Climate change and post-politics: Repoliticizing the present by imagining the future?
Introduction
Over the last two decades, an important debate has taken place in political theory concerning our current ‘post-political’ or ‘post-democratic’ condition (Crouch, 2004, Marchart, 2007, Mouffe, 2002b, Mouffe, 2005, Mouffe, 2006, Rancière, 1998, Žižek, 2000). Broadly speaking, this condition implies that predominant representations of society tend to be consensual or technocratic and thus make power, conflict and exclusion invisible. As Chantal Mouffe (2002a, pp. 33–34) has argued, this is a threat to democracy: ‘Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires us to bring them to the fore, to make them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation.’
This topic has also received significant attention in the fields of geography and ecology, primarily with regards to climate change, an issue that is particularly vulnerable to being represented in a post-political way, as Swyngedouw, 2007, Swyngedouw, 2010a, Swyngedouw, 2013 has shown. Many authors in these fields have focused on the post-political thesis, either to criticize it (e.g., Chatterton et al., 2013, Featherstone, 2013, Featherstone and Korf, 2012, North, 2010, Urry, 2011) or apply it to specific cases (e.g., Bettini, 2013, Brand et al., 2009, Celata and Sanna, 2012, Goeminne, 2010, Goeminne, 2012, Mason and Whitehead, 2012, Neal, 2013, Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010, Kenis and Mathijs, 2009, Kenis and Mathijs, 2009). A question that has received much less attention, however, concerns what happens when an actor explicitly tries to repoliticize the present to realize the change that the actor has deemed necessary. This is the topic of the present paper: the study of the Climate Justice Action movement (CJA) as one of the most prominent movements in recent history that explicitly took issue with the consensual, post-political logic governing much of the debate on climate change.1 CJA emerged in the year prior to the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit and consisted of a broad range of groups and activists from around the world and especially from Western Europe.2 After the summit, many CJA groups remained active, setting up various types of activities (e.g., actions around specific issues such as the investments by banks and companies in the exploitation of tar sands or shale gas and larger events such as climate camps), campaigning around the summits in Cancún, Durban and Qatar and engaging in a myriad of education and information initiatives. At the same time, the movement slowly disintegrated.
Interestingly, CJA did not merely advocate a specific cause, as all social movements do: CJA also targeted post-politics as an obstacle for promoting this cause, and this difference is what makes it such a relevant object of study. CJA criticized the fact that in a post-political condition, alternative voices are at risk of remaining unheard. The movement did not merely wage a concrete political struggle about a specific issue, but it also engaged in a type of meta-struggle for genuine political struggle and disagreement to even become possible and visible (Kenis and Lievens, 2014a). Thus, it aimed to create a space in which political plurality, power differentials, conflicts and oppositions would become visible, and it considered this condition to be essential for tackling climate change in an effective, democratic and socially just way. In this way, CJA attempted to repoliticize the debate on climate change, and it was quite explicit concerning this goal (COP15zine, 2009).
In this paper, we will attempt to spell out the difficulties and obstacles that confront such an endeavor. We elaborate two possible strategies of repoliticization: one based on the work of Jacques Rancière and the other on the writings of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. On the basis of our involvement as scholar activists within the movement, we will discuss CJA’s practices and discourses from the perspective of these two strategies and spell out the challenges and obstacles the movement was confronted with in its attempt to repoliticize the public sphere. We will pay particular attention to the role of visioning the future as a crucial element in any attempt to repoliticize the present. The paper concludes by analyzing the paradoxical nature of CJA’s project to repoliticize in the context of post-politics, which helps to explain its relative failure.
Section snippets
Research design
Our research combined a theoretical exploration of strategies for repoliticization with scholar activism or action research (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003, Reason and Bradbury, 2008, The Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010), the confrontation between which allowed us to assess these strategies on the basis of the actual experiences and discourses of an existing movement.
As scholar activists involved with CJA, we involved in a movement with others, which required us to set up meetings, engage
Rancière: making visible what was invisible
The atmosphere we encountered during the climate summit in Copenhagen (both in and around the conference venue itself, such as on billboards, in press articles and in the slogans of mainstream NGO’s, resembled what Rancière has described as post-democracy or consensual democracy. ‘Consensual democracy,’ he writes, ‘is a reasonable agreement between individuals and social groups who have understood that knowing what is possible and negotiating between partners are a way for each party to obtain
Politicization and its limits
To analyze CJA’s discourse in terms of its relation to the political, we will make use of a set of distinctions that Jensen, 2002, Jensen, 2004 introduced in the domain of environmental education. Jensen distinguishes between four dimensions that environmental education can consist of: (1) the nature of the problem and its effects, (2) the human-societal root causes, (3) strategies for change and (4) visions and alternatives. Jensen’s thesis is that mainstream environmental discourses focus too
CJA’s discursive nodal points
Our analysis of CJA’s discourse from the perspective of Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) framework yielded a straightforward result: CJA’s discourse was centrally structured around three core nodal points. Central to CJA’s discourse was a defense of ‘climate justice’, which was opposed to what it called ‘false solutions’ for climate change, such as nuclear energy, biofuels, carbon capture and storage and emissions trading (e.g., ClimateCollective, 2009, Müller and Passadakis, 2009, Virtanen, 2009).
Alternatives for the future or antagonisms in the present?
As Mouffe argues, the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ is a crucial element of today’s post-political atmosphere: ‘[i]n fact, the main consequence of visualising our societies in such a “post-political” manner is to impede the articulation of any possible alternative to the current hegemonic order’ (Mouffe, 2002b, p. 61). Of course, demanding ‘system change’ is an important step in repoliticizing the present. However, Mouffe (2002a, p. 7) suggests that repolitization requires, in addition,
How to repoliticize the present?
Interestingly, many environmentalists outside CJA tended to take a distance from CJA because of its politicized discourse. For instance, participants of the Transition Towns movement found CJA to be too radical, violent and extreme and based on a ‘we against them’ discourse. Sophie stated that ‘When I first heard about it, the action aspect scared me a bit. I immediately imagined that these will almost be violent actions, to damage or overthrow certain things […] and I don’t like that, I don’t
Conclusion
Intentionally pursuing repoliticization in post-political times is a highly paradoxical endeavor, and CJA embodied a number of the tensions involved. It attempted to demarcate a strong we/them distinction while simultaneously struggling with the question of how broad ‘we’ should be. At times, its fight against post-politics tended to overshadow the actual cause it was fighting for, at least to outsiders. CJA invoked the need for alternatives without always being able to spell them out
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all activists for sharing their opinions and commitments with us. Being involved together in such an exciting movement as CJA, which despite its difficulties had the merit of putting ‘climate justice’ and ‘system change’ in the centre of the debate, was a great experience. We are also grateful to the members of our panel at the 11th Essex Conference in Critical Political Theory (‘Global challenges. Envisaging alternatives. Image, voice and radical democracy’) for their
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