Given the enormous and complex challenges of climate change it is not surprising that discourses advocating for adaptation and mitigation policies appeal to different layers of social and political cooperation. These discourses emphasize certain legitimatory principles that are usually
referred to the local and the global scale. The local is based on the basic human attachment to face-to-face community practices -from consumption of km. 0 products to recycling- with a localist approach that often miss the wider implications and impact of environmental issues. On the other hand, the global dimension goes to the opposite extreme linked to cosmopolitan ideals, where as inhabitants of the earth we should develop global responsabilities with an an abstract component that often do not directly reflect but in a vague set of values and attitudes -the melting of poles, deforestation in developing countries, and so on. The globalist perspective also faces relevant problems linked to visualize impacts that are not always easy to perceive and are thus more difficult to legitimate and generate widespread changes in societal practices.
In our paper we focus on how discourses for action on climate change overlook and intermediate yet fundamental layer of social cooperation between the local and the global. This intermediate level can be associated with political institutions -mainly the State- or cultural groups -such as regions or nations. Despite many actions are designed at the ‘national’ level (mostly that of the State) we explore whether the legitimatory and normative assumptions that underpin these discourses rely more on local and global notions than in the middle layer that connects the individual and the community allowing for social cooperation. Group dynamics have played historically a key role in modernity, as a driver for the transit from agrarian and stamentarian societies to industrial revolution, democratization or welfare. In this paper we argue that for building a sustainable agenda the role played by collective identities, that of linking anonymous relations with individual practices, can be of fundamental importance in traditional aspects such solidarity, sustainability or intergenerational justice.
With this approach in mind, we try to identify an analytical void in literature when categorizing discourses of climate change. We refer to the taken-for-granted global and local connection that, in our view, might be ignoring a multilevel interconnection that can arguably be mediated by a meso, national framework of reference for justifying climate action. In this vein this paper attemps at establishing a research agenda that pivots around the following questions: Is there a multi-level dimension that structures a categorisation of justificatory discourses of climate policy? If so, how can we depict it, and under what conditions do these emerge?
