Culture and (collective) identity need to become more central in thinking about how ambitious climate policy for decarbonization can be enacted within domestic (i.e., national, subnational) politics. Policy attention has long centered on material costs and benefits of action, including distributions of costs/benefits between different actors and over time. The challenge of reconciling concentrated short-term costs to specific actors and groups with diffuse long-term benefits to a much wider range of actors remains central, particularly considering inequality both within and between societies. But culture and identity also play an important role in shaping the opportunities, challenges, and dynamics of realizing ambitious climate action (e.g., following Hulme, 2009). For example, the social construction of risk and action, the feasibility of phasing-out specific industries and transitioning toward new practices, and the fractious dynamics of populism and polarization that threaten to derail collective action all have strong links with issues of culture and identity.

Culture in the most general sense refers to a basic social fabric that ascribes meaning to people in their relations and practices, and which may be tied to history, language, community, and artifacts. This creates tendencies to think about the world in particular ways, influencing preferences and decision making (Zaval, 2016). For example, Adger et al. (2013) view culture as comprising “symbols that express meaning” which “create collective outlooks and behaviours.” Bulkeley et al. (2016) view culture as not only a milieu mediating social relations, but also as co-emergent with everyday socio-material practices (e.g., relations with infrastructures and technologies), forms of subjectivity (e.g., embodiment of social identities and roles) and resistances (e.g., frictions against deliberate changes). In this sense, culture not only infuses people's ways of making meaning, but is also continuously (re)produced through engagements with others and the material world.

Collective or social identity (hereon, simply “identity”) refers to conception of self and others in relation to perceived commonalities with a wider group such as experiences, interests, and sense of solidarity (van Stekelenburg, 2013). Identity has long been an important topic in sociological, geographical, and political scholarship. For example, identity can motivate mobilization for shared causes in social movements (Meyer et al., 2002), is tied to place/space in geographical processes (Warf, 2010), and is linked to demands for recognition and dignity as well as partisan tribalism in contemporary polarized politics (Fukuyama, 2018). Furthermore, identity can arise at a range of scales. For example, climate change scholars have highlighted national (e.g., Eckersley, 2016), community (e.g., Mayer, 2018), political (e.g., McCright & Dunlap, 2011), and religious (e.g., Peifer et al., 2016) identities.

Culture and identity are related but not synonymous. Identity can be seen as an aspect of the broader notion of culture. Both culture and identity are increasingly highlighted in climate change literature over the last decade and provide complementary entry points for understanding intangible drivers of collective behavior regarding climate policy. Yet, these issues may be approached in widely varying ways,¹¹ For example, culture is frequently addressed in anthropology, indigenous studies, and post-structural theory, and identity is frequently addressed in social movement studies and political studies, among others.
and implications for strategic climate action are not always clear. Bringing different lines of thinking into dialogue is needed to explain the dynamics of climate (in)action and to find opportunities to advance climate policy within complex social-political-historical contexts. In this Commentary, I briefly survey some prominent ideas on culture and identity in climate change literature to provide an orientation for thinking about how climate policy for decarbonization might proactively engage with these still under-recognized issues. More broadly, I contend that without attending to matters of culture and collective identity, climate policy for decarbonization may encounter deep-seated resistance and even provoke political backlash.