Ways to go? (un)sustainable school commuting in Majorna, Gothenburg city

ABSTRACT

Gothenburg city has bold ambitions of becoming carbon neutral. School commuting is one piece of the puzzle in reducing emissions. While the literature on school transportation is extensive, the issue of climate change has been overlooked. This article explores how parents in the district of Majorna understand mundane choices of school transportation in a context of increasing recognition of climate change. The article shows that school transport is a contentious issue, entangled with subjectivity, emotions, and notions of responsibility. The findings also highlight some complexities: (1) Although most parents are concerned with climate change it is not a significant factor in daily transportation. (2) There is a discourse in favour of active transportation where climate change is explicitly downplayed, on the other hand regular car use merges with deep climate concerns. (3) Informants’ anticipations of future urban traffic conflict with their hopes, yet it seems difficult to imagine something otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban climate policy
• urban sustainability
• climate change
• school commuting
• active transportation
• car transportation
• automobility
• traffic
• Gothenburg

Acknowledgments

This article forms part of the research project Reduction of car use in Gothenburg: a prerequisite for combating climate change, but how?, funded by the Swedish Energy Agency. We are very grateful to the anonymous informants who participated in the study. We also want to thank Arne Wackenhut for valuable feedback on the construction and analysis of the survey. Finally, we want to thank Keri Facer, Ebba Lisberg Jensen, Maggie O’Neill, and the Critical Education Research group (KRUF) for helpful input. Any mistakes are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. When printed information from the City of Gothenburg is available in English, we refer to the translated documents. When not, we refer to the original documents written in Swedish.

2. Pupils enter preschool class in the year they turn 6. Hence the age span of the school is roughly 6–12 years.

3. The informant’s expression ‘small goes first’ is difficult to translate into English but it is a word play on the Swedish expression ‘störst går först’ (literally ‘big goes first’) which resembles the English expression ‘might is right’.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Energimyndigheten [46196-1].

Notes on contributors

Beniamin Knutsson

Beniamin Knutsson is Associate Professor in the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is also a research associate of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Beniamin’s research focuses mainly on issues relating to sustainable development and education. He has published in a range of international academic journals like, for example, Critical Studies in Education; Critical Education; Comparative Education Review; Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education; Development and Change; Environmental Education Research; Globalisation, Societies and Education; Globalizations; International Journal of Educational Development; Journal of International Relations and Development; and Third World Quarterly.

Sofie Hellberg

Sofie Hellberg is Associate professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Sofie’s research revolves around sustainable development and environmental governance with an emphasis on water and climate politics. She is author of The Biopolitics of Water: Governance, Scarcity and Populations (2018) and co-editor, with Stina Hansson and Maria Stern, of Studying the Agency of Being Governed (2015). Sofie has also published in a range of international academic journals.