Communities on a threshold : climate action and wellbeing potentialities in Scotland

Abstract

Community projects provide opportunities for their participants to collectively undertake climate action and simultaneously experience alternative concepts of wellbeing. However, we argue that community projects do so in ‘liminal’ ways—on the threshold of (unactualised) social change. We employed an ethnographic approach involving participant observation and qualitative interviews to investigate two community climate action projects in Scotland supported by the Climate Challenge Fund (CCF). We identify some of the outcomes and barriers of these projects in relation to promoting wellbeing through work, transport, participation and green spaces for food production, biodiversity and recreation. Projects’ achievements are contextualised in light of the urgent imperative to tackle climate change and against a background of social inequality. Liminal community projects are structurally constrained in their potential to create wider systemic changes. However, the projects’ potential to promote wellbeing among their participants can intersect with climate change mitigation when systemic and wide-ranging changes are adopted. These changes must involve a meaningful shift towards an economy that centres wellbeing, framed through principles of environmental justice and promoting social equity.