Climate in common: a communications toolkit for working class engagement

Climate in Common is a communications toolkit produced by the Working Class Climate Alliance, funded by the European Union through the Green Economy Coalition and IIED Europe. The toolkit gives campaigners, civil society organizations and policymakers ten practical tools for building working class engagement with climate policy, including the adaptation measures that will reshape their homes, streets and livelihoods. The tools are taken from social science methodologies that encourage a relational and creative approach to engagement and communications, prioritizing conversation, shared activity and local knowledge over broadcast messaging. Every tool is participatory by design and built for group settings, drawing out the lived experience that adaptation planning depends on. The toolkit stresses accessibility throughout, taking people’s material needs, transport, clothing and mobility into account so that sessions do not become exclusionary, and it treats working class communities as knowledgeable and capable rather than in need of saving.

Working class communities are on the front line of climate impacts, from flooding to heatwaves, yet adaptation decisions are routinely made without them, and opponents of climate policy exploit that exclusion by casting environmental measures as an expensive imposition by an out of touch liberal elite. The world's working class – people who bear the greatest brunt of climate change's impacts, are rarely visible in shaping decision-making processes such as policymaking. This is not only a crisis of democratic participation, it is also a great loss of the rich skills, knowledge and resources that they hold and can collectively contribute to climate action. Unless we take steps to rectify these issues, greenlash will continue to thrive in our communities.