What Motivates Environmental Action and Change? Exploring Class and Environment in India
Environmental Analysis ENVS 220 // Grace Anderson & Margot Chirayath
This page documents my progress in the creation of a situated project proposal.
My lab partner, Margot, and I began the project by creating and then researching the tentative framing and focus questions below.
- Framing—How does class influence one’s relationship with the environment?
- Focus—How do class and caste influence one’s relationship with the environment in India?
This framing question addressed our theory that social class is one of the biggest factors that affect how people interact with their environment because it can determine one’s agency, access, income, role, and money. By studying this intersection between class and environment, we hoped to understand why conversations about the environment have been limited to people that have agency and time, the upper class.
We created this Zotero online library to put all of our sources in one place. The platform allowed us to organize our sources with tags. We tagged each source with either “framing” or “focus”. This process was documented here.
Later, we created the C-Map below to help us think about and visualize the relationships we uncovered while researching our framing question and situated context.
After doing some more thinking about our project, we revised our framing and focus questions. They became the following:
- Framing—How do class and environment interact?
- Focus—How do caste and environment interact in India?
- Focus—Is one’s environment in India predetermined by caste? How? Which aspects?
- Focus—How does being a member of a ‘scheduled caste’ affect one’s environment?
The wording of our new framing question freed us from a potentially problematic cause and effect relationship that we feared might have trapped us in harmful or limiting assumptions. We also sought to avoid finding proof for conclusions we’d already come to.
We also began to discuss our project’s methodology.
We believed that a survey about regional environmental values would be a key piece of our methodology when carrying out this project. As the designers of this survey, we have the ability to control most of the variables in the situation, except for the crucial information we are looking to obtain from participants. This would set us up to obtain data that help us answer our specific question. We were especially interested in the powerful qualitative data we can collect from a survey, and looked forward to analyzing the responses.
We wanted to conduct both a widespread numerical-based survey similar to the one conducted by the World Values Survey and a more conversational or interview-based survey that highlights personal narratives. By combining the two, we are ensuring that multiple types of data will be on hand when we begin an analysis. This allows for security within the research and the overlap will make the conclusions stronger as it might highlight similarities and discrepancies between both survey response types.
After collecting responses to our numerical-based survey, we plan to make a GIS map that visually represents trends in regional environmental values. This map, alongside an analysis of the qualitative data collected from our interview-based survey, will help us answer our focus questions.
A week later, we realized we were still unsatisfied with our questions and our study overall. During our last lab period of the semester, we revisited our research and realized that what we really wanted to get at are the motivators behind environmental action and environmentalism. Because of its large size, (larger than the entire US population) and its concentration of wealth, India’s middle class has unique social and political influence in the country. Emma Mawdsley’s “Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability” stressed that northern environmental theories cannot act as a template for India. For this reason, we decided it was necessary to include the ‘Brown Agenda’—a critique left out of many environmental discourses which examines environmental health issues due to factors such as limited land availability and rapid industrialization—into our project.
Our framing question became “What motivates people to do environmentalism?”
While reviewing our research, we identified a recurring tension in the examples we found of Indian middle-class environmental actions. While environmental actions create environmental awareness and positive environmental effects, they are often off-limits to members of lower classes. This is often because the actions are motivated by the way that they work to distance members of the middle class from people of other classes.
With this realization, our focus question became “How can pro-environment actions and values be encouraged and expanded without intensifying social stratification?”
The yellow bubbles represent motivators we identified in the examples of environmental action we found during our research. The “? to the ? power” bubble represents the motivators we cannot identify until we carry out our project.
Even though our questions shifted, our methods remain similar to our earlier project drafts. We still propose to carry out both surveys and analyze the results in GIS.
Finally, we created the three “spectrums” above from the examples of environmental action we already know about to help us begin to think about how our complete results might be analyzed in the future. As the strain on India’s resources mounts and the country’s middle class continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to understand what motivates its members to take environmental action and engage in environmentalism. As we collect data and place more and more examples on these and other spectrums representing additional motivators, we hope to be able to offer insight into the future.
Grace Anderson 