Amount Awarded: $25,000
The proposed project aims to develop and operationalize a methodological approach for understanding personal-political climate change vulnerability. Personal-political climate change vulnerability is an emerging concept that considers how people's everyday lived personal, emotional, existential and spiritual experiences shape their vulnerability. This proposed project addresses a key gap in climate change vulnerability research wherein understandings of vulnerability are limited to discrete, quantifiable, and externally defined biophysical and socio-economic variables, obscuring people's lived experiences of vulnerability. This project pairs a two-part workshop between University of California, Berkeley and Norwegian University of Life Sciences PIs and two doctoral students to first develop a replicable methodological approach for examining personal-political climate change vulnerability and second analyze results and develop comparative insights. Our pilot methodological approach will be operationalized and refined through fieldwork in San Bartolomé, Ecuador and Laikipia, Kenya where we will conduct interviews, participant observation, and focus groups with community members to understand how they perceive and understand their own climate change vulnerability. This proposed research is exploratory and will provide the basis for a larger future collaborative research project that focuses on how notions of personal-political vulnerability reshape current models for designing and implementing adaptation initiatives.