Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics 1839100664, 9781839100666

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HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN ENERGY, THE ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE This series provides a definitive overview of recent research in all matters relating to energy, the environment, and climate change in the social sciences, forming a comprehensive guide to the subject. Covering a broad range of research areas including energy policy, the global socio-political impacts of climate change, and environmental economics, this series aims to produce prestigious, high quality works of lasting significance. Each Handbook will consist of original contributions by leading authors, selected by an editor recognized as an international leader within the field. Taking an international approach, these Handbooks emphasize both the widening of the current debates within the field, and an indication of how research within the field will develop in the future. Titles in the series include: Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change Edited by David C. Holmes and Lucy M. Richardson Handbook of Security and the Environment Edited by Ashok Swain, Joakim Öjendal and Anders Jägerskog Handbook of Sustainable Politics and Economics of Natural Resources Edited by Stella Tsani and Indra Overland Research Handbook on Energy and Society Edited by Janette Webb, Faye Wade and Margaret Tingey Handbook on Trade Policy and Climate Change Edited by Michael Jakob Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics Edited by Luigi Pellizzoni, Emanuele Leonardi and Viviana Asara

Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics Edited by

Luigi Pellizzoni Full Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pisa, Italy

Emanuele Leonardi Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Italy

Viviana Asara Assistant Professor, Department of Human Studies, University of Ferrara, Italy

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN ENERGY, THE ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Luigi Pellizzoni, Emanuele Leonardi and Viviana Asara 2022

With the exception of any material published open access under a Creative Commons licence (see www.elgaronline.com), all rights are reserved and no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Chapter 20 is available for free as Open Access from the individual product page at www. elgaronline.com under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Unported (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) license. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941153 This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781839100673

ISBN 978 1 83910 066 6 (cased) ISBN 978 1 83910 067 3 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of contributorsviii Introduction: what is critical environmental politics? Luigi Pellizzoni, Emanuele Leonardi and Viviana Asara PART I

1

THEORETICAL STRANDS

1

Critical theory: praxis and emancipation beyond the mastery of nature Christoph Görg

23

2

Decolonial ecologies: beyond environmentalism Malcom Ferdinand

40

3

Feminisms and the environment Corinna Dengler and Birte Strunk

58

4

Marxism and ecology: an ongoing debate Emanuele Leonardi and Salvo Torre

71

PART II

CONTESTED NOTIONS

5 Anthropocene Marija Brajdić Vuković and Mladen Domazet 6

91

Buen Vivir Philipp Altmann

104

7 Degrowth Ekaterina Chertkovskaya

116

8 Limits Erik Gómez-Baggethun

129

9

141

Sustainability: buying time for consumer capitalism Ingolfur Blühdorn

PART III KEY ISSUES 10

Agrarian development and food security: ecology, labour and crises Maura Benegiamo

11 Bioeconomies Kean Birch

157 170

v

vi  Handbook of critical environmental politics 12

Cities and the environment Hug March

181

13

Climate justice and global politics Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen and Oliver Hunt

192

14

The Common(s) Angelos Varvarousis

206

15

The cultural political economy of research and innovation: meeting the problem of growth in the Anthropocene David Tyfield

16

Disasters and catastrophes Laura Centemeri and Isabella Tomassi

232

17

Energy politics and energy transition Natalia Magnani, Dario Minervini and Ivano Scotti

245

18

Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment Rolf Lidskog and Monika Berg

257

19

Extractivism and neo-extractivism Maristella Svampa

270

20

Religion and ecology Jens Koehrsen

282

21

Social metabolism Dario Padovan, Osman Arrobbio and Alessandro Sciullo

295

22

Technological fixes: nonknowledge transfer and the risk of ignorance Matthias Gross

308

23

The values of Nature Clive L. Spash and Tone Smith

318

217

PART IV GOVERNANCE 24

Democracy and democratisation Marit Hammond

333

25

Environmental violence Gloria Pessina

347

26

Environment-related human mobility Eleonora Guadagno

362

27

Financialisation of nature Tone Smith

374

Contents  vii 28

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations: a case study in environmental non-compliance388 Edwin A. Edou, Debra J. Davidson and Sydney Karbonik

29

Global environmental governance and the state Alina Brad, Ulrich Brand and Etienne Schneider

402

30

Just transition: a conflict transformation approach Damian McIlroy, Seán Brennan and John Barry

416

31

Sustainable welfare: urban areas and transformational action Kajsa Emilsson and Max Koch

431

PART V

MOBILIZATIONS

32

Climate change consensus: a depoliticized deadlock Erik Swyngedouw

443

33

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South Pallav Das

456

34

Engaging the everyday: sustainability, practices, politics Alice Dal Gobbo

468

35

Environmental movements Viviana Asara

483

36

More-than-social movements: politics of matter, autonomy, alterontologies Andrea Ghelfi and Dimitris Papadopoulos

505

PART VI NEW DIRECTIONS 37

Decolonising environmental politics Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner

521

38

Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability Ingmar Lippert

540

39

Eco-feminism and the commons: the feminization of resistance in Latin America554 Silvia Federici

40

Geopower: genealogies, territories and politics Miriam Tola

564

41

Post-work and ecology Luigi Pellizzoni

577

42

Transformative innovation Andreas Novy, Nathan Barlow and Julia Fankhauser

593

Index611

Contributors

Philipp Altmann is Professor of Sociological Theory at the Universidad Central del Ecuador. He works on how ideas spread, on the intersection of discourse analysis, history of concepts, and sociology of knowledge. At the moment, he is doing so by studying the diffusion of the political concepts of the indigenous movement in Ecuador – Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay at the centre – and the development of Ecuadorian sociology in relation to global sociology and other national/local traditions. Osman Arrobbio is Researcher at the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries at the University of Parma, where he teaches Sociology of the Environment and the Territory, and Cultures, Practices and Languages of Political and Social Movements. He holds a PhD in Sociology with a background in Political Science and Sustainable Development from the University of Turin. His research interests are in environmental and energy sociology, with a focus on socio-ecological practices, energy and environmental transition strategies, interdisciplinarity and the rebound effect. Viviana Asara is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Department of Human Studies at the University of Ferrara and research affiliate with the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her work has focused on political ecology and environmental politics and governance, more particularly she has undertaken research on democracy, social movements, degrowth, commons, social innovations, and political parties. Nathan Barlow is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development (MLGD) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) in the area of strategies for social ecological transformation. He has published on the relevance of degrowth in the current COVID crisis and about the role of care in social movement organizing. He co-edited Degrowth & Strategy (MayFly, 2022) and was the Program Coordinator for the 2020 Vienna Degrowth Conference. John Barry is Professor of Green Political Economy and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action at Queen’s University Belfast, and Co-Chair of the Belfast Climate Commission. Maura Benegiamo is a researcher associate at the University of Pisa. She is interested in the transformations of the capitalist system, global developmental strategies and socio-economic transitions in relation to the ecological and climate question, paying particular attention to emerging bio-capitalist political ecologies, labour exploitation and non-human valorization dynamics and decolonial ecologies. She has conducted research in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Central America on environmental conflicts and extractivism, new directions of agrarian development, and the role of techno-scientific innovation. She collaborates with different international research projects and she is part of the Politics Ontologies Ecologies Network.

viii

Contributors  ix Monika Berg is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the Environmental Sociology Section, School of Humanities, Educational and Social Sciences, Örebro University. Her research covers different aspects of relevance for a green transformation. It concerns science–policy relations and the role of different forms of scientific expertise, as well as how value conflicts and ethical dilemmas are actualized by climate change and other environmental concerns, and how those conflicts are managed. Kean Birch is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Canada. Ingolfur Blühdorn is Professor in Social Sustainability. He is founder and Head of the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability (IGN) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). He is a political sociologist and socio-political theorist. His work explores the legacy of the (eco-)emancipatory social movements since the early 1970s, their participatory revolution and the transformation of emancipatory politics over the past five decades. Alina Brad is Senior Scientist at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, focusing on international environment and resource politics as well as social-ecological transformations. In her current research, she explores the contested integration of negative emission technologies into EU climate policy. Marija Brajdić Vuković is Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Social Inequalities and Sustainability – Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Rijeka. She is a sociologist of knowledge, science and technology, and a social research methodologist interested in methodological innovations and improvements of social research tools and approaches. Her main field of research is sustainability transitions based on values and knowledge frameworks of citizens and institutions, and the role of science and technology in current and future societies. Ulrich Brand works as a Professor of International Politics at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the ecological crisis and social-ecological transformations, imperial mode of living, with particular emphasis on Latin America. Recent publication The Imperial Mode of Living. Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (London, Verso 2021, with Markus Wissen). Seán Brennan, PhD, is an independent peace researcher. His work explores the transformative impact of liberal peacebuilding paradigms on post-ceasefire populations and governance systems: from the geopolitical to the biopolitical. Patrick Bresnihan is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. He works across the interdisciplinary fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. His research focuses on different but related concerns around water, energy, land, and infrastructure in Ireland and how these speak to broader questions of colonial and postcolonial development, the ‘green’ transition and environmental justice. His book, Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature and the Commons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), won the Geography Society of Ireland Book of the Year in 2018. Laura Centemeri is Senior CNRS Researcher in environmental sociology at the Center for the Study of Social Movements (CEMS) of the EHESS (Paris). Her current areas of interest and research projects include: sociology of (e)valuation and environmental conflicts, agro-

x  Handbook of critical environmental politics ecological movements and agrifood systems preparedness, sociology of repair and environmental disasters. She is the author of La permaculture ou l’art de réhabiter (QUAE, 2019) and editor (with Sezin Topçu and J. Peter Burgess) of Rethinking Post-Disaster Recovery: Socioanthropological Perspectives on Repairing Environments (Routledge, 2021). Ekaterina Chertkovskaya is a researcher based at Lund University, working on degrowth and critical organization studies. Her research addresses contemporary crises and explores paths for socio-ecological transformation. She has been writing on the problems with work/ employability, corporate violence and the plastic crisis, on the one hand, and focusing on degrowth as a vision for transformation, its political economy, and alternative models of work and organizing, on the other. Ekaterina co-edited Degrowth & Strategy (MayFly, 2022) and Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). She is a member of the editorial collective of ephemera: theory & politics in organization. Alice Dal Gobbo is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. Her research interests are in the fields of political ecology, sustainability and everyday life, decolonial perspectives paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity, power and critique. She also researches and teaches on critical social science research methods. She is part of the Politics Ontologies Ecology (POE) network, the CoAct Research Group and reviewer for a number of international journals. Her current research interests include energy transitions, food sustainability and the platform economy. Pallav Das is a founder member of the Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group (www​ .kalpavriksh​.org), and a development analyst. He also edits the ‘Radical Ecological Democracy’ website (www​.radica​lecologica​ldemocracy​.org). As a conservation professional and activist, Pallav has contributed to the preservation of threatened habitat areas in South Asia, and has spent years exploring the Himalayan wilderness, researching and writing on the ecology of wetlands and alpine areas, building grass-roots networks to promote sustainable environmental policies, and analysing and advocating public policies for biodiversity and habitat conservation. As a student of politics and social anthropology, Pallav has helped build a productive space at the confluence of ecology, politics and communications to discuss and craft creative and sustainable solutions for the future. Debra J. Davidson is Professor of Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching are focused on social responses to environmental and climate change, particularly in our energy and agri-food systems. Her research has been featured in journals such as Science, Nature Climate Change, Climatic Change, and Environmental Research Letters. She is the co-author of two recent books, including the Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society (2018), and Environment and Society: Concepts and Challenges (2018). Corinna Dengler works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Socioeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). In 2020, she graduated summa cum laude with a cumulative PhD on feminist degrowth from the University of Vechta and then transferred to a Postdoctoral Researcher position at the Department for Development and Postcolonial Studies at University of Kassel. Her research focuses on heterodox economics with an emphasis on feminist economics, ecological economics and global political economy, and she is interested in inter- and transdisciplinary work at the intersections of feminisms, decoloniality, and the environment more broadly.

Contributors  xi Mladen Domazet is Research Director at Zagreb’s Institute for Political Ecology and leader of international research team developing a modified doughnut visualization for a safe and just operating space under constraints of twenty-first century development challenges. He graduated in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford and completed a doctorate in Philosophy of Science at the University of Zagreb. His publications reflect a career of diverse interdisciplinary interests and collaborations, from analysis of Wikipedias as complex networks, through analyses of sustainability practices in marginalized European regions to structural aspects of depth of explanation in contemporary (socio-metabolic) realism. Edwin A. Edou is an Energy Transition and Low Carbon Development Consultant at the United Nations Development Programme and Climate Change Policy Analyst at Hatch. His five years of academic research have addressed environmental policy topics, namely, fossil fuels, nuclear power, and responses to climate change. As a recent graduate of the Master’s of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, Edwin has since pivoted to supporting UNDP Viet Nam and Hatch determine and enact low-carbon development strategies for a 1.5°C compatible future. He dedicates this chapter in memory of his beloved sister, Laura Egulu. Kajsa Emilsson is a PhD student at the School of Social Work, Lund University. In her PhD thesis she explores Swedish residents’ social welfare and environmental attitudes, but also their political strategies to achieve societal transformations and prevent climate change. Her research interest lies primarily in the intersection between social policy and climate change. Other research interests are to be found in welfare state development, welfare service delivery, and civil society’s collective organizing and mobilizing in relation to the welfare state, but also in relation to social-ecological transformations. Recent sole and co-authored articles appeared in the Journal of European Social Policy and the British Journal of Sociology and Sustainability. Julia Fankhauser is a research assistant at the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development (MLGD) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) with a transdisciplinary research focus on social-ecological transformation and social innovation. She has a background in business and socio-economics and experience in adult education. Her previous research included comparative policy analysis. She is currently contributing to and assisting in coordinating the 27th Austrian Panel on Climate Change (APCC 2022) special report on ‘Structures for climate-friendly living’. Silvia Federici is Emerita Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York). She is a long-time activist, teacher and writer. Among her books are Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004, Autonomedia), and Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (2020 revised edition, PM Press). Malcom Ferdinand is an environmental engineer from University College London and doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is now a researcher at the CNRS (IRISSO/Université Paris Dauphine-PSL). At the crossroad of political philosophy, postcolonial theory and political ecology, his research focuses on the Black Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean. He explores the relations between current ecological issues and the colonial

xii  Handbook of critical environmental politics history of modernity. In 2021 he published a book entitled Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Andrea Ghelfi is research associate at the School of Sociology and Social Policy (University of Nottingham). He is a Leverhulme Early Career Researcher, with a research project on ‘Politics of matter: agroecological farming between science and society’. Before that he completed his PhD at the School of Management-University of Leicester in 2016. During his PhD was a visiting PhD at the University of California-Davis. He has studied Contemporary Philosophy (BA and MA) at the University of Bologna, with a period of study at Université Paris 1-La Sorbonne. Erik Gómez-Baggethun is a Professor of Environmental Governance at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), a Senior Scientific Advisor at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), and a Senior Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford. His research covers topics in ecological economics, political ecology and sustainability science. He is president elect of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE), a lead author of the report ‘The economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB), and a lead author of the global assessment on biodiversity values of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Christoph Görg is chair of Social Ecology at the Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural resources and Life sciences Vienna (BOKU). From 1978 to 1990 he studied political sciences, sociology and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt/Main From 1990 to 2005, he worked as Assistant (1995–2001) and Associate Professor (2004) at the University of Frankfurt/Main and as Associate Professor at the University of Kassel (2001–2003). From 2005 to 2015 he was Head of the Department Environmental Politics at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig, Germany and, since 2008, has been Chair of Environmental Politics at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Kassel. He published widely on Society Nature Relations on critical state theory, and on different aspects of global environmental change. Matthias Gross is Professor of Environmental Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU) and, by joint appointment, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, where he is head of the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology. His recent research focuses on alternative energy systems (especially geothermals and wind), senses and society, technology in society, the sociology of engineering, as well as the relationship between risk, knowledge, and ignorance. His book publications in English include Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design (MIT Press, 2010), The Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (Routledge 2015, edited with Linsey McGoey; revised version in 2023), and the Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society (Oxford University Press 2018, edited with Debra Davidson). In 2018, he was awarded the Frederick H. Buttel Prize of the Research Committee on Environment and Society (RC24) of the International Sociological Association (ISA). Eleonora Guadagno obtained her PhD in Geography at the University of Poitiers (Migrinter/ CNRS), with a thesis titled ‘How environmentally induced displacement is perceived in the Global North? Empirical evidence from Italy following Sarno and Cerzeto landslides’, under the direction of Professor Veronique Lassailly-Jacob and Professor François Gemenne. She

Contributors  xiii mostly works on the linkage between human communities’ vulnerability and environmental degradation, through a critic geographical approach. She is currently enrolled as research fellow in Geography at the Department of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. Marit Hammond is Lecturer in Politics at Keele University and Co-Investigator of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). Her research interests span environmental political theory, normative democratic theory, and critical theory. Recent work includes the book Power in Deliberative Democracy: Norms, Forums, Systems (Palgrave, with Nicole Curato and John B. Min) as well as numerous articles in journals such as Environmental Politics, Environmental Values, Contemporary Political Theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and Critical Policy Studies. Oliver Hunt holds an MSc in Globalization and Development from SOAS University of London. His research focus on the political economy of energy transitions, climate justice, energy democracy and social movements. Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Arts and teaches global history and climate politics. His research addresses climate justice, social movement history, eco-social transformation and political economy. He recently edited Climate Justice and the Economy: Social Mobilization, Knowledge and the Political. Sydney Karbonik’s research centres around sustainable and climate resilient cities, especially in the interrelations between industry, rural and urban environments. She is currently completing her Master of Science in Sustainable Urban Planning and Design at KTH Royal Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Max Koch is Professor of Social Policy and Sustainability, Lund University. His research addresses the ways in which political and economic restructuring is reflected in the social structure, welfare systems, and the environment. Recently, he co-developed the concept of sustainable welfare and studied issues of degrowth/postgrowth transitions. His work appeared in journals such as Ecological Economics, Global Environmental Change, Futures, Environmental Values, International Review of Social History, Journal of Social Policy, European Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, Critical Social Policy and British Journal of Sociology. Jens Koehrsen (Köhrsen) is an Associate Professor for Religion and Society at the University of Oslo and a senior researcher at the University of Basel. In 2013, he received his PhD in sociology from the University of Bielefeld and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Jens Koehrsen undertakes sociological research about climate change and the relationship between religion and sustainable development. Emanuele Leonardi is Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna (Italy) and Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). His research interests include political ecology, platform capitalism, climate justice movements, and working-class environmentalism. He has published articles in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Ecological Economics, Ephemera, Globalizations and Sociologia del Lavoro. Rolf Lidskog is Professor of Sociology at the Environmental Sociology Section, School of Humanities, Educational and Social Sciences, Örebro University. His research concerns

xiv  Handbook of critical environmental politics environmental policy and politics and science–policy relations, especially the role of expertise in environmental politics. Currently, he is conducting research on the epistemic and social conditions for expertise and its role in international environmental governance. Ingmar Lippert is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. As a sociologist, he conducts research on how environments are turned into infrastructures for human, societal and economic operations, as well as on the information infrastructures within and beyond these processes. He has widely published in Science & Technology Studies and contributed to organization studies, environmental sociology and the field of environmental humanities. His edited works include ‘Environmental management as situated practice’ (Geoforum, 2015), ‘Innovations in science and technology studies’ analytics of numbers and numbering’ (Science & Technology Studies, 2018) and ‘Methodography of ethnographic collaboration’ (Science & Technology Studies, 2021). Natalia Magnani holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is Senior Assistant Professor in Environmental Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. Her research interests include the energy transition, environmental conflicts and sustainable development. On these issues she has published several articles in international journals such as the Journal of Rural Studies, Energy Policy, and Energy Research & Social Science, as well as two monographs and a number of chapters in national and international volumes. Hug March, MSc and PhD in Environmental Sciences from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economy and Business and affiliated researcher of TURBA, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. His research focus is on the political ecology of socio-environmental urban transformations that aim to cope with and adapt to the local effects of global environmental change. He has carried out extensive research on the urban political ecology and economy of the water cycle, including research on financialization and the debates around remunicipalizaiton and privatization. He is also interested in how information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated urbanism opens up new possibilities as well as challenges concerning sustainability and social justice. Damian McIlroy is a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, his work has a specific focus on the structural crisis of capitalism, its relationship with climate breakdown and the transformative potential of organized labour and social movement agency for Just Transition. Naomi Millner is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. Her work, which draws on feminist science and technology studies, political ecology and political geography, explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global environments in the context of changing cross-border agendas for sustainability and terrains of conflict. Main themes in her work include citizenship rights, legal aspects of tenure and displacement, environmental expertise, environmental technologies and the construction of ecologically sustainable futures – especially those that emerge ‘from below’ or as the consequence of new claims or acts by social movements. When not working in India, Naomi’s work focuses geographically on Central and Latin America. Dario Minervini is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples ‘Federico II’. He teaches Environmental Sociology, and his research interests

Contributors  xv mainly concern the socio-material dynamics of eco-transition, professionalism, gender studies and qualitative methods. His works are published in international articles and books. Andreas Novy is a socioeconomist, Associate Professor and Head of the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development (MLGD) at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and president of the International Karl Polanyi Society. He is Co-Chair of the special report on ‘Structures for climate-friendly living’ for the 27th Austrian Panel on Climate Change (APCC 2022). He has published extensively in the field of urban and regional development studies, social-ecological transformation, social innovation and transdisciplinarity. Dario Padovan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Turin and a member of the Department of Culture, Politics and Society. He is the coordinator of the Unesco Chair on Sustainable Development at the University of Torino. He is a member of the Editorial Committees of Theomai Journal (Buenos Aires), Chosmos & History (Melbourne, Australia), and Culture of Sustainability (Torino). Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Science, Technology and Society and Director of the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham. He is also the founding director of EcoSocieties, one of the University of Nottingham’s Interdisciplinary Research Priority Clusters. He has recently published two books: Reactivating Elements: Substance, Actuality and Practice from Chemistry to Cosmology (Duke University Press, 2021) which examines new social and cultural research on chemical and elemental thinking, and a monograph titled Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More-Than-Social Movements (Duke University Press, 2018) which investigates the distributed invention power of community technoscience, political movements and social innovation projects. Luigi Pellizzoni is Professor of Environmental Sociology and Political Ecology at the University of Pisa. He has previously taught at the universities of Trieste, IUAV Venice and the International School for Advanced Studies (ISAS). Current appointments include the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and the editorship of Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia. He is the co-ordinator of the research group and community of discussion Politics-Ontologies-Ecologies (www​.poeweb​.eu). Research interests focus on environmental change and sustainability, the impacts of technoscience, new mobilizations and the transformation of governance, with their implications for social theory. His latest book is Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature (Routledge, 2016). Gloria Pessina is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at Politecnico di Milano (Italy). She has been contributing to the department’s excellence project on ‘Territorial Fragilities’ since 2018. After obtaining a PhD in Spatial Planning and Urban Development with a thesis on the political ecology of water-related urban design in India (in 2015), she started investigating multiscalar power relations and trade-offs between environmental protection, economic development, and energy transition in marginal European regions (focusing on Sardinia, Italy). In late 2021 she was hosted by the Rachel Carson Center (LMU, Germany) as Visiting Scholar. Etienne Schneider is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the political economy of European monetary integration, European Union (EU) industrial and competition policy and the role of negative emission technologies in EU climate policy.

