Being attached to an unsustainable lifestyle : A case study on accounting for the persistence of high emission lifestyles using an Ontological Security Lens

To fully acknowledge the complexity of the climate change, responses to climate change needs to be redefined, taking into consideration social aspects. In this study, I explored the social aspect of ontological security defined as a lens to understand high emission lifestyles. The aim of this study was to explore how ontological security helps to explain high emission lifestyles and explore what ontological security suggest in terms of policies addressing climate change emissions directed at high emission lifestyles. The study was conducted as a case study with a qualitative method where eight interviewees living in a high emission lifestyle region were selected from a combination of convenience and snowball sampling. The interviews were then analyzed based on the ontological security lens that was created before the interviews. The findings illustrate that being ontologically secure for people with high emission lifestyles could mean being attached to a lifestyle that is threatening the climate and that this attachment makes it hard to move away from unsustainable behaviours since that would risk reducing their ontological security. This indicates that their behavior is a cultural trait and ontological security show that the required change on individual level requires more than them just changing by individual choice. Based on the findings of the study, I argue that ontological security provides valuable insights within the social field of climate change and valuable insights in policy development.