Keri Facer – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Life after COVID: most people don’t want a return to normal – they want a fairer, more sustainable future

Posted on January 6, 2022March 29, 2023 by janet.crompton

We are in a crisis now – and omicron has made it harder to imagine the pandemic ending. But it will not last forever. When the COVID outbreak is over, what do we want the world to look like?

In the early stages of the pandemic – from March to July 2020 – a rapid return to normal was on everyone’s lips, reflecting the hope that the virus might be quickly brought under control. Since then, alternative slogans such as “build back better” have also become prominent, promising a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future based on significant or even radical change.

Returning to how things were, or moving on to something new – these are very different desires. But which is it that people want? In our recent research, we aimed to find out.

Along with Keri Facer of the University of Bristol, we conducted two studies, one in the summer of 2020 and another a year later. In these, we presented participants – a representative sample of 400 people from the UK and 600 from the US – with four possible futures, sketched in the table below. We designed these based on possible outcomes of the pandemic published in early 2020 in The Atlantic and The Conversation.

We were concerned with two aspects of the future: whether it would involve a “return to normal” or a progressive move to “build back better”, and whether it would concentrate power in the hands of government or return power to individuals.

Four possible futures

Back to normal – strong government
“Collective safety”

- We don’t want any big changes to how the world works.
- We are happy for the government to keep its powers to keep us safe and get back on economic track.

Back to normal – individual autonomy
“For freedom”

We don’t want any big changes to how the world works; our priority is business as usual and safety.
We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.

Progressive – strong government
“Fairer future”

What we want is for governments to take strong action to deal with economic unfairness and the problem of climate change.
We are happy for the government to keep its powers if it protects economic fairness, health and the environment.

Progressive – individual autonomy
“Grassroots leadership”

What we want is for communities, not governments, to work together to build a fair and environmentally friendly world.
We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.

In both studies and in both countries, we found that people strongly preferred a progressive future over a return to normal. They also tended to prefer individual autonomy over strong government. On balance, across both experiments and both countries, the “grassroots leadership” proposal appeared to be most popular.

People’s political leanings affected preferences – those on the political right preferred a return to normal more than those on the left – yet intriguingly, strong opposition to a progressive future was quite limited, even among people on the right. This is encouraging because it suggests that opposition to “building back better” may be limited.

Our findings are consistent with other recent research, which suggests that even conservative voters want the environment to be at the heart of post-COVID economic reconstruction in the UK.

The misperceptions of the majority

This is what people wanted to happen – but how did they think things actually would end up? In both countries, participants felt that a return to normal was more likely than moving towards a progressive future. They also felt it was more likely that government would retain its power than return it to the people.

In other words, people thought they were unlikely to get the future they wanted. People want a progressive future but fear that they’ll get a return to normal with power vested in the government.

We also asked people to tell us what they thought others wanted. It turned out our participants thought that others wanted a return to normal much more than they actually did. This was observed in both the US and UK in both 2020 and 2021, though to varying extents.

This striking divergence between what people actually want, what they expect to get and what they think others want is what’s known as “pluralistic ignorance”.

This describes any situation where people who are in the majority think they are in the minority. Pluralistic ignorance can have problematic consequences because in the long run people often shift their attitudes towards what they perceive to be the prevailing norm. If people misperceive the norm, they may change their attitudes towards a minority opinion, rather than the minority adapting to the majority. This can be a problem if that minority opinion is a negative one – such as being opposed to vaccination, for example.

In our case, a consequence of pluralistic ignorance may be that a return to normal will become more acceptable in future, not because most people ever desired this outcome, but because they felt it was inevitable and that most others wanted it.

Two people talking on a bench — We think we know what other people think – but often we’re wrong.
dekazigzag/Shutterstock

Ultimately, this would mean that the actual preferences of the majority never find the political expression that, in a democracy, they deserve.

To counter pluralistic ignorance, we should therefore try to ensure that people know the public’s opinion. This is not merely a necessary countermeasure to pluralistic ignorance and its adverse consequences – people’s motivation also generally increases when they feel their preferences and goals are shared by others. Therefore, simply informing people that there’s a social consensus for a progressive future could be what unleashes the motivation needed to achieve it.

