Bringing Missing Actors to the Table

This chapter focuses on how responses to climate change have tended to focus on some actors and sectors to the exclusion of others. Central to this is the idea of enabling innovation. Elements of enablement include leadership, relationship building (e.g. trust, commitment, open communication, collaboration and information exchange), skills development and competence building (e.g. problem identification, developing solutions), decision-making support (e.g. financial or human resourcing, delegating power to act) and response-ability (i.e. to external disruptors, e.g. storm events or financial shocks, risk management, entrepreneurial readiness, experimentation). Activist practices that map onto these five dimensions of enablement illustrate how each dimension offers a different way to bring missing actors to the table. New ways of bringing diverse localised actors together (e.g. trade unions, religious organisations and businesses) can break through barriers to collective action, ushering in new forms of climate activism.