Shifting and sharing power in urban climate justice work: experiments in transformative learning in Vancouver, Canada

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report describes the vital role of sub-state actors in climate action, and cities and urban coalitions are stepping up to this challenge in great numbers¹. City leadership is rapidly growing and organizing into movements for collective action and advocacy, with Mayors making strong commitments and calls to action related to climate. Civil servants and community collaborators are delivering ambitious adaptation and mitigation plans, policies, and regulations and are building and retrofitting infrastructure and delivering new programs and services. Alongside this surge in urban climate work are growing calls for justice from leaders representing countries and communities that are being most impacted by climate change, and are least responsible for causing it. As the impacts of a changing climate arrive on our global shores, the calls to action and accountabilities related to intergenerational equity, financing losses and damages, just transition, reparations, land back, multi-species justice, and many others are growing in urgency from the international to city scales. There is a persistent and increasingly urgent question of who is benefitting from and who is being harmed by climate action and inaction. Even as the collective of voices calling for just climate action grows, powerful societal actors continue to oppress and marginalize the people, lands, and waters most impacted by rapidly changing climate^2,3,4,5,6. These actors wield power and agency through the dominant systems and structures of colonialism and capitalism, emphasizing that just climate mitigation and adaptation has a power problem that we must contend with if we are to move our climate action ambitions forward, together^{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14}. As an increasing number of urban climate plans, policies, regulations, and programs move to integrate justice considerations, researchers can support this work by providing robust frameworks and approaches to ensure that this work is systemic, high impact, and actionable for practitioners, while working at the deeper root causes that perpetuate injustice, oppression, and ongoing colonization.

Urban climate action is often treated as a constellation of discrete policy, planning, technical, engineering, land use, public engagement, and financial problems rather than as a systemic socio-economic and ecological challenge that also impacts equity, justice, inclusion, and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples^11,12,14,15. Urban climate adaptation and mitigation plans tend to be siloed from each other, organized into discrete categories (e.g. scope 1 and 2 emissions, confined within jurisdictional limits), and conceptions of (in)justice in these plans (if present) tend to be focused on a limited number of procedural, distributive, and recognitional justice considerations^16,17,18,19. The field of climate justice research, practice, and real-world impacts often push against these categories, and they continue to be contested, expanded, and made more complex in important ways as the field evolves (e.g^20,21,22,23). In the imperfect and messy world of implementing climate adaptation and mitigation plans generally, and more specifically when integrating justice, taking social innovation, systemic and transition design, and sustainability transitions perspectives is helpful. These ways of thinking about climate justice seek to identify paradigms, values, socio-cultural factors, niche innovations, and conditions that shape landscape- and regime level forces as high leverage places to experiment and intervene (e.g^{24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33}.). Systems thinking and sustainability transitions theories of change can help us to see that working on climate and justice challenges discreetly, or solely within the dominant, western colonial paradigm of urban governance is neither most effective nor just, and there are ongoing social harms being caused by climate work that does not embed justice (for example^2,5,6,19,34). These are generalized patterns being discussed and explored in academic literature theoretically and through examination of cases and examples, and they also show up in our study located in Vancouver, Canada.

While the City of Vancouver (2024 population ~679,000) is fairly ‘young’ in its conceptualization as a colonial city (est. 1886), it exists in a place of permanent settlements of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Indigenous peoples and on unceded territory. The City of Vancouver’s first climate plan, Clouds of Change, was passed in 1990. This was followed by the Greenest City Action Plan (2011-2020), a comprehensive environmental plan which included ambitious climate change goals, targets, and actions. The Climate Emergency Action Plan and the Climate Change Adaptation Plan currently guide climate work in Vancouver, with an array of land use, infrastructure, and other plans integrating climate commitments as well (e.g. local food, transportation, biodiversity and the urban forest, health). High-level commitments to equity and reconciliation are being made in these plans, with some specific equity-related actions starting to be included (e.g. measures to protect seniors and people with disabilities during extreme heat events). However, actively anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and decolonial commitments and actions grounded in disaggregated quantitative and qualitative data with strong reporting and accountability mechanisms are not yet present, and the plans continue to reinforce many of the siloes of how this work tends to be planned and resourced in cities. The city has also set additional policy priorities not directly connected with current climate plans, including high level commitments to reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, equity, anti-Black racism, rights of LGBTQIA2+ people, and women’s equity, alongside political statements and formal apologies to racialized communities that the City has harmed/is harming through a variety of oppressive laws, land uses, inadequate provision of infrastructure and services, and other municipal activities.