xvi  Handbook of critical environmental politics Ivano Scotti holds a PhD in sociology and social research at the University of Naples Federico II. He worked at the University of Molise, Pisa and Naples, where he is currently a research fellow. His interests include issues relating to the energy transition from a sociological perspective (for example, new green professions and opposition to energy facilities). He has published in international journals – Energy Policy, Journal of Rural Studies, Energy Policy, and Rural Sociology – and a book on energy themes. Alessandro Sciullo is Researcher in the Department of Culture, Politics and Society at the University of Turin. He holds a Master’s in Public Policy Analysis and a PhD in Sociology. His main research interests and experiences are in the fields of public policy evaluation, innovation diffusion, circular economy, socio-ecological systems and energy transition, with a specific focus on citizen engagement and social impacts of the transition pathways. He is coordinator of the Joint Programme e3s (Economic, Environmental and Social Impacts of the Energy Transition) of the EERA – European Energy Research Alliance. Tone Smith (Dr) is an independent researcher in the fields of ecological economics, social-ecological transformation, institutional change and degrowth. She defended her doctoral thesis on ‘The role of numbers in environmental politics’ in 2017, a topic chosen after working many years at Statistics Norway and with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the field of sustainability indicators, environmental performance assessment and environmental-economic accounting. She has subsequently worked on international biodiversity policy for the Austrian Federal Ministry of Sustainability and Tourism. Smith is also a co-founder of Rethinking Economics Norway. For further information see: www​.wu​.ac​.at/​mlgd/​staff/​tone​-smith. Clive L. Spash is Professor of Public Policy & Governance at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Values, and former President of the European Society for Ecological Economics. He promotes the need for social-ecological transformation and a paradigm shift in economic thought. His research over four decades has addressed climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution, conservation and land-use, and covering economics, environmental policy, valuation and ethics. His books include The Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society (2017), Ecological Economics: Critical Concepts in the Environment (4 volumes, 2009), and Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics (2002). For more information: www​.clivespash​.org. Birte Strunk is an economics PhD student at the New School for Social Research in New York. Having previously studied economics and philosophy in Maastricht, London, and Vienna, her current research focuses on both philosophy of economics and ecological economics, specifically economics of climate change. As a fellow of the Balaton group, of the ZOE Institute for future-fit economies, and member of the Post-growth Economics Network, her research links social and ecological perspectives, especially around (waged and unwaged) work, climate justice, and post-growth. Maristella Svampa is a writer and researcher focusing on the socio-ecological crisis, social movements and collective action, as well as issues related to critical thinking and Latin American social theory. She holds a degree in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and a PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Contributors  xvii (EHESS) in Paris. She is a Senior Researcher at Conicet and Professor at the National University of La Plata. Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at The University of Manchester, UK. He was previously Professor of Geography at Oxford University and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship at Science Po, Paris, in 2014. Erik Swyngedouw also holds Honorary Doctorates from Roskilde University in Denmark and the University of Malmö in Sweden. His research focuses on political ecology, environmental politics, democratization, urbanization, politicization, and socio-ecological movements. Miriam Tola is Assistant Professor in environmental humanities at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Her research combines interdisciplinary approaches to explore the intersections between gender, race, and the politics of nature. She is the co-editor of Ecologie della cura (Orthotes, 2021). Her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory and Event, Studi Culturali, and Nouvelles Questions Féministes. She held faculty positions at Northeastern University in Boston and John Cabot University in Rome, and worked as a journalist in the United States and Italy. Isabella Tomassi is a critical geographer. She is currently completing a PhD thesis on spatial planning in post-disaster situations, with a focus on the case of L’Aquila (Italy). She is a member of the Environnement, Ville, Société (EVS) laboratory (University Lyon 2-CNRS). Salvo Torre is Associate Professor at the University of Catania (Italy), where he teaches geography and political ecology. He is a member of the Right City Lab of the University of Salerno and of the Politica Ecologia Società research centre of Pisa University. His research interests include political ecology, social movements, crisis theory, and decolonial studies. David Tyfield is Professor in Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC), and Associate Director of Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University. His research focuses on issues of low-carbon transition and ‘ecological civilization’ in China, especially urban e-mobility and associated infrastructures, which he has been studying since 2007. He has been Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-principal Investigator (CoI) on multiple projects from the United Kingdom, the European Union and Chinese research bodies regarding issues of low-carbon transition. His latest book is Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China: Global Crisis, Innovation, Urban Mobility (Routledge, 2018) and he is a co-editor of Mobilities journal. Angelos Varvarousis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and an adjunct faculty member of the Hellenic Open University (HOU). He holds a PhD in Urban Political Ecology and an MSc in Spatial and Regional Planning. His research revolves around issues of degrowth in urban and rural settings, the study of the commons, alternative economics, and island sustainability.

Introduction: what is critical environmental politics? Luigi Pellizzoni, Emanuele Leonardi and Viviana Asara

On 28 September 2021 – precisely while we started to collect thoughts and ideas for this introductory chapter – Greta Thunberg addressed the Youth4Climate1 delegates gathered in Milan for the upcoming Pre-COP 26.2 Her ‘Blah blah blah’ speech was to become as iconic – if not more iconic – than her notorious j’accuse – ‘How dare you?’ – uttered at the UN Climate Meeting roughly two years prior. Since Thunberg’s words are very often commented upon but seldom reported, we find it important to quote her at some length: There is no planet B’ there is no planet blah – blah blah blah, blah blah blah. ‘This is not about some expensive politically-correct green-assed bunny-hugging or’ blah blah blah. ‘Green economy’ blah blah blah. ‘Net zero by 2050’ blah blah blah. ‘Net zero’ blah blah blah. …

Thunberg continues, we contend, with an accurate delimitation of the field of critical environmental politics: This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words – words that sound great, but so far have led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises. Of course we need constructive dialogue, but they’ve now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us? Over 50% of all our CO2 emissions have occurred since 1990,3 and a third since 2005.4 All this while the media is reporting what the leaders say that they are going to do instead of what they are actually doing. … They say they want solutions, but you cannot solve a crisis that you do not fully understand and you cannot balance a budget if you do not count all the numbers. And as long as we ignore equity and historic emissions, and as long as we don’t include consumption of imported goods, burning of biomass etc. etc., and as long as clever accounting is one of the most efficient ways of reducing emissions, we won’t get anywhere. And the climate crisis is of course only a symptom of a much larger crisis – the sustainability crisis, the social crisis – a crisis of inequality that dates back to colonialism and beyond – a crisis based on the idea that some people are worth more than others and therefore have a right to exploit and steal other people’s land and resources – and it is very naive to believe that we can solve this crisis without confronting the roots of it. Right now we are still very much speeding in the wrong direction … .5

In light of yet another underwhelming outcome at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 26 in Glasgow,6 it seems to us that Thunberg’s words call for a deep rethinking of what critical environmental politics has theoretically meant thus far (next section) and on what conjunctural 1

2  Handbook of critical environmental politics field it will most likely be deployed in the future (subsequent section). After reflecting on these issues, we briefly present the structure of this handbook (final section).

CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS: WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Critical, environmental, politics: three words that both individually and taken together hardly seem to require clarifications. That the environment has become a major political issue is uncontested even by most resolute denialists of climate change or its anthropic causes (Jacques et al. 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010). Moreover, decades of debates and interventions have not produced much, at least if we consider the situation about climate change and other alterations to the processes that, since the inception of the Holocene about 10 000 years ago, have reportedly ensured a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity (Rockström et al. 2009). This alone suggests the need for a thorough critique of environmental politics carried out thus far. As a proper field of political intervention, rather than a set of occasional measures, environmental politics began around 1970 in correspondence with government and public acknowledgment of an ‘ecological crisis’, that is, of structural problems with the relationship between fast-growing, ever more industrialized societies and their biophysical milieu. The notion of crisis, incidentally, shares its etymological basis with the notion of critique, as both derive from the Greek word krinein – ‘judge’, ‘decide’. A crisis, especially if it endures and worsens in spite of decades of efforts to tackle it, asks for an assessment of its origins and possible solutions. This amounts to being critical, right? Well, not necessarily, or at least, the point needs specification. Is it the same, for example, to write a handbook of critical environmental politics and a critical handbook of environmental politics? A quick reflection suggests this is not the case. Critically addressing a subject matter requires sound research: setting valid questions, looking for relevant evidence, and probing a terrain of inquiry carefully and rigorously. So, a critical handbook of environmental politics should just be a good handbook of environmental politics. Referring to critical environmental politics, instead, gives the work performed a peculiar qualification – a posture. Being critical is not just about doing a good job but, first, addressing the job in a particular way. What is this way? Most answers to what ‘being critical’ is focus on the theoretical level, though this by no means rules out empirical research, as long as on-field inquiry is always based on some explicit or implicit theory. In a frequently cited account, Cox distinguishes between ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ theory. The former aims to ‘help solve the problems posed within the terms of a particular perspective which was the point of departure’. It therefore ‘takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action’. The latter stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about. Critical theory, unlike problem-solving theory, does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing’. (Cox 1981, pp. 128–9)

A critical outlook is committed to questioning the backdrop against which, or the framework whereby, problems are identified and solutions devised, and in so doing being attentive to the origin and contestation of institutional arrangements, power differentials, agency distribution, knowledge and authority claims, reality definitions, interest and identity attributions, and the

Introduction  3 transformative potential of alternative approaches and social struggles. It is therefore sensitive to historical change. For Fraser (1989, p. 113) critical theory is the ‘self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’. Similarly for Horkheimer – exponent of a school including several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition that, being named ‘critical theory’ (see Chapter 1 in this volume), should epitomize what a critical posture is about – holds that a critical theory ‘never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such’ but at ‘emancipation from slavery’ (Horkheimer 2002, p. 246). Leaving aside for the moment who the subject of emancipation is, being critical thus entails both doing good research (increase of knowledge) and making that research instrumental to tackling domination. This goal reminds the Enlightenment principle of human progress, a famous description of which comes from Kant. For him (Kant 1784 [2009]), enlightenment is the task for humanity to emerge from immaturity, which depends on a lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of someone else. His famous motto is Sapere aude! (Dare to be wise!) – a call for the use of reason to emancipate themselves addressed to each and every human being. However, there is a difference between, say, assuming that just by letting reason do its job (for example, undertaking effective research) domination will eventually be wiped out, and claiming that reason cannot do its job well unless domination itself falls under its gaze. This involves also, and perhaps primarily, being alert to the dominative assumptions and outcomes hidden within our own intellectual posture. Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has been particularly effective in denouncing the dominative implications of a pretended universalism of reason. According to Said (1993, pp. 278–9), the critical tradition stemming from, or aligned with, the Kantian framework, performs a false universalism that ‘assume[s] and incorporate[s] the inequality of races, the subordination of inferior cultures, the acquiescence of those who, in Marx’s words, cannot represent themselves and therefore must be represented by others’. This false universalism, which has effectively supported Western imperialism, is also endorsed for Said by critical theory. This claim finds some support in Horkheimer’s own words. He contrasts traditional theoretical thinking, with its outlook on ‘the genesis of particular objective facts, the practical application of the conceptual systems by which it grasps the facts and the role of such systems in action [as] external’ to itself, with the critical questioning of the dominative grounds and implications of such endeavour; yet he also holds that ‘the free development of individuals depends on the rational constitution of society’ (Horkheimer 2002, pp. 208, 246), suggesting the presence of an ordering principle that should be brought to light and let unfold or promoted against reactionary forces. That is, on one side, Horkheimer questions the dominative implications of the case for what Nagel (1986) has aptly termed the ‘view from nowhere’ – the distinctive objectivism of Western civilization that has as a cornerstone Descartes’s idea of a mind separated from the body yet capable of apprehending the world as it is, and that finds a functional equivalent in Kant’s a-priori elements of reason. On the other side, Horkheimer seems to believe in a critique of Western reason from within this very reason, according to the latter’s view of history, subscribing to the idea of a ‘progress’ over premodern or non-modern forms of life. This standpoint, postcolonial and decolonial scholars claim, makes it impossible to address coloniality as an imperialist endeavour repeated time and again through a systematic devaluation and subjection of peoples and places under the justification of helping these to catch up with the ‘advanced’ part of the world. The problem with the Enlightenment’s equation between reason and freedom, notes Allen (2016, p. 3), is that ‘the language of progress

4  Handbook of critical environmental politics and development is the language of oppression and domination for two-thirds of the world’s people’. After this is acknowledged, however, where do we go? To make its point, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has built to a significant extent on French poststructuralism (Eagleton 1998; Go 2016), that is, its deconstruction of the modern argument for universal reason and progress as a narrative among others, with no superior access to a trans-historical or transcultural truth. This entails that social arrangements can and should be questioned only in their own terms and within their own boundaries, without a possibility of appealing to an external principle. Hence, for example, the controversy over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This conclusion, however, has recently met with growing concerns that it may entail a weakening of the possibility to challenge the global reach of a ruling order that, through technological advancement, corporate expansion and neoliberal regulation, is entailing a growing exploitation of humans and nonhumans. The issue, more precisely, is that contestations of injustices grounded on difference instead of inequality (a concept that entails a standard for comparison) may be a blunt weapon against a hegemonic ideology that portrays market differentiation, individual competition and a ‘flat’ ontology of monetary equivalents as the only Reason of the world (Dardot and Laval 2017). Can this new type of universalism – not of principles or ends but of results, the unpredictable combination of myriad of independent decisions, whose necessity is testified by its very actualization – be tackled through an argument for radical diversity and incommensurability? Preoccupations that this may not be the case are expressed from various perspectives: for example, that late feminism’s focus on difference to the detriment of redistribution and representation may have come up to effectively support neoliberal politics (Fraser 2009); or that mobilizations based on claims about identity and lifestyles are proving ineffective in engendering political change (Mouffe 2013); or else that the deconstruction of scientific assertions is benefitting ruling elites, corporate interests and reactionary forces rather than disadvantaged groups and unrepresented ecological concerns (Latour 2004; McIntyre 2018). However, if both the case for a view from nowhere and for a view from anywhere – which replicates the former in reverse (poststructuralism may repudiate Western reason but is an offspring of the latter!), becoming in this way more resistant to contestation – can hardly serve the purpose of a critique aimed at emancipation from domination, does the idea of a critical posture keep any meaning and purpose? An initial reply is that it does not; that the traditional notion of critique as based on claims, counter-arguments and protests is doomed. This argument has been made by scholarship, especially feminist, partaking in ‘new materialisms’ (Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012), also known as the ‘ontological turn’ (Pellizzoni 2016; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) that has involved philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities at the turn of the twenty-first century, gaining momentum in subsequent years. The shared tenet of an otherwise diversified intellectual tide is an argument against both naturalism and culturalism: the former for its several dualisms (mind/body, masculine/feminine, nature/ culture, and so on), which imply the dominance of one polarity over the other, deemed passive, deaf and valueless; and the latter for its failure to question the language/matter duality ending up with the same result and an inability to acknowledge the agency and vitality of matter and the body. Critique, new materialist scholars remark, has traditionally dealt with concepts and discourses, focusing on ‘errors and points of contention’ (Grosz 2005, p. 27), regarding materiality as passive and limiting, and positioning the critic ‘as the dispassionate outsider who stands above and outside the epistemological or philosophical fray’ (McNeil 2010, p. 433).

Introduction  5 This has been unable to yield social and political change. Critique as discourse deconstruction is therefore to be replaced with embodied practices, where alternative ways of living are experimented with and affirmed. This, we may argue, is what is happening with a host of ‘prefigurative’ mobilizations where corporeality and new socio-material entanglements become sites of resistance, creativity and hope (for example, Yates 2015; Schlosberg 2019; see Chapters 34 and 35 in this volume). A critique embodied in materiality and everyday practices should ostensibly circumvent the politically disabling alternative between the view from nowhere and the view from anywhere. However, the argument for prefiguration has been targeted with the same criticism of ineffectiveness it addresses to traditional protest. If discourse deconstruction is a blunt weapon against a ruling order based on violence, exploitation, systematic devaluation and, increasingly, the adoption of deconstructive styles by ruling elites themselves, some scholars wonder how effective can be an embodied politics that struggles to transcend the level of small groups, that the commodity system intercepts as lifestyle, profitable market niches, and that governments ever-more leaning towards the market ideology welcome as a self-help reply to a shrinking welfare state (De Angelis 2013; Haiven 2016; Pellizzoni 2021a). Does the alternative between the view from nowhere and the view from anywhere, or between a discursive and an embodied approach, exhaust the space for conceiving and enacting critique? Not necessarily. There is a line of argument, connecting otherwise distant scholars such as Foucault and Adorno, that opens up a possibility for critique to be both historically and culturally located and transformative (Allen 2016). Both Foucault and Adorno subscribe to the emancipative ethos of Enlightenment without endorsing its metaphysical assumptions about progress as the universal affirmation of Western modernity as it is and as a whole, making a case for an immanent critique, that is, a critique that turns against themselves the assumptions and conceptual tools available in the historical moment, questioning their foundation as bound up with specific power relations, hence raising the issue of ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’ (Foucault 2007a, p. 44). For Foucault the task of a critique so conceived is to bring into question the ruling ‘problematization’ – why and how certain issues emerge as problems and the horizon of meaning that even opposed solutions share – from within itself. Think, for example, of how, in the debate over the ecological crisis, those who call for more technology and those who call for a return to ‘simpler’ ways of living generally share a same understanding of what technology is about. Problematizing that understanding, then, means regarding technology, as currently conceived and implemented, as neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ but – using Foucault’s term – ‘dangerous’, by which he means that, whatever the situation and its dominant accounts, ‘we have always something to do’ (Foucault 2000, p. 256). This amounts to saying that technologies are amenable to different developments according to different purposes, rather than just according to different possibilities of fulfilling same purposes, as if these were self-evident and constrained by the materiality of devices and by their conditions of production. Existing socio-material arrangements can and should, instead, be only the starting point for a rethinking and transformation of technologies that builds on contesting their very matter-of-factness, their apparent necessity. Similarly, Adorno proposes the ‘non-identical’ as an alternative to ‘identity-thinking’, the matter-of-fact appearance taken by historically located and culturally loaded apprehensions of the world. Against the argument for an actualization of socio-technical potentialities that can be fostered or hampered but not diverted, ‘negative dialectics’ means for him a ‘historically

6  Handbook of critical environmental politics situated response to a particular form of social organization and its accompanying worldview’ (Allen 2016, p. 193), showing precisely its non-necessity: that ‘it need not be’ (Adorno 1973, p. 321). On this view, ‘the positive meaning of freedom lies in the potential, in the possibility, of breaking the spell or escaping from it’ (Adorno 2006, p. 174). The separation between nature and society, and the domination of the latter over the former in the name of progress, represents a key element of this spell, to which even critical theorists have proven sensitive. Habermas (1983, p. 108), for example, has claimed that ‘for the sake of removing socially unnecessary repression we cannot do without the exploitation of external nature necessary for life’. A statement that Marx, in spite of his nuanced account of the relationship between humans and nature, would arguably underwrite (see Chapter 4 in this volume). It is of the utmost relevance for a critical environmental politics, then, that for Adorno it is not possible to instrumentalize and exploit non-humans without doing the same to humans. Even for the late Foucault (despite his well-known disregard for nature), freedom builds on a particular relation with oneself and with the world (Iofrida and Melegari 2017). For both these scholars, moreover, it is not possible to predict where critique will lead to, precisely for its immanent character, alien to any claim of historical necessity. Its only normative benchmark is freedom from domination (of humans and non-humans alike, and together: an issue on which Adorno is most explicit), which means inclusion, justice and respect for the other. Its way of proceeding is contestatory, first and foremost of the aprioristic assumptions that naturalize power relations foreclosing imagination and acknowledgement of alternatives, in so doing giving relevance to embodied experiences, especially of injustice and suffering, which are neither ruled out nor hypostatized, but seen as affecting and effecting thinking, and vice versa (see, for example, Foucault 1988; Adorno 1998a). An immanent critique, moreover, acknowledges that experiences of injustice and domination never repeat themselves in the same way, yet they can be recognized across time and place. It is on this recognizability, which Walzer (1990) names as minimal or reiterative universalism, that emancipatory thrusts can build up and find support beyond the confines of specific communities or social groups. Equally important is to take notice that a critical posture so conceived entails a peculiar relationship with uncertainty or non-knowledge. The case for progress as a pathway towards the full realization of universal Reason crucially builds on science, and specifically on the incomplete, ever-revisable character of scientific knowledge. Outside the laboratory or the university lecture hall, the assumption of knowledge perfectibility has effectively authorized a sort of retroactive application of its future accomplishment in terms of sufficiency of the knowledge available at any given time for handling the world in full accord to purposes. This has led to a neglect of early warnings of ‘unpredictable’ adverse effects of technology, a preference for amount of yield against resilience and reversibility, an assumption of resolutive technical progress, and so on. The tendency to conflate knowledge exhaustiveness as a normative ideal – the vanishing point of the scientific enterprise – with the capacity of handling biophysical processes has gained momentum in recent years, the purpose of basic research having been increasingly diverted from cognition to usability (Stokes 1997). Acknowledgement of incompleteness, in the Adornian account of non-identity, means instead that the anticipated matter-of-factness to which action should conform is incompleteness itself (Pellizzoni 2021b). In the lexicon of Adorno, it is impossible to do full justice to the Other – and all the better if this leads to an attitude of humbleness and respect, a care in avoiding smugness and assimilation, a demand of friendship rather than an attempt at lordship, and a search for ‘agreement between human beings and things’ (Adorno 1998b, p. 247). This position draws inspiration

Introduction  7 from Benjamin’s (2019, p. 203) claim that a type of labour is possible which ‘far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials’. Benjamin’s envisaged horizon appears now increasingly crucial, yet foreclosed by a critique of technology harnessed in a conflict between technophiles and technophobes that is largely fictitious and instrumental to dominative designs. If the above provides an account of the type of job ‘being critical’ entails, be it a matter of academic work, action research or civic mobilization, the account cannot but invest the notions of environment and politics themselves. Environment is not the same as nature. The latter is a complex concept which, according to Williams (1983), can be drawn to three main meanings: the whole material reality; the opposite of culture, that is, the sphere of what is not altered by humans; and the essence or distinctive features of a being. This applies to the Western tradition, as all these meanings presume the external similarity and internal difference between humans and non-humans that Descola (2014), Viveiros de Castro (2014) and other anthropologists have shown to be specific to Western ontology. Environment, however, is a relational concept. When applied to the biophysical world it draws attention to interaction instead of identity. It is not by chance that it has become synonymous with ecology, the study of the relationships between organisms and their biotic and abiotic surroundings, whose official birthday is 1866, when the German biologist Ernst Häckel reportedly coined it. The rise of this relational perspective is thus concomitant, and hardly unconnected, with what Foucault (2007b) terms the liberal problem of government, as a political focus on the handling of the dynamics involving populations and their biophysical milieu, with the crucial help of specialized knowledges. Environment, therefore, is a concept where knowledge and power are deeply intertwined from the outset. Political and cognitive aspects are constitutive of the notion. The environmental crisis is a crisis in the relationship between humans and nature, and surely not a crisis of nature, if by this we mean the planet. Life has proven capable of surviving the most adverse conditions, as the vestiges of past geological eras indicate. Therefore, a critical outlook cannot but scrutinize the notion of environment, a task that should also involve a critique of what counts as ‘environmental’ and what constitutes ‘environmentalism’. This has traditionally been set by Western standards, the bounds of which have coincided with the legitimization of ‘white’ and colonial visions, and the de-legitimization of other, indigenous, non-white and non-modern visions, ontologies and knowledges not orientated towards extractive relationships. While the environment has been framed as ‘an exotic elsewhere’ (Di Chiro 2008, p. 286) environmentalism has traditionally been constructed as a ‘cult of wilderness’ legitimating the dispossession of peoples from their land, and as an approach that should not be concerned with livelihoods, human labour, and materiality, but rather with presumed ‘post-material’ values and issues (see Chapters 35, 37 and 42 in this volume). Decolonizing the notion of the environment hence means to make visible the alternative genealogies of environmental thought that have been silenced by an assumed universal meaning of green concerns. Furthermore, scrutinizing the notion of environment also entails an investigation of how it is used in political action and struggles, which brings into question a great deal: for example, the type of value humans assign to the biophysical world, and how this value comes about. Without pre-empting an issue touched upon in various chapters of this volume, a critical posture should ostensibly question the idea that value is a thing or an intrinsic quality of things, conceiving of it as a consequence of acts of valuation and evaluation (Muniesa 2011; Lamont 2012), as this allows inquiry into the underlying assumptions about worthiness and

