Questioning the logic of collective climate action: framing the climate action situation and the model of "Common rescue"

The problem of climate change, and how to respond to it, is often confronted to a dilemma between social justice and efficacy of action. Systematically presented as a tradeoff between individual action and profit (Acquier & Aggeri, 2015), or social acceptability and efficacy (Klenert et al., 2018), or equity and efficiency (Bauer et al., 2020), the coupling between social justice and efficacy appears to be a theoretical and empirical knot for climate action. In this conceptual paper, we draw on the notion of framing to show that current mechanisms for climate action are based on the same frame of climate action. The frame of a "social dilemma" or "collective action problem" or "commons dilemma" situation underlies most of our thinking of climate action and forces to see climate action as individuals who are 1) interdependent because they are constrained by a common resource, but 2) independent in the way they derive value from this resource. Yet, this single framing is restrictive. While climate change has been framed in many ways, we propose that there is a need for research to properly frame climate action itself to access new strategies. We show that "common peril" situation which acknowledge an interdependence between values can be an alternative action frame and allow exploring new ways of thinking climate action.