Our participatory action research in Vancouver steps into the multiple tensions in the current field of climate justice as identified by Newell et al³. including: academic vs. activist approaches; global vs. local scales; mitigation vs. adaptation; and climate justice vs. other forms of justice. They call for a more transformative approach to climate justice that pluralizes climate knowledge, explores diverse meanings of climate justice, and moves away from human exceptionalism and toward multi-species and intergenerational perspectives. This points toward the potential for shifting and sharing power and agency as a vital and underexplored area of inquiry when working toward climate justice. More specifically, challenging/subverting existing power relations, reimagining decision-making structures and processes, holding powerful actors to account, and reconfiguring and centering different perspectives and considerations than those that currently dominate urban climate discourse^3,19,35,36.

In this article we focus on exploring the potential of transformative learning as a theory, practice, and process for shifting and sharing power in urban climate justice work. Hughes and Hoffmann³⁴ say that “knowledge for the just city, then, becomes a process of learning and producing shared knowledge about justice beyond those held by the status quo” (p.5). From our perspective, transformative learning is foundational to transcending the dominant paradigms that we are operating in when we are doing climate work that integrates justice considerations. Hoggan³⁵ defines transformative learning as “processes that result in significant and irreversible changes in the way a person experiences, conceptualizes, and interacts with the world” (p.71). Our specific orientation to transformative learning in this article is that it is both an individual and collective/social process that transforms problematic frames of reference, beliefs, habits of mind, perspectives, and assumptions that no longer serve a person or situation. This learning enables them to contend with more complex and emergent challenges and contexts, and to then act from this place^37,38,39,40. Several generations of researchers and practitioners have worked with a set of stages in transformative learning processes, including cultivating a productive zone of disequilibrium or disorienting dilemma followed by critical reflection, taking responsibility, exploring and testing, and then integrating this new learning into the ways that they are in the world^{38,41,42,43,44,45}. Transformative learning is often experiential, can be both/either fast and durational, and is characterized as a mixture of content and process where learners: work through their own processes of self-discovery in individually relevant ways; see meaningful relationships in complex systems and find ways to work within them; engage in reflection; work at the edges of their comfort zones; and be “accountable for one’s actions and owning the consequences” (⁴⁶, p. 243).

These orientations to transformative learning make clear that these processes are uncomfortable by design. This is perhaps even more evident when working toward climate justice, as transformative and generative learning for climate justice demands building competencies and capacities to reckon with ever increasing urgency, complexity, volatility, and uncertainty while seeking rapid innovation and transformation and then putting this learning into practice⁴⁷. Many adults will resist or avoid the discomfort of this kind of learning and thus (un)consciously inhibit our own transformation under the guise of professionalism, defensiveness, competitiveness, conflict avoidance, perfectionism, and other dodges that normalize behaviors, systems, and structures designed to de-escalate or avoid the discomfort and disorientation that is required for transformative learning^48,49. Hoggan³⁵ describes six broad types of transformative learning outcomes as shifts in worldview, self, ontology, epistemology, behavior, and/or capacity. This provides a helpful framework to aid understanding about learning outcomes when designing, implementing, and evaluating processes that hold a transformative learning intent, including, we argue, climate justice work that intends to move beyond the status quo and into equity, anti-racism, anti-oppression, and decoloniality.

The insights in this article were generated through richly situated and contextual participatory action research (PAR) done within a Climate Justice Field School (CJFS) in Vancouver, Canada. The CJFS was a community-led and collaborative experiment in transformative learning and in shifting and sharing power, and was an implementation response to the first Climate Justice Charter for Vancouver completed in 2023. In the Results section, we briefly describe the making of the Climate Justice Charter in order to establish the context for our PAR with/for the Climate Justice Field School, with further details about how we did this provided later on in the Methods section. Using the experiences in the Field School, in the Discussion we then work to discern generalizable transformative learning interventions that support shifting and sharing power in urban climate justice work. These are offered as insights to researchers and practitioners interested in moving toward just, equitable, inclusive and decolonial climate action through deeper understanding and implementation of transformative learning praxis.

