Towards a Broader Ecological Citizenship Repertoire: Exploring Climate Change Engagement, Transformative Agency, and Post-Carbon Transition Imaginaries among Citizens in Sweden

Abstract: Current post-carbon transition trajectories are primarily based on a belief in technical solutions wherein considerations of the citizens’ role in collective mobilisation and transformation are largely overlooked. To this end, the thesis seeks to understand how citizens can become active agents of change within transition efforts and how their political agency can be empowered accordingly. This, by exploring how climate change responsibility is perceived, negotiated, navigated, and enabled as well as what future pathways can be sourced from the imaginaries of the citizens themselves. The study uses data from a SenseMaker survey coded via a retroductive Grounded Theory methodology and analysed through the combined framework of Critical Realist and Ecological Citizenship. Through its lens and aims, the thesis contributes to understanding conditions for engagement, distribution and management of responsibility and sustainable transformations via individual and systemic change. Its conclusions argue for a need to broaden the collectively available ‘Ecological Citizenship repertoire’, partly by creating more autonomous, local, and cooperative channels for engagement embedded within concrete communities of practice.