8  Handbook of critical environmental politics how to protect or increase it, and related power relations, bringing to light conflicting moral economies and challenging the claim that any judgement of worth can ultimately be traced back to a single metric (see Chapter 23 in this volume). Indeed, many emergent mobilizations in the Global South and Global North contest precisely this, enacting what Centemeri (2018) terms ‘alternative value practices’. Undoubtedly, a critical outlook should also extend its gaze to the notion of politics. This entails taking a post-foundationalist posture, that is ‘a constant interrogation of the metaphysical figures of foundation’ (Marchart 2007, p. 2), whereby politics is not simply the ontic manifestations of conventional politics (including, for instance, the political system and institutions, or politics meant as the ‘art of government’), but also encompasses ‘the political’, the ontological dimension of the institution of society which is characterized by the absence of a final ground or ‘closure’ of the social. Political difference explains the ‘unbridgeable gap’ (Marchart 2007, p. 6) between, on the one hand, concepts such as polity, policy, politics and police, and on the other ‘the political’ or radical antagonism, that is the instituting moment of the social. A critical approach should also involve a critique of those instituted forms of conventional politics that contribute to mark the current socio-ecological crisis. It is in this sense that, as political ecology has forcefully voiced since at least the 1970s, dealing with the environmental question is an inescapably political endeavour and, vice versa, politics cannot prescind from its environmental groundedness and implications. That is, a critical approach to politics is intimately tied to a critical approach to the environment. This involves critiquing the continuous ‘displacement (or denial) of the real socio-ecological processes’ (Chapter 32 in this volume) that drive the socio-ecological crisis, such as the capitalist mode of production and consumption and its generalization through an ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2012) that is deeply rooted in everyday practices. Such a suppression occurs by means of a politics of unsustainability (Chapter 9 in this volume) that has turned the ‘ecological transition’ into a new orthodoxy (Brand 2016) where, as in the famous novel The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa, ‘for things to remain the same, everything must change’. A paradigmatic case is the European Union (EU), an actor traditionally considered to be environmentally progressive. Here, while the environment has moved centre stage, with the ecological transition raised to the rank of newly established ministries in several European countries, and the Next Generation EU mobilizing unprecedented funds with the goal of climate protection, eco-politics is reduced to a techno-managerial issue, revolving around issues such as green finance, commodification of nature, circular economy and, most likely, even reliance on nuclear energy and fossil gas as tools for win-win solutions that can harness momentum for further economic growth.7 Such politics of unsustainability involves, as we argue in the next section, on the one hand a new approach to the environmental challenge, whereby ecological limits are turned into an opportunity for market-led valorization, and on the other an intimate relationship with the slippage into post-democratic governance through consensual governing and a mainstreamed environmental discourse that attempts to erase social antagonism (see Chapter 32 in this volume). Related to the point above, a noteworthy direction of inquiry over politics and its ongoing transformations considers the change occurred to the notion of crisis. According to the modern conception of reality, time and the human agent, crisis meant a decisive moment of confirmation or upheaval of the political order (Koselleck and Richter 2006), yet it now increasingly expresses a permanent situation from which there is no exit. This is exemplified well by the growth of debt as a structural condition at individual and collective level (Graeber 2011;

Introduction  9 Lazzarato 2012), or by the shift from one ecological emergency to the next (heath waves, hurricanes, pandemics, industrial accidents, and so on) with hardly any break. That is, some scholars contend, crisis has become a way of governing (Lazzarato 2015; Gentili 2018). More precisely, we would be witnessing an intensification of the ‘administrative’ concept of government that Foucault (2007b, 2008) had detected first in liberalism and then in neoliberalism; an intensification possibly engendering a new political condition, with novel forms of domination. The project for this volume started before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book was developed at the same time as this was unfolding, and completed before its end. Various chapters touch upon it though without giving it central stage, which in our opinion is correct as the scope of a handbook must go beyond the headlines, dramatic that these may be. However, voices have been raised claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic is a crucial step towards the normalization of the state of emergency, main restrictions of fundamental rights in the name of a bio-political necessity being bound to endure in some form or another after the end of the pandemic (Agamben 2021). Beyond the specific case, an administrative declension of crises has an impact on critique, as it increasingly crushes the latter on a problem-solving plane, foreclosing, among the other things, the possibility to question the growing account of adaptation as the sole sensible approach to climate change, pandemics, job precarity and a host of biophysical and social issues. A claim that not only assumes that the status quo is unchangeable (not ‘in time’, at least), but opens avenues for an expanding sector of economy that works on emergencies, the endless modulation of which corresponds to endless opportunities of profit. Also on this view, a critical approach to environmental politics is more necessary than ever. Finally, another emergent line of inquiry in recent environmental politics scholarship comes from new materialist literature, especially at the crossroads between science and technology studies (STS) and feminist and postcolonial theory. What has come under the spotlight is the way ‘knowing, the words of knowing, and texts do not describe a pre-existing world [but] are part of a practice of handling, intervening in, the world and thereby of enacting one of its versions – up to bringing it into being’ (Mol and Law 2006, p. 19). The world, it is claimed, takes shape and meaning, emerging from an indistinctiveness that constitutes the (moveable) border of thinkability, only together with a cognitive act which is inseparable from history and flesh. Moreover, ‘if reality is done, if it is historically, culturally and materially located, then it is also multiple’ (Mol 1999, p. 75). It is ‘open to an alternative ordering or recomposition of the relational field’ (Clark 2013, p. 2828). Hence, a focus on emergent ‘ontological struggles’, on their crucial building on a denaturalization of Western dualisms in favour of perspectives by which ‘all beings exist always in relation and never as “objects” or individuals’ (Escobar 2010, p. 39). The notion of pluriverse is often evoked in this regard (Kothari et al. 2019), as not a kaleidoscope of declensions of a same world but a world comprising many worlds (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018).

CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS: CONJUNCTURAL ELEMENTS AND FUTURE SCENARIOS The task of a handbook, we believe, is to offer an updated compass of a problem field, without succumbing to the lure of fashionability, using interpretive lenses provided with a focus deep enough to help the reader discern what is most relevant in ongoing events and emergent trends.

10  Handbook of critical environmental politics On one side we have to acknowledge the growing significance of the ontological politics practised by socio-ecological mobilizations and initiatives in the Global South and also increasingly in the Global North, as underpinning a new type of emancipatory politics – for humans and non-humans alike, and together – grounded in materiality that can itself nurture critical environmental politics. On the other side it is important to take note of how environmental movements’ approach towards global environmental governance has evolved in recent years, such that it becomes hard to talk of ‘traditional’ mobilizations, in relation to usual politics of discourse (voicing and lobbying). Both issues are addressed from different perspectives in a number of chapters. It may however be useful to delve here into the latter as a way to contextualize the book in its entirety vis-à-vis the challenge of climate change, which now ostensibly encompasses and synthesizes the whole case for an environmental politics. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a key relationship: that between ecological issues and transnational governance. Our crux is that Greta Thunberg’s words – and, more importantly, the massive movements they inspired – constitute a remarkable shift in the history of that relationship. In brief, they put an end to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)8 as the centripetal force for climate-related imagination, as the main attractor of ecology-related policy efforts. This does not mean that, post-Greta, critical environmental politics is entirely unprecedented: many features of Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion existed in previous mobilizations, especially those of the alter-globalization cycle. Yet, what we believe is important to emphasize is the progressive disintegration – endogenous as well as exogenous – of the UN-led governance process, which represents a moment of discontinuity from both an institutional and a social movements’ perspective. From the 1960s onwards, owing to convergent pressures by engaged scientific communities and vocal social movements, ecological issues have gradually become pivotal both in national and supranational political agendas. Up until the late 1980s, however, this unprecedented importance constituted a barrier to capital accumulation. As O’Connor (1973) and Gorz (1978 [1980]) remarkably showed, environmental protection was seen as a necessary evil, an additional cost to be either internalized within firms or externalized onto governmental budget, but eventually driving to an identical outcome: an increase in market prices for ‘dirty’ commodities. Although historical evidence suggests that ruling elites were most often willing to privilege profits over a liveable planet, it is worth noting that legal controversies over ecological issues – most often following socio-ecological mobilizations – were usually regulated within a command-and-control legal framework (Klein 2015), or else public regulation. The best example of this procedure is the Montreal Protocol which, in 1987, phased out a number of substances that were industrially useful but also detrimental to the stratospheric ozone layer (Epstein et al. 2014). This situation significantly changed with the rhetoric of ‘sustainable development’ (SD) (in 1987) and was eventually reversed by the discursive formation of the ‘green economy’ (GE), arising within innovative business circles in the early 1990s. Whereas the main tenet of SD is the conviction that economic growth, biospheric health and future generations’ best interests may go hand in hand (if properly balanced), the disruptive kernel of GE is the idea that what was once conceived as crisis of capitalism (that is, the ecological crisis) is from now on to be regarded as a crisis for capital. That is, GE postulates that the internalization of environmental limits does not constitute a burden but, rather, opens up a new strategy for market-led valorization (Leonardi 2019). This also led to significant shifts in environmental policy discourse after the 1970s. On the one hand, there was a change in discourse from ‘growth versus the

Introduction  11 environment’, which characterized international environmental governance of the 1970s (more particularly, global forums, such as the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and the 1974 Cocoyoc Symposium), to ‘growth for the environment’, which has emerged since the Brundtland report and further strengthened in later UN conference (the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development), most especially with the 2012 Rio + 20 summit under the aegis of the new GE concept (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015). On the other hand, there was a shift from a political discourse, characterizing the early days of global environmental governance, to an increasingly technocratic discourse where the ecological crisis is set as an apolitical problem requiring techno-managerial fixes. A brief glance at the historical development of global climate governance shows the connection between the emergence of SD and GE and the governmental design of market-based schemes. The Kyoto Protocol is the first legally binding agreement on climate change whose main tenet is undoubtedly the beginning of carbon trading, for which it unmistakably represents an ‘official’ date of birth. The basic economic rationale which frames the flexibility mechanisms is that trading emissions permits and credits on dedicated markets would simultaneously reduce the aggregate cost of meeting the targets, foster sustainable development in non-industrialized countries and create profitable opportunities for green business. This formula indicates that global reliance on specifically dedicated markets as an exclusive policy option is connected to an extremely entrenched political belief according to which climate change, although a historical market failure (since negative externalities were not accounted for), could be viably solved only by further marketization. This assumption has represented the red thread of climate governance as a whole and remained intact in the much celebrated Paris Agreement (signed at COP 21, in 2015). In passing, this uncontested centrality is consistent with the hypothesis according to which the environmental limit is turned by GE into an element of the process of valorization. That the COP-system is entirely reliant on this wager is shown once more by the inability of delegates at COP 26 to move beyond exclusive market mechanisms and to design a non-market mechanism – as prescribed by article 6 of the Paris Agreement. As far as carbon trading is concerned, it must be noted that negotiators in Glasgow reached an agreement over transparency by detailing the rulebook, the impact of which on fraudulent practices, such as double counting, is expected to be significant. Yet, the main flaw of the Clean Development Mechanism still undermines all efforts: carbon offsets – awkwardly renamed Article 6, paragraph 4, emission reductions (A6.4ERs) – do not achieve actual mitigation as they simply shift emissions from one side of the world to the other without any benefit for the atmosphere (Leonardi 2017). For our purposes, it is key to assess also the disruptive nature of SD/GE on social movements’ side. Our main argument is that, since the 1990s, the policy framework aimed at posing ecological issues as drivers of capital accumulation has attracted even radical imaginaries as it ostracized denialists of various forms. Again, global warming is an example: the UNFCCC process being a centripetal force for social advocacy, most climate justice (CJ) actors ended up playing as legitimacy providers for climate governance (at the very least from Kyoto 1997 to Paris 2015). As is well established, CJ as a political tool for social mobilizations has emerged in close connection with the anti-globalization cycle of struggles, also referred to as no-global, new-global or ‘movement of movements’ (Chapter 13 in this volume). It was at that juncture that ecology ceased to be perceived as an area among other areas, as a specific sector to be

12  Handbook of critical environmental politics linked to others, to instead be turned into a systemic viewpoint, a general connective tissue, and a broad perspective through which the traditional dualism between nature and society could be redefined. It is no coincidence that the expression ‘climate justice’ was coined in a 1999 text circulated on the eve of the Seattle uprising. In that context, what the movement of movements wanted to emphasize was ‘the ethical and political dimension of global warming’, conceived of as a ‘not purely environmental or climatic issue’ (Corporate Watch 1999). Quite correctly, climate naysayers – or, merchants of doubt (Oreskes and Conway 2010) – were indicated as reactionaries unable to face an enormous and unprecedented challenge: making atmospheric stability a political stake. Perhaps less correctly, in hindsight, the UN-led climate governance was seen as a meaningful response; if not immediately effective, at least politically adequate to this challenge. Every preliminary definition of ‘alterglobal’ CJ cannot but be based on the recognition that those who have been least responsible for the historical volume of emissions are those who are most vulnerable to pay the price it entails. In this perspective, CJ was originally, for the most part, a geopolitical critique dealing especially with historical responsibility (for cumulative emissions) (Carbon Brief 2021) and (repayment of) climate debt. Against this background, it is possible to distinguish among three different strands of self-portrayed CJ: 1. Pro-corporate elites (for example, World Resource Institute) – progressive neoliberals, in Fraser’s (2019) terms, according to which eco-competition plus the Green Climate Fund9 would be effective in tackling carbon inequality. 2. Large environmentalist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (for example, Greenpeace), often part of the Climate Action Network, according to which divestment strategies plus the Green Climate Fund could be better candidates. 3. Radical unions, global networks and locally unwanted land use (LULU)/environmental justice movements from below (for example, Climate Justice Now!), according to which marked-based solutions plus money transfers per se could not work without a deep restructuring of exploitative social relations. Schematically, and in the absence of a mass movement, the following can be stated: group 1 has consistently supported the COP system; group 3 has mostly opposed the COP system; group 2 – by far the largest civil society advocate of CJ – has oscillated between tepid endorsement and mild criticism, but has nonetheless consistently provided climate governance with political legitimacy. A significant confirmation can be found in the following 2010 interview with Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace. Asked about the NGO strategy in the dramatic aftermath of COP 15, Naidoo explains that campaigning within the UNFCCC was still to be a key component of it: At Greenpeace we are intensifying our efforts and we have an effort to put more pressure on the US, China, the BASIC countries [Brazil, South Africa, India and China] in general as well as trying to see if the European Union which were fairly marginal in the politics played out in Copenhagen, can get their act together and add some momentum to the talks. The UNFCCC is also going through a transition because with de Boer10 leaving there is anticipation that perhaps someone from a developing country might be appointed who would bring urgency to the negotiations.11

These words echo the typical group 2 comment at the end of every COP: ‘it’s not enough, but it’s a first step in the right direction’. In our interpretation, however, this course of actions progressively lost support to eventually end in Katowice at COP 24 (in 2018). As the climate

Introduction  13 movement’s confidence in COP’s ability to produce substantive progress and handle the climate crisis in an efficacious and socially just manner progressively weakened, strand 2 moved closer to strand 3’s positions, as a reformist approach aimed at influencing the COPs was gradually discarded in favour of a more radical approach, thus facilitating a relative unification of the climate movement (see also De Moor 2018). The core of climate governance (global warming exists and can only be solved by markets) was undermined by two unexpected events: 1. the rise of a ‘denialist front’ within the COP system itself (USA, Russia, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia). These four countries stated that the latest IPCC report was not to be ‘welcome’ but, rather, ‘taken note of’; 2. the delegitimization of climate negotiations on the part of group 2 of the CJ camp. If Donald Trump was the political personification of the first process, Greta Thunberg played the same function as regards the second. Her message, in Katowice, was threefold: 1. Delegitimation of the UNFCCC elites: ‘our political leaders have failed us’ so ‘I will not ask them anything. Instead, I will ask the media to start treating the crisis as a crisis’ (Katowice, 3 December 2018]; 2. Inversion of the relationship between economy and ecology: ‘some companies and some decision makers’ are to blame for the climate crisis. They ‘have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money’ (Davos, 22 January 2019); 3. Call for action rather than negotiation: ‘We’ve had 30 years of pep talking and selling positive ideas and I’m sorry but it doesn’t work. Because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now …. The one thing we need more than hope is action’ (Stockholm, 24 November 2018). All these speeches by Thunberg heavily impacted on group 2 of CJ, as shown by the reaction of Greenpeace at the end of COP 24: ‘People expected action and that is what governments did not deliver. This is morally unacceptable and they must now carry with them the outrage of people and come to the UN Secretary General’s summit in 2019 with higher climate action targets’ (Greenpeace International Executive Director, Jennifer Morgan). More importantly, these speeches fuelled a political process which eventually erupted in the first global climate strike on 15 March 2019. Instead of NGOs providing legitimacy, 2019 brought to the UNFCCC a mass movement undermining its very raison d’être. This mass movement for CJ is marked by some key features. First, it thoroughly changed the social perception of climate change: from apocalyptic scenario to driver of youth worldwide mobilization. Second, it incorporated the centrality of transversal feminism not only in respect of critical repertoires, but also, more directly, within its structure of leadership: Greta Thunberg is accompanied by young women such as Vanessa Nakate, Luisa Neubauer, and Angela Valenzuela. Third, within and against the institutional process of climatization of the world (Aykut 2020), it turned CJ from an oppositional stance to a general political framework for the convergence of different struggles. From this perspective, it is important to highlight that the four climate strikes of 2019 progressively enlarged CJ’s focus on geopolitics so that it now includes social inequality within national communities as a key target of its critical endeavour. What is now explicitly posed

14  Handbook of critical environmental politics is an unprecedented proximity between social equality and conflicts for atmospheric stabilization (linked primarily to emissions reduction). In order to properly grasp this fundamental extension of the scope of CJ, it may be useful to link it to the crisis of the UNFCCC as the centripetal force for climate-related imagination. We contend that this crisis is an instance of what Sachs has described as the crisis of development as West-centric Weltanschaung (worldview) of the post-World War II world: A suspicion spreads among the global middle class that the expectations kindled by development are not going to be fulfilled. Alienated from their traditions, aware of Western living styles through their smart phones, yet excluded from the modern world, this is the fate of too many people, and not only in poor countries. Thus, cultural confusion and ecological crises fuel fear of the future. (Sachs 2019, p. xv)

Elaborating on Sachs’s crucial insight, we may say that the UNFCCC’s promise of social inclusion through green growth (or, climate mitigation as achieved through carbon trading) has not materialized. On the contrary, inequality worldwide has been increasing since the 1980s. With specific regard to the US and EU, the World Inequality Report contains a remarkable graph (Figure I.1).

Source: Chancel et al. (2021).

Figure I.1

Top 1 per cent versus bottom 50 per cent wealth shares in Western Europe and the US, 1910–2020

However, what is even more remarkable is that this data is openly connected with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions not at the country level – where inequality often is obfuscated by the failure to account for imported emissions owing to offshoring heavy industries – but, instead, at the per capita level, as Figures I.2 and I.3 show.12 This interest on carbon inequality is a direct consequence of CJ’s ‘new clothes’ and can be appreciated in the insightful figure from an Oxfam Media briefing in September 2020 (Figure I.4). What is key here is a new understanding of what has to change in order for the 1.5°C target (set by the Paris Agreement) to be achieved: not the lifestyle of developed countries in general but, primarily, the lifestyle of the richest 10 per cent, worldwide. This does not mean that indi-

Introduction  15

Source: Chancel et al. (2021).

Figure I.2

Per capita emissions across the world, 2019 (1)

Source: Chancel et al. (2021).

Figure I.3

Per capita emissions across the world, 2019 (2)

Source: Gore (2020).

Figure I.4

Total and per capita consumption emissions of individuals in different global income groups, 2015

16  Handbook of critical environmental politics vidual contributions are to be considered unimportant; the opposite is true, when it comes to climate activists (Wahlström et al. 2019). Simply, contemporary CJ postulates that individual efforts can be effective only against the background of more systemic transformations. While it is not possible to anticipate how the climate movement will fare in the face of the mounting challenges of the politics of unsustainability, what we have tried to show in this section is that a critical take on environmental politics cannot leave aside not only the ‘ontological’ struggles developing in the Global South and Global North at different scales, from the everyday to the national, but also the current historical conjuncture concerning global environmental governance and movements’ positioning in and contribution to it. That is, a critical outlook should consider praxis as a fundamental dimension for nourishing the sociological imagination, so that observing, investigating and, even, partaking in social processes and practices can generate grounded theoretical reflection eventually feeding into emancipatory and transformative processes.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK In the sections above we have depicted our understanding of a critical approach to environmental politics – its rationale and distinctive outlook. We neither expected nor pushed the contributors to endorse this account; all the more so considering the number of issues worthy of entering a handbook, and the variety of perspectives from which they could be addressed. However, browsing the pages of the book, our feeling is that the authors collected may not explicitly or entirely subscribe to what we have said about immanent critique but at least endorse its spirit. This, therefore, can be regarded as a common denominator of otherwise varied, sometimes contrasting, theoretical orientations and substantive focuses. Similarly, we have suggested that chapters include a section devoted to introducing the topic and its genealogy, subsequently addressing its problem-framing and relevant ideas and contentious issues, and ending with open questions and transformative potentials. Some authors felt comfortable with this structure; others interpreted their remit more freely. Contributors chose equally freely how to connect and balance conceptual elaboration, literature discussion and empirical insight. We believe all this provides the pages of the book with a healthy variety and individuality of approaches. The field of environmental politics cannot be delimited according to well-established criteria, nor can the issues addressed be displayed according to a consensual organization. That said, the book aims to, and we think does, offer an overview of the state of the art, covering questions of significant relevance for a critical view on environmental politics. Entries have been selected after a great deal of discussion and some inevitable sacrifice – otherwise the reader now would be holding or watching a far bulkier text: too much, we felt. Yet, topics that were not attributed an entry of their own are often addressed within one or more chapters. An example is new materialisms. This emergent theoretical perspective is involved in many ways in a number of chapters, which confirms its relevance for a critical approach to environmental politics, as we have stressed previously. Dispensing with a dedicated discussion, which would inevitably be partial and tentative given the pervasiveness of new ontological perspectives and, most importantly, the pace of their current evolution across the Global South and Global North, was felt to be an acceptable choice faced within space constraints. At the opposite side of the spectrum of potentially significant topics, we have sacrificed issues boasting

Introduction  17 a long-established literature to the benefit of less covered issues, or to ways of addressing them in an exploratory, even challenging, way. All things considered, we believe the entries included offer a comprehensive array of questions and outlooks that move across a variety of temporal and spatial scales, institutional levels and cultural perspectives, though – for the reasons outlined above – special emphasis is given to the impact of Western modernity and capitalism on socio-material organization and human–non-human relations, and how such impact has been and is being strengthened and challenged. For the sake of space we will not follow the usage of synthesizing here each contribution. Giving an outline of the book’s structure may suffice to conclude this introduction. The book is organized in six parts. The first is devoted to theoretical strands of great relevance in constituting the framework of a critical outlook on environmental politics: ‘Critical theory’, ‘Decolonial ecologies’, ‘Feminisms and the environment’, and ‘Marxism and ecology’. The second part addresses notions of the contested status which makes them pivotal to the articulation of academic debates, political actions and societal struggles: ‘Anthropocene’, ‘Buen Vivir’, ‘Degrowth’, ‘Limits’, and ‘Sustainability’. The third part focuses on key issues, some referring to resources, others to challenges, conflicts, institutional arrangements, knowledge, and regulatory approaches, namely: ‘Agrarian development and food security’, ‘Bioeconomies’, ‘Cities and the environment’, ‘Climate justice and global politics’, ‘The Common(s)’, ‘The cultural political economy of research and innovation’, ‘Disasters and catastrophes’, ‘Energy politics and energy transition’, ‘Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment’, ‘Extractivism and neo-extractivism’, ‘Religion and ecology’, ‘Social metabolism’, ‘Technological fixes’, and ‘The values of Nature’. The fourth part deals with how the relationship between nature and society is regulated and governed (or allegedly so), by means of different types of institutionalized arrangements, with related power effects and agency implications. The chapters included are ‘Democracy and democratization’, ‘Environmental violence’, ‘Environment-related human mobility’, ‘Financialization of nature’, ‘Fossil fuels and state–industry relations’, ‘Global environmental governance and the state’, ‘Just transition’, and ‘Sustainable welfare’. The fifth part takes a perspective opposite to the former, namely, bottom up. It addresses manifestations of social effervescence concerning the environment, all important but differing according to focus, conception, target, organization, cultural background, and location. The chapters included are: ‘Climate change consensus’, ‘Ecological mobilizations in the Global South’, ‘Engaging the everyday’, ‘Environmental movements’, and ‘More-than-social movements’. The final part is devoted to emergent issues and perspectives. These are fundamentally concerned with whether and how human and non-human agential powers and societal goals can or should be reframed, also as a result of technological change. The chapters included are ‘Decolonizing environmental politics’, ‘Digitalization and other promissory infrastructures for sustainability’, ‘Eco-feminism and the commons’, ‘Geopower’, ‘Post-work and ecology’, and ‘Transformative innovation’.