Making of a Climate Justice Charter for Vancouver

Arising from more than three decades of municipal activity on climate action in Vancouver, and working alongside increasing community-led advocacy and the leadership of several municipal councilors, in 2022-23 the first ever Climate Justice Charter for Vancouver (CJC) was written. The work was led by the community-based Climate and Equity Working Group (CEWG) with support from City staff and a consulting team. The goal of this work was to provide a climate justice North Star by describing a vision, goals, activities, and accountabilities for a just climate future together in a comprehensive way. The CJC was completed in early 2023 and includes three main sections: (1) Understanding the Climate Justice Charter; (2) The Climate Justice Charter Framework (including definitions, vision, guiding principles, and goals); and (3) Moving Toward Climate Justice (guidance for implementation and evaluation)⁵⁰. The vision for climate justice set out in the CJC is for “A city of interconnected communities collectively advancing climate action, Indigenous sovereignty, intersectionality, equity, and social justice towards a shared future of healing and hope” (p.15) on concurrent timelines of the present climate emergency and also 500+ years into the future⁵⁰.

The ways that justice is defined and embedded throughout this work defy the neat boundaries that the urban climate justice literature is establishing in several key ways: ten different related facets of justice are considered (Fig. 1); implications are for mitigation, adaptation, and beyond; the edges of what is seen as the responsibility of the city are morphed and stretched far beyond what is typical (i.e. inclusion of migrant labor in food production); and the work is deeply rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and understands colonization as the root of the climate crisis.

Ten facets of justice described in the Climate Justice Charter for Vancouver⁵⁰.

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The CJC was taken to the City Council in February 2023 with a mixed reception from the majority political party of the time. The CEWG recommended that Council direct staff to use the CJC to guide Vancouver’s climate work, and that staff report back annually on its implementation, including explicit equity analyses in all climate-related reports. Council amended the wording to: (A) That Council receive A Climate Justice Charter for Vancouver, written by the Climate Equity Working Group; and (B) That Council direct staff to apply an equity lens and the City’s Equity Framework to climate strategy and initiatives. Opposition Councilors holding a minority of seats considered this a significant watering down of the work, questioned how Council would make informed decisions about implementation if they did not receive regular updates on progress, and did not vote in favor of the amendment. Conditions for implementing the CJC inside City government remain challenging at the time of writing this article, and yet some City staff continue to find creative ways to implement the CJC alongside a growing number of community partners even without clear leadership from elected officials or senior staff.

As authors, we supported a developmental evaluation (DE)⁵¹ of the process of making the CJC with City staff that led the effort to aid reflexivity and sense-making after this Council decision. This was meant to help determine where to take the work next, and more detailed DE findings are shared in the Methods section. An important thread running through the evaluation, as well as in the CJC itself, was that different conceptions of power (other than the top-down/power-over practices dominant in government) were needed in order to skillfully and successfully move toward climate justice. At this point a collaboration between some City of Vancouver staff involved in making the CJC and Emily Carr University was established, and external funding support was secured, to create a permissive space to explore and experiment with power and relational dynamics through a Climate Justice Field School (CJFS). The CJFS was shaped by our inference that transformative learning can meaningfully shift individual and collective relationships with power, and that these shifts are vital in working toward climate justice, which is particularly important when top-down enabling conditions are not strong.

Climate justice field school

A field school is a short-term, site-specific pedagogical approach that takes participants outside of typical learning or working spaces and into a contextual environment for guided fieldwork. Held from June – November of 2023, our CJFS was hosted by a core team of six people (including the authors) and included six site-based sessions, a series of prompts for asynchronous, reflective work amongst the 25 participants, and a large public symposium. Participants were initially recruited amongst those who participated in the authorship of the CJC (both community members and city staff), and then invitations were extended through relational networks linking different domains of climate justice expertie in Vancouver. Community participants in the CJFS (roughly half) had experience in ethnobotany and protection of nature, transportation, education, Indigenous sovereignty, cultural practice, and social and ecological justice, and held positions in non-profits, community advocacy groups, schools, and academic institutions. The other half of participants were mid-level City of Vancouver staff with different climate-related responsibilities, effectively those working most closely on implementation of the CJC.

We designed the CJFS to help shake loose from a number of stuck patterns that help maintain and reproduce existing power structures in our urban climate work. This included: dynamics associated with professional hierarchies and job titles; the minimization and absence of strong relational accountabilities as a central strategy; the siloing of expertize and control of resource and information flows; overemphasis on technical solutions above grappling with systemic complexities; the centering of comfort, convenience, and familiarity for City staff; and the exclusion of cultural practices in climate work. We recognized the ways that these patterns are fractal in nature, replicating themselves from individual to systemic scales, and how transformative learning also ripples in- and outward across these same scales. Working across these fractals was a central aspect of the CJFS design⁸.

