Novel, potentially radical climate intervention technologies like carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering are attracting attention as the adverse impacts of climate change are increasingly felt. The ability of publics, particularly in the Global South, to participate in discussions about research, policy, and deployment is restricted amidst a lack of familiarity and engagement. Drawing on a large-scale, cross-country exercise of nationally representative surveys (N = 30,284) in 30 countries and 19 languages, this article establishes the first global baseline of public perceptions of climate-intervention technologies. Here, we show that Global South publics are significantly more favorable about potential benefits and express greater support for climate-intervention technologies. The younger age and level of climate urgency and vulnerability of these publics emerge as key explanatory variables, particularly for solar geoengineering. Conversely, Global South publics express greater concern that climate-intervention technologies could undermine climate-mitigation efforts, and that solar geoengineering could promote an unequal distribution of risks between poor and rich countries.

The need for public engagement is increasingly evident as discussions intensify around emerging methods for carbon dioxide removal and controversial proposals around solar geoengineering. Based on 44 focus groups in 22 countries across the Global North and Global South (N = 323 participants), this article traces public preferences for a variety of bottom-up and top-down engagement practices ranging from information recipient to broad decision authority. Here, we show that engagement practices need to be responsive to local political cultures and socio-technical environments, while attending to the global dimensions and interconnectedness of the issues at stake. Establishing public engagement as a cornerstone of inclusive and sustainable governance of climate-intervention technologies requires (i) recognizing the diversity of forms and intensities of engaging, (ii) considering national contexts and modes of engagement, (iii) tailoring to technological idiosyncrasies, (iv) adopting power-sensitive practices, (v) accounting for publics’ prior experience, (vi) establishing trust and procedural legitimacy and (vii) engaging with tensions and value disagreements.

The participation of practitioners in transdisciplinary sustainability research has been heralded as a promising tool for producing ‘robust’ knowledge and engendering societal transformations. Although transdisciplinary approaches have been advanced as an effective avenue for generating knowledge positioned to question and transform an unsustainable status quo, the political and power dimensions inherent to such research have hardly been discussed. In this article, we scrutinise the constitution of participation in transdisciplinary research through a power lens. Guided by social theories of power and a relational understanding of participation, we analyse how diverse actors equipped with a variety of material and ideational sources wield power over the subjects, objects, and procedures of participation. We applied a qualitative meta-analysis of five transdisciplinary projects from a major German research funding programme in the field of sustainability to unveil the ways in which the funding body, researchers, and practitioners exercise instrumental, structural, and discursive power over (i) actor selection and (re-)positioning, (ii) agenda setting, and (iii) rule setting. We found that researchers primarily exert instrumental power over these three elements of participation, whereas practitioners as well as the funding body wield primarily structural and discursive power. By elucidating tacit and hidden power dynamics shaping participation in transdisciplinary research, this article provides a basis for improving process design and implementation as well as developing targeted funding instruments. The conclusions also provide insights into barriers of participatory agenda setting in research practice and governance.

Carbon removal is emerging as a pillar of governmental and industry commitments toward achieving Net Zero targets. Drawing from 44 focus groups in 22 countries, we map technical and societal issues that a representative sample of publics raise on five major types of carbon removal (forests, soils, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), and how these translate to preferences for governance actors, mechanisms, and rationales. We assess gaps and overlaps between a global range of public perceptions and how carbon removal is currently emerging in assessment, innovation, and decision-making. In conclusion, we outline key societal expectations for informing assessment and policy: prioritize public engagement as more than acceptance research; scrutiny and regulation of industry beyond incentivizing innovation; systemic coordination across sectors, levels, and borders; and prioritize underlying causes of climate change and interrelated governance issues.

Conservation research and practice are increasingly engaging with people and drawing on social sciences to improve environmental governance. In doing so, conservation engages with power in many ways, often implicitly. Conservation scientists and practitioners exercise power when dealing with species, people and the environment, and increasingly they are trying to address power relations to ensure effective conservation outcomes (guiding decision‐making, understanding conflict, ensuring just policy and management outcomes). However, engagement with power in conservation is often limited or misguided. To address challenges associated with power in conservation, we introduce the four dominant approaches to analyzing power to conservation scientists and practitioners who are less familiar with social theories of power. These include actor‐centered, institutional, structural, and, discursive/governmental power. To complement these more common framings of power, we also discuss further approaches, notably non‐human and Indigenous perspectives. We illustrate how power operates at different scales and in different contexts, and provide six guiding principles for better consideration of power in conservation research and practice. These include: (1) considering scales and spaces in decision‐making, (2) clarifying underlying values and assumptions of actions, (3) recognizing conflicts as manifestations of power dynamics, (4) analyzing who wins and loses in conservation, (5) accounting for power relations in participatory schemes, and, (6) assessing the right to intervene and the consequences of interventions. We hope that a deeper engagement with social theories of power can make conservation and environmental management more effective and just while also improving transdisciplinary research and practice.

Calling for increased action on climate change, Fridays for Future (FFF) quickly gained momentum around the world and became highly visible through strikes and protests in more than 150 countries. Considering its scale and magnitude, questions about the impact of this newly emerging climate movement arise. This article is based on a survey investigating the perception of Swiss residents (N = 1206) of how the FFF movement and Greta Thunberg’s climate activism changed their environmental awareness and behaviour. We found that the Swiss public by and large perceives Greta Thunberg and the FFF movement positively, and a considerable share of participants report that Greta Thunberg (30%) and the FFF activism (23%), respectively, positively influenced their environmental concern and behaviour. Structural equation modelling revealed that the strength of the behaviour change motivation depended mainly on how a participant evaluated the FFF movement and Greta Thunberg. The latter was influenced positively by general environmental attitudes, and education level and negatively by the acceptance of justifications for environmentally harmful behaviours. Participants reported environmentally positive changes most frequently in private sphere behaviours, particularly in the domains of mobility, consumption and waste, whereas few changes in public sphere behaviour were reported. Next to increased awareness and motivation gains, also the reinforcement of existing pro-environmental behaviour was reported. Although the influence on sympathisers was stronger, some of those sceptical of the climate strike movement also reported behaviour changes, indicating that the unconvinced have to some extent been reached.