18  Handbook of critical environmental politics

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

https://​ukcop26​.org/​pre​-cop/​youth4climate​-2021/​ (accessed 27 December 2021). https://​ukcop26​.org/​pre​-cop/​pre​-cop​-milan/​ (accessed 27 December 2021). Baseline year for the Kyoto Protocol. Ratification year of the Kyoto Protocol. See: https://​www​.carbonindependent​.org/​119​.html (accessed 27 December 2021). https://​unfccc​.int/​sites/​default/​files/​resource/​cop26​_auv​_2f​_cover​_decision​.pdf (accessed 27 December 2021). At the time of writing this chapter, gas and nuclear energy are seriously being considered for inclusion in the EU sustainable investment taxonomy; see https://​www​.euractiv​.com/​section/​energy/​ news/​gas​-and​-nuclear​-fate​-of​-eu​-green​-taxonomy​-now​-in​-the​-hands​-of​-von​-der​-leyen/​. Moreover, the war in Ukraine is likely to deepen this trend. The UNFCCC established an international environmental treaty to tackle ‘dangerous human interference with the climate system’. It was signed by 154 states at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. It established a Secretariat headquartered in Bonn and came into force in March 1994. The treaty called for ongoing scientific research and regular meetings, negotiations, and future policy agreements designed to both reduce greenhouse gasses and allow ecosystems to adapt to climate change. The Green Climate Fun is a fund established within the framework of the UNFCCC as an operating entity of the Financial Mechanism to assist so-called developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices. The objective of the Green Climate Fund is to ‘support projects, programmes, policies and other activities in developing country Parties using thematic funding windows’. It is intended that the Green Climate Fund be the centrepiece of efforts to raise Climate Finance under the UNFCCC. Yvo de Boer, Dutch, has been Executive Secretary of UNFCCC from 2006 to 2010. After him, the role has been filled by Costa Rican Cristina Figures (2010–16) and Mexican Patricia Espinosa (2016–ongoing). https://​www​.huffpost​.com/​entry/​climate​-2010​-an​-exclusive​_b​_520531. It should be underlined that these figures refer to production-based rather than consumption-based emissions, thus, owing to far-reaching processes of delocalization, we can expect that they underestimate the Global North’s contribution to carbon emissions, as demonstrated by some studies (Peters et al. 2012; Steinberg et al. 2012; Wiedman et al. 2015).

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. (1973), Negative Dialectics, New York: Continuum. Adorno, T.W. (1998a), Marginalia to theory and praxis, in T.W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 259–78. Adorno, T.W. (1998b), On subject and object, in T.W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 245–58. Adorno, T.W. (2006), History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, Cambridge: Polity. Agamben, G. (2021), Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Aykut, S. (2020), Climatiser le monde, Paris: Editions Quae. Allen, A. (2016), The End of Progress. Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, W. (2019), Theses of the philosophy of history, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 196–209. Blaser, M. and de la Cadena, M. (eds) (2018), A World of Many Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Introduction  19 Brand, U. (2016), ‘Transformation’ as a new critical orthodoxy: the strategic use of the term ‘transformation’ does not prevent multiple crises, Gaia: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Societies, 25 (1), 23–7. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2012), Global environmental politics and the imperial mode of living: articulations of state–capital relations in the multiple crisis, Globalizations, 9 (4), 547–60. Carbon Brief (2021), Which countries are historically responsible for climate change? accessed 11 October 2021 at https://​www​.carbonbrief​.org/​analysis​-which​-countries​-are​-historically​-responsible​ -for​- climate​- change​? fbclid​=​I wAR0s​7 ALJJHuTey​j LKc0DMAsL​p fIP3oYMY2​l vsdVGOjdr​ 5wdD6Tp2S5​_cdSA. Centemeri, L. (2018), Commons and the new environmentalism of everyday life. Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permaculture movement, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 59 (2), 289–313. Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E. and Zucman, G. (2021), World Inequality Report 2022, Paris: World Inequality Lab. Clark, N. (2013), Geoengineering and geologic politics, Environment and Planning A, 45 (12), 2825–32. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) (2010), New Materialisms, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Corporate Watch (1999), Greenhouse gangsters vs. climate justice, accessed 10 October 2021 at http://​ www​.corpwatch​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​Greenhouse​%20Gangsters​.pdf. Cox, R. (1981), Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10 (2), 126–55. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2017), The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, London: Verso. De Angelis, M. (2013), Does capital need a commons fix? Ephemera, 13 (3), 603–15. De Moor, J. (2018), The ‘efficacy dilemma’ of transnational climate activism: the case of COP21, Environmental Politics, 27 (6), 1079–100. Descola, P. (2014), Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Di Chiro, G. (2008), Living environmentalisms: coalition politics, social reproduction, and environmental justice, Environmental Politics, 17 (2), 276–98. Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Eagleton, T. (1998), Postcolonialism and ‘postcolonialism’, Interventions, 1 (1), 24–6. Epstein, G., Pérez, I., Schoon, M. and Meek, C.L. (2014), Governing the invisible commons: Ozone regulation and the Montreal Protocol, International Journal of the Commons, 8 (2), 337–60, http://​doi​ .org/​10​.18352/​ijc​.407. Escobar, A. (2010), Latin America at a crossroads, Cultural Studies, 24 (1), 1–65. Foucault, M. (1988), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton (eds), London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (2000), On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works, vol. 1, London, Penguin, pp. 253–80. Foucault, M. (2007a), What is critique? in S. Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 41–82. Foucault, M. (2007b), Security, Territory, Population, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fraser, N. (1989), What’s critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender, in N. Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 113–43. Fraser, N. (2009), Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history, New Left Review, 56 (March–April), 97–117. Fraser, N. (2019), The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, London: Verso. Gentili, D. (2018), Crisi come arte di governo, Macerata: Quodlibet. Go, T. (2016), Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gómez-Baggethun, E. and Naredo, J.M. (2015), In search of lost time: the rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy, Sustainability Science, 10 (3), 385–95. Gore, T. (2020), Confronting carbon inequality: putting climate justice at the heart of the COVID-19 recovery, Oxfam Media Briefing, 21 September. Gorz, A. ([1978] 1980), Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press.

20  Handbook of critical environmental politics Graeber, D. (2011), Debt. The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melville House. Grosz, E. (2005), Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Habermas, J. (1983), Theodor Adorno: the primal history of subjectivity – self-affirmation gone wild, in J. Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 99–110. Haiven, M. (2016), The Commons against neoliberalism, the commons of neoliberalism, the commons beyond neoliberalism, in S. Springer, K. Birch and J. MacLeavy (eds), Handbook of Neoliberalism, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 257–29. Holbraad, M. and Pedersen, M.A. (2017), The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer, M. (2002), Traditional and critical theory, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, pp. 188–252. Iofrida, M. and Melegari, D. (2017), Foucault, Rome: Carocci. Jacques, P., Dunlap, R. and Freeman, M. (2008), The organization of denial, Environmental Politics, 17 (3), 349–85. Kant, I. (1784), An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’, repr. 2009, London: Penguin. Klein, N. (2015), This Changes Everything, London: Penguin. Koselleck, R. and Richter, M. (2006), Crisis, Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (2), 357–400. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (eds) (2019), Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary, New York: Columbia University Press. Lamont, M. (2012), Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation, Annual Review of Sociology, 38 (August), 201–21. Latour, B. (2004), Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–48. Lazzarato, M. (2012), The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Lazzarato, M. (2015), Governing by Debt, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Leonardi, E. (2017), Carbon trading dogma, Ephemera, 17 (1), 61–87. Leonardi, E. (2019), Bringing class back in, Ecological Economics, 156 (February), 83–90. Marchart, O. (2007), Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McIntyre, L. (2018), Post-Truth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McNeil, M. (2010), Post-millennial feminist theory: encounters with humanism, materialism, critique, nature, biology and Darwin, Journal for Cultural Research, 14 (4), 427–37. Mol, A. (1999), Ontological politics. A word and some questions, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74–89. Mol, A. and Law, J. (2006), Complexities: an introduction, in J. Law and A. Mol (eds), Complexities. Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–22. Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics, London: Verso. Muniesa, F. (2011), A flank movement in the understanding of valuation, Sociological Review, 59 (2), 24–38. Nagel, T. (1986), The View from Nowhere, New York: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, J. (1973), The Fiscal Crisis of the State, London: Routledge. Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. (2010), Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York: Bloomsbury. Pellizzoni, L. (2016), Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Pellizzoni, L. (2021a), Commodifying the planet? Beyond the economy of ecosystem services, Stato e mercato, 121, 23–50. Pellizzoni, L. (2021b), Prefiguration, subtraction and emancipation, Social Movement Studies, 20 (3), 364–79. Peters, G.P., Davis, S.J. and Andrew, R. (2012), A synthesis of carbon in international trade, Biogeosciences, 9 (8), 3247–76. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F.S. III, Lambin, E., et al. (2009), Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity, Ecology and Society, 14 (2), art. 32, accessed 2 October 2021 at https://​www​.ecologyandsociety​.org/​vol14/​iss2/​art32/​.

Introduction  21 Sachs, W. (2019), Foreword. The Development Dictionary revisited, in A. Kothari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria and A. Acosta (eds), Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. xi–xvi. Said, E.W. (1993), Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage. Schlosberg, D. (2019), From postmaterialism to sustainable materialism: the environmental politics of practice-based movements, Environmental Politics, 8 March, accessed 10 July 2021 at https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1080/​09644016​.2019​.1587215. Steinberg, J., Roberts, J.T., Peters, G.P. and Baiocchi, G. (2012), Pathways of human development and carbon emissions embodied in trade, Nature Climate Change, 2 (2), 81–5. Stokes, D.E. (1997), Pasteur’s Quadrant – Basic Science and Technological Innovation, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Wahlström, M., Kocyba, P., De Vydt, M. and de Moor, J. (eds) (2019), Protest for a future. Composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in Fridays For Future climate protests on 15 March, 2019 in 13 European cities, accessed 3 October 2021 at http://​cosmos​.sns​.it/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​07/​ 20190709​_Pro​test20for2​0a20future​_GCS2​0Descripti​ve20Report​.pdf. Walzer, M. (1990), Two kinds of universalism, in M. Walzer, Nation and Universe. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 11, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, pp. 509–56. Wiedman, T.O., Schandl, H., Lenzen, M., Moran, D., Suh, S., West, J., et al. (2015), The material footprint of nations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112 (20), 6271–6. Williams, R. (1983), Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York: Oxford University Press. Yates, L. (2015), Rethinking prefiguration: alternatives, micropolitics and goals in social movements, Social Movement Studies, 14 (1), 1–21.

PART I THEORETICAL STRANDS

1. Critical theory: praxis and emancipation beyond the mastery of nature Christoph Görg

INTRODUCTION ‘Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils’ (‘Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’) (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], p. 25). In view of multiple crises of capitalism, including the climate crisis, the disastrous effects of resource extraction, the emergence of autocratic populism, racism and proto fascist regimes in many countries worldwide, and the failure of reformist strategies to respond to these crises, some authors diagnose a crisis of civilization in which societal and environmental issues are inextricable interlinked (Lang and Mokrani 2013; Kothari et al. 2019). These judgements can be interpreted as an indication that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is highly topical. Developed under different historical conditions, including the failed revolution of 1918 in Germany, and facing prima facie different societal challenges, in particular, authoritarianism and the emerging fascism in the 1930s, this type of Critical Theory1 considers the disastrous role of society–nature–relations as decisive for societal development and its crises. During exile, Horkheimer and Adorno in their seminal book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002]) developed an analysis of European history in the middle of the twentieth century as a rupture of civilization, with the murdering of European Jews at its centre. From this approach we can learn that the current environmental crises, from the climate crisis up to the loss of biodiversity and other ecological and societal crises dimensions worldwide, indicate a deep-rooted crisis of societal development as a whole, including its basic beliefs in science and culture, a crisis of civilization which requires a critical rethinking of history, society and nature. Currently, many voices are arguing for this type of critical approach, from materialist, feminist or post-colonial thinkers to social movements worldwide. What we can learn especially from the Frankfurt School is the need for a critique of the belief in societal progress as based on the mastery of nature. Following Adorno and Horkheimer, this belief represents a compulsory law since it presents itself as a false alternative between mastery of nature or submission under nature and was deeply involved in European history, and thus in the making of the modern capitalist world system. This critique allows for a new understanding of praxis and emancipation, and thus for a non-repressive dealing with nature and the crises at hand. To fully grasp the current relevance of this critique, it is important to start with a critical reflection on the different historical moments. The Frankfurt School approach to critical theory was developed long before the environmental crisis was on the agenda of scientific and political concerns, and before the ecological movements of the twentieth century emerged. However, building on Marx’s critique of capitalism and its concepts of nature and society as dialectical terms, Frankfurt scholars strongly criticized the belief in scientific and technical progress, deeply rooted within European science and culture but also within the organiza23

24  Handbook of critical environmental politics tions and parties of the labour movement. This critique was developed, thus, by radicalizing critical thinking and without abandoning the claim for societal emancipation.2 Nevertheless, a reworking and renewal of this approach for the current crises is unavoidable. This reworking has taken place since the 1980s from several perspectives (see ‘Domination in current society– nature–relations’ section in this chapter). Central for the perspective proposed in this chapter is the strong emphasis on the critique of the mastery of nature, which is decisive for several reasons. First, it criticizes the belief in scientific and technical progress, deeply anchored in the quest for technological solutions and economic innovations to stimulate economic growth (whether it is labelled ‘green’ or not) without addressing the societal root causes of the current crises. Second, it addresses environmental issues from a dialectical perspective on the relations between society, nature and individuals, and thus links the mastery of nature to different kinds of societal domination (class, gender, colonial, and so on) and the domination within the individual and its subjectivity (consumerism, authoritarian personalities, sexism, racism and antisemitism, and so on). Third, the critique calls for a new understanding of praxis and emancipation that are decisive for counter strategies to current crises that proceed in a non-repressive way. Thus it calls for an in-depth investigation of the role of subjectivity and culture in human history, partly because of the need to look more carefully at the relationship between society and the individual and to better understand how radical social movements are motivated, how they may emerge and contribute to social ecological transformations also beyond capitalism. In the following, the next section deals with the specific historical conditions of the development of Critical Theory as much as its influences on others (such as ecofeminism). These conditions are even more important as usually acknowledged, as the Frankfurt School indicates that any truth has a specific historical index. The subsequent section introduces key concepts, such as the concept of society–nature–relations (SNR) and of the mastery of nature and elaborates on their meaning for contemporary debates. The fourth section discusses some contentious issues, such as the meaning of domination and what this means for nature, but also their relevance for an adequate meaning of praxis and emancipation today. The final section discusses the political relevance of the Frankfurt School for current debates on social-ecological transformations; it also links this approach to other concepts to demonstrate its strength but also its limits.

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS MATTER: THE TEMPORAL INDEX OF TRUTH (ZEITKERN DER WAHRHEIT) What was denoted later as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was founded in the early 1930s, when in 1931 Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research, a privately funded independent research institute, linked to the University of Frankfurt (Jay 1973; Demirovic 1999; Jeffries 2016). In his famous inauguration speech and in some other essays (see Horkheimer 1931 [1993]), Horkheimer indicated a new approach critical to traditional Marxism and its canonization through socialist and communist parties, in particular concerning the basis–superstructure dichotomy and the status of the proletariat as historical subject. This approach, while still following a materialist approach and critique of capitalist societies, empirically focuses more closely on the relations between society and the individual as well as the role of culture in history.3 Perhaps even more important is its methodological

Critical theory  25 approach, which requires a ‘dialectical permeation and development of philosophical theory and disciplinary scientific research’ (Horkheimer 1931 [1993], p. 29, translation modified). An ‘interdisciplinary materialism’ needs to complement political economy, that is, historical materialism in the tradition of Marx focusing primarily on the structures and processes of capital accumulation. In addition, psychology, in particular psychoanalysis but also other social sciences such as sociology and humanities, were integrated. To avoid the specialization and separation of individual disciplines, however, research should be synthesized by theory, that is, in a philosophical perspective, and guided by what Horkheimer refers to as ‘an interest in a better society’ (Horkheimer 1931 [1993], p. 12). Thus, the concept of critique in Critical Theory, its strong normative orientation, is not only a subjective attitude of researchers or a pure methodological consideration, but intends to closely link a (social) scientific approach to the organization of society as a totality, its relation of power and domination, and the crisis tendencies that raise injustice and suffering. At the centre of Horkheimer’s approach was the diagnosis of a crisis of scientific rationality, including the Marxist theory of history. In the early twentieth century, many scholars from philosophy and beyond confirmed uneasiness with the mechanical worldview of science (for example, Edmund Husserl). What Horkheimer distinguished from a more conservative critique of scientific rationality was his emphasis on the societal roots of this crisis and the role of science as productive force in capitalism. However, he was also convinced that Marxism was no longer sufficient to explain societal development and the crisis of emancipation. Marxist approaches, with their teleological view on history, failed to anticipate the revolution in Russia (that is, in a largely agrarian society) and its absence in one of the most advanced industrialized society, namely, Germany. Neither were they able to respond accordingly to the threat of the emerging Nazi movement. Horkheimer argued that it is no longer adequate to solely refer to economic interests to explain mass movements, class struggles or social revolutions (or their absence), but to take the psychodynamic of the individuals and the social psychology of mass movements into account. In a study on ‘labourers and white-collar-workers at the eve of the Third Reich’, Fromm and other colleagues detected the vulnerability of the working class for authoritarian thinking and Nazi propaganda (Fromm 1932 [1980]). This led Horkheimer, as early as 1932, to prepare the Institute for Social Research for exile – as they no longer believed that the working class and its organizations were able to respond effectively to emerging Nazism. It was Walter Benjamin who, in his posthumous theses ‘On the concept of history’ (Benjamin 1940 [2003]), revived this insight while arguing that the belief in the progress of history weakened working-class organizations. Following Benjamin, the assumption of these organizations, that they were ‘swimming with the flow of progress’, enshrined in a growing mastery of nature, brought about what he termed a deeply rooted conformism that made them unable to respond to the danger of fascism. This conformism ‘recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society’, as Benjamin (1940 [2003], p. 393) stated in thesis XI. To address this regression, Benjamin asked for a concept of history from a ‘state of emergency’. To avoid astonishment about fascism as something happening in the, assumingly civilized, twentieth century – even more in a country which perceived itself as being one of the most civilized – a new concept of history and progress was required, expressed by Benjamin in his interpretation of the painting Angelus Novus from Ernst Klee: the ‘angel of history’ looks back and sees history as a succession of catastrophes. Accordingly, Benjamin called for a new

26  Handbook of critical environmental politics understanding of societal emancipation, no longer depending on societal progress at the cost of nature, that is, on the mastery of nature, and economic growth. Sadly, Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 while fleeing from Nazi Germany, but Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [2002], during their exile in the USA, drew on his critique and extended it towards the Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE; first version in 1944 but published only in 1947). It addresses Nazi barbarism as a failure in European civilization based on the belief in a mastery of nature: ‘Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], p. 9). ‘Breaking nature’ implies an appropriation of nature via the mastery of nature, that is, by ignoring its autonomy, not any kind of societal metabolism with nature. Dialectic of Enlightenment states that enlightenment failed ‘to take fear away from people’ by controlling nature. In reverse, this belief ‘only gets deeper into the natural constraints’; such an approach of non-self-critical enlightenment constitutes nature as unqualified entity, subjected to domination. However, for that reason, society will face what Horkheimer (1947, pp. 92ff.) termed the insurrection of nature also following Engels, who writes of ‘the revenge of nature’ (see Engels 1883 [2012], ch. 9). During the 1930s and1940s, this revenge was triggered by authoritarian personalities and the fascist mass movement, what Horkheimer and Adorno in DoE named ‘the sign of triumphant calamity’. This type of revenge is based on an authoritarian personality, analysed empirically by the scholars of the Frankfurt School (Adorno et al. 1950), a consequence of the mastery of nature within the individual (see the next section). Today the repercussions of the ‘revenge of nature’ take a different form; they are represented by the climate crisis and other crises of SNR, such as the coronavirus pandemic, or as discussed but not fully grasped, by the concept of planetary boundaries (Brand et al. 2021). These crises can be grasped, thus, as a new phase in the dialectic of enlightenment, different from the 1930s–1940s, but following a similar logic as stimulated by the mastery of nature (see for example, concerning the debate on the Anthropocene Görg 2016; see also below). After World War II, DoE was contested and some authors, in particular Habermas (1987), rejected its diagnosis as rampant scepticism based on a totalizing critique of reason. Building on Benjamin’s concept of history, however, this diagnosis can be grasped as a critique of European history from the vantage point of the ‘state of emergency’, which without doubt Auschwitz and the Shoa represent. Thus, it is important to notice that it is a self-critique of European culture and philosophy in the face of Nazi barbarism, but is neither an approach to a general history of humankind nor towards a truly global, that is, post-colonial thinking. However, it is exactly this dialectic between an overarching tendency, European history as driven by the belief in the mastery of nature, and the specific historical circumstances, the murdering of European Jews, which have to be investigated carefully. While Horkheimer and Adorno address enlightenment from a broad perspective, ranging from the myths of ancient Greece (Homer’s Odyssey) up to the historical phase of enlightenment (for example, Bacon and Descartes) and to modern societies, DoE does not pursue a systematic approach to history, but only fragments (as the subtitle ‘Philosophical fragments’ indicates). Moreover, in the foreword to a new 1969 edition, Horkheimer and Adorno state that they would not remain committed to all topics presented in the book owing to the ‘historical index of truth’ (Zeitkern der Wahrheit) (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], p. xi, translation modified). Here, a dialectic approach to history becomes visible: a general attribute of history – that any interpretation of history is always part of history, part of its object at a specific point in time, and often dedicated to change this history – becomes even more relevant when a concept of

Critical theory  27 history from a ‘state of emergency’ is envisaged. As a consequence, the diagnosis of DoE cannot be simply translated into different historical contexts, as sometimes proposed (see, for ecological problems, for example, Beck 1995). To avoid misinterpretations, an explanation is needed for both aspects, that is, for overarching tendencies and for the specific historical constellation. Both requirements, however, can be obtained from the core concepts of DoE: SNR and the mastery of nature. Thus, the diagnosis of DoE needs to be reframed and updated under different historical conditions to make its critique useful. Seen from this perspective, environmental issues which currently concern us were out of scope, even if Adorno in several books and essays made use of the concept of SNR in his theory of society. From the first generation of Critical Theory, only Herbert Marcuse explicitly addressed environmental concerns when he realized in the 1970s the relevance of new social movements like the new feminist, the anti-racist or the anti-colonial liberation movements (Marcuse 1972). Marcuse was fully aware of the deep-rooted causes of environmental crises in capitalism and asked how these crises may trigger a transformation. Building on his critique, we can develop strategies for a radical reformism that avoids the dualism between reform and revolution (Görg 2018; Roth 2018). In addition to environmental issues, nature was an important topic for Marcuse also concerning the ‘natural’ dimensions of humans. Following Horkheimer and Adorno in DoE, the individual was for Marcuse a site of interdependencies between nature and society, as analysed by psychoanalysis (Marcuse 1955), and the ‘male character’ an outcome of the mastery of nature within the individual (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], p. 26). Later, these topics played an important role for feminist thinking (Benjamin 1990) and Ecofeminism (Scheich 1994). For a critical approach to ecological crises from the perspective of CT the dialectic between society, nature and the individual is decisive.

