Creating a Cerc Network for Equity in Sustainability Transitions

While climate change impacts the quality of life and economic prosperity of societies across divides of race, gender, and class, it disproportionally affects those least responsible for its causes and least able to cope with its consequences. Cities are central to the sustainability transitions needed to respond to climate change. Still, local authorities’ pervasively techno-centric transition approaches fail to consider the lived experiences of their residents, particularly in underserved and vulnerable neighbourhoods. In this presentation, I will introduce the CERC Network for Equity in Sustainability Transitions (CERC NEST). The CERC NEST seeks to find ways to bridge the gap between climate and sustainability imperatives and communities' and individuals' values, priorities and aspirations by developing knowledge co-production methodologies, focusing on the concerns of communities and city actors and using creative strategies to address these concerns. our attempts to achieve ambitious climate and sustainability goals will likely succeed. Using a transdisciplinary, equity, and comparative approach, we will seek to operationalize three equity-centred objectives: 1) enable communities' self-determination and full participation in decision-making about programs, investments, services, technology, and practices (procedural justice); 2) understand and redress inequities in regulations and practices related to investment, lending, planning, and energy technological innovations (ETIs), such as heat pumps, rooftop solar, and electric vehicles (recognition justice); and (3) analyze how addressing (1) and (2) can foster equity in access to benefits and protection from harm (distributional justice). Context specificity is a common tenet of scholarship; problems and solutions within or across neighbourhoods differ across cities. We will explore how to enhance our capacity to overcome patterns of exclusion and unequal distribution of benefits and harms. We will also examine how we can scale or go beyond a neighbourhood or a pilot to achieve broader social and intellectual impact at multiple levels.