Building on the framework of emotional political ecology, we seek to expand ways of studying the relationships between emotion, power, and environmental conflict. Our review of work in feminist ...studies, human geography, social psychology, social movement theory, and social and cultural anthropology suggests the need for a theoretical framework that captures the psychological, more-than-human, collective, geographical, and personal-political dimensions that intersect subjectivities in environmental conflicts. We stress the need to explicitly consider ‘the political’ at stake when researching emotions in environmental conflicts, and develop a conceptual framework for facilitating nuanced conceptualisations and analyses of subjects and power in environmental conflicts.
The EU has recently taken important climate action, notably through the launching of the European Green Deal. However, EU action has been criticized for its potential to generate a heavy increase in ...mining of ‘critical minerals’ necessary for renewables technologies, and so create green sacrifice zones both overseas and within Europe. We explore the politics of green sacrifice making through an analysis of green governance practices and opposition to them in a case of a lithium mining conflict in rural northern Portugal. We find that institutional rearrangements attempt to reconfigure lithium mining as a force for sustainability in ways that enable capital accumulation. Such reconfigurations clash with concerns about maintaining a meaningful life in localities where mining would take place, as well as alternative definitions of the logic of the circular economy and of what the proper scales of decision-making for marginalized territories should be. Government and corporate action attempt to resolve these clashes by promoting a discourse of ‘responsibility’, which assigns public institutions the role of convincing communities to accept ‘green’ mining; to corporations the role of exercising corporate social responsibility; and to affected populations the role of subjects whose political action should conform to their consumption habits and help deliver a distinctive ‘European way’ of being responsible in a warming world. We conclude that green sacrifice is essential for maintaining economic growth and a liberal order of governance, delivered through a biopolitics of inclusion that exists side-by-side with attempts at self-constitution. We highlight a contradiction between what such praxis tries to achieve and ways in which some critical constituencies seek to address democracy challenges of just transitions.
Why do people who care about the environment adopt behaviours that are not consistent with their beliefs? Previous studies approach this as a case of cognitive dissonance, researchers looking into ...the strategies through which people reduce gaps between their attitudes and their behaviours. Here we start from the premise that there is no dissonance, and that people have consistent reasons of why they are doing what they are doing. The research task is then to shed light on these reasons. Using Q-methodology, a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach, we interviewed 42 environmentally-minded researchers asking them why they eat meat. Our interviewees were aware of and cared about the environmental and ethical impacts of meat eating, but reasoned that they eat meat because either technological, or political changes are more important than what they personally do, because of doubts about the impact of personal action in a complex world, or simply because they lack the determination to stop eating meat. Our analysis suggests that policies and messages that try to educate or guilt meat-eaters are unlikely to work with those well aware of the impacts of their actions.
As the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change increases, so does the urgency of and interest in urban transformational adaptation. To date, however, research has not looked ...empirically at how "everyday" urban politics shape the multi-scalar political constraints that prevent municipalities from implementing transformational adaptation. We analyze the Poblenou superblock project in Barcelona, Spain as an effort to enact transformational land use planning linked with climate adaptation efforts. We find that the key driver behind opposition is the everyday political struggle for municipal authority, which materializes in clashing visions for the future city -- and who has the political clout to define and own them. We show that urban transformation is at least as much about competitive urbanism and related short-term political gains as it is about the importance of environmental and quality-of-life benefits that are ostensibly the target of interventions. We also highlight how civic and political contestation over the authority of ‘climate champions’ can jeopardize not only transformational adaptation achievements, but also the political survival of champions themselves. We conclude that transformational adaptation can be obstructed not only out of fear for the material and political effects of transformation per se, but also because of the message it conveys as concerns of who has the authority to decide for “the common good”.
•Barcelona’s superblocks incorporate elements of transformational climate adaptation.•Struggles for the municipal seat of authority are key to understanding opposition to transformational efforts.•The everyday politics of urbanism are critical, but not often considered, for success of transformational urban adaptation.•Transformational adaptation politics hinge on who decides the common good.•Transformational urban adaptation reshapes existing local politics in order to overcome barriers embedded within entrenched institutions.
