Conditions for Emergence, Stability and Change in New Organizations in the Field of Citizens Climate Action

Climate change represents a crisis of tangible measure and the emergence of a field of action within which acting today needs to be motivated for what can contribute to benefit climate and transform society into a low carbon tomorrow. With the breadth and scope of citizen action on climate change expanding worldwide the weight of expectations can be boiled down to two: One refers to their potential for delivering specific mitigation/adaptation goals; the second refers to their organizational potential, stability and the manner in which they can ultimately affect societal transformational change. This contribution is concerned with the latter. It proposes that using field analysis it is possible to understand conditions of emergence, stability and change in citizen engagement in climate action. The present contribution offers only a preliminary exploration of possibilities for how using field theory can help understand the dynamic interaction of citizen engagement into collective actions for climate change. This theoretical exploration is advanced as part of the European project ITSOIN (Social Innovation in the Third Sector 2014-2016) which has the goal of understanding what happens in social organizations in general, in this case applies to climate action organizations, what are the major trends, and how they may develop in particular with regard to their contribution to innovation for societal change.