Embracing Emotions & Conflict

Description

Even if emotions are central to deliberation, learning and action, the scientific framing of CCAs can clash with their expression. These dynamics do not emerge in a vacuum but relate to broader patterns of disconnection from self, others, and the living world, manifesting in perceived scarcity, short-termism and polarisation. Working with emotions is key to addressing conflict, and effective political engagement. Inspired by the Ubuntu principle (“I am because you are”), conflict can act as a catalyst for transformation by opening space for voices and experiences that feel uncomfortable.

Constructive anger can overcome apathy, fear, and depression while prompting collective climate action. Structured procedures can channel fear, frustration, or grief into constructive, future-oriented energy. Facilitators can establish cultures of active listening, mutual understanding, and respectful disagreement. Setting clear dialogue rules, spaces for dissent, and relationship-preservation (e.g., NVC) can help embrace emotions. Still, negative emotions may be easier to acknowledge than positive ones, which are often dismissed as naive. Joy, gratitude and belonging can emerge from meaningful convivial experiences. Activities that encourage healing, awe and connection support participants, while narrative sharing or value mapping can help express feelings alongside facts and co-develop solutions.

How-To & Examples

Non-Violent Communication (NVC) helps surface underlying needs, fosters empathetic listening and can be introduced early to co-create rules for dialogue.

Safer Spaces for emotions encourage dissent, frustration and constructive skepticism while m maintaining relational safety. “Safer” acknowledges that no space is harm free.

The Collective Healing Handbook supports facilitators in addressing grief, anxiety, and disconnection as collective conditions with practices such as The Invisible Backpack, The Center of My Environment, The Action–Reaction Model

Allowing time and space to address concerns as at theKlimabürgerrat where participants initially needed to express frustration about the political climate, enhances capacity to act and supports visioning beyond dissatisfaction with the status quo. Scotland’s Climate Assembly also centered on emotions, balancing realism and agency, and structuring reflection spaces.

Harvesting captures visible and invisible group outcomes (emotions, tensions, shifts in perspective) though question like “What came up?”, “What has changed?”, “What was surprising?” Art of Hosting.

The Procedure Framework tracks emotional flow and critical moments, and channels negative emotions constructively, Value Mapping surfaces shared values to co-developing solutions.

Ubuntu reminds us that ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’.

Literature & Sources

Grau, M. (2025). Beyond “hope”: constructive anger as a force in sustained climate action. Pastoral Psychology, 74(1), 113-129.

Morrell, M. E., Johnson, G. F. & Black, L. W., (2022) “Mini-Public Replication: Emotions and Deliberation in the Citizens’ Initiative Review Redux”, Journal of Deliberative Democracy 18(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.1043

McKeever, N., Nezami, A., & Kourtis, D. (2024). The overview effect and nature-relatedness. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 5, 1196312.

MacKuen, M., Wolak, J., Keele, L. and Marcus, G.E. (2010), Civic Engagements: Resolute