this is not to say these chacterisations reflect the reality or intent of the Convoy participants. It reflects how they were characterised in the conflict.

While the Convoy participants used Adani’s Carmichael mine as symbolic of the campaign for climate action and opposition to the supremacy of coal, the counter-movement found an alternative symbolism: that of regional survival and self-determination.

The prominence of political spokespersons & the context of the Australian 2019 federal election fit the episode to the shape of a binary political divide. This obscured other social cleavages that could have been salient (e.g. wage labourers v managers/owners).

The consequence of this is that the Convoy episode created a new ‘normative fit’ (i.e. what we expect identity groups to do in a given situation) for making sense of social-political interactions in Australia’s energy transition.

A new ‘us and them’ (but not a ‘we’).

The distinctions drawn between the Convoy participants and the counter-movement are now available as social categorisations for informing behaviours, attitudes, experiences, and understandings of future social entanglements in the energy transition.

The way in which social context, social norms & social identity interacted in this episode have reinforced the idea that regional survival is at odds with the energy transition and climate action...

..It’s not – this idea is a false dichotomy. But we need grapple with social complexity to manage the transition; the transition that is already underway and can’t be ignored.

The implication from this research is that we must think about social relations, and in particular the identity dimension.

This doesn’t just mean ‘who we are’ but also how we relate to each other, and the mutually constitutive relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in shaping social divides – or social unity.

Thanks for reading. As ever there’s more to the story, which you can read in the full article. Caveats, nuance, extended arguments. If you can’t access it please drop me an email as I’d love to share it. Online here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1airj7tZ6Zqx…

Also thanks to @jrpickering, @cassandra_star & @rebeccapearse for being the prompt to write this piece and @PNTags & @glennalthor for helpful feedback.