A DIALECTICAL APPROACH: SOCIETY–NATURE–RELATIONS AS TRILATERAL INTERDEPENDENCIES The key concept of DoE and Critical Theory, the concept of SNR, is rooted in the philosophy of Hegel and the historical materialism of Marx and Engels (Wehling 1997; Görg 1999a, 2003, 2011). It envisages society as constitutively linked to nature. As a dialectical approach it emphasizes the strict relational interconnectedness between society and nature. In contrast to Hegel, however, Adorno (1966 [1973], 1969a [1998]) emphasizes the priority of the object concerning the dialectic between subject and object, without referring to a natural ontology. Instead, he points to the need for a constructivist approach. However, he indicates a second reflection and a self-critique of the subject of cognition, a subject which is not necessarily an individual but actually societal groups, such as from science. In his seminal work, Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1966 [1973]), he emphasizes that every construction is a construction of something: ‘Something as the essential substrate of the concept’ (Das Etwas als denknotwendiges Substrat des Begriffs, translation modified). Adorno refers to this as the non-identical – non-identical with all discursive or practical constructions, that is, something that follows a logic of its own not fully available for human constructions. A dialectical approach following Marx or Adorno states that nature is transformed in this process and the concept of nature cannot be reduced to untouched nature or wilderness since this does no longer exist (as Marx had noticed in the middle of the nineteenth century) and

28  Handbook of critical environmental politics cannot do justice to the relevance of the societal modified nature for societies. In contrast to other concepts of society or social processes, the concept of SNR neither ignores the relevance of nature, that is, the biophysical conditions of existence, nor establishes a dualism between nature and society as two independent entities (Görg 1999a). Humans, similar to all other living beings, are living organisms depending on material and energy inputs, and produce an output of emissions and waste. However, different from other living beings, for human societies, metabolism is organized by themselves and develops over time. Human societies developed several organizational principles of how to organize their metabolism, for example, by direct personal rule during feudalism or by an anonymous law of value in capitalism. Moreover, the way societies are appropriating and transforming nature is decisive for both, nature and society (Marx 1867 [1992]). The concept of SNR can refer even to Marx and Engels, who, in the German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1846 [1998]), conceptualized history as based on the needs of humans as living beings, stating also that the production of needs is shaped by society and the historical process. It is important, thus, to conceptualize ‘societal relations to nature’ not as interactions between independent processes, as within dualistic or dichotomous approaches, but as dialectical relations. Within dialectical relations, all parts are constitutively linked to each other: each part of the relationship can be understood only in (often contradictory) relation to the other dimensions. Society can never be independent from its natural conditions of existence, but its appropriation of nature under particular historical conditions should be pivotal for any concept of society. It is always part of metabolic processes but the way these processes are organized is not ‘natural’: in historical perspective their organization varies tremendously, building clearly distinct metabolic regimes (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007; Krausmann 2016). Within capitalism, societal metabolism is shaped by the way economic processes are organized by the ‘law of value’. According to Marx (1867 [1992]), this implies the need for achieving surplus value, which constitutes an accumulation imperative, and the dominance of exchange value over use value. This implies an abstraction from any material characteristics of goods within capitalist economies: society is organized around making money, that is, the realization and the accumulation of added value, not around material properties. Moreover, the law of value depicts an abstract synthesis of economic processes ‘behind the back’ of economic actors. This ‘fetishism’, as Marx called it, is anchored within deep rooted structures of capitalist societies and prevents insights into the historical character of economic terms and conditions: the social relations involved in production, circulation and consumption of commodities (for example, class rule or the gendered division of labour) are ignored or ‘fetishized’ as ‘natural’. In addition to these deep-rooted structural conditions of capitalism, however, the concrete historical metabolism is shaped by conflicts and social compromises. We have learned from regulation theory (Lipietz 1992; Esser et al. 1994; Jessop 2002) and other approaches that the contradictory crises-driven character of capitalism is stabilized only during particular phases. Thus, its concrete societal metabolism at a given time in history is not only organized by the law of value, but by specific accumulation regimes and corresponding modes of regulation, that is, historically specific institutional setting functional for stabilizing specific historical phases such as ‘Fordism’ after World War II (Görg et al. 2020). Here, entry points for alternative forms of shaping the societal metabolism emerge, which can be realized, however, only through social struggles and a reshaping of the societal relations of forces, including a reshaping of societal institutions in which these relations of forces are inscribed (Brand et al. 2020). Without a Great Transformation beyond the capitalist synthesis,

Critical theory  29 the metabolism remains subordinated to the accumulation imperative and it will be impossible to resolve social-ecological crises beyond processes of ‘ecological modernization’ (Brand et al. 2020; Görg et al. 2020). The mastery of nature, thus, can be understood only within its concrete historical circumstances. Horkheimer and Adorno refer to Max Weber and his famous notion that science is guided by the belief in a mastery of nature or, more precisely, in the belief that ‘by calculation we can control all things’ (Weber 1973, p. 43, own translation). Following Weber, this belief contributes to what he calls ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (Weber 1973, p. 43, own translation) and what others have named the ‘death of nature’ (Merchant 1980): the loss of all material qualities and its reduction to an abstract mathematic calculation. At the centre of the specific type of rationality dominant in European history (but not in other parts of the world), is what Horkheimer termed ‘instrumental rationality’ (thus the German title of its seminal book, Eclipse of Reason: Horkheimer 1947). Even in Europe it was always contested and, following Horkheimer and Adorno, always shaped by societal structures of domination. In DoE (more in its first version from 1944 than in the published version from 1947) the authors clearly state that the scientific concepts and classifications in which the mastery of nature is expressed, are rooted within the power structures of capitalist societies (that is, in class, gender, racism and colonialism). Thus, they do not claim to substitute an analysis of class struggles by struggles between humans and nature, as criticized by, for example, Neil Smith (2010). In reverse, they broaden the critique of capitalist forms of socialization towards their interactions with nature and addressed science and culture while doing so (Görg 2011). In summary, it is compatible with Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach to further acknowledge that capitalist metabolism in general is organized by the law of value, by an accumulation imperative, by fetishism and by the dominance of exchange value. For a full picture, however, we must address also the symbolic meaning of nature, in which science defines the dominant, but not the only, cultural meaning of nature. Therefore, to fully elaborate their approach requires a revision and expansion of Critical Theory, in particular concerning their concept of (natural) sciences which was developed only after the critique of new social movements since the 1980s (see the next section). Societal domination over the individual is an important dimension of the mastery of nature, as it concerns also the relationship between the biophysical conditions of subjectivity within the individual living being and the societal process including culture. However, it is important to emphasize that the notion of the individual should not be misunderstood as an individualistic concept of society where social processes are depending on individual preferences. Critical Theory conceptualized society as an antagonistic totality (Adorno 1969b [1989]), but within this totality the dialectical relation between society and the individual is decisive to understand subjectivity. The psychoanalytical concept of the individual and its psychical dynamic reveals the psychodynamic as the reproduction of societal conflicts within the individual (Adorno 1979: 55). With psychoanalysis, Critical Theory refers to an approach which analyses the process of human civilization as a contradictory process which mediates between individuals as bodies, and their physically grounded needs, and the psychodynamics arising from this contradictory process stimulated in their psyche in respect of their feelings. The psychoanalytic concept of the human psyche, which is fully compatible with the state of the art in neuroscience and brain research (see Solms 2015; Solms and Turnbull 2002), emphasizes at least two dimensions which are of utmost importance for further research on social-ecological crises. First, consciousness is embodied: more concrete consciousness mediates between the needs

30  Handbook of critical environmental politics (for nutrition, shelter, and so on) and desires of a physical body, the meanings of a culturally traded social reality and the given material conditions to fulfil these needs. Thus, there exists no duality of biophysical and meaningful processes, but a dialectical mediation between them within an individual. Decisive for this mediation are psychodynamic processes, the conscious but also the unconscious elements and repressions within the psychodynamic of the individuals. Second, what is particular to the human brain and offers the opportunity for a shaping of human behaviour is the ability to deliberately control their behaviour. From the perspective of neuroscience, free will is the ability of inhibition anchored within the profrontal cordex (Solms and Turnbull 2002, p. 292f; see also Freud 1920 [1960]). According to Adorno (1979, pp. 20–85), under the conditions of ‘late capitalism’, individuals are structurally overburdened by society as a totality, and this must be taken seriously while asking for alternatives in the shaping of SNR. In DoE, ‘the identical, purpose-directed, male character’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], p. 26) is the result of the mastery of nature within the individual. Trying to be best adapted to societal functioning, according to what Freud (1920 [1960]) calls the reality principle but under conditions of a specific, anonymous and fetishized capitalist organization of society, individuals subsume their own needs and wishes under societal demands and try to ‘optimize’ their subjectivity in this regard. This is not only a superficial effect but deeply anchored within the subjectivity of individuals, the way their constitution as natural and social beings is imprinted by their societal identity. The nature within the individual, never directly accessible and manifesting itself mostly in negative terms (that is, physical or psychical illness), represents an important dimension of SNR. Furthermore, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [2002], p. 32) identified the ‘remembrance of nature within the subject’ as ‘the unrecognized truth of all culture’ and as opposed to all kinds of domination. It is not easy to understand what exactly ‘remembrance’ may mean.4 Marcuse (1955), in his philosophical interpretation of Freud, elaborates in more detail on this issue, focusing on the suppressed dimension of subjectivity and on counter tendencies, such as aesthetical reason.5 This perspective became very important within the social movements of the 1960s. The most positive and concrete concept of DoE refers to the nature within the individual, which may build an entry point for the transformation needed in the face of the current rupture of civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer developed another argument which is of utmost importance for current debates and politics. They wanted to provide a ‘positive concept of enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [2002], p. xviii) beyond the mastery of nature without subduing societies under supposed laws of nature. They argue that it is a false alternative to believe that humans have only the alternative between controlling nature and returning to nature, and call this belief an apparent ideological construction (Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [2002], p. 23). Its apparent inevitability is itself a manifestation of social domination. Moreover, the mastery of nature is never complete and can never reach a full control, either over nature or regarding the contradictions between society and the individual. Horkheimer and Adorno refer to Hegel’s ‘dialectic of master and servant’6 in which the rule of the master is never complete. Contrary to the belief in the mastery of nature as reaching full control over nature, Hegel stated that in reverse the master is dependent on the servant, as he or she is working and thus mediates also the master with nature. Thus, in the dialectic of master and servant, SNR becomes thematic and Hegel emphasizes that even a ruling class (or all other types of domination) remains dependent not only on the workers but also on nature, that is, on the biophysical conditions of their existence, the material input into their societal way of living, including their metabolism.

Critical theory  31 In a similar way, society is dependent on those qualities of nature which can never be fully controlled7 or which are perhaps totally unknown yet. It’s only a belief that science is able to control things by calculating them – in reality this belief is often blamed, and ecological risks are the most obvious manifestation of this fallacy.

DOMINATION IN CURRENT SOCIETY–NATURE–RELATIONS Dialectic of Enlightenment represents a rupture in the development of Critical Theory. Several scholars, such as Habermas (1994) and Honneth (1996), want to join the early version of an interdisciplinary materialism, while others, such as Harvey (1996) or Smith (2010), argue that Critical Theory leaves the Marxist terrain.8 In opposition to both instances, I argue that it is important to see the continuation of historical materialism and, at the same time, the critique of some basic assumptions, in particular concerning progress and social emancipation (see Görg 2011). In the face of the deepening of social and ecological crises, which calls for an encompassing social-ecological transformation of the capitalist (‘imperial’) mode of production and living (see Brand and Wissen 2017, 2021), it is decisive to conceptualize the interdependencies between societal and environmental issues, to rethink capitalist development and to elaborate on the emancipatory dimension of this challenge. Thus, it is not only possible to extend the meaning of domination beyond intersubjective social processes (as denied by Honneth 1996; for a critique see Görg 1999b), but even more, it is necessary. Whereas the central concepts of Critical Theory – in addition to the mastery of nature and the concept of SNR – are important conceptual tools for understanding the upcoming crisis of civilization, what was missing in traditional Critical Theory is a truly interdisciplinary approach able to involve also natural sciences. Horkheimer (1931 [1993]), in his inaugural speech, mentioned philosophy of nature and natural sciences as examples for an integrative approach, but never elaborated on that. There is no doubt that natural sciences represent a blind spot in the Frankfurt School. This is not by coincidence, but because Adorno and Horkheimer consider natural sciences as devoted to instrumental rationality and the mastery of nature, without dealing with new developments as in ecology or post-positivist physics (Becker 1996; Becker and Jahn 2003). Marcuse (1964), in reverse, emphasized the historical character of science and technology and considered the possibility of a technology of liberation, but without further elaborating on this in detail. Habermas (1986) denied this possibility and developed a strict dualistic approach of instrumental rationality and communicative rationality, seeing the first as universal approach to nature and thus naturalizing the mastery of nature. In the face of these debates, it was a significant innovation that, from the middle of the 1980s, a new approach to SNR was developed (Becker and Jahn 2003, 2006). The main argument of the Institute of Social-Ecological Research (ISOE), founded 1989 in Frankfurt, is a crisis of SNR encompassing not only the physical dimensions but also the symbolic understanding, within science but also beyond science. Developed under different historical conditions and building on the critique that was formulated by new social movements at this time, in particular environmental, anti-nuclear and feminist movements, this approach differs significantly from that which Adorno and Horkheimer had elaborated in DoE and thereafter, while also acknowledging the tradition of Critical Theory. Social-ecological research in this approach is an interdisciplinary endeavour which bridges the gap between natural and social sciences. Moreover, it acknowledges the limits of scientific knowledge and tries to integrate

32  Handbook of critical environmental politics also non-scientific knowledge from praxis partners in a truly transdisciplinary approach (Jahn et al. 2012). It is decisive for any analysis of the current crises to also take seriously, in addition to the biophysical, the cultural meaning of nature – for example, in the public debate, in science and the media, and on the Anthropocene (the ‘era of the humans’: see Görg 2016). In these debates the ‘end of nature’ thesis as something dualistically opposed to society is evoked. However, this means a concrete cultural meaning of nature and tells us nothing about how biophysical dimensions become relevant within the ecological dimensions. These biophysical conditions are no longer natural but societally modified, yet they nevertheless represent an interdependency to which societies belong, and which are not fully controlled by humans. Cultural meanings clash with each other and currently are always contested, with European and other cultural concepts of nature and societal relations to nature confronting each other on a global scale. Moreover, the argument of the ‘end of nature’ in the Anthropocene is hardly new.9 Indeed, some meanings of nature seem inappropriate, but there are alternatives. For example, nature as wilderness perhaps no longer exists or, if it does, only as a residual. There were, however, alternative meanings of nature in European history, and even more beyond it. For example, in the ecological conflicts worldwide since the 1970s, but also during the historical phase of romanticism and currently, the questioning of the nature–society dualism has been increasingly expressed (see, for example, Merchant 2018). On the contrary, the belief in the mastery of nature was and still is an important part of the cultural dimensions of the making of capitalist societies. Until now it represents the dominant guiding principle of European civilization: to control both nature and other civilizations. However, that does not mean that it is not contested and could not potentially be reshaped through societal conflicts.

TOWARDS A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF FREEDOM, EMANCIPATION AND PRAXIS – THE RELEVANCE OF CRITICAL THEORY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE At the beginning of the twenty-first century the historical index without any doubt has changed. There are, however, several dimensions in which Critical Theory is still up to date. As a conclusion, I see at least four dimensions where we still can learn from it: 1. The argument of an end of nature is a dangerous myth which represents itself as a new constellation within the dialectic of the mastery of nature (Görg 2016). It ignores that humanity is increasingly unable to control their SNR at an unprecedented scale. Ecological problems are nothing new but were part of all human history and sometimes led to the collapse of a particular society (Diamond 2005). However, currently, global societies are increasingly confronted with potentially disastrous crises on a global scale, and mitigation measures have not proven as effective, until now. Thus we should avoid construing the Anthropocene similarly to the false alternative mentioned previously. The Anthropos has neither reached full control over nature nor is there a disappearance of nature, but the opposite: the contradiction between global societies and the biophysical conditions of existence has escalated in such a dangerous way and leads to a state of emergency that only a collectively binding self-limitation of the Anthropos fought through fierce social

Critical theory  33 struggles may offer a chance for survival (Brand et al. 2021). However, it is far from certain or even likely that this self-limitation will be achieved. At least Benjamin has not argued for a catastrophism as much as Adorno and Horkheimer have. For Benjamin, the angel of history looks back and wants to help and ‘put together what has been broken’ and not to trust in catastrophic warnings, but the storm of progress prevents him from doing so, but unlike a conservative concept of history, he emphasizes an emancipatory concept of history to break up the continuum of history (Benjamin 1940 [2003], p. 395). This radical break can only occur beyond the mastery of nature. As Adorno (1964 [1998], p. 150) later wrote, ‘progress only occurs where the compulsion to progress ends’. 2. Critical Theory tells us that biophysical reality must be acknowledged as a precondition for effective measures (Görg et al. 2020). This insight leads to a renewal of what Freud terms the ‘reality principle’. Marcuse had claimed that under the condition of a surplus society the reality principle is no longer functional but becomes a source of additional suppression. However, perhaps under condition of multiple crises the reality principle again changes its function as represented by the simple question ‘How dare you?’ asked by young people, Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future (FfF) movement (see Chapter 35 in this volume). Their basic claim is that politicians are acting in an irresponsible way by ignoring the urgency of the climate crisis. While asking this question, they refer to those instances representing the reality principle in modern societies according to the biophysical conditions of existence: sciences. 3. According to FfF, the meaning of freedom has changed: as free will – the assumed free choice between given alternatives – it is no longer appropriate. Freedom as arbitrariness was never the best definition of freedom. Following Immanuel Kant, it gives only a negative meaning, whereas a positive meaning requires a more transparent normative principle, which he calls the moral law or the categorical imperative, and which was later elaborated by socialists as solidarity or a political understanding of freedom; a principle that manifest itself in shaping a just and united society within the boundaries of the climate crisis. Also, with the coronavirus pandemic crisis, arbitrariness has become a dangerous principle that enforces the crisis tendencies and must be transformed. As regards the planetary boundaries concept and the multiple crises of today, freedom manifests itself only as the ability to self-limit (Brand et al. 2021; see Chapter 8 in this volume). In addition, freedom must do justice to the real threats of human existence, such as climate warming. Thus, perhaps an older definition of freedom from Hegel becomes more accurate under the condition of multiple crises, freedom as insight into necessity (Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit). 4. To take the crises of Western civilization seriously we must turn the belief in progress upside down. As Adorno wrote, progress in Western culture means coercion, regarding nature (the mastery of nature), but also concerning the individual (as structurally overburdened) and within society itself (as following a supposed natural law of societal development). A civilization based on humanity, in reverse, can be achieved only by ending this coercion (ereignet sich da, wo der Zwang zum Fortschritt endet – see previously; see also Chapter 41 in this volume). The mastery of nature is deeply rooted within European history. It lays behind the belief in limitless economic growth and the belief in scientific and technical progress as the only way to respond to the crises caused by this economic growth as demanded by the degrowth movement (see Chapter 7 in this volume). It nurtured the belief in the primacy of European culture and civilization and has prevented, until recently, the realization of the full dimension of social and environmental catastrophes that

34  Handbook of critical environmental politics European expansion has caused in the past 500 years in most parts of the world (Galeano 1971 [1972]). Further, it is not only a belief, but has been reflected in the institutions of modern capitalism, and shapes the strategies for dealing with ecological crises as much as social crises. Even after decades of slowly raising awareness of these crises, the idea of mastery of nature is still effective and deeply anchored in the quest for technological solutions and economic innovations expressed, for example, by approaches of ecological modernization (for example, in the ‘ecomodernist manifesto’: Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; see also Hajer 1995). Thus, to critically respond to the threat of a rising rupture of civilization, we must not only quit the belief in economic growth, but also the underlying concept of development as a universal direction of human history where the most ‘advanced’ societies represent the future of all (Parsons 1971). In reverse, in particular the most ‘advanced’ societies at the time when the modernization ideology was formulated, such as the USA, are currently those countries unable to change their unsustainable level of resource use and the greenhouse gas emissions involved. Those countries that want to catch up in economic terms, such as China, compete as considerable emitters, whereas regions always excluded from the promises of modernization ideology, such as sub-Saharan Africa, are more sustainable, at least in ecological terms (Görg et al. 2020). Without any doubt, Adorno and Horkheimer did not open their thinking to other cultural traditions, and thus their own critical approach is limited in this regard. However, they provided a critical approach to European thinking which is still valid as it builds not upon a dualistic opposition between Enlightenment (= us) and non-Western (= mythological) thinking, but on a dialectical relationship. Horkheimer and Adorno stated that even the myths are enlightenment. Myths want to explain reality and enlightenment strikes back as a myth of progress. However, this dialectical approach needs extension towards a more sophisticated acknowledgement of other cultural traditions, as required in post-colonialism, for example, in the work of de Sousa Santos (2018). From the self-critique of Western culture by Critical Theory we can learn that a non-repressive concept of nature is needed. For these concepts we can refer to non-Western traditions, but the challenge is to integrate scientific rationality in a non-dualistic and non-repressive manner with other rationalities. Many voices now argue for this type of critical approach based on post-development and post-colonial theory or on approaches from feminist, social or political ecology, and alternatives are developed by social movements worldwide (Escobar 1995; Lang and Mokrani 2013; de la Cadena 2019; Kothari et al. 2019; see Chapters 2, 3 and 31 in this volume). Critical theory based on the tradition of the Frankfurt School may play a role within these debates to bridge different lines of argument and the knowledge types behind, in particular, the greatly needed integration of scientific and non-scientific knowledge beyond the deep-rooted belief that we can control nature. This entry point can be identified in the current debate on social-ecological transformations (Jahn et al. 2012; Görg et al. 2017). Seen from a wider perspective on society and human history, we may realize that social-ecological transformations have occurred throughout history and are always taking place, but in different ways: we can discern transitions between different metabolic regimes which vary in resource and energy use. The current industrial metabolic regime, however, is only a transition period owing to their dependency on limited fossil fuels (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007) and it can be never sustainable; the question is only whether a transformation towards a new regime occurs by design or disaster. To identify potential transformation

Critical theory  35 paths for a deliberate transformation, power relations and structural challenges must be taken seriously (Görg et al. 2017; Brand et al. 2020). From Critical Theory we can learn that we need to abandon the belief in scientific and technological progress without abandoning (scientific) enlightenment: the challenge is to bridge different knowledge types within, but also across, specific world regions. What is decisive here is the meaning of nature in different knowledge systems and in particular the belief in the ‘mastery of nature’ within the European tradition (which was contested but dominant). Within the discussion on social-ecological transformations it has been realized now that non-Western cosmologies are valuable in the face of particular crises tendencies and thus should be acknowledged (see Chapter 6 in this volume).10 Also, scientific knowledge, which is to some degree a de-contextualized knowledge based on specific methods of knowledge generation and universal truth claims, is indispensable, even if contested, for example, in respect of climate warming (Hulme 2009). What is needed, therefore, is a non-hierarchical exchange between different knowledge types including epistemologies of the South (Jahn et al. 2012; de Sousa Santos 2018), but also different scientific approaches from natural and social sciences as envisaged in transdisciplinary knowledge. Thus, as a historical approach towards different phases of capitalist development, emphasizing the historical index of truth and aiming at an understanding of history from a state of emergency, Critical Theory must acknowledge the role of current social movements and link their claims to scientific debates. In contrast to many critics which see Critical Theory after World War II only as a sceptical approach stuck in resignation, Adorno, while rejecting this critique, emphasized that he sees a tendency towards maturity of the social movements of the 1960s.11 However, he also emphasized that, after the rupture of civilization, this rupture must be taken seriously as something that can always occur again. Marx’s alternative ‘socialism or barbarism’ is no longer a valuable alternative as barbarism has already taken place. Moreover, after the disaster of the twentieth century, a critical approach towards the primacy of praxis is needed,12 which acknowledges the role of theory as a necessary self-reflection for praxis, but also societies’ dependency on nature. This dependency cannot be overcome and must thus be acknowledged.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Many thanks to Ulrich Brand and Luigi Pellizzoni for their constructive feedback on an earlier version and Ulrich Brand and Paula Baethge for their valuable support for finalization.

