Abstract

Environmental ideologies are sets of beliefs about the human-nature interaction, influencing environmental values, policies, and actions. Echoing the regional and cultural sensitivity of the conference, the panel investigates environmental ideologies not in abstract but in their specific time-space configurations - chronotopes. Its focus on qualitative interviewing and the diversity regional and local voices, including the ones from Volga, Siberia and Hindu Kush, stimulates panel participants to problematize methodological nationalism in our scholarship. The first paper sheds light on energy myths shared by elites in Kazakhstan. Those myths influence decision making on country’s energy transition despite incomplete or contested evidence. The second paper looks at how environmental activists connect local patriotism, nationalism and environmentalism in Russia’s regions during the war. Often seen as opposite and antagonistic, nationalist and pro-environmental ideologies are linked in unexpected but subjectively meaningful ways on the regional level. The third paper asks how local knowledge should be integrated in the work of capital-based and international NGOs assisting people affected by glacial lake outburst flood (GLOFs) in mountainous regions, such as Chitral in Pakistan. It finds NGOs can learn from locals better designs of early warning systems and improved ways of distributing development assistance across genders and ages.