Ethnography of Migration: Breaking Out of the Bi-Polar Myth

Paper by Douglas Uzzel

Introduction

Introduction by David Guillet and Douglas Uzzel

Changing relations in global environmental change

This presentation was published as "Rathzel, N and Uzzell, D (2009). Changing relations in global environmental change. Global Environmental Change, 19 (3). 326 - 335. Available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/7421/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378009000399 We discuss a cross-national pilot study in Sweden and the UK examining young people's environmental concerns and their perceptions of the causes and solutions. The study demonstrates that evaluations of the causes of environmental degradation are partly contingent upon the manner in which questions are framed leading to quite different interpretations of the findings. Moreover, attitudes also differ significantly between the British and the Swedish sample: in the UK environmental degradation is seen as more serious but also more distant from the respondents’ everyday experiences when answering pre-formulated questions. The causes of environmental degradation are located in both countries in government and industry policies promoting economic growth on the one hand. On the other, respondents identify distant developments in emerging economies as problems, without connecting their local experiences to the global effects they describe. In the open-ended part of the survey, individual behaviour is seen as the most important cause of environmental degradation. But while British respondents describe individuals as selfish, lazy and consumerist, Swedish respondents emphasise also structural causes like Western lifestyles and the market society. We present possible explanations for these differences and discuss the relationships between the global and the local in relation to constructions of the Other as well as the relationship of individualism and authoritarianism that emerge from the results

Temporal pessimism and spatial optimism in environmental assessments: An 18-nation study

The personal assessments of the current and expected future state of the environment by 3130 community respondents in 18 nations were investigated at the local, national, and global spatial levels. These assessments were compared to a ranking of each country’s environmental quality by an expert panel. Temporal pessimism (‘‘things will get worse’’) was found in the assessments at all three spatial levels. Spatial optimism bias (‘‘things are better here than there’’) was found in the assessments of current environmental conditions in 15 of 18 countries, but not in the assessments of the future. All countries except one exhibited temporal pessimism, but significant differences between them were common. Evaluations of current environmental conditions also differed by country. Citizens’ assessments of current conditions, and the degree of comparative optimism, were strongly correlated with the expert panel’s assessments of national environmental quality. Aside from the value of understanding global trends in environmental assessments, the results have important implications for environmental policy and risk management strategies