NOTES 1.

In the following, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is meant if the term is written in capital letters. This is to indicate a specific version of critical theory with its strength and weaknesses, not to claim that this is the most prominent or the only correct version of critical theories. 2. However it was contested for a long time whether this approach looks for a positive outlook at all (see below). In this chapter, I argue that it aims for a self-critique of critical reasoning and not for its abandonment. 3. They coined the concept of ‘culture industry’, very important to understand the changing role of culture within capitalism. See Steinert (2003). 4. Even the original German term Eingedenken is not easy to grasp. See Schmid-Noerr (1990).

36  Handbook of critical environmental politics 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

In a similar way, Adorno asked in his posthumous Aesthetic Theory (Adorno 1970 [2002]) and other writings for a non-repressive appropriation of nature. See Görg (2003). The English translation ‘master and slave’ is not appropriate, as the German term Knecht, used by Hegel, does not mean slave, a human being owned by the master. Moreover, for Hegel this dialectic also has an ideological function to explain the historical role of bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the gentry. As, for example, discussed in complexity science: see Merchant (2018). Also, there are many more issues contested in the history of Critical Theory, for example, the concept of praxis and the relation between theory and praxis. Whereas this issue is discussed later, others are out of scope of this section. See, for a comprehensive history, Jay (1973), Wiggershaus (1988) and Demirovic (1999). McKibben (1989) argues that climate change indicates the end of nature as something bigger than us. However, within science and the philosophy of science there is long-lasting process to exclude the term ‘nature’ as something different to society. The physicist Werner Heisenberg argued several decade earlier: ‘For the first time in the course of history man on this earth only faces himself, so that he can no longer find another partner or opponent. We keep encountering the structures created by people, so that we are in a sense only ourselves to encounter. Certainly, there are parts of the earth where this process is far from being completed, but sooner or later man’s rule in this regard should be complete’ (Heisenberg 1955, pp. 17–18; see von Winterfeld 2021). Yet, there exist no unrestrained ‘man’s [sic] rule’, but a modification of our biophysical conditions of existence, and this modification is itself out of control, thus is in crises. See, for example, the relevance of terms such as ‘buen vivir’ or ‘ecological swaraj’ in current debates (Gudynas 2011; Kothari et al. 2019) or the role of traditional and indigenous knowledge within the establishment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a new global science policy interface (Díaz et al. 2015; Tengö et al. 2017). But he did not believe that the societal conditions were fit for a revolution; see for the controversy between Adorno and the student movement Demirovic (1999); Görg (1992). As expressed by Marx in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (Marx and Engels 1846 [1998]).

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Critical theory  37 Benjamin, J. (1990), The Bonds of Love. Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon. Benjamin, W. (1940), On the concept of history, in W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, repr. 2003, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 389–411. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2017), Imperiale Lebensweise. Zur Ausbeutung von Mensch und Natur im globalen Kapitalismus, Munich: Oekom. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2021), The Imperial Mode of Living. Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism, London: Verso. Brand, U., Görg, C. and Wissen, M. (2020), Overcoming neoliberal globalization: social-ecological transformation from a Polanyian perspective and beyond, Globalizations, 17 (1), 161–76. Brand, U., Muraca, B., Pineault, E., Sahakian, M., Schaffartzik, A., Novy, A., et al. (2021), From planetary to societal boundaries: an argument for collectively defined self-limitation, Sustainability, 17 (1), 265–92, doi:​10​.1080/​15487733​.2021​.1940754. De la Cadena, M. (2019), An invitation to live together: making the ‘complex we’, Environmental Humanities, 11 (2), 477–84. De Sousa Santos, B. (2018), The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Demirovic, A. (1999), Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Diamond, J. (2005), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, London: Penguin. Díaz, S., Sebsebe, D., Carabias, J., Joly, C., Lonsdale, M., Ash, N. et al. (2015), The IPBES conceptual framework – connecting nature and people, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 14, 1–16. Engels (1883), Dialectics of Nature, repr. 2012, London: Wellred Books. Escobar, A. (1995), Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esser, J., Görg, C. and Hirsch, J. (eds) (1994), Politik, Institutionen und Staat. Zur Kritik der Regulationstheorie, Hamburg: VSA. Fischer-Kowalski, M. and Haberl, H. (2007), Socioecological Transitions and Global Change: Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land Use, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Freud, S. (1920), Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in S. Freud, Das Ich und das Es, repr. 1960, Frankfurt: Fischer. Fromm, E. (1932), Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches. Eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung, repr. 1980, Munich: DVA. Galeano, E. (1971), Die offenen Adern Lateinamerikas, repr. 1972, Wuppertal: Peter Hammer. Görg, C. (1992), Neue Soziale Bewegungen und kritische Theorie, PhD dissertation, W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt. Görg, C. (1999a), Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse, Münster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot. Görg, C. (1999b), Kritik der Naturbeherrschung, Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, 5 (9), 73–88. Görg, C. (2003), Regulation der Naturverhältnisse, Münster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot. Görg, C. (2011), Societal relationships with nature – a dialectical approach to environmental politics, in A. Biro (ed.), Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Crises, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 43–72. Görg, C. (2016), From daily business to Earth history. The varying time scales of the Anthropocene debate, GAIA-Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 25 (1), 9–13. Görg, C. (2018), Die Historisierung der Staatsform. Regulationstheorie, radikaler Reformismus und die Herausforderungen einer Großen Transformation, in U. Brand and C. Görg (eds), Zur Aktualität der Staatsform: Die materialistische Staatstheorie von Joachim Hirsch, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 21–38. Görg, C., Brand, U., Haberl, H., Hummel, D., Jahn, T. and Liehr, S. (2017), Challenges for social-ecological transformations: contributions from social and political ecology, Sustainability, 9 (7), 1045. Görg, C., Plank, C., Wiedenhofer, D., Mayer, A., Pichler, M., Schaffartzik, A. et al. (2020), Scrutinizing the great acceleration: the Anthropocene and its analytic challenges for social-ecological transformations, Anthropocene Review, 7 (1), 42–61.

38  Handbook of critical environmental politics Gudynas, E. (2011), Buen vivir: today’s tomorrow, Development, 54 (4), 441–7.Habermas, J. (1986), Theory of Communicative Action, Cambridge: Polity Press.Habermas, J. (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1994), Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hajer, M. (1995), The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process, Oxford: Clarendon. Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Heisenberg, W. (1955), Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Honneth, A. (1996), The Struggle for Recognition, Cambridge: Polity Press. Horkheimer, M. (1931), The present situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research, in M. Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science. Selected Early Writings, repr. 1993, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–14. Horkheimer, M. (1947), Eclipse of Reason, New York: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1947), Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, repr. 2002, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1947), Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, repr. 1987 in M. Horkheimer, Collected Works, vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Hulme, M. (2009), Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jahn, T., Bergmann, M. and Keil, F. (2012), Transdisciplinarity: between mainstreaming and marginalization, Ecological Economics, 79 (July), 1–10. Jay, M. (1973), The Dialectical Imagination, Boston, MA: Little & Brown. Jeffries, S. (2016), Grand Hotel Abyss. The Lives of the Frankfurt School, London: Verso. Jessop, B. (2002), The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kothari, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (2014), Buen vivir, degrowth and ecological swaraj: alternatives to sustainable development and the green economy, Development, 57 (3–4), 362–75. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (eds) (2019), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, Chennai: Tulika. Krausmann, F. (2016), Transitions in sociometabolic regimes throughout human history, in H. Haberl, M. Fischer-Kowalski, F. Krausmann and V. Winiwarter (eds), Social Ecology: Society-Nature Relations across Time and Space, New York: Springer, pp. 63–92. Lang, M. and Mokrani, D. (eds) (2013), Beyond Development. Alternative Visions from Latin America, Amsterdam: TNI, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Lipietz, A. (1992), Vom Althusserismus zur ‘Theorie der Regulation’, in A. Demirovic, H. Krebs and T. Sablowski (eds), Hegemonie und Staat, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 9–54. Marcuse, H. (1955), Trieblehre und Freiheit in T.W. Adorno and Walter Dirks (eds), Sociologica. Aufsätze, Max Horkheimer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet, Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, pp. 47–66. Marcuse, H. (1964), One Dimensional Man, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marcuse, H. (1972), Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston, MA: Beacon. Marx, K. (1867), Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, repr. 1992, London: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1846), The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach, repr. 1998, Amherst, NT: Prometheus. McKibben, B. (1989), The End of Nature, New York: Random House. Merchant, C. (1980), The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Harper & Row. Merchant, C. (2018), Science and Nature: Past, Present, and Future, London: Routledge. Parsons, T. (1971), The System of Modern Societies, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Roth, R. (2018), Radikaler Reformismus. Geschichte und Aktualität einer politischen Denkfigur, in U. Brand and C. Görg (eds), Zur Aktualität der Staatsform. Die Materialistische Staatstheorie von Joachim Hirsch, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 219–40. Scheich, E. (1994), Naturbeherrschung und Weiblichkeit. Feministische Kritik der Naturwissenschaften, in C. Görg (ed.), Gesellschaft im Übergang, Darmstadt: Wbg Academic, pp. 179–201.

Critical theory  39 Schmid Noerr, G. (1990), Das Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Smith, N. (2010), Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, London: Verso. Solms, M. (2015), Sigmund Freud heute – eine natutwissenschaftliche Perspektive auf die Psychoanalyse, in M. Leunzinger-Bohleber, H. Böker, T. Fischmann, G. Nordhoff and M. Solms (eds), Psychoanalyse und Neurowissenschaft, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, pp. 56–88. Solms, M. and Turnbull, O. (2002), The Brain and the Inner World, London: Routledge. Steinert, H. (2003), Culture Industry, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tengö, M., Hill, R., Malmer, P., Raymond, C.M., Spierenburg, M., Danielsen, F. et al. (2017), Weaving knowledge systems in IPBES, CBD and beyond-lessons learned for sustainability, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 26–27 (June), 17–25. Von Winterfeld, U. (2021), Schwächen und Perspektiven der Transformationskultur: Vorsicht, Wende! in Politische Ökologie, 163 (Lehren aus der Coronakrise), 119–22. Weber, M. (1973), Soziologie, Universalgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik, Stuttgart: Kröner. Wehling, P. (1997), Dynamic constellations of the individual, society and nature. Critical Theory as an approach to environmental problem, paper presented at the Sociological Theory and the Environment Conference, Woudschoten Conference Center, The Netherlands, 27 January. Wiggershaus, R. (1988), Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte Theoretische Entwicklung, Politische Bedeutung, Munich: DTV.

2. Decolonial ecologies: beyond environmentalism Malcom Ferdinand

INTRODUCTION On 24 January 2020, at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, a peculiar event took place. Five young women (Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer, Isabelle Axelsson and Vanessa Nakate) came from Sweden, Germany and Uganda to alert people to the urgency of global warming. The peculiar event was not the remarkable speech given by these ecological leaders, calling the biggest economic actors of the world to take actions, but the way they were later presented to the world. Indeed, after having taken a group picture of the five women, a photographer of the Associated Press cropped out Vanessa Nakate, founder of the Youth for Future Africa and Rise-up Movement, the only Black and African woman of the group, to present to the media of the world a picture made of the remaining four White women in front of the snow-capped Swiss mountains. Through this cropping, the voice, the body and the contribution of this Black woman to the ecological struggle for a livable world was silenced and erased, as if she had not been there nor spoken. Vanessa Nakate quickly took to Twitter to denounce the erasure, pushing the Associated Press to justify this action, and to release the full picture. Equally remarkable were the words chosen by the director of photography of the Associated Press, David Ake, to explain the gesture of the photographer, saying he ‘cropped it purely on composition grounds … because he thought the building in the background was distracting’ (Kenya 2020, emphasis added). Anecdotal as it may appear, this event carries a much deeper meaning as regards the historical development of environmental movements, discourses and theories in Western countries. Indeed, the Nakate exclusion is just another example of a long history of the marginalization of non-White voices in ecological struggles and environmental theories. It represents both the sociological exclusion of non-White bodies in the arenas where ecological issues are conceptualized, and policies are made, but also the exclusion of particular issues, topics and themes, such as urban living conditions and its various pollutions that disproportionately affects racialized people. Not only did the photographer crop out the black body, and with it voices and experiences of Africa, but he also chose the pristine mountains to the exclusion of the buildings, the places where humans live. White bodies in front of snowy mountains seemed a more palatable composition to the photographer than a Black body in an urban setting to paint ecological advocacy. Acutely aware of this process, in a video on her Twitter account, Vanessa Nakate responded saying, ‘Now I know the definition of “racism”’ (Nakate 2020). This chapter is not another demonstration of this historical exclusion. Here, I am concerned with a different set of questions. Why does this exclusion, sociologically and conceptually still persist today? How is it that in 2020 exclusions, such as the picture controversy of Davos, not only still take place, but are in many ways still the norm? I proceed in three steps. First, I present some elements of the historical whiteness of environmental movements in relation to 40

Decolonial ecologies  41 what I have termed the double colonial and environmental fracture of modernity (Ferdinand 2022a, p. 3). I refer to the sociological and political conditions of production of early ecological discourses since the eighteenth century. Secondly, I question not so much why these exclusions came about, but how some of them are maintained via 10 mechanisms. This is based on my own experience as a French Black scholar on ecological issues who has been living in Europe for the past 10 years. Finally, I highlight how many initiatives of decolonial ecologies are actively attempting to go beyond this double fracture.

THE HISTORICAL WHITENESS OF ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT: THE DOUBLE FRACTURE As a necessary starting point, we must first look at the sociopolitical conditions within which a variety of classical environmental thoughts and ecological discourses were produced historically. What were the cultural imaginaries and societal contexts in which these discourses were ushered? That is, what have been the sociopolitical ecologies of ecological discourses? A number of books pretending to determine the founders of ecological discourses will often indicate two major philosophical figures in Europe and the United States, respectively Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau. The Rêverie du promeneur solitaire (Rousseau 1782 [2001]) and Walden or Life in the Woods (Thoreau 1854 [1983]) are still, to this day, canonical texts in environmental thought (Bourg and Frasnière 2014). Yet, part of the discursive ecologies of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, was the global sociopolitical organization of the world defined by colonizations, genocides, slavery and imperialisms (see Chapter 37 in this volume). They were written by well-educated and middle-class White men within societies that were explicitly organized by both a racist hierarchy placing White people on top of any other people, and a patriarchal structure placing men above women. Not only was it easier for some White middle-class men to have access to different educational institutions, to lead research and to produce knowledge that were recognized as scientific, but, more importantly, there was an imaginary of masculinist whiteness that either prevented both White women and colored others (men and women) from speaking and writing. A permanent doubt persisted on the nature of their discourse, an unending questioning as to whether or not their sounds and letters should be considered as discourse. As Grada Kilomba indicates, the nineteenth-century engraving by Jacques Etienne Arago of the enslaved Brazilian Black woman known as Anastacia most vividly portrays this silencing of black female bodies (Kilomba 2008). This refusal of the non-Whites’ participation in the world, this refusal of the recognition of their discourse was specifically inscribed in the law as evidenced in the French 1685 Black Code which established the testimonies of slaves during trials as beneath that of White people, or the three-fifths compromise in the 1787 US constitution that reasserted the political inferiority of enslaved Black people in elections. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the times of ‘scientific racism’ with the likes of Antoine Gobineau, of a persistent colonial slavery in the Americas, and of the start of imperial expansions throughout Africa, Oceania and Asia. In a context where people of color were still dehumanized, and had less access to good housing, education services and jobs, the structures of societies normalized the absence of production of discourse on the part of minorities. That is, before questioning, discussing or analyzing the content of discourses by racialized minorities in Western countries

42  Handbook of critical environmental politics for ecological insights, a first hurdle had to be removed, that of validating the nature of their speeches and written pieces as discourse. In this segregating context, it is no surprise that the emergence of a conservation movement in the US carried similar discriminatory practices. As Taylor (2016) noted, the US conservation movement was socially and politically built on the exclusion of non-White people, including practices that not only removed Native Americans from their lands, but also prevented racialized minorities from taking part in the conservation management and effort, and from accessing the preserved spaces. It is not possible to understand the apparent marginalization of racialized people in ecological and environmental thoughts without acknowledging first this global racial divide. In diverse and pluri-racial societies, scenes and groups comprised of a majority of White people in the nineteenth century constituted the conditions of ecological policies, theories and knowledge production. Whiteness as project was an integral part of the sociopolitical ecologies of ecological movements and theory. This includes the social marginalization of minorities within environmental movements, as is still the case in the US according to Finney (2014) and Taylor (2015), but also in European countries, as many environmental activists from major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) would attest. The whiteness of the history of the ecological movement has also been felt in the marginalization of non-White voices in environmentalist texts and theories, as noted by Smith (2007) and Ruffin (2010). Beyond the sole exclusion of racialized minorities, it is also the historical feeble interest within environmental thought and ecological scholarship into issues that have particularly affected Black and Indigenous people around the world. The most stunning conceptual example of this invisibilization is the infatuation for the concept and cultural practice of ‘wilderness’ (Nash 1967 [2014]; Cronon 1996). The invention and the ‘cult of wilderness’ relies explicitly on the erasure of the history and voices of Native Americans and people of African descent, as well as a racialized conception of ‘nature’ (Outka 2008; Guha and Martínez-Alier 1997). This idea of wilderness has influenced the implementation of many ‘nature reserves’ around the world supported by environmental NGOs, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and most notably in Africa, that were explicitly conditioned on the violent removal of the autochthonous people living there (Guha 1989; Spence 2000; McDermott 2006; Neumann 2008; Gissibl 2016; Blanc 2020). Similarly, as Haymes (2018) argues from a decolonial and Africana perspective, the contributions of the field of environmental ethics have mostly failed to acknowledge the consequences of the historical whiteness of the environmental movement on the sociopolitical conditions of their discourse and on the nature of their propositions. Again, let us not forget that a number of racist and misogynistic propositions such as the ‘lifeboat hypothesis’ of Hardin (1974), the ‘population bomb’ of Ehrlich (1971) or ‘the nature over poor people case’ of Rolston (1996) have been made under the umbrella of environmental ‘ethics’. These propositions systematically target the habits, the wombs and the number of poor people of color around the world as a condition of the survival of Western White people. The issue here is not the development of a philosophical discourse on population or on the survival of humanity and the nature of the relations to the planet’s ecosystems, but that these discourses mostly fail to bring into discussion the colonial and slavery foundations of modernity. It is important to note that the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of number of significant contributions in the field of ecofeminism (see Chapter 3 in this volume), political ecology and social ecology. In particular, the contribution of Bookchin (2005), the development of the disciplines of environmental history, political ecology and ecological economics, including

Decolonial ecologies  43 the works of Martínez-Alier (2005), Guha (2010) and Moore (2016), offer an understanding of ecological issues that is deeply associated with the relations of power, the questions of emancipation and social justice, while paying attention to different types of ‘environmentalism of the poor’. However, despite the important work of scholars such as Merchant (1989), Crosby (2015), Grove (1995) and Taylor (2014), the specific issues of racism, imperialism, coloniality or the legacy of slavery remain seldom seen as central elements of environmental theories. That is, it was – and still is – perceived as self-evident for to not engage with the former issues when dealing with the environment. The historical whiteness of the environmental movement, within the frame of systemic racism has led to this double fracture of modernity. The creation of a divide in which environmental activists and scholars pay little attention to racism and colonization, and, in return, the engagement of antiracist activists, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers, afro-feminists with environmental issues remain overlooked. Ecological issues and discourses have been established not only as a special site of whiteness, historically and sociologically, but as a claim of whiteness, that is, as the mostly unspoken and yet underlying political projection of a society living in an ecologically minded world. A main exception remains the rise of the environmental justice movement since the late 1970s and early 1980s in the US (see Chapter 35 in this volume). Initiated by many minorities of color and mostly women, activists and scholars, such as Bullard (1990) and Pulido (2016), have denounced the unjust and discriminatory exposure of their communities to toxic waste, calling out the environmental racism at play (Cole and Foster 2001; Taylor 2014). The engagement with environmental issues was seen as a prolonging of the antiracist struggle. Along that same line, Nathan Hare declared in 1970 that the real solution of the environmental crisis was the ‘decolonization of the Black race’ (Hare 1970, p. 8) or that Sankara et al. (2017, pp. 179–94) denounced the colonial plunder and imperialism as the causes of deforestation and desertification in the world. One of the defining moments of the environmental justice movement came in the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in October 1991 in Washington, DC. A declaration of the environmental justice principles was produced with the following preamble that interweaves issues of ecology, justice, spirituality, racism and colonialism: WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice. (Principles of Environmental Justice 1991)

The concept of environmental justice has since been used and developed in many parts of the world including South America, Africa and Europe, fueling many movements and grassroots collectives (McDonald 2002; Schlosberg 2007; Carruthers 2008; Larrère 2017; Robins and Fraser 2017; Holyfield et al. 2018). The principle of climate justice adopted in Bali in 2002, specifically refers to that 1991 declaration (see Chapter 13 in this volume). A growing body of literature and academic disciplines such as law, philosophy, sociology, geography and political sciences have engaged with the concept of environmental justice in variety of ways that,

44  Handbook of critical environmental politics for instance, document the violence imposed on marginalized communities owing to discriminatory policies regarding waste and particularly toxics disposal, and the unequal exposure and resilience in the face of climatic events made more frequent and/or more intense by global warming, but also the conflicts and struggles of those seeking a life in a safe environment (Davis 2005; Nixon 2011; Scheider et al. 2020). A special mention must be made of the discipline of literature, and most specifically the field of postcolonial ecocriticism which has been at the forefront of bringing together postcolonial studies and environmental studies, offering some of the best attempts to bypass the double fracture of modernity (Tiffin and Huggan 2009; Mukherjee 2010; Roos and Hunt 2010; Deloughrey and Handley 2011; Caminero-Santangelo 2014; Carrigan et al. 2015; Campbell and Niblett 2016). More recently, along the same line, a number of activists, NGOs and scholars, which I am part of, offer perspectives for decolonial ecologies from the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Oceania, bringing together not just the issues of racism, colonialism and environmental change, but the imperative for a radical deconstruction of the historical colonial inhabitation of the Earth and the associated coloniality of power, that still denies dignity, humanity and justice to the colonized and formerly colonized (Epeli 2000; Demos 2016; Alimonda et al. 2017; Escobar 2018; Parreñas 2018; Ferdinand 2022a; Green 2020).

