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It would be a terrible shame if anyone seeing the title of this book thought that its relevance is limited to a special interest. It is not. Planning in Australia, whether or not it interacts direc...

This chapter explores the diverse collaborative practices of local climate action. Working together differently draws on a range of diverse knowledge and methods capable of producing generative and creative practices that can create genuinely new opportunities for social and environmental change. In the cases highlighted in this chapter, rethinking action on climate change is identified as a key social experiment and innovation: the ways it can be done; the ways it is being done; and how this generative climate-related activity engages diverse and multiple collaborators at the local scale through other modes, narratives and activist practices.

This chapter explores how the shared understandings and collective capacity to address climate change are nurtured and developed at the local scale, and in doing so help to transform the status quo. Key to this is embracing the diverse nature of stories and recognising the rich possibilities of what counts as knowledge. At a local scale this range of ways of “knowing” involves a spectrum of stories: informal, subjective accounts such as dialogue, personal experience, local knowledge, visual images, actions and activities; as well as the more formal, objective reports such as resource mapping and scientific research. Building and bridging the knowledge base involves engaging with diverse ways of knowing through a constellation of stories, experience and activities—the innovative activist practices and relationships that take root and flourish at the local scale.

This chapter introduces “quiet activism” and its relationship to social innovation, adaptation and other forms of activism with an embodied ethic of care. This includes an emphasis on the importance of the local scale in addressing the climate emergency and other crisis; cases of socially innovative practices and partnerships from Australia alongside international examples; and critical engagement with the role of quiet activism as a transformative conceptual frame and contemporary practice in climate change. We are interested in the diverse ways this transformative potential of quiet activism can create more equitable and sustainable futures.

This chapter focuses on how responses to climate change have tended to focus on some actors and sectors to the exclusion of others. Central to this is the idea of enabling innovation. Elements of enablement include leadership, relationship building (e.g. trust, commitment, open communication, collaboration and information exchange), skills development and competence building (e.g. problem identification, developing solutions), decision-making support (e.g. financial or human resourcing, delegating power to act) and response-ability (i.e. to external disruptors, e.g. storm events or financial shocks, risk management, entrepreneurial readiness, experimentation). Activist practices that map onto these five dimensions of enablement illustrate how each dimension offers a different way to bring missing actors to the table. New ways of bringing diverse localised actors together (e.g. trade unions, religious organisations and businesses) can break through barriers to collective action, ushering in new forms of climate activism.

In this chapter the focus is on innovative activist practices (by local government authorities, non-government organisations and the private sector) and how they connect with other practices. In doing so we identify the critical points of connection and the potential footholds or leverage points for transformational change in response to the climate crisis. Quiet activist practices are made up of many elements which can be grouped together as images or meanings, materials and skills or competences. Making and breaking connections represents provocative challenges to the status quo. These activist practices can be creative disruptors in order to engender transformative potential and politicised change to address the climate emergency.

This chapter returns to questions around what it means to be an activist, or to “do activism” in the context of the climate emergency. Responding to climate change is a profound societal challenge and crisis that requires transformative change across society’s institutions and structures. Our interest is at the local scale where we argue international, national and state policies are translated into practices, and community mobilization, preparation and responses to the anticipated impacts of the climate crisis predominantly occur. Modest acts of care, connection and creativity can be collectively and politically significant. Through purposeful, collective commitment to socially innovative practices, local communities are forging new political pathways in response to the climate crisis. This we argue is the power and potential of quiet activism in climate change.

This chapter focuses on the potential of local activists to expand their reach: to transform practices and social relations and empower actors more widely (“scaling out”), more formally (“scaling up”) and/or more profoundly (“scaling deep”) than their original scope and scale. There are lots of different ways that these different kinds of scaling can happen. New practices change not just organisations, but people too. This is “scaling deep”—having a profound effect on the lives and minds of the people who participate in an initiative. It means that everyday activist practices can become embedded as a way of life—a new normal.

Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of humans and nonhumans is recognised as characteristic of the Anthropocene – multispecies entanglements and becoming-world. Drawing on the more-than-human literature in urban and cultural geography and the environmental humanities, we consider how these terms offer new possibilities for productively rethinking the ontological exceptionalism of humans in planning theory. We critically explore how planning theory might develop inclusive, ethical relationships that can nurture possibilities for multispecies flourishing in diverse urban futures, the futures that are increasingly recognised as co-produced by nonhuman agents in the context of climate variability and change. This, we argue, is critical for developing climate-adaptive planning tools and narratives for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies cities.

