Speaker: Michael Schnegg, UHH
Why do people in climate-vulnerable regions of Kenya and Namibia often express more hope for the future than many people in Germany, even though they face more immediate environmental threats?
Drawing on ethnographic research and Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy of hope, Julian Sommerschuh and I (Sommerschuh and Schnegg 2026) argue that this difference is partly rooted in how climate change is experienced. In Germany, climate change is often encountered abstractly, through scientific models, media reports, and global scenarios, which can foster feelings of powerlessness and despair. In Kenya and Namibia, by contrast, climate change is experienced more concretely, through failed rains, livestock losses, and shifting livelihoods. Such concrete experiences make response possible. In Marcel’s terms, they enable both “techniques of liquefaction,” which loosen apparently fixed circumstances and open alternative futures within existing horizons of aspiration, and “acts of transcendence,” which reorient people toward radically different futures. I suggest that reengaging climate change at a human scale, and taking seriously socially creative or religious forms of transcendence, may help reawaken hope in contexts where climate futures appear increasingly closed. Such hope matters because it does not only transform the self; it can also reshape the situations people seek to inhabit and change.