THE CONTINUATION OF THE FRACTURE OR THE NORMALIZATION OF AN ABSENCE Despite more than 40 years of environmental justice work and conceptualization of political ecology, social ecology, ecological economics and ecofeminism, the recent development of postcolonial and decolonial ecologies, we cannot but notice the persistence of the historical whiteness of the ecological discourse and marginalization of the racialized voices, as illustrated in the Davos incident. In no way do I suggest that all contemporary environmental thinkers and activists are responsible for the historical colonial structure that prevented Indigenous people and minorities from having an equal place in the world. However, the failure to acknowledge the privilege of discourse as well as other privileges, and the refusal to actively work for more inclusion and equality indicates a fault and a responsibility in the continuation of the marginalization of non-White voices in environmental movements and theories. Why has this exclusion of minorities and people of color persisted to this day? How was this fracture maintained? Why are the voice of the Vanessa Nakates of the world still being marginalized today? Answers to these questions will inevitably vary depending on the environmental movement, NGO, academic journal, governmental arena or sociopolitical context. Each of these contexts deserve independent research on their own, well past the scope of this chapter. However, beyond the plurality of stories, discourses and contexts, in the following paragraphs I suggest different possible answers stemming from my own experience as a French Black scholar born and raised in Martinique, an overseas territory of France, and now living in Paris. Through my academic research on ecological issues and my frequent dialogues with environmental NGOs and environmental studies scholars, I have noticed at least 10 mechanisms that facilitate the

Decolonial ecologies  45 continuation of this fracture and the subsequent normalization of the absences of non-White voices. 1. The denial of the history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism: the refusal to acknowledge the history of colonization and slavery as an important or relevant historical condition of modernity. In countries, such as France, in which the colonial and slavery history is still institutionally repressed and cast as a historical subject to be solely relegated to the past, it appears self-evident as a starting point that main concepts of history of ideas need not be discussed in relation to colonization or slavery. From discussions on capitalism to revolutions, from biopolitics to freedom, equality and justice, the colonial and slavery foundations of modernity are rarely seen in the discussion. It is this absence that has been identified by the works of Robinson (1983 [2021]), Williams et al. (1944 [2021]), Trouillot (1995) and, more recently, by Roberts (2015) and Ajari (2019). In this case, environmental thought simply follows the same trend, enabling the continued invisibilization of experiences and thoughts of a majority of people around the world. 2. The discriminating universalism: a ‘universalist’ stance that engages in the active denial and refusal to acknowledge the inequalities, the injustice, the discriminations endured by racialized people, Indigenous people and women. Ecological issues are then discussed in relation to very abstract terms, such as ‘humanity’ and the ‘planet’; all other categories or subgroup are forsaken or readily banned. This universalist stance is here defined not by the pursuit of equality and justice for all amid the plurality of conditions or inhabitants of the Earth, but by the explicit call, echoed for instance by Bourg (2018), Serres (1990) and even Chakrabarty (2009), to abandon concerns of different oppressed groups, to relinquish demand of justice, for instance, by postcolonial subjects as if they were not only passé, but out of touch with the current ecological imperatives. In pretending that ‘all of humanity’ is in the same circumstances, such a stance works actively against antiracism – at times, also against feminism or social justice movements – by denigrating the political grammar with which these struggles are expressed. It not only posits ecological arenas and environmental thoughts a special site of whiteness, equipped with its noble justifications – ecology is too high a subject for its discourses to be ‘sullied’ by these claims or demands of colonial emancipation, gender equality, social justice and antiracism, that is, down-to-earth issues – but it also allows the re-enactment of a colonial civilizing mission perfectly expressed in Kipling’s (1899) poem, ‘White man’s burden’. In that light, former colonial subjects and many poor inhabitants of the Global South (see Chapter 33 in this volume) are portrayed as hopeless and voiceless victims to be saved by the good and just mission set out by thinkers and governments of the Global North, and not as a political or a justice issue. A telling example of the erasure of antiracist and anticolonial struggles and the conservation of ecological arenas as a White space is the reception of the concept of environmental justice within France’s environmental theory production and environmental movements. While the development of the notion was deeply rooted in the struggle against (environmental) racism in the southern US, this notion in France has been stripped of its antiracist component. There only remained a question of unequal treatment between abstract groups, which is why notions of ‘environmental inequalities’ or ‘ecological inequalities’ became more prevalent than environmental justice in the 2010s (Emelianoff 2008; Durand and Jaglin 2012). The few scholars that write about environmental justice in France remind readers of its origin in the US and its antiracist struggle, but then make sure to reframe,

46  Handbook of critical environmental politics reformulate or adapt this notion to the French context (Blanchon et al. 2012; Laigle and Moreau 2018). In the latter, antiracism is thrown overboard with the persistent belief that racism only exists on the other side of the Atlantic, not in Europe. To date, environmental justice in France is still seen in technical term as a particular branch of the law that would apply to the environment and not as a consequence of a large grassroots struggle led by women and minorities of color. Similarly, receipt of the notion of the Anthropocene in continental France has furthered this erasure. A quick look at the edited volume, Penser l’Anthropocene, from a 2015 conference held in Paris a month before the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), provides an additional example (Beau and Larrère 2018). Among the 37 contributors offering insightful perspectives on the subject, not one would be categorized as Black. In this 554 page-long volume comprising 30 chapters, an introduction and a conclusion, the words ‘racisme’ and ‘Noir’ as a social category are nowhere to be found. As it pertains specifically to postcolonial and post-slavery France, there is not one mention of the word ‘Outre-mer’, the overseas non-sovereign territories of France that are, for the most part, the remains of the former French colonial empire. Even more incoherent, it overlooks the ecological importance of these territories. Let us not forget that the Outre-mer harbours 80 percent of the French national biodiversity and 97 percent of the French Marine areas, including 10 percent of the world’s corals and 20 percent of the world’s atolls (Gargominy and Boquet 2013; Ferdinand 2018). This testifies to the ongoing invisibilization of the history of colonization of France and the persistent marginalization of the French citizens inhabiting these territories, who are for the most part non-White. Only one chapter, written by Barbara Glowczewski and Christophe Laurens, addresses seriously the legacy of colonization in thinking about the Anthropocene, albeit not that of France (Glowczewski and Laurens 2018). By no means do I infer that this is the outcome of a collective decision by these scholars and organizers. However, that is precisely the issue here. While no racist intent is set, the collective result is the production of the absence of part of the world from such scholarly arenas where the history and geology of the Earth are conceptualized. The problem here is the lack of recognition of this exclusion or, more precisely, the lack of actions taken to mitigate these exclusions, which is legitimated by this peculiar form of ‘universalism’. 3. The tyranny of the global numbers’ argument: the aforementioned call to abandon antiracism, postcolonial and post-slavery critique is also promoted via a global number’s argument. Geologists, climatologists, physicists, chemists, oceanographers and other scientific disciplines have been able to measure the great acceleration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission, the depletion of natural resources and of the diminution of the biodiversity since the mid-twentieth century on a global scale. That is, they have been able to express a variety of these environmental changes and losses on a global scale by a series of different numbers. Although these numbers are useful tools, we must wonder what part they play in the stories told about these global changes. There is a disturbing tendency for these numbers to systematically occupy the central stage to the extent that they, themselves, become the story that supersedes any other story. This is particularly the case of scholars who engage in Anthropocene research (Chapter 5 in this volume), including, as Kathryn Yusoff (2018) noted, the dominant position of geological arguments. The greater number enables us to signify a higher value and level of priority to these contemporary problems. Furthermore, the acceptance of numbers on global

Decolonial ecologies  47 scale as the sole reference points to evaluate an issue allows for the belittling of various colonial dominations, slavery oppressions and genocides that took place from the end of the fifteenth century to the early twentieth century, as their environmental consequences have not yielded a ‘significant’ number as an environmental indicator on the global scale. As a consequence, the hegemony of the global number prism allows some scientists and some environmental activists to conceptualize the various processes of colonization as not significant in the history of the planet. This is definitely the approach taken by different Anthropocene advocates, such as Crutzen et al. (2007). An important remark must be made here on the proposition by Lewis and Maslin to have 1610 as the starting date of the Anthropocene. Following the colonial conquest and genocide of numerous Indigenous people in the Americas, Lewis and Maslin noted that the sudden loss of population led to a rapid, albeit short, reforestation. This drastic reforestation led to a sudden increase in the GHGs absorbed by trees, and thus a sudden global decrease of the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere (Lewis and Maslin 2018, pp. 147–87). This dip in the global concentration of GHG gases led Lewis and Maslin to suggest the year 1610 as a noticeable point, traceable in the strata of the planet from where the ensuing acceleration of GHG could be measured. The advantage of this point is that it links, geologically, the history of colonial conquest of the Americas and the Anthropocene notion. However, Lewis and Maslin still maintain the same hegemony of the global number’s scale as a reference to evaluate the significance of an event on the Earth. That is, the colonization of the Americas is seen as relevant in the Anthropocene discourse only because the secondary effects of the extermination of Indigenous people could be measured according to this scale. In this discourse very little of the colonization and slave trade, the conquest and its inherent racism, are presented as relevant to the Earth’s story. More surreptitiously, in highlighting the global importance of 1610 for the global measurable scale, it is assumed that the rest of the colonial and slavery processes, before and after 1610, are not relevant. Furthermore, in placing the only events that specifically affected people of color in the Anthropocene discourse as being far in the past, a temporality is also imposed, a time-wise direction of progress is suggested which relegates Indigenous and enslaved Africans’ concerns to the past in the face of the more modern concerns of the present. More severely, in an Anthropocene discourse which emphasizes the perils of increasing GHG emissions, acknowledging only the link between the extermination of Indigenous peoples and the decrease of GHGs is both clumsy and dangerous. The dangers lie not in the argument of Lewis and Maslin themselves, whose intentions are not in question here, but in the continuation of a Western imaginary which only addresses Indigenous non-White people in respect of their numbers and the impacts their numbers have or do not have on the planet. This imaginary fuels neo-Malthusian propositions,1 the discourses of ecofascism and even the rhetoric of some terrorists – as was the case for the Christchurch (New Zealand) and El Paso (US) massacres of 2019 – regarding the supposedly ‘too big’ number of non-White people on Earth. Here lies the danger of adopting a number’s grammar that rejects people’s history, discourses, practices, languages and struggles. 4. The denial of biased knowledge production and recognition: a fourth mechanism is the refusal to acknowledge the biased constitution of institutions of knowledge production, including schools and universities, which, in pluri-ethnic and pluri-racial countries, make it harder for poor people, women, and non-Whites to participate in research and knowledge

48  Handbook of critical environmental politics production. The consequent whiteness of the academic and political spaces that made it possible to produce critical discourses on the environment is either hidden or, when noted, is deemed inconsequential. It is presented as the fruit of random circumstances that in no way influences or affects the possibility and the content of environmental discourses. Paradoxically, this refusal to recognize the social ecologies of environmental and ecological discourses carries the belief in universal non-situated knowledge and discourses, the surprisingly non-ecological belief that the bearers of environmental knowledge and ecological discourses do not have bodies. More precisely, their bodies, the history of the possibilities these bodies had to circulate, to be fed, to be treated with respect and dignity while the same possibilities were denied to other bodies, do not matter or should not be acknowledged. The aporia lies in a discourse which intends, in part, to reflect on the bodily conditions of humans on Earth, and their often mentioned negative impacts, while overlooking the own body of the speaker. 5. Exclusive genealogies of environmentalism: a fifth mechanism is found in the repeated establishment of historiographies and genealogies of environmental thought that systematically erase the contribution of Indigenous and people of color. These genealogies are found, for instance, in the number of books on the great thinkers of ecologies that usually trace the origin of environmental thought in the minds, not the bodies, of lonesome White men walking by themselves in nature, such as Thoreau and Rousseau (Debourdeau 2013; Bourg and Frasnière 2014). It is this peculiar contemporary process of selecting who did or did not contribute to environmental thought, and from whom that current environmental thinkers and activists inherit. On the one hand, these genealogies reaffirm a whiteness of environmental thought through history. On the other hand, it reinforces the false claim that people of color did not think or produce any knowledge on the environmental or ecological crisis. It has been one of my intentions in Une écologie décoloniale: penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen to foreground not only how the enslaved and Maroons of the Americas produced their own political ecologies, but also how these overlooked ecologies influenced the likes of Thoreau (Ferdinand 2022a, pp. 144–72). 6. Fetishism of texts: a sixth mechanism relies on the fetishism of published written argument. Here the exclusion of people of color is explained by the apparent few texts that have been written by them on the subject of environmental changes and ecology. This mechanism establishes written text as the most important indicator of environmental thought, and often marginalize cultural practices and oral history that nonetheless express thought, theory and knowledge of the world and the Earth. Another version of this exclusion is the assertion that people who engaged in protecting the environment in order to feed themselves were not expressing ecological thought. This is another trick that results in the removal of Indigenous voices within classical environmental thoughts and discussions. 7. Connectionless sympathies: a seventh mechanism consists in expressing feelings of contrition and empathy on the situation of racial minorities and, even, solidarity with the antiracist struggles on an individual level, while still excluding these issues and struggles in the conceptual work, analysis or practices of environmental thought and/or ecological practices. This applies to important thinkers, such as Baird Callicott (2010) who recalls how he took part in the civil right movements in the south of the US, expressing his solidarity, while still excluding these subjects from the elaboration of an Earth ethics. This also applies to many environmental NGOs or green political parties that express solidarity with antiracism and afro-feminism while not undertaking any significant change in their

Decolonial ecologies  49 organization nor their approach. First, this mechanism reveals a very common defense in the face of racism that consists in claiming that a person is not racist. It reduces the question of racism to a matter of individual opinion or attitude while eluding the systemic racism that allow some to benefit from racism (via job opportunities, access to higher education and better accommodation) and some to be structurally at a disadvantage, with their lives literally threatened by state institutions, such as the police. Secondly, this mechanism negates any link between the legacy of colonialism and slavery and the conceptual work of environmental thought. Consequently, while racism is recognized as a significant issue, it is neatly kept outside the ‘house’ of ecological thought: A connectionless issue met with a ‘connectionless-sympathy’ (Ferdinand 2022a, p. 9). 8. Acknowledging racism and colonization but not the racialized and colonized: the eighth mechanism is particularly pernicious. It is found in a number of environmental thinkers who would readily recognize the importance of colonization and slavery in the history of the commodification of the Earth, and the development of capitalism, the importance of the domination of the enslaved, the Indigenous people, poor people and women while still not engaging with the practices and intellectual productions of the former. It is then assumed that it is sufficient to talk about the events that led, for instance, to the domination and enslavement of people in and from Africa without engaging with the discourses produced by them, nor with their physical presence. It is revealed as a house where issues such as slavery, colonization and racism are talked about while still not engaging with the former enslaved and colonized in a manner where they could enter the house and take part in the discussion themselves. In addition to the continuing exclusion, and the safeguarding of ecology as a White space, two disparaging consequences are of note. First, the idea that ‘we can do this without you, even when it is about you’, maintains a refusal to consider and engage the other as source of discourse and knowledge production, and fosters a Western imaginary in which the colored others do not speak: ‘Your discourse on your experiences of the world matters less than our discourse on your experience.’ Second, this approach leads to contortionist practices to recuperate stories about colonialism and slavery into an ecological discourse that was designed not to acknowledge these stories. It consists of bending the story of the racialized other in a manner that, far from constructively challenging the classical ecological discourse, reinforces it. Here the encounter fails, as this posture essentially says ‘I am willing to meet you and listen to your story with the pre-established position that this meeting shall not challenge much less change my discourse on the world and its grammar’. The attempt of Andreas Malm to use the story of Maroons –fugitive slaves – in the Americas to defend the idea of wilderness is another example of the refusal to really engage with the other. Malm (2018, p. 19) claims that ‘wilderness was a premise for emancipation’ with reference to the enslaved, and therefore would indicate a conceptualization of wilderness more inclined to social justice. In this instance, the history of anticolonial, antiracist and antislavery history of the enslaved becomes not a theme to engage with, encountering its own politics, theory and concepts, its own understanding of what emancipation means, but instead an exotic example to legitimate the contemporary use of the concept of wilderness – paradoxically an idea built especially on the rejection of racialized people, such as Maroons. That is, the other’s story matters as long as it allows someone to comfort their established worldview. The silencing of the other continues.2

50  Handbook of critical environmental politics 9. Exclusive choice of ecological issues: a ninth mechanism is the prioritization of ecological issues that are far from the cities and location of racialized people, such as the melting ice, climate change (Chapter 32 in this volume), while neglecting issues of environmental pollution, for instance, that affect the disadvantaged. The pernicious idea that the degraded environmental quality that poor people and minorities of color experience, denounced by environmental justice activists, are not part of the more noble and global ecological struggle. This is the ‘apartheid ecology’ described in the 1970s by Jones (1975). Through the choice of issues, we again exclude people of color and lazily refuse to recognize the relations between the melting Arctic ice sheet and the air pollution that kills millions in cities and impoverished suburbs. Consequently, when information campaigns, public advertisements, fundraising operations by large NGOs or ecological parties systematically focus on issues that seem disconnected from the everyday experience of poor people and minorities of color, they further the fracture, and maintain the idea of ecology as a subject that is not concerned with the racialized other than as victims – and not as active participants. 10. The ecological exoticism: ecological exoticism refers to the common practice of fantasizing, even celebrating, the perceived ecological attitudes of the racialized other while not only excluding them, their experience and their knowledge, keeping them confined to a far-removed place, but also hiding the modes of inhabiting the Earth condoned by the West that impacts their living conditions. One of the latest examples of this ecological exoticism was the media coverage of the blazing fires of the Amazon and Australia during 2019–20. The spectacular fires captured the attention of the media as if these forests were not inhabited by human beings, most notably the numerous Indigenous communities of the Amazon and various aboriginal communities in Australia. The recognition of the suffering of the communities living in these places either took the form of the presentation of voiceless victims, and/or the hint that these communities, by their way of life – mostly the use of small fires – would have prevented these great fires. That is, either they have no name, each group and individual is referred to as this homogenous whole, or it is only the particular practice that the West finds useful that is of interest. Even when their fire practice is deemed of interest ecologically, it is covered in a manner that still maintains ignorance of their history, plurality, and the nature of their social conditions and political struggles. The long historical processes by which these communities have been colonized and marginalized in their own countries (Brazil and Australia) is not mentioned, nor is the way through which the lifestyle of the West, in particular, meat consumption, fuels the deforestation of the Amazon. This absence facilitates the feeble engagement with ‘ecological imperialism’, ‘environmental racism’, ‘green orientalism’ or ‘environmental colonialism’ (Crosby 2015; Chavis 1987; Lohman 1993; Nelson 2003). That is, the racialized ecological other is recognized on condition that they remain excluded from modern environmental thoughts and still confined to a distant outside, historically and politically unrelated to the here and now. Paradoxically, this ecological exoticism fosters the exclusion of the racialized other as a companion on equal footing with whom a common world is imagined. The cumulative consequences of these mechanisms is the normalization of the absence of racialized minorities in environmentalist circles and especially in multiracial Western societies, such as France and the US. The normalization of this absence is not the simple ignorance of it. It would be a sign of bad faith to suggest that environmentalists, whether in non-governmental or governmental and international agencies, have not been aware of this absence, especially

Decolonial ecologies  51 since the mid-twentieth century. The question is not whether or not this absence is known or noted but why, while it is noted and known, not enough change has occurred over time? The normalization of this absence is the processes through which the absence of minorities is established as normal and, even, justified. In that regard, the numerous alerts on the lack of diversity in environmental groups become an integral part of the normalization process. It has become normal to talk about the lack of diversity in particular environmental NGOs, and it has become normal that this lack of diversity should not be considered a fundamental challenge to these environmental groups beyond a few hires here and there. The other side of these normalized absences is the normalization of whiteness in environmental arenas within multiracial and multicultural societies.

WHAT DOES DECOLONIAL ECOLOGY MEAN? WORLD-MAKING In addition to the unjust marginalization of a significant part of the world, and of particular environmental issues, why is this state of affair problematic? After all, it might be possible for us to say that every theme, topic or issue carries a particular political and academic audience, freely based on our own interest. This is certainly a valid argument regarding, for instance, the different interests in the literature or history of different countries in the world. However, environmental discourse, and particularly the more recent works on the concept of the Anthropocene, are of a different nature. Owing to their scope – the global Earth, the world, life, the planet’s ecosystem, and their history – environmental discourses carry an inherent universal outlook that claims to encompass all inhabitants on Earth as well as the various elements of the planet’s biota and their history. The problem arises when that claim is made on condition of the exclusion of part of the inhabitants of the Earth, an exclusion justified, for example, by any combination of the mechanisms described previously. The outcome is an enormous body of literature and political actions on the Earth, on the world, on their history and their desired future that are produced and conducted with the exclusion, as Césaire (1939 [1983], p. 46, translation modified) poetically put it, ‘of those without whom the Earth would not be Earth’. What a stunning consequence for a variety of discourses that claim to be concerned with the environmental living conditions of humanity on Earth that their sociological, political and theoretical practices have been historically exclusive of those who have been dehumanized for centuries. That is the fracture addressed by numerous decolonial ecologies. In the face of the exclusiveness of environmental discourse, many initiatives have attempted to bridge the divide, to mend this fracture. Within the numerous approaches of decolonial ecologies, perhaps a minimal and common thread is the acknowledgment of a plurality of actors, cultures and histories of Earth, a plurality from which a common world is possible but not a given outcome. The search for justice, equality and dignity in the face of historically long colonial, imperial, misogynistic and capitalist domination of many people are ways to recognize this plurality and to open the possibility of a common world with humans and non-humans on Earth. The central question is no longer ‘What must be done to preserve the ecosystems, the biodiversity and reduce global warming?’, but ‘How can we build a common world, with equality, dignity and justice, while ensuring that the conditions of life on Earth are looked after?’ This clarification allows us to steer away from a problematic understanding of the decolonial work within ecology, echoed in the various calls to ‘decolonize the Anthropocene’ and

52  Handbook of critical environmental politics ‘decolonize nature’, and evident in confusion between ‘decolonizing ecology’ and ‘decolonial ecologies’. Indeed, ‘decolonizing ecology’ has often been taken on a superficial level. The absence of racialized minorities would then be addressed solely on the level of the images used to present particular environmental groups. For instance, the 2020 Davos incident would be the picture in itself, and not the ongoing silencing of African voices, thinkers and experiences within environmental movement and theories. A sustained attention to diversity becomes the politically correct thing to do. People of color then serve the purpose of establishing a diverse image of NGO or environmental arenas, while the issues at work and the functioning of the group does not fundamentally change. In this practice, also known as ‘tokenism’, the absence is taken as only a matter of colorism that can easily be solved by giving a ‘new look’ to the same organization, to the same configurations of the world and relations to it. The subject, the organizing principles, the issues addressed do not change, only the images shown to the public. While well intended, this approach does hold on to the legitimacy of particular centers of ecological discourse and fails to recognize other spheres, arenas and sites from which ecological discourses are made, regardless of their label. Established NGOs would then be tempted to go into impoverished suburbs with the intention of ‘educating’ inhabitants on ecological issues, as if they were on a civilizing mission. This approach fails to first listen to the ecological conceptualization of existing organizations of these same impoverished suburbs and other marginalized places. It maintains a reluctance to recognize others, whether poor, non-whites or women, as equal participants with their structures, discourses and organizations. In that event, decolonizing ecology paradoxically reinforces the invisibilization it set out to mitigate. In addition to these mishaps, countless activists, scholars and organizations have dedicated their lives and work to the possibility of a common world. We can note, schematically and non-exhaustively, four different types of decolonial ecologies. A first source comes from the long history and numerous struggles, written and oral texts, thoughts and cosmogonies of Indigenous communities around the world to preserve their way of life and place in the world against the colonial and capitalist predations of multinationals, the ongoing extractism of neoliberal states and international agencies (Gómez-Barris 2017). From the struggle against the Keystone pipeline in the US, against the ‘Montagne d’or Project’ in French Guyana, or the struggle of the Ogoni people against oil companies made famous by Ken Saro Wiwa, and the systematic murders that many Amazonian communities endure simply because they inhabit this forest, the fight of the Sami people against the Green colonialism of Norway, or the historical resistance of aboriginal communities in Australia, Indigenous communities worldwide have been engaged in actively preserving the ecosystems of the Earth, their human and non-human communities against this colonial way of inhabiting the planet (the colonial inhabitation) (Saro-Wiwa 1995; Clayton-Dixon 2019; Norman 2020). The extent of the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems is but a mirror of the extent of the violence and domination imposed on the Indigenous communities of the world since 1492. It is aporetic to recognize one but not the other. A second source comes from the political and ecological resistance of those who have been forcefully enslaved and transported from Africa to the Americas and elsewhere. Those third terms of modernity (neither colonists nor Indigenous), such as the historical fugitive slave communities, the contemporary Maroons communities, but also the numerous antiracist collectives of the Americas, (including the numerous environmental justice groups) have also struggled against colonial and capitalist agents to preserve their lives, communities and dignity. Whether it concerned the preservation of the forest of the Maroon place of living as

Decolonial ecologies  53 shown by the Saramaka in Surinam, the creole gardens of the West Indies or the urban gardens of Detroit, these groups and the associated scholars have long articulated their antiracist fight with the demand to live in a safe environment, and to have access to food security (Price 2011; White 2018). A third source that intersects the first two and yet suggests an important additional aspect is the struggles engaged in specifically by women, who join together the imperative to preserve life on Earth with the demand for social and political equality between men and women. It concerns the ecofeminist movements, led in the Western countries, including the contributions of Rose and Robin (2004), Carson (1962 [2015]), Merchant (1989), Plumwood (1993), Hache (2011, 2016), D’Eaubonne (1974 [2020]). More specifically it includes those led by Indigenous and racialized women who had to face racism, misogyny and the destruction of their living conditions. Included were, among others, the struggles of the Chipko Movement in India described by Shiva (1988), of Maathai (2008) and her Green Belt movement in Kenya – with its fight against desertification and for women empowerment – the courageous struggle of Marielle Franco for the LGTQ+ communities in the urban ecology of the favelas, the struggle of Berta Cacéres in Honduras, or Afro-Colombian Francia Marquez and the women of LaToma against goldmining. A fourth sources comes not from a particular group of people, but from the numerous collectives, in the North and the South, regardless of their ethnicity or racial categorization, that denounce the colonization of their world by capitalistic and state-sponsored projects. Examples include the remarkable resistance against the airport project in Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France and the preservation of the Hambach forest in Germany, as well as the relationship with the land of peasants worldwide (Vidalou 2017). These are various examples of decolonial ecologies. The one common consequence is the expression of a desire to open up the possibility of a common world composed of a plurality of peoples, cosmogonies, histories and dignities. A desire described, for instance, by the concept of pluriverse in the field of design and ‘post-development’ (Kothari et al. 2019; Escobar 2020). The possibility of inhabiting the Earth with equality and justice as the deciding guidelines of the kind of relationships with others is a radical change from the exclusive characteristics of the early conservation movement in nineteenth century and the first iterations of environmental groups in the West. As detailed in the mechanisms of the normalization of the absence of minorities of colors and echoed by the example of the exclusion of Vanessa Nakate from the photograph in Davos, the exclusive tendencies of environmental discourse and organization are still present. The condescending myth that endows a few Western organizations with the task of saving the world, by themselves and without engaging with others persists. It is time to do away with this colonial perception of the world in which the racialized other has yet to be recognized on an equal footing. What world can be preserved or imagined if we still refuse to address the continued injustice and inequalities inherited by the colonial and racist foundations of the modern world? What world on Earth can be imagined if the other is still feared and rejected? Let us remember the wise words of Glissant, who reminds us all that it is ‘possible to change with the other, while not losing oneself nor innate nature’ (Glissant and Chamoiseau 2009, p. 33, translation modified). Beyond the sole preservation of ecosystems, decolonial ecologies work towards that horizon to lay the ground for a common world with relations of justice, equality and dignity.