Social enterprises are businesses with primarily social objectives that reinvest their surplus in the community rather than seeking to maximise profit for shareholders. However, there is a debate ...regarding the drivers and the role of the social enterprise, the outcome of which is expected to have serious implications for the future of the institution Brady, C., 2003. Social Enterprise development and the Role of the Social Economy in Scotland. CBS Network, Edinburgh. A ‘reformist’ view supports the position that social enterprises are simple extensions of existing economic systems, whereas a ‘radical’ stance sees them as the embodiment of an alternative vision of running local economies. Development Trusts (DTs) are social enterprises that focus on community regeneration. Our research explored DT stakeholder views regarding the role of DTs in regenerating rural Scotland. Using Q methodology Barry, J., Proops, J., 1999. Seeking sustainability discourses with Q methodology. Ecological Economics, 28, 337–345, we drew on ‘rurality’ discourses Frouws, J., 1998. The contested redefinition of the countryside. An analysis of rural discourses in The Netherlands. Sociologia Ruralis 38(1), 54–68 expressed by DT stakeholders in order to investigate how these discourses informed their views. Radical positions were mostly associated with a hedonist rurality discourse and were split into three sub-discourses, whereas reformist positions mostly reflected a utilitarian rurality discourse. There was consensus between discourses in rejecting a primary DT contribution to rural regeneration by substituting state and local authority functions in rural Scotland. Results suggest that stakeholders prefer that DTs develop their own agendas and activity rather than try to substitute unsuccessful state or local authority provision of rural services. Social enterprise strategies and support policies promoting a service-providing role for DTs in rural Scotland should consider this issue if they are to avoid stakeholder objection and contribute to the success of DTs in becoming active vehicles of rural regeneration.
In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for ...analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.
To avoid dominant positivist explanations of links between climate change and security, I use alternative, human security approaches to study how climate security is managed in one of Spain’s most ...endangered coastal ecosystems, the Ebro Delta. I find that increasing the downstream flow of sediments retained in upstream dams is a crucial measure for dealing with climate change threats (sea-level rise) in the Delta. Yet, state policies do not increase sediment flow, but instead implement incremental adaptation at the site of climate impact (coast), which, at times, requires executing small-scale land expropriations. Refraining from improving human security via increasing sediment flow benefits corporate interests upstream. At the same time, expropriation silences mild farmer protest downstream and adds insult to injury by conveying to farmers a sense of blame for their vulnerability to climate change. Meanwhile, using expropriation at the service of incremental adaptation goes against the very rationale of expropriation established by Spanish legislation and creates a fundamental contradiction between what the practice is meant to deliver, namely security and the social contract from the part of the state, and what it actually does, i.e. permit the state to evade providing human security. I conclude that, under climate change, achieving human security, the delivery of the social contract, and corporate rent-seeking at the same time may not be possible. Moreover, rather than the social contract been threatened by state incapacity to respond to the effects of climate change and breached social contract expectations of vulnerable communities, it is the actual mobilisation of the contract in order to respond to climate change that diminishes human security.
Intersectional praxis - the practical application of intersectional theorizing into action - can be highly relevant for pursuing social-ecological transformations. Yet, we know little about the ...benefits and challenges of trying to mobilize such praxis for pursuing transformations. In this contribution to critical feminist and political ecology scholarship, we explore this gap empirically through a case study of producing a grassroots Green Deal in North Macedonia in which intersectional theory principles were employed in a process of collective visioning and grassroots organizing around that endeavor. To identify benefits and challenges related to this process, we inquire into the documents produced and the experience of organizers coordinating and catalyzing those efforts. We find that the benefits of enacting intersectional praxis relate to strategizing and mobilizing, collective action, and intersectional solidarity building. Challenges faced included fears concerning the unfamiliarity with the concept of intersectionality, and issues related to the capacity of individuals from subaltern groups to participate in collective visioning processes under conditions of precarious existence. We conclude that grassroots organizing around the Green Deal framework could have a potential to address some critiques of mainstream Green Deals, shift narratives of socio-ecological transformations (SETs), unite different movements working towards climate and social justice, and mobilize people power under an umbrella framework that dominates the policy arena, such as the Green Deal.
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