Making sense of an impending failure: How grief becomes actionable hope in environmental campaigning

Abstract

How do environmental campaigners make sense of a global failure to contain climate change below a critical threshold while continuing their campaigning? We find that the campaigners consider impending failure through different temporal lenses that provoke emotional responses. After acknowledging the failure, the campaigners engage in retrospection, triggering emotions of grief at what is ‘already lost’. Their grieving leads to a prospective lens that is characterized by their fear of what the future will hold. Then asking themselves how to nevertheless maintain hope, the campaigners turn to actions that mitigate temperature rise even “by a few decimals”, and hence, reduce suffering. The campaigners’ focus on the present offers actionable hope. We contribute to the literature on sensemaking by examining how the different yet overlapping temporal foci and their emotional responses lead the campaigners to overcome their perception of an existential crisis facing humankind, calibrate their expectations of what is still possible, and renew their commitment to action. We contribute to temporary organizing literature by studying campaigners that meet a failure with a pursuit of further action, and in the process, find actionable hope.