The imperative of climate change adds urgency to the longstanding equity agenda in cities and urban areas. Justice and equity issues arise in the climate change context because of the high prospects for impacts on already vulnerable people and communities. In this chapter we outline the framework of the climate-just city as a conceptual and analytical lens for taking the urban equity agenda forward within the context of climate change. Building on the concept of the "just city" (see Fainstein 2010), we argue the key tenets of democracy, diversity, recognition and equity must more explicitly take into account the complex links between human society, urban settlements and the natural environment. We apply this lens to our empirical research focused on enabling social innovation to climate change at the local scale within the Australian context. The chapter concludes by offering insights into how the (climate-) just city principles can be mobilised in practice.

Climate change is a highly contested policy issue in Australia, generating fierce debate at every level of governance. In this paper we explore a crucial tension in both the policy and the public debate: a seeming lack of attention to social inclusion and broader equity implications. We pay special attention to the municipal scale, where concerns about social difference and democratic participation are often foregrounded in political discourse, using South East Queensland—a recognised climate change ‘hotspot’—as a case study. Mobilising critical discourse analysis techniques, we interrogate three local government climate change response strategies, and place these in the context of transscalar discourse networks which appear to sustain a technocratic, ‘ecological modernisation’ approach to the issue. Finally, we suggest a broad strategy for reimagining this approach to embed a notion of climate justice in our policy thinking about climate change. Keywords: climate change, social justice, climate justice, local government, Australia

Australian environmental justice research is limited, with scant planning literature on this topic. The Planning Institute of Australia's core business omits environmental justice concerns. State and local governments are silent on the matter. Few Australian planners would recognise the term. Yet the basic ideals behind environmental justice underpin the core principles of accessibility, equity, social inclusion and participatory democracy, which, in principle, inform Australian planning policies and practice. In this paper, we begin the important task of crossing the borders of ignorance to engage with environmental justice in Australian planning. We review the United States' (US) origins of the concept, discuss the processes behind the formation of unjust environmental landscapes (both built and organic) and overview some contemporary Australian environmental justice issues that warrant closer scrutiny. We conclude by charting a research agenda and pointing to potential changes and ways forward for plan...

Issues of urban equity have long been linked to urban planning. Yet in practice the quest for the ‘just city’, defined in terms of democracy, diversity, difference and sustainability, has proven to be highly problematic. Drawing on examples from the Australian urban context, we argue that the imperative of climate change adds urgency to the longstanding equity agenda of planning in cities. In our normative quest for the climate-just city we offer a conceptual and analytical framework for integrating the principles of climate justice and equity into urban planning thinking and practice.

1Plans are among the most durable products of planning, and as such offer a revealing window into the worlds of the planners of their time. In this paper we set out a methodology for viewing those worlds using critical discourse analysis (CDA). This method focuses on four key textual features of plans: construal of substance, construction of agency, generic structure, and presentation. Together they enable the investigator to go beyond thematic discourses and uncover the institutional, political and ideological role of planning during the time period in which plans are produced. We use this method to interrogate the changing rationalities governing planning in Western Australia (WA) since the Second World War by analysing the four major city plans for Perth, covering a period from 1955 to 2010. This longitudinal analysis suggests that planning in WA mirrors concurrent trends in international planning theory, and highlights the significance of “the plan” as an object of inquiry for revealing the changing n...

One of the defining characteristics of the “communicative turn” in planning is the rejection of technocratic instrumental (means-ends) rationality as the principal source of legitimacy for planning procedures. Procedural quality is now seen as grounded equally in the tenets of participatory democracy: inclusiveness, reciprocity, good communication, empowerment, mutual learning. Such ideals have become widely accepted (even if they are not always well implemented in practice). However, this trend seems to have had little effect on the products of strategic planning processes—plans—which, in the public sector, seem mostly to present recommendations as the logical (instrumentally rational) response to conditions. This article discusses the step from “collaborative” process to “logical” product as a problem of translation, drawing on actor-network theory and social linguistics to activate this concept. The discussion is informed by two case studies from Australia. Though the translation problem was dealt with...

Over the last few years, there has been increased emphasis placed on the “right way” of doing business involving transparent and ethical interactions with communities of interest. The global resource industry is regarded as the one of the primary champions and leaders of this corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement. Increasingly, however, its credibility within the industry is being challenged by the existence of conflict and confrontation and accusations of company misdemeanours that can surround resource development projects globally. For Western Australia’s resource sector, the liquefied natural gas precinct recently proposed at James Price Point in the Kimberley is a prime example. The aim of this chapter is to take a critical assessment of the relations and practices that define interactions between industry, government and community spheres, as a way to make sense of the conflict that surrounds this project. The analysis is informed by theories of governmentality and spatiality, which captures the ‘spaces of CSR’ framework discussed in this chapter. The argument is presented that resource development projects in Western Australia are shaped and defined by a series of historical, political, institutional, economic and social forces, prevailing values and assumptions and also relations of power. This is shown to play out in the contest surrounding the LNG precinct. As a consequence, the practice of CSR in the resource industry is shown to be more complex, problematic and dynamic than is suggested within broader CSR scholarship.