Competing notions of social change and intervention in local climate change governance: The case of Copenhagen. Sara Berthou

Sara’s presentation discussed a study based on ethnographic fieldwork to examine the production of a Local Agenda 21-plan within Copenhagen. Using the Local Agenda 21-plan as a starting point, her study uses practice theory to look at how policy-makers think of their role in relation to creating social change, how they conceptualise social change and how this translates into specific problem definitions, solutions and intervention strategies. The study shows competing notions of social change and intervention in Copenhagen, but that the practice of policy-making most often reproduces ideas of normality rather than challenging these. The possibilities to systematize the beginning tendencies to challenge the dominant views on social intervention, when seeing policy-making as a distinct practice of its own, will be discussed.