54  Handbook of critical environmental politics

NOTES 1. I mean propositions that argue for a significant decrease of the human population in the face of the limited resources of the Earth (Malthus’s argument), especially population in the Global South, while not taking into account the different level of consumption and/or pollution by different groups on Earth. The result is a de facto discrimination against peoples in poor countries, women in particular, while not changing the lifestyle of the Global North. 2. I have written a more detailed response to Malm’s argument, entitled ‘Behind the colonial silence of wilderness: “in marronage lies the search of a world”’ (Ferdinand 2022b).

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Decolonial ecologies  55 Crutzen, P., Steffen, W. and McNeill, J.R. (2007), The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36 (8), 614–21. Davis, M. (2005), Planet of Slums, London: Verso. Debourdeau, A. (ed.) (2013), Les Grands Textes fondateurs de l’écologie, Paris: Flammarion. DeLoughrey, E. and Handley, G. (eds) (2011), Postcolonial Ecologies, Literatures of the Environment, New York: Oxford University Press. Demos, T.J. (2016), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Durand, M. and Jaglin, S. (2012), Inégalités environnementales et écologiques: quelles applications dans les territoires et les services urbains? Flux, 89–90 (3), 4–14. Ehrlich, P.R. (1971), The Population Bomb, London: Macmillan. Emelianoff, C. (2008), La problématique des inégalités écologiques, un nouveau paysage conceptuel, Ecologie et politique, 35 (1), 19–31. Epeli, H. (2000), Epilogue: pasts to remember, in R. Borofsky (ed.), Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 453–72. Escobar, A. (2018), Sentipensar con la tierra, Medellín: Ediciones Unaula. Escobar, A. (2020), Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. D’Eaubonne, F. (1974), Feminism or Death: How the Women’s Movement Can Save the Planet, 2022 trans. E. Ramadan, New York: Verso. Ferdinand, M. (2018), Subnational climate justice for the French Outre-mer: postcolonial politics and geography of an epistemic shift, Island Studies Journal, 13 (1), 119–34. Ferdinand, M. (2022a), Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, trans. A.P. Smith, Cambridge, UK. Ferdinand, M. (2022b), Behind the colonial silence of wilderness: ‘in marronage lies the search of a world’, Environmental Humanities, 14 (1), 182–201. Finney, C. (2014), Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gargominy, O. and Boquet, A. (2013), Biodiversité d’Outre-mer, Paris: Comité Français pour L’UICN. Gissibl, B. (2016), The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa, New York: Berghan Books. Glissant, É. and Chamoiseau, P. (2009), L’Intraitable Beauté du monde. Adresse à Barack Obama, Paris: Éditions Galaade. Glowczewski, B. and Laurens, C. (2018), Le conflit des existences à l’épreuve du climat, ou l’Anthropocène revu par ceux que l’on préfère mettre à la rue ou au musée, in R. Beau and C. Larrère (eds), Penser l’Anthropocène, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, pp. 141–55. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Green, L. (2020), Rock, Water, Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grove, R. (1995), Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1660-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Guha, R. (1989), Radical American environmentalism and wilderness preservation: a third world critique, Environmental Ethics, 11 (1), 71–83. Guha, R. (2010), The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Bangalore: Orient Blackswan. Guha, R. and Martínez-Alier, J. (1997), Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, London: Earthscan. Hache, É. (2011), Ce à quoi nous tenons: propositions pour une écologie pragmatique, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond & La Découverte. Hache, É. (ed.) (2016), Reclaim: recueil de textes écoféministes, Paris: Cambourakis. Hardin, G. (1974), Commentary: living on a lifeboat, BioScience, 24 (10), 561–68. Hare, N. (1970), ‘Black ecology’, The Black Scholar, 1 (6), 2–8. Haymes, S.N. (2018), An africana studies critique of environmental ethics, in L. Nishime and W.K.D. Hester (eds), Racial Ecologies, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 34–49.

56  Handbook of critical environmental politics Holyfield, R., Chakraborty, J. and Walker, G. (eds) (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, London: Routledge and Taylor & Francis. Jones, T. (1975), Apartheid ecology in America: on building the segregated society, Black World, 24 (7), 4–17. Kenya, E. (2020), Outrage at whites-only image as Ugandan climate activist cropped from photo, Guardian, 24 January, accessed 25 January 2021 at www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2020/​jan/​24/​whites​ -only​-photo​-uganda​-climate​-activist​-vanessa​-nakate. Kilomba, G. (2008), Plantation Memories, Münster: Unrast. Kipling, R. (1899), The white man’s burden: the United States and the Philippine Islands, McClure’s Magazine, 12, 290–91. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Federico, D. and Acosta, A. (eds) (2019), Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary, New Delhi: Tulika Books. Laigle, L. and Moreau, S. (2018), Justice et environnement: les citoyens interpellent le politique, Paris: Infolio. Larrère, C. (ed.) (2017), Les inégalités environnementales, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lewis, S. and Maslin, M. (2018), The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lohman, L. (1993), Green orientalism, The Ecologist, 23 (6), 202–4. Maathai, W. (2008), Unbowed: My Autobiography, London: Arrow. Malm, A. (2018), In wilderness is the liberation of the world: on Maroon ecology and partisan nature, Historical Materialism, 26 (3), 3–37. Martínez-Alier, J. (2005), Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflict and Valuation, New York, Oxford University Press. McDermott, D. (2006), From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on the South African Frontier, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press & Weather Press. McDonald, D. (ed.) (2002), Environmental Justice in South Africa, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Merchant, C. (1989), Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science, in New England, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Moore, J. (2016), Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso. Mukherjee, P.U. (2010), Postcolonial Environment: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nakate, V. (2020), Twitter account ‘I was cropped out of this photo’, 24 January, accessed 15 December 2020 at ‘Vanessa Nakate @ Vanessa_vash’. Nash, R.F. (1967), Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th edn, 2014, Yale, CT: Yale University Press. Nelson, R.H. (2003), Environmental colonialism, ‘saving’ Africa from Africans, Independent Review, 8 (1), 65–86. Neumann, R. (2008), Imposing Wilderness in Africa, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norman, S. (2020), Green colonialism in the Nordic context: exploring Southern Saami representations of wind energy development, Journal of Community Psychology, 49 (1), 77–94. Outka, P. (2008), Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parreñas, J.S. (2018), Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Plumwood, V. (1993), Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Price, R. (2011), Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Principles of Environmental Justice (1991), Web resources for environmental justice activists, accessed 7 October 2020 at http://​www​.ejnet​.org/​ej/​principles​.html. Pulido, L. (2016), Geographies of race and ethnicity II: environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence, Progress in Human Geography, 41 (4), 524–33. Roberts, N. (2015), Freedom as Marronage, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Decolonial ecologies  57 Robins, N.A. and Fraser, B. (eds) (2017), Landscapes of Inequity: Environmental Justice in the Andes-Amazon Region, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Robinson, C.J. (1983), Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd edn 2021, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Rolston, H. III. (1996), Feeding people versus saving nature? in W. Aiken and H. LaFollette (eds), World Hunger and Morality, 2nd edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 248–67. Roos, B. and Hunt, A. (2010), Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics & World Narratives, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Rose, D. and Robin, L. (2004), The ecological humanities in action: an invasion, Australian Humanities Review, 31–32 (April). Rousseau, J. (1782), Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, repr. 2001, Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Ruffin, K.N. (2010), Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Sankara, T., Jaffré B. and Ouedraogo S.R. (eds) (2017), La Liberté contre le destin, Paris: Syllepse. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1995), A Month and a Day & Letters, Banbury: Ayebia Clarke. Scheider, A., Del Bene, D., Liu, J., Navas, G., Mingorría, S., Demaria, F., et al. (2020), Environmental conflicts and defenders: a global overview, Global Environmental Change, 63, 102104. Schlosberg, D. (2007), Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Serres, M. (1990), Le contrat naturel, Paris: Flammarion. Shiva, V. (1988), Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zedbooks. Smith, K.K. (2007), African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Spence, M.D. (2000), Dispossessing the Wilderness, Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, D.E. (2014), Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility, New York: New York University Press. Taylor, D.E. (2015), Gender and racial diversity in conservation organizations: uneven accomplishments and cause for concern, Environmental Justice, 8 (5), 165–80. Taylor, D.E. (2016), The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Thoreau, H.D. (1854), Walden and Civil Disobedience, repr. 1983, New York: Penguin Classics. Tiffin, H. and Huggan, G. (2009), Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, London: Routledge. Trouillot, M. (1995), Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Vidalou, J. (2017), Être forêt, habiter des territoires en lute, Paris: Zones/Editions la Découverte. White, M. (2018), Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, E., Darity A.W. and Palmer, C.A. (1944), Capitalism & Slavery, 3rd edn 2021, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Yusoff, K. (2018), A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

3. Feminisms and the environment Corinna Dengler and Birte Strunk

INTRODUCTION In mainstream environmental politics, discussions on gender, if considered at all, rarely go beyond an acknowledgement that women are more vulnerable to environmental degradation and climate change, for example due to unequal access to resources. However, critical discussions on gender and the environment have gone much deeper. In this chapter, we retrace feminist academic engagement with the environment from the late 1970s onwards to shed light on the often neglected feminist roots of critical environmental thinking. This chapter only contains some fragmentary glimpses on the topic; for a more extensive overview of the field, we recommend the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment edited by Sherilyn MacGregor (2017). In writing this chapter, we approach the topic from a specific standpoint. Feminist standpoint theory, informed by the work of theorists such as Donna Haraway (1988) and Sandra Harding (1991), highlights the need to acknowledge that what we know about the world depends on our materially grounded and socioculturally formed standpoint. As white, female-assigned, middle-class feminist ecological economists and degrowth activists based in the Global North, we are particularly interested in feminist approaches that aim for a reflective, engaged standpoint between science and activism, as well as in those that have the potential to enhance the degrowth project. Against this background, we structure the chapter as follows: we start with an introduction to various streams of critical feminist academic engagement with the environment and then proceed to a brief discussion of the role of women and/or queer activists in environmental justice struggles. In the penultimate section we trace how these feed into a critical-feminist degrowth approach and note open questions that arise for us as degrowth scholar activists in engaging with the introduced streams. The final section concludes.

FEMINIST ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT WITH THE ENVIRONMENT In this section, we introduce six streams of thought that we have identified as major academic discourses at the intersection of feminism(s) and environmentalism, namely, the subsistence approach, materialist ecofeminism, feminist ecological economics, postcolonial feminisms and the environment, feminist political ecology and feminist new materialism.1 For each, we provide a brief overview of the historical context of its emergence, main assumptions, key concepts and contentious issues. While all approaches critically question power hierarchies within capitalism, each has a distinct focus on where this power manifests: contested conceptual realms of dichotomies that need to be broken down, material practices of a parallel structural devaluation of nature and care work or power-imbued definitions of, for example, ‘the economy’, ‘development’ and ‘nature’. The following section is hence written to illustrate the 58

Feminisms and the environment  59 breadth and variety, but also the interrelationship between various streams of critical feminist environmental scholarship. The Subsistence Approach The subsistence approach, sometimes also referred to as the Bielefeld approach, was formulated by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof and Maria Mies in Germany from the late 1970s onwards. It originally drew on Rosa Luxemburg’s work in approaching three distinct questions: (1) the women’s question regarding the undervaluation of household work; (2) the question of continued colonial relations despite formal decolonization; and (3) the nature question on the exploitation of what is seen as ‘free’ resources (Mies 1986). While Rosa Luxemburg (1913 [2003]) did not address specifically these three questions, she put forward the concept of an ongoing primitive accumulation, which poses a critique to Marx, who regards primitive accumulation as prevailing only in the early stages of capitalism. Luxemburg, instead, highlights how capitalist accumulation always needs an exploitable exterior, a non-capitalist outside, to stabilize itself. The subsistence scholars turned this perspective into a fruitful lens through which to approach the three questions outlined above. Women’s unpaid labour, so-called ‘developing’ countries and nature all serve as reservoirs for non-capitalist exploitation, an exploitation that orthodox Marxists have remained blind to. The Bielefeld scholars argued that this exploitation is fundamentally relevant for continued capital accumulation – naming the three realms of nature, women and exploited countries ‘the colonies of the White Man’ (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 2000, p. 12). Non-monetized household production, for example, can be understood as an internal colony that exists amid capitalist milieus (Mies 1986). But exploitation goes beyond that of unpaid care, as Mies (1982) showed with her research on rural women in Narsapur, Southern India, who produced at home for the lacemaking industry. Even when household production is drawn into marketized production, it is seen as the cheapest type of production – the ‘housewifization’ of household production feeds into the narrative that any income generated by women only complements that of the male breadwinner and can thus be remunerated below subsistence level. Von Werlhof (1988) predicted that this dynamic, which includes the flexibilization of work, will increasingly lead to a housewifization of wage labour, where men would also become ‘housewifed’. An important element of this relation is that capital accumulation not only exploits subsistence production but also destroys it, as can be seen most evidently in the example of the natural environment (Bennholt-Thomsen and Mies 2000). The analysis the Bielefeld scholars have put forward, however, goes beyond pure critique. Instead, it offers an alternative conceptualization of both ‘the economy’ and ‘the good life’: economic activity no longer centres around capital accumulation but around ‘life and everything necessary to produce life on this planet’ (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 2000, p. 5), that is, subsistence production. Their concept of subsistence production challenges the neat distinction between production and reproduction prevalent in orthodox thought. In doing so, the Bielefeld scholars have offered a bottom-up perspective (rather than a ready-made economic model), which has since then inspired many contemporary feminist debates on social reproduction.

60  Handbook of critical environmental politics Materialist Ecofeminism Materialist ecofeminism resembles the subsistence perspective described above and ‘sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women’ (Mellor 1997, p. 1). While both approaches share a general outlook, the two strands emerged in different discursive and geographical settings: Ecofeminism originated in the Anglo-American tradition as an academic-activist field from the mid-1970s onwards and received increasing attention in the aftermath of the 1980 Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the Eighties conference in Amherst. It was originally developed by early ecofeminists, such as Carolyn Merchant (1980 [1990]), Val Plumwood (1993), Greta Gaard (1993), Ariel Salleh (1997) and Mary Mellor (1997), but also – and here we see important overlaps with the theoretical strands discussed in other sections of this chapter – by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva (1993). In more recent years, research on specific topics, such as ecological citizenship and the politics of care (MacGregor 2006), public money (Mellor 2016), intersectional ecofeminism (Kings 2017), and the forces of reproduction (Barca 2020), have further refined and diversified ecofeminist thought. Some feminists were quick to brush aside all ecofeminism as essentialist, since there is a marginal stream in ecofeminism, sometimes termed ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ ecofeminism, which evokes a feminine essence that presumably is closer to nature (Biehl 1991). However, the majority of ecofeminist analysis is decidedly materialist (Salleh 2009; Oksala 2018). Materialist ecofeminism, rather than seeing women as naturally caring or closer to nature, focuses on the embodied materiality arising from the subordinate position women have historically had in society, which is closely linked to the gendered division of labour women have been socialized into. Moreover, from the beginning there have been ecofeminists pointing out the need for a queer ecofeminist theory. Queer ecofeminism traces, for example, how it is precisely those identity groups that are oppressed in Western ideology that are seen as ‘closer to nature’, while, ironically, queer sexualities are frequently devalued for being ‘unnatural’ (Gaard 1997). To support our argument that most of ecofeminism is materialist, let us take a look at two of the founding texts of Anglo-American ecofeminist thought, namely, Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution and Val Plumwood’s 1993 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Merchant (1980 [1990]) retraces how the feminization of nature, the naturalization of ‘the feminine’ and the discursive and material subordination of both goes back to the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century and is reified under capitalism. In the preface of the book, Merchant claims that there are no unchanging ‘essential’ characteristics of sex, gender or nature. … In seeking to understand how people conceptualized nature in the Scientific Revolution, I am asking not about unchanging essences, but about connections between social change and changing constructions of nature. (Merchant 1980 [1990], p. xvi)

Similarly, Plumwood (1993) shows how the hierarchization inherent in dichotomies, such as culture/nature, male/female and production/reproduction, lies at the very core of the devaluation, exploitation and destruction of female-codified care work and nature. She argues that the assumption that (especially rural) women have a different relationship with nature is not based on ‘“essentialism”, the appeal to a quality of empathy or mysterious power shared by

Feminisms and the environment  61 all women and inherent in women’s biology’ (Plumwood 1993, p. 35), but on a different socio-historical position women are ascribed to in patriarchy. Ecofeminist political economy, as another sub-stream of ecofeminist thought, takes a closer look at how economic systems are deeply gendered and rely on the exploitation of female codified unpaid care work and the environment. Ecofeminist political economists see the monetized economy as the tip of an iceberg (Mies 1986), the top layers of a cake (Henderson 1980) or more generally ‘a small part of a much greater sustaining whole’ (Mellor 2009, p. 252). They would commonly reject the commodification of nature to make its contribution to production processes visible and instead argue that ecofeminist analysis needs to ‘start from the fundamental necessities of life’ (Mies and Shiva 1993, p. 20). Feminist Ecological Economics The focus on the economics of nature-care relations as explored by feminist political economists is further taken up in the field of feminist ecological economics, which grew out of two streams of contributions: ecological economists who dealt with feminist issues and feminist economists who dealt with ecological topics. These contributions started to merge in the 1990s with various papers published, for example, in the Ecological Economics special issue on Women, Ecology, and Economics edited by Ellie Perkins (for example, Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997; O’Hara 1997; Pietilä 1997) or, more recently, with the Feminist Economics symposium on Ecology, Sustainability, and Care edited by Julie Nelson and Marilyn Power (for example, Nelson and Power 2018; Dengler and Strunk 2018). Conceptually, the starting point of feminist ecological economics is the acknowledgement that the formal, growth-driven, money-dominated economy is only one facet of ‘the economy’ and that without social reproduction, on the one hand, and natural processes, on the other, no formal economic activity would be possible. Nonetheless, as feminist scholars have demonstrated since the 1990s, mainstream economic theory marginalizes both these contributions to economic activity, treating them – if at all – as ‘externalities’. Against this background, O’Hara (2009, p. 190) emphasizes, in feminist ecological economics ‘what typically has been considered an “externality”, now becomes the focus of analysis’. Feminist ecological economics is thus concerned with what is and what is not considered economics, a distinction that in our current economic system runs along the line of what is counted in gross domestic product (GDP). Biesecker and Hofmeister (2010, p. 1703) argue that ‘it is the structure of separation between the productive and the reproductive that has given rise to the present socioecological crisis situation’ and have coined the term ‘(re)productivity’ as a category of mediation between the two spheres. (Re)productivity tries to overcome the structural devaluation of non-monetized caring activities and the natural environment, which occurs in an economic paradigm that focuses only on the monetized economy. In seeking to revert the hierarchical dominance of market activities over non-market caring and ecological provisioning, feminist ecological economics puts the principle of ‘social provisioning’ (Power 2004) or the ‘economy of socio-ecological provisioning’ (Dengler and Lang, 2022) at the centre of what economics is. Drawing from feminist scholarship more broadly, feminist ecological economists suggest conceptualizing social reproduction beyond markets, to start from local places and commons and emphasize the importance of institutions-building and collective decision-making (Perkins 2007). While exploring these pathways, feminist ecological economists also reflect on poten-

62  Handbook of critical environmental politics tial negative social or environmental repercussions of particular strategies. For example, concerning valuation, feminist ecological economists note two problematic consequences of valuating in monetary terms: the strengthening of hierarchies between the monetary and the non-monetary, and the increase of disposable income for ecologically harmful consumption (Perkins 2007; Dengler and Strunk 2018). While feminist ecological economists do recognize the need to make unpaid care as well as natural processes more visible within current, money-focused valuation systems, they generally advocate for decoupling social recognition from monetary valuation in the long(er) term. Postcolonial Feminisms and the Environment All three approaches introduced so far in one way or another criticize certain facets of what is understood as ‘the economy’. Postcolonial feminist scholars extend this analysis to how discourses on ‘development’ either enable or prevent critical outlooks on environmental politics. Whereas Chapter 2 of this volume explores the relations between postcolonial studies and the environment in greater detail, this section aims at giving a brief genealogy and overview of discussions on feminisms and the environment in the Global South. An early dispute on postcolonial feminisms and the environment concerned the Women, Environment and Development (WED) approach. WED proponents, such as Vandana Shiva (1988), not only asserted women a higher vulnerability regarding environmental degradation, but in taking inspiration from ecofeminist discourses and activism, such as the Chipko Movement in India (Shiva 1988) and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya (Maathai 1985), also emphasized women’s agency in resisting environmental destruction. Early critics, such as Bina Agarwal (1992), argued that WED scholars tend to homogenize women and overlook broader socio-political processes and intersections with, for example, class, race or caste. Currently, this intersectional perspective arguably prevails in much of postcolonial ecofeminisms. Postcolonial feminisms that engage with the environment are multifaceted and regionally diverse, and there are plenty of debates on the intersection of feminism and environmentalism in the context of