What follows is a discussion of five key transformative learning interventions within the CJFS that showed promise to shift power in our urban climate justice work in this fractal pattern. These are considered in relation to Hoggan’s framework of transformative learning outcomes:

• Self: self-in-relation, empowerment/responsibility, identity/view of self, self-knowledge, personal narratives, meaning/purpose, personality change;

• Worldview: assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, ways of interpreting experience, more comprehensive of complex worldview, new awareness/understandings;

• Epistemology: more discriminating, utilizing extra-rational ways of knowing, more open;

• Ontology: affective experience of life, ways of being, attributes;

• Behavior: actions consistent with new perspective, social action, professional practices, skills; and

• Capacity: cognitive development, consciousness, spirituality³⁵.

We describe how the pedagogy of the CJFS mapped to these transformative learning outcomes in terms of approach, provide examples of what this looked and felt like in practice, and offer quotes from participants in the CJFS reflecting on different aspects of their learning experiences and how they relate to ongoing climate work. Please note that quotes are attributed to participants in accordance with their wishes, as determined through our research ethics and consent processes.

Radical and generous hosting

Shifts in epistemology, ontology, and behavior

Recognizing the pervasiveness of the stuck patterns described above, along with a deep desire to do things differently from the outset, our core team committed to radical experimentation and saying yes to each others’ ideas while hosting the Field School. We collectively offered up and validated a variety of attempts to try things typically outside the boundaries of ‘real work’ in a western colonial context, allowing a fuller expression of our lived experiences and cultural perspectives and some pedagogical risk-taking to inform our approach. As a group of highly skilled and experienced facilitators and educators, we consistently reflected on the power dynamics inherent in our roles. We shifted from conceiving of ourselves as individual expert facilitators and instead to being generous hosts of shared experiences. We aimed to be of utmost service to the work that we were doing individually and together rather than focusing on the ‘right’ way to do climate justice from our perspectives.

We worked hard to hold this hosting ethos using several central strategies that we practiced and iterated as we went. Our core team held our initial planning sessions outdoors and shared food, cultural materials, and somatic practices in our meetings to practice and access multiple ways of knowing, being, feeling, and doing. We checked in frequently about pace and each others’ capacity and designed our work together with a spirit of supporting healing and abundance with- and for each other. Working this way felt risky and vulnerable. As hosts, we shared culturally meaningful songs and stories, set up material prototypes to play with concepts of balance, and shared ceremonial practices and medicine plants without knowing if the field school participants would be able to make connections between these extra-rational experiences and the CJC or would dismiss them as naive or a waste of time. We worked in circle, and held ourselves and each other in right relationship with the others in the CJFS and the places that we visited. This approach meant that decisions took more time, an overall project plan with known/predictable outcomes was not clear from the outset, and that we were working in resistance to the explicit power dynamics of our roles in the project (as a team made up of 3 students, 2 researchers attached to a university, and 1 city staff person). We put time and energy into cultivating a dynamic that shared power and leadership, which meaningfully moved us away from tending to the patterns that replicate dominant constructions and conceptions of power.

Through these shifts in our ways of being and behaving, which felt so distinctly different from everything else, transformative learning about shifting and sharing power was occurring for our core team – as individuals with different positionalities, as well as together as a group in learning to be of service to the work we were cultivating with/for participants in the CJFS. This became a pattern that grew in fractal formation as we extended these practices to others in the CJFS. Making this relational practice central in our organizing approach and making this explicit and visible to Field School members enacted this ripple-effect theory, meaning we were significantly investing energy into creating a transformative experience of shifting and sharing power for participants in the CJFS through our own radical approach to hosting.

“When we sit in a circle, it’s not to change other peoples’ minds but to be changed ourselves.” (Splash).

“I felt very much cared for with my physical disabilities in walking, it was great to have someone check in. It’s been great to go from feeling awkward and out of place at the beginning to feeling a part of a very passionate group by the end.” (Leona Brown).

Embodied anti-racism

Shifts in self, epistemology, and capacity

Drawing from Resmaa Menakem’s practices of embodied anti-racism, or somatic abolitionism, this is an approach that locates the processing of grief and intergenerational trauma in the body and resources energies that are always present in your body, in the collective body, and in the world. Through grounding exercises, embodied anti-racism invites each individual to sit with their own relationship to privilege and oppression, building a heightened awareness of how these forces inform the ways we understand and respond to complex conditions such as climate change, and move toward healing⁵². Offering an entry-point for every individual to be involved and implicated in this work is important, as bodies of culture tend to shoulder much of this labor, while also being looked to for guidance and answers.

