Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 52, March 2014, Pages 148-156
Geoforum

Climate change and post-politics: Repoliticizing the present by imagining the future?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.01.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • CJA epitomizes the paradox of politicizing climate change in post-political times.

  • A Rancièrian political act is limited as it does not advocate a future alternative.

  • Counter-hegemonic demands and nodal points (Mouffe/Laclau) might remedy this.

  • But in CJA’s discourse these function primarily to sharpen a we–them distinction.

  • If repoliticization becomes an end in itself, it risks to undermine itself.

Abstract

Several scholars have criticized the predominant post-political representations of our current era, particularly with regard to climate change. However, what happens when a movement explicitly aims at repoliticizing the present in an attempt to open a space for change? Combining scholar activism with theoretical insights from post-foundational political theorists, such as Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, this paper studies the paradoxical nature of the attempt to repoliticize climate change by Climate Justice Action (CJA), a grassroots movement that was set up before the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. Comparing different repoliticization strategies, the paper shows how CJA exhibits core features of a Rancièrian political act, which makes visible what was previously invisible by starting from the postulate of equality. However, lacking an elaborate perspective on alternatives, both Rancière and CJA appear to be stuck in the present. Drawing on Mouffe and Laclau’s discourse theory, the paper subsequently analyzes the nodal points of CJA’s discourse that could function as inscription points for alternatives. Yet, these points appear to primarily intensify a we/them distinction. The result is a paradox: to create a space for imagining alternative futures, one must first fight post-political representations of the present. However, when politicization becomes an end in itself, the outreach of the movement, and therefore its capacity to repoliticize and stimulate the imagination of alternative futures, is constrained.

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

References (71)

  • F. Celata et al.

    The post-political ecology of protected areas: nature, social justice and political conflicts in Galápagos Islands

    Local Environ.: Int. J. Just. Sustain.

    (2012)
  • P. Chatterton et al.

    Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: antagonism, the commons, and solidarity

    Antipode

    (2013)
  • CJA-Booklet, 2009. Why Climate Change is Not an Environmental...
  • CJA-Leaflet, 2009a. Hit the...
  • CJA-Leaflet, 2009b. It is Not Just About...
  • CJA-Leaflet, 2009c. Reclaim Power. Pushing for Climate...
  • CJA-Leaflet, 2009d. System Change! Not Climate Change. Take Action in...
  • ClimateCollective, 2009. Action Guide to...
  • I.R. Cook et al.

    Cities, social cohesion and the environment: towards a future research agenda

    Urban Stud.

    (2012)
  • COP15zine, 2009. Dealing with Distractions. Confronting Green Capitalism in Copenhagen &...
  • C. Crouch

    Post-Democracy

    (2004)
  • V. De Lucia

    Hegemony and climate justice: a critical analysis

  • D. Demeritt

    The construction of global warming and the politics of science

    Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr.

    (2001)
  • M. Dikeç

    Space, politics, and the political

    Environ. Plann. D: Soc. Space

    (2005)
  • M. Dikeç

    Beginners and equals: political subjectivity in Arendt and Rancière

    Trans. Inst. Brit. Geograph.

    (2013)
  • D. Featherstone

    The contested politics of climate change and the crisis of neo-liberalism

    ACME. Int. E-J. Crit. Geograph.

    (2013)
  • G. Goeminne

    Climate policy is dead, long live climate politics!

    Ethics, Place Environ.

    (2010)
  • G. Goeminne

    Lost in translation: climate denial and the return of the political

    Glob. Environ. Polit.

    (2012)
  • P. Hallward

    Staging equality. On Rancière’s theatrocracy

    New Left Rev.

    (2006)
  • Howarth, D., 2000. Discourse Open University Press,...
  • Howarth, D., Stavrakakis, Y., 2000. Introducing discourse theory and political analysis. In: Howarth, D., Norval, A.J.,...
  • Howarth, D., Norval, A.J., Stavrakakis, Y., 2000. Discourse Theory and Political Analysis. Identities, Hegemonies and...
  • B.B. Jensen

    Knowledge, action and pro-environmental behaviour

    Environ. Educ. Res.

    (2002)
  • B.B. Jensen

    Environmental and health education viewed from an action-oriented perspective: a case from Denmark

    J. Curricul. Stud.

    (2004)
  • Jensen, D., 2009. Forget shorter showers. why personal change does not equal political change. In: COP15zine (Ed.),...
  • Cited by (94)

    • From hope to disappointment? Following the ‘Taking Place’ and ‘Organisation’ of hope in ‘Building Back Better’ from COVID-19

      2022, Geoforum
      Citation Excerpt :

      While hope can be positioned as a type of space–time relation with significant disruptive potential, by linking the taking place of hope with its organisation we reveal how this potentiality is bounded both by the technical practices of the processual world, national scale politics, and those expert voices who are given significant tasks and power during times of crisis. We also see how elements of depoliticisation were built into the decision-making process, constraining the potential for radically different futures and acting to reinforce business-as-usual by working at the edges of the status quo (Swyngedouw, 2010; Kenis & Mathijs, 2014). This research, therefore, echoes issues raised by scholars in planning and geography who have emphasized the concerns with processural and techno-managerial politics (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2012; Legacy, 2016; Swyngedouw, 2018).

    • Change in policy regimes for disaster risk reduction in Fiji and Nepal

      2022, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text