Climate beyond Classism

About the Toolkit

The climate crisis is threatening people’s ability to have a good life worldwide. Its consequences are already being felt, particularly in the Global South, but increasingly in the Global North as well. Floods, storms and heatwaves hit people with little money particularly hard across the globe. They have fewer resources to protect themselves from the consequences of the climate crisis. To ensure a good life for everyone in the future, greenhouse gas emissions must therefore be reduced much more rapidly. The climate movement, among others, is campaigning for this through vocal protests and a wide range of actions.

Wealthy individuals and large corporations contribute particularly significantly to the climate crisis. Depending on how climate policy is shaped, it may – or may not – hold these groups to account. Currently, climate policy is hitting people with little money harder. This is the case, for example, when food becomes more expensive for environmental reasons, or when electric cars receive subsidies instead of public transport. A climate-just society therefore requires solidarity-based approaches that reduce social inequality and oppose the capitalist exploitation of people and the environment.

These connections between ecological and social sustainability are still not given enough attention in non-formal education. People with little money or little formal education often experience exclusion – this is also the case in the climate movement. Classism refers to this structural discrimination based on class position and class background. It affects people from the poverty and working class. Classism runs through our entire society and helps determine who feels at home in the climate movement and who finds access difficult due to travel costs, working hours, social codes and language barriers.

With this Toolkit, we aim to contribute to a more inclusive climate movement and a more inclusive non-formal education sector. We begin with a brief introduction to the topic and some guidance on educational work addressing climate change and classism. This section is kept relatively brief. It is intended to provide an entry point into the subject, but by no means covers all the interconnections. Our main focus is on presenting educational methods that address the interconnections between climate, classism, social inequality and capitalism. The methods are divided into three thematic sections: The first section, ‘Understanding and Contextualising’, provides information on the interconnections between climate, classism and capitalism in the past and present. The second section, ‘Reflecting and Empowering’, encourages discussion about participants’ own experiences of class society and the climate crisis, and facilitates engagement on an emotional and physical level. The third section, ‘Acting and Creating Change’, is dedicated to visions of a climate-just, anti-classist society and outlines ways to work together to achieve this.

The methods presented were developed as part of the Erasmus+ project ‘Climate beyond Classism’ by the political education collective ‘Bildung für utopischen Wandel’, in collaboration with our partner organisations Change Multipliers from Greece, Degrowth in Action from Spain, the European Anti-Poverty Network in the Netherlands and Latvia, the Polish Ecological Club, the education collective radix, and Service Civil International from Austria. We tested the methods during two seminars. The first seminar was a multiplier training session for anyone interested in the topic. The second seminar, the Empowerment Retreat for socio-ecological change, was an anti-classist empowerment session for people with personal experiences in the working and poverty classes. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all participants in both seminars for their valuable feedback, which has greatly enriched the methods and the toolkit

We hope you enjoy reading and applying the methods, and we look forward to your comments and feedback! (gerne per Mail an: info@buwa-kollektiv.de)

Your BuWa Team

You can download the toolkit here. Additional materials for the individual learning modules can be found below.

You can also check out our german toolkits with more methods and materials on our website.