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This chapter starts from the premise that technologies of knowing the environment are molded by broader political and societal contexts. Just as “science” is never singular, but rather an ever-changing product of personal commitments, institutional struggles, and historical legacies, environmental research, data, and methods that are never dryly environmental. It focuses on the production of environmental knowledge as an explicitly political process, one that is in constant conversation with institutional, ideological, and economic forces. Examining environmental knowledge production is important because China's green dream reaches the population unevenly and builds on inequalities to realize itself. The chapter identifies key parameters that regulate rural-environmental research. These include pressures to prioritize economic growth over environmental protection, the commercialization of academia, governmental controls of what is considered acceptable or unacceptable research, as well as limitations on fieldwork access. The chapter also details how economic and political parameters bound environmental research in specific ways.

This chapter examines the role of science and of knowledge in environmental and resource management and in ecological governance. It discusses the criteria for knowledge-based and democratic ecological governance and describes the organising knowledge for sustainable resource governance. It considers solution-oriented research to develop green technology and the political fight to control strategic environmental research. This chapter stresses the need to move towards a multi-faceted relationship between science, politics and market actors and highlights the importance of monitoring and providing common knowledge for policy-making and evaluation.

Over the past decade, topics pertaining to the natural environment, such as climate change, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and pollution, have become increasingly prominent in organizational research, with academics attempting to answer important questions regarding key determinants and outcomes of pro-environmental engagement. In an effort to synthesize the work undertaken in several disciplines, including management, business, organizational psychology, and corporate social responsibility, this chapter presents a review of the research methodologies in pro-environmental research based on 118 articles from 14 journals. Specifically, it provides an extensive examination of empirical research by sample characteristics, approach to research, research strategy, data collection methods, types of data used, and level of analysis. It also highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each methodology.

This chapter examines qualitative methods used by various environmental health scholars. Qualitative methods are important in enabling community narratives to be constructed and shared. They also provide social scientists with an opportunity to contribute to community activism and advocacy. Not all environmental social-science researchers practice this form of advocacy, but many do. Their work helps create, modify, and present to the world the community narratives of grassroots environmental health research and advocacy that might otherwise remain unknown. While this chapter focuses on in-depth ethnographic studies of contaminated communities, other forms of qualitative methods are also used in environmental health research. These include structured interviewing, focus groups, policy analysis, media analysis, content analysis of documents, and cultural critique.

This chapter situates the INTERSECTION programme of research within wider international debates regarding the relationship between consumption and climate change. It explores how this relationship is addressed in arguments for environmental justice and sustainable development, and how it is reflected in international policy-making. This discussion highlights how climate change is typically cast as both an international and intergenerational injustice, or the convergence of a ‘global storm’ and an ‘intergenerational storm’. This chapter also situates the original contribution of the book within recent social science scholarship that explores how people live with a changing climate, advocating a ‘human sense’ of climate and social change, and outlines the main themes of the subsequent empirical chapters.

When asking people across diverse geographical and cultural contexts about the impact of climate change on their lives, it is important to take into account how the idea of climate – and thus of climate change – may be differently conceptualised. This chapter explores urban residents’ perceptions of living with a changing climate, the cultural construction of climate change, and how it is conflated with local weather and high-visibility environmental problems such as air pollution, tree felling, industrial waste and changing land use. It discusses how local explanatory narratives differ in their treatment of climate change as remote in space and time or immediate and locally-rooted; and how this affects the extent to which people feel it has a direct impact on their lives. It argues that residents across Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield were more or less anxious about climate change not only as a consequence of different levels of regional exposure, but also as a result of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate shocks, and the perceived physical deterioration or improvement of their immediate environment as a consequence of urban infrastructural change.

Taking ‘Youth Strike 4 Climate’ as a starting point, this chapter outlines how climate change is commonly framed as an issue of intergenerational injustice, and how this intersects with arguments for sustainable development. It introduces the INTERSECTION project, its empirical focus on the human sense of climate and social change in Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield, the rationale for focussing on these cities and world regions, and the fieldwork undertaken to inform this book. It also critically reflects on methodological issues in cross-cultural and cross-national research, and how the research team addressed issues of cross-cultural comparability in the design, collection and analysis of data.