Moving Forward for Community Inclusion and Policy Change

This chapter synthesizes the book’s themes of contextualizing climate change in community realities, reflecting on the five climate reductionisms introduced in the opening chapter and taking actionable progress toward policy change. Though climate change is a wicked problem, characterized by uncertainty and complexity, the way forward for socially just solutions must include purposeful, meaningful partnerships with communities in ways that recognize their own inherent diversity, value their knowledge, and address their manifold needs. However, partnerships for policy change might be conceived as a wicked “solution”: They will involve many stakeholders, there is little precedent for how to make them successful, and there are still questions of whether they are needed in all phases of the policy process or for all policy decisions.