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This blog is written by Caboteer Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and Ullrich Ecker, Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Australian Research Council Future Fellow, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reconnecting the civic university with the climate agenda: thinking globally acting locally

Posted on March 10, 2020April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

As someone who has spent the last decade leading a research programme encouraging partnerships between universities and communities, I very much welcome the publication of the new Civic University Commission report from the UPP Foundation. There is much in here to applaud: the call for strategic commitment by universities to civic engagement; the demand for a new approach to adult education and widening participation; and the need for sustained national funding for civic collaborations. But it is hard to avoid the fact that there is a glaring blind spot in a report that claims to be making a case about the future of universities. Namely, there is no reference to climate change. This is surprising given the significant and far-reaching implications of a changing climate not only for universities but for the communities in which they are based. For a report on the civic role of the university not to engage with climate change – when issues such as Artificial Intelligence, ageing populations and the ‘Asian Century’ are prominent – is a significant omission.

This gap in the report matters. It matters because it overlooks the significant positive impact that universities could make, working with their partners, to prevent and adapt to a changing climate. It matters because it underestimates the significant negative impacts that are already being felt by communities and cities as a result of disruptive weather events. It matters because it ignores the huge intellectual, social and practical innovation needed to allow our towns, cities and rural communities to live well with a lively planet, a civilizational shift in which universities should play a lively and creative role. Finally, it matters because young people and students across the UK as well as the rest of the world are looking to universities to provide them with an education that recognises the reality and the consequences of climate change.

The concerns of the authors of the report are clearly oriented toward the role of universities in softening the blows of past and future economic and technological changes. This is important. But even if this were the primary goal of the civic university, couching discussion of labour market futures primarily in terms of the fourth industrial revolution is on shaky environmental ground. The huge and currently unsustainable energy costs of artificial intelligence and machine learning, for example, suggest that the shift towards a brave new techno-enhanced future might be somewhat more dependent upon boring matters such as planetary sustainability than even the most ardent Prime Ministerial advisor in search of wacky ideas might imagine.

The entanglement of economy and environment, after all, is something the Stern report pointed out 14 years ago. If one of the agendas of the Civic University report is to rebalance the attention of universities towards the radical economic inequalities at play in their communities, then climate change and its impacts have to play a role in these calculations. Moreover, at a time when the UN Sustainable Development Goals (however flawed) are increasingly making their way into local government decision-making; at a time when many cities and towns are themselves taking the lead in setting ambitious carbon reduction goals, this absence in the report is hard to explain. It ignores what is already a defining challenge for many of the cities and communities in which universities are based.

There is, moreover, a clear opportunity to align the civic university and climate change agendas. Not least because civic collaboration of the sort envisaged by this excellent report works best not when it is a vague hand-waving memorandum-of-understanding type endeavour, but when people from different organisations come together to roll their sleeves up, learn from each other and figure out how to work on a shared matter of concern. And working out how to prevent and adapt to climate change is the mother of all shared concerns.

There are at least four clear areas for potential alignment:

Climate change provides a creative motivation for research and education collaborations between universities and communities. Let’s look at what is happening in the city where I am currently working in Sweden. Here in Uppsala, universities, city leaders and business leaders have begun working together to actively reduce their carbon emissions 14% year on year. This sort of hugely ambitious challenge – far greater and faster than anything in the UK at present – brings significant educational and research opportunities from practical partnerships with the community. Elsewhere, in universities and cities in the UK with a similar shared agenda, as in Bristol, we see researchers, business leaders and community leaders coming together to begin to work out what it means to create cities that are carbon positive, create employment and provide housing and energy for everyone.
A changing climate provides a powerful rationale for investing in adult education. Taking climate change seriously also aligns closely with the report’s calls to reinvigorate adult education. Any serious attempt to reconfigure the UK’s energy and infrastructure systems in lines with the Paris agreement, will involve significant shifts in employment. Adults in carbon intensive employment will need to be supported to develop new skills. The university system will need to adapt, welcoming older adults, supporting them to rapidly learn and innovate. Any Green New Deal requires Green New Universities able to respond to the interests and needs of older adults. Irrespective of Brexit, universities seeking to remain part of the European Research Area will need to engage with the challenge of green skills and innovation.
A changing climate brings an urgent demand to re-localise education. Understanding that a changing climate is the condition in which we are now living also has implications for the trend that has seen some British universities detach themselves from the cities that first funded them in order to become finishing schools for wealthy international students. The sort of international travel habits encouraged by this trend (one student I recently spoke to told me of the nine transatlantic flights every year that she and her West Coast American boyfriend take to see each other) is unlikely to be compatible with any university or city seeking to reduce its emissions. In an era in which international travel becomes an increasingly unacceptable choice both for increasingly carbon literate younger age groups and for city leaders with an eye on their carbon budget, understanding what replaces international students will become an increasingly compelling concern for university leaders – a re-localisation that fundamentally connects with a renewed civic role.
A changing climate demands that universities recognise their material and economic role in the local community. Understanding universities as anchor organisations in their communities, as this report recommends, means paying attention to how university money flows, where it flows, who benefits, what is invested in, how buildings are built and how land is used. Universities with landholdings, with investments in student accommodation, with thousands of staff and students everyday moving into and around the city, have the potential to make a major contribution to both preventing and adapting to climate change. Thinking through climate change therefore, only strengthens the commitment to local economies, cultures and communities. It encourages a respectful and careful stewardship of land and resources and of the people in those communities.

Taking climate change seriously, in other words, is not something that detracts from the civic role of the university, it brings a much-needed focus and purpose to this agenda.

Thinking globally, acting locally is an old slogan from the environmental movement but it is one that also captures the essence of a civic university. These two movements for change – the civic university and the university of the climate emergency – need urgently to align to create the universities we actually need today.
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This blog post was written by Cabot Institute member Professor Keri Facer. Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol and Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. The blog has been reposted with kind permission from HEPI. View the original blog.

Keri Facer

Towards the all-age friendly city

Posted on October 8, 2014April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

The All-Age-Friendly City project, carried out in Spring-Summer 2014, emerged from a desire to imagine the future city from the perspectives of those people – children and older adults – who are too often overlooked in the design and planning of cities today.

Today, reports on ‘the Smart City’ tend to make little or no mention of the wide variety of different age groups living in cities, or of the different and sometimes shared needs of a multi-generational city. This is not just an inevitable oversight that arises when working age adults design infrastructure. It is also a serious flaw in the design imagination shaping the future city: significant amounts of public expenditure go precisely to these age groups and to those institutions and services responsible for addressing the interests of children and older adults. If we want a future city that is adequate to the people living in it, therefore, designers, policy makers, developers and planners need to think carefully about all ages and stages of life.

To begin to address this issue, the All-Age-Friendly City project brought together researchers working in childhood and aging, members of local government, artists, community groups, computer scientists, developers, planners and practitioners working with children and older adults, to develop ideas about how cities might better meet the needs and interests of our oldest and youngest generations.

This first working paper builds on desk research and workshops conducted by the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, in collaboration with the Future Cities Catapult in Spring/Summer 2014. It outlines why designing the All-Age-Friendly city is an urgent contemporary concern, the resources that are available to us to do this, and identifies four key areas for future development:

building intergenerational trust;
encouraging encounters across generations;
re-imagining housing; and
creating all-age-friendly transport systems.

We are grateful to the TSB/Future Cities Catapult for funding the workshops, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for enabling Keri’s involvement as part of her Connected Communities Leadership Fellowship. We are also grateful to the contributors to the workshops who contributed their ideas and experience so generously.

This is the start, we hope, of a longer conversation about how we can create cities that are not just livable in terms of the technologies and infrastructure that underpin them, but that harness such infrastructure to generate experiments in humane, caring and empowered ways of life for all generations.

We look forward to continuing the discussions with others who are interested in this aspiration.

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This blog has been reproduced by kind permission from the abstract of the report Towards the all-age friendly city.

It has been written by Cabot Institute members Keri Facer, Lindsey Horner, and Helen Manchester, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol.

Read the press release Lego housing, automatic ambulances and car-free streets