In the CJFS, participants were invited to identify an outdoor ‘sit spot’ that they would regularly return to for individual reflection between in-person sessions. We provided paper journals and a series of prompts, and each prompt always included three elements: a grounding/orientation exercise; a question; and a gift, such as a song or poem. For example, one prompt that called for reflection on privilege and oppression was: What ancestries, power, privileges, experiences, assumptions, values or other perspectives do you hold? How might this shape how you see, understand, experience, and know the problem space that you are working in? Doing this work while situated in a sit spot was an experiment in activating the senses, bringing participants into a setting that would stand out from other day-to-day work, deepening relationships with more-than-human relations, and giving them a relationally grounded place to return to this question at a later time. This layering was intentionally shaped to put the nervous system at ease while doing this important processing work and to build capacity for understanding the healing role of cultural offerings. In guiding participants through attending to this process work, our aim was to quiet or disarm dominant power dynamics experienced in the self and in larger social professional spheres, thereby equipping participants to see and implicate themselves in the pattern in a different way.

“I felt gratitude for the time and space made for these explorations and discussions. I appreciated the safety. It made me reflect on the boundaries and armor we place on ourselves in our usual place of work where you don’t feel the same sense of safety. How wonderful it would be, and how much positive and game changing work could we do, if we created this safety and welcoming in the bureaucracies many of us work in.” (CP).

“The journey towards equity demands difficult conversations, forcing every individual to confront their own unconscious biases and challenge long-standing norms.” (Navdeep).

Seasonal attunement and setting as teacher

Shifts in worldview and ontology

When climate work takes place indoors in comfortable and climate-controlled environments there is a gap in embodied understanding of seasons, weather, and other sensory data. Cognitively examining data that describes how summers are warming, or species are going extinct at increasing rates, is a different experience than being immersed in the discomfort of extreme heat, or observing the effects of drought on Western Red Cedar in a forest. Embodied learning and attunement to seasons was a primary tool for transformative learning that we experimented with throughout the CJFS in a variety of ways. We chose outdoor settings for gatherings that would bring us into closer contact with the ecological beings in our bioregion. Gathering in community gardens, urban forests, inner-city cultural sites, and parks was significantly disorienting and also revitalizing, thereby lightening our load as hosts and providing a strong experiential impression on the group. Design interventions of the hosting team (e.g. invitations to participants) followed seasonal color palettes which gradually shifted as we moved from spring and summer into fall. In aggregate, through gathering across eight locations and through three seasons we enhanced the collective experience of deepening our understanding of climate justice as informed by natural cycles and spaces. The CJC asks us to “revisit the goals [of the Charter] and recommit to the outcomes seasonally […] in practice and in ceremony” (⁵⁰, p. 25). Our emphasis on seasonal attunement was intended to build capacities for this. To allow seasons, weather, and embodied understanding to have a meaningful influence on the learning and actions of the group. To shift power away from dominant human-centric practices and towards practices more holistically aware of how other-than-human beings experience the impacts of climate change.

Gathering in informal and community-oriented settings, such as parks and community gardens, promoted ease and familiarity for CJFS participants within community. ‘Kitchen talk,’ the informal conversation and learning that takes place in spaces like kitchens, was enabled by gathering around picnic tables and sharing in simple, preparatory work like washing fruit and vegetables or setting up chairs. This constant rearrangement of people and the invitation to help out allowed different kinds of opportunities for people to get to know each other in low-pressure and less structured ways. Over time, gathering and reconvening in different parts of the city created a sense that the group had traveled together and become practiced and ready to do the work together as a group in an ongoing way.

“I’m usually in an office—muted colors and uniform. It’s a space so disassociated from the realities and communities we purport to serve in our work. How can we do this work if we sever this connection and relationship to place?” (CP).

“Locating the reciprocity at play within given moments – between hosts and participants; between the land and us as witnesses; between what we’re all able to contribute/give and what we get out of this experience and the work that we do. Also understanding when reciprocities are/have been out of balance, when some might be overextended, extracted from, under-attended to, and the awareness and will that’s needed from those in places of privilege and power to tip those scales the other way.” (LR).

Navigating pace and place-based memory

Shifts in worldview, ontology, and capacity

Instead of thinking about climate justice in its distinct workings at different geological, jurisdictional, or spatial scales, or neatly categorizing climate work into mitigation and adaptation, policy, programs, and other categories, in the CJFS we practiced space- and time travel. Bayo Akomolafe says that the times are urgent, we must slow down, capturing the energy of the ways that we tend to construct the many paradoxes in climate justice work. In the CJFS, following the guidance of the CJC, we released ourselves from the pressure to define, categorize, and implement discrete quick starts, immediate follow-up actions, and specific measurable outputs from our work. This gave all of us a liberated experience of opening up, exploring, creating, and imagining which rarely, if ever, happens for people working on climate change and climate justice. This was very uncomfortable for most of the participants, particularly those working in the public sector who shared that they felt like they were cheating in some way when they were in the CJFS sessions because it did not feel like they were working.

As an example of this, one of our sessions was hosted by Laiwan, a local artist, at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden and the Chinese Canadian Museum located in Vancouver’s Chinatown. As we stood on highly urbanized firm ground in these spaces in the present, the artist showed the film Summer Afternoon⁵³ and told stories of the Chinatown of over 100 years ago located in a swampy mudflat where kids moved around using floating walkways and boats. Even older stories (as told by T’uy’t’tanat- Cease Wyss) from Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Indigenous cultures tell of Sínulhḵay̓, the two-headed sea serpent who lives in the waters underneath and around this part of the city. Guided by Laiwan, we traveled back-and-forth in space and time together, also thinking into the future when the sea level will rise again and this area will return to the intertidal. Thinking and moving in these ways decenters the urgency of now that dominates climate discourse, a pattern which enables justice considerations to continually be set aside until greenhouse gas emissions are adequately reduced. Instead, space-time travel centers the reality that multiple truths exist concurrently, that there is expertize held by those who have already experienced apocalypse and persisted anyway, and that we can shift and change power in climate spaces to lift up those knowledge systems.

“Pace is a major and largely unacknowledged driver of power dynamics: the privileging of speed and efficiency is systemic and very difficult for any one person to challenge on their own. I notice contending with my own feelings that slowing means I am being lazy or not taking my job seriously.”

“Work can look and feel very different in positive ways. Rest is productive; slowing down with others, listening, being present is productive.” (ZL).

“I remember the slow-bustling of making walking sticks and star blanket pieces together, feeling the joy and the loss of this last day of gathering together, and also knowing the world will continue to shift and change afterwards.” (ZL).

Cultivating not-knowing while keeping our moorings

Shifts in self, capacity, and behavior

Throughout the CJFS we actively cultivated experiences of uncertainty, ambiguity, and non-closure as part of our approaches to shifting power and transformative learning. As hosts and participants we worked hard to resist falling back into the comfortable and regularly traveled grooves of thinking and practice of climate action because those grooves tend to compartmentalize climate action and justice into different categories, and downplay the importance of justice in climate work. Cultivating not-knowing engaged and enabled other ways of knowing, being, doing, and feeling that then generated different insights and experiences. Many processes of transformative learning emphasize the importance of holding these disorienting experiences of not-knowing with care and respect, for ourselves and each other, because they take people into and beyond their edges and this can inadvertently cause harm.

As a hosting team we wanted to maintain a grounding while we stretched, and Resmaa Menakem’s concept of moorings helped us to do this⁵². He invites people to identify anchor points that they can stay grounded in and focused on to help with wayfinding when navigating and working to heal (from) generational and ongoing racialized trauma and the deep and widespread culture of white supremacy. In the CJFS we were navigating big, complex, emergent, and turbulent waters. The following moorings are what we stayed tethered to together to help us hold an open and learning-oriented space of transformation throughout the journey (Fig. 2).

“We were challenged in navigating the urge or expectation for something tangible and outcome-focused to happen, and figuring out how much to focus on sensemaking compared to creating next steps.”

“The stubborn and deep-rooted biases we have are harder to give up when under duress. We all need opportunities to practice – really practice – other ways of doing things if we want to change ourselves and our relationships.”

“I started paying attention to how much I’ve swallowed down despair, hopelessness, and fear for so many years and hidden it away so that I could keep doing this work. Realizing that I have the strength and courage to start to resurface this and be in a different kind of relationship with these feelings and experiences.”

Moorings used to guide and shape the Climate Justice Field School⁶⁴.

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In conclusion, we found that holding a transformative learning orientation while examining, shifting, redistributing, and reimagining power in climate justice work generated powerful practices and insights that we argue are vital to ensuring that climate action also moves toward justice, equity, inclusion, and decoloniality. It was important to create the conditions for participants with different experience, expertize, and positionality to be in learning relationships with each other throughout the experience, shifting away from a dynamic of city-staff-as-experts and community members as non-experts. Experimenting with pace, inviting different forms of communication (such as practices of cultural exchange), locating ourselves in relation to land and place, and practicing a sense of curiosity were attributes of this work that showed significant promise in shifting and sharing power, and helped move toward three of the CJC’s goals to: “ensure climate change mitigation and adaptation solutions are guided by those who are most impacted by systemic oppression and climate change; respond to the need for accountability and resulting repair work related to climate injustices; and catalyze systems change within climate policy and practice”⁵⁰.

The five guiding principles of the CJC – nə́caʔmat tə šxʷqʷeləwən ct (We are of One Heart and Mind), Indigenous Sovereignty, Thinking Beyond Borders, Redistribution, and Fluidity – demand that we work to transcend the siloing of climate work (inviting personal agency, feeling and responsibility as a part of systems-change and resisting common trappings such as disciplinary isolation). The CJFS allowed us to navigate around common silos by individually and collectively exploring how we might differently understand our agency and accountabilities in our work at micro, meso, and macro scales, thus reinforcing a fractal-shaped understanding of power dynamics. Each participant in the CJFS was supported in building ongoing reflective practices to consider their own relationship to power, to implicate themselves in the maintenance or disruption of status quo dynamics, and to explore contextually meaningful alternatives to top-down hierarchies common in urban climate work.

Climate justice charter context

From 2020–2021, the City of Vancouver convened the first iteration of the Climate and Equity Working Group (CEWG), a group of 16 people with diverse expertize at the intersections of climate and justice. This group was tasked with providing input and insight about how equity could be included in the making of the (mitigation focused) Climate Emergency Action Plan, and through this work identified the potential purpose and shape for what would become the Climate Justice Charter (CJC). From 2021–2023, the City convened a second iteration of the CEWG, with 17 members recruited through an open call for participation and including some people who were part of the first CEWG. This is when the authors became actively involved as process designers, facilitators, and action researchers in this work. The CEWG undertook two primary activities over their term: (1) providing focused feedback to City of Vancouver staff working to understand and embed justice considerations in specific climate-related policy, engagement, and programs; and (2) producing a Climate Justice Charter. The process of writing the CJC was quite open and iterative, with the specific form of the final CJC and the process of writing it and deciding when it was complete becoming clear only as the work progressed. Early on in the process, City staff determined that a typical City-led process would not be appropriate for this initiative as it would risk the CEWG’s work being substantially edited and revised as it went through the City approval processes before being presented to City Council. Instead of this route, it was determined that the CEWG would author the CJC and take it directly to Council in their own words, an unusual approach to policy-making in the public sector. A diverse consulting team, experienced with equity-centered and decolonial ways of working, was hired to support the CEWG alongside the team of City staff.

As shared in the Results section, after the CJC went to Vancouver City Council, the authors worked with City staff responsible for supporting the CEWG to undertake a developmental evaluation (DE) of the process and work to date to help figure out where to take this work next. Through this DE six key learnings were surfaced which informed and inspired the conceptualized of the Climate Justice Field School: (1) the necessity of personal transformation when doing climate justice work; (2) the importance of beginning processes purposefully and well; (3) the need to reimagine project management for complexity; (4) the qualities of cultivating a caring space for community to do their best work; (5) the importance of having radical trust in community-led and authored work; and (6) the need to translate what was practiced and learned in the making of the CJC thoughtfully and skillfully into implementation. These learnings are also influencing the approaches that some City staff are taking as they continue to question and counter the dominant forces influencing municipal climate work (i.e. siloing, maintaining power structures, etc. as discussed in the introduction) and instead move deliberately, relationally, systemically, and with a learning orientation into implementing the CJC particularly as the power-over, hierarchically shaped leadership conditions for this work remain challenging.

Methodology

Participatory action research (PAR) was chosen as an appropriate and robust methodology for this research as it is “a participatory process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes” (⁵⁴, p.4). As researchers and authors of this article, we worked alongside City staff and community members as co-participants (rather than subjects or objects), which included activities of action and reflection, generating questions and objectives, sharing knowledge, interpreting findings, and implementing and evaluating outcomes and impacts. PAR is an eclectic, pluralist family of methods and orientations to inquiry and aims to address power imbalances typical of many Euro- and Anglocentric research approaches^54,55,56,57. Our approach was further refined in response to recent calls for participatory action researchers to work toward transformation (PAR-T) to contribute to a better world, and to incorporate methods of grappling with relationality, reflexivity, interconnectedness, transformation, and complexity in our work^55,56. PAR-T was well suited to developing and articulating understandings of applied and action-oriented urban climate justice research.

Indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, and queer methodologies informed and shaped and a critical view of the dominant approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation held within white dominant, western, colonial institutions that hold majority space in climate action work in Vancouver. These methodologies are essential for guiding inquiry when working beyond/outside of the usual ways of working and into the potential for just, equitable, inclusive, decolonial climate action^{8,57,58,59,60,61,62}. These ethics and orientations were integrated throughout the project, including: a diverse core hosting team (including the authors of this article); ensuring that action co-researchers (participants in the CJFS) held a variety of lived experiences, gender identities, racial backgrounds, and Indigenous ways of knowing and being; drawing on anti-racism and EDI training in the approach to hosting and facilitating the CJFS; constant reflection on the orientation that the hosting team and action co-researchers hold to data collection, sensemaking, and synthesis work; and all knowledge mobilization decisions and activities.

The Climate Justice Field School research was approved by Emily Carr University of Art and Design Research Ethics Board, File No: 100546. All members of the Climate Justice Field School provided their formal written consent to participate in this research. We have received formal consent to use Fig. 1 in this publication; Figs. 2 and 3, the participant quotes in the Discussion, and the end quote in Methods were produced as part of this research and are original materials.

Timeline and activities/methods

The early planning for the Climate Justice Field School began in December 2022 as the making of the CJC was coming to a close, and four hosting team co-researchers joined the process in February 2023. Approaches to hosting drew from the potlatch method, described by Wilson and Nelson-Moody in their article Looking Back to the Potlatch as a Guide to Truth, Reconciliation, and Transformative Learning as a community-based, participatory approach, which “must model resiliency, innovation, and abundance” (⁶³, p. 47). The paper describes the potlatch method, or λi ´ala, as having five common elements that we worked to integrate into each gathering and into the longer arc of the CJFS as a whole: greetings and welcoming; nourishment; doing the work; reflection; and honor. We met in a variety of locations using different approaches to convening in the twenty different sessions. The Field School formally concluded in November 2023, after which the core planning team continued to convene for 9 months for ongoing sensemaking, ceremony, and seasonal attunement. Figure 3 describes the timeline and activities of the Field School.

Learning Journey describing the arc of transformative learning in the Climate Justice Field School⁶⁴.

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Approaches to sensemaking

Qualitative data was collected throughout the project by way of observation, interviews, design and process interventions, developmental evaluation cycles, and making. Sensemaking in social innovation and experimentation work is often about finding promising signals, surfacing patterns, and deepening learning through cycles of action and reflection. Results and findings are non-linear, do not have clear cause-effect relationships, and are deeply contextual. We engaged in sensemaking and synthesis work throughout the CJFS, drawing upon decolonizing, feminist, diagrammatic, and abductive methods^8,57,58. Following a framework of developmental evaluation⁵¹, the data gathered through this project was oriented around the questions of ‘What?; So what?; and Now what?’ with the purpose of surfacing significant moments, making sense of challenges, feelings or insights, and adapting to what emerged for different people involved with the CJFS.

Zoë Laycock, a participant in the CJFS, who during this time was an emerging artist and Master of Fine Arts student at Emily Carr, stepped forward to create a cultural documentation of the process. Working with their Anishinaabe Red River Métis teachings and contemporary art practice, Laycock collaborated with CJFS participants to create a traditional star blanket. Textiles used to make the blanket were exposed to the sun using a cyanotype process at our closing gathering, and then stitched together to form the eight-pointed star of the blanket. Each piece of the star blanket pattern points inward, outward, and to each other, holding each of our ideas, goals and actions, exemplifying that the work is not linear. Laycock shares this in their artist statement about the project:

“The star blanket pieces have been within the hands of many who have shared time, place, perspectives and care throughout the Climate Justice Field School. [The blanket] was made through a communal process of gathering to reflect on our learning and kinship built together towards our common aspiration. There are imprints of natural materials we chose on the surface of the diamonds making up this star blanket. There are images of our coming together, of songs and of witnessing, of hands and of the land, of a kaleidoscope of minds coming into a place of hope, of thought and of action.

The star blanket is a living document, it is a place of comfort for those hard hitting questions and conversations that we must continue to have to grow. It is a place to rest, reflect, and make time to maintain the community connections, and foster positive impacts for those around us. I am learning from all of you, we are all learning from each other and this star blanket lives as a reflection of our diversities coming together and organizing in many harmonies” (⁶⁴, p. 27).