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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 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 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.

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...

The rise in the discourse and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been significant over the last few years, driven largely by a dominant business case logic. The CSR concept though, as suggested here, is more complex, loaded and problematic than is acknowledged within mainstream CSR scholarship. In this chapter, we present the view that CSR should be re-conceptualised as being situated within a relational space, ever unfolding and constituted by a range of forces, be they political, institutional, economic or social. This allows governmentality and spatiality as analytical instruments to deconstruct CSR at the level of the political economy. In this way, it is possible to capture the construction, dissemination and the lived experience of CSR. We also indicate that the impact of global social forces such as the prevailing neoliberal mentalities and the global accumulation agenda are for example better understood when taking this perspective.