Spiral-scaling climate action: lessons from and for the academic flying less movement

ABSTRACT

The notion that scholars should reduce consumption of workrelated flight travel as a form of climate action has become common in academia. Proponents of this idea have coalesced into a sectoral movement seeking to have a more significant impact. This article critically reflects on the case of the Academic Flying Less Movement (AFLM) to conceptually explore how the environmental concerns of individual scholars might cohere and coalesce into something more powerful. We draw lessons from the AFLM’s existing efforts to change common academic practice through norm diffusion, while also interpreting lessons for the AFLM by developing a spiral model of strategic multi-scalar climate action, wherein the limitations of various modes of action compel scalar shifts towards different forms of action. Our analysis contributes to ongoing efforts in the field to develop more nuanced understandings of the value and limitations of small-scale, demandside actions within the broader constellation of climate action.

KEYWORDS:

• Flying less movement
• climate action
• environmental norms
• spiral scaling
• global aviation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Additionally, they are indebted to Lisa Seiler and Susan O’Donnell for their critical insights and editorial help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the practice of academic air travel to a complete halt early in 2020, completely transforming the nature of scholarly exchange and research fieldwork, and opening the door to new practices in low-carbon scholarly exchange (Klöwer et al. 2020). Inevitably, as the world overcomes the pandemic (or learns to live with the virus) questions around the environmental politics of academic flying will come back to the fore.

2. At the time of writing there were 17 institutions and 675 individual signatories.

3. At the time of writing the petition had 1073 signatories.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs [950-233016]