The Role of Translation in Enacting Multiscalar Climate Action: Insights from European Christian Faith-Based Actors

Abstract

The complex nature of climate change requires action at different scales and in different ways, but questions remain around how to produce climate action that is both multiscalar and joined up. Here we explore this question by adopting a relational approach to studying climate action by faith-based actors, who increasingly play an active role campaigning on climate action. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with representatives of Christian churches in Sweden, Belgium, Scotland, and England, we identify two interrelated processes that explain how climate action “travels”: first, by horizontal circulation (between faith-based and non-faith-based spheres), and second, by vertical circulation (across individual, local, national, and international levels). However, such processes are not without friction. We demonstrate how processes of “translation” can ensure the integration of climate action into new contexts and result in producing new scalar relations but also exclusions. In doing so, we advance understandings of how multiscalar climate action is produced by nonstate actors.