Patchwork Ethnography of Solar Geoengineering. Looking for novel ways of counting the ripples of public perception.

Solar radiation management (SRM) has been proposed as a potential method to offset the effects of global warming caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions. This controversial technology presents several environmental side-effects that are still poorly understood and entails an enormous challenge for international governance. Due to the planetary scale of SRM, an inclusive and global conversation is deemed essential for its effective governance. To this end, in the last fifteen years, a growing body of scholarly journals on public engagement with SRM has appeared. These studies are based on quantitative opinion surveys administered to large numbers of people or qualitative deliberative workshops and interviews with a small number of individuals. However, public perception research on SRM has been mostly limited to the Global North and predominantly assumed the Western liberal-democratic view as a benchmark. Because public opinion is essential to create an appropriate governance framework and because SRM will have a global effect if deployed, more inclusive research is needed to investigate the attitudes of people who do not share Western values. The present thesis provides a critical review of the literature on public engagement with SRM based on the post-colonial studies on geoengineering. Notably, the Confucian ethical framework will be adopted to nuance the results of past research that too often neglect alternative ontologies and worldviews. The analysis is also based on a survey of university students in China and Italy about their attitudes towards stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), one of the most discussed SRM proposals. My results showed that Chinese students revealed a more positive attitude toward the potential of SAI deployment and outdoor research. I also found a different degree of trust toward the national authority that could lead to support of different forms of governance and widespread agreement on SAI governance principles, such as transparency, inclusivity, and the need for public participation in decision-making. My thesis suggests that an inclusive approach that attends to the cultural specificities of a more heterogeneous public might nuance our understanding of public perception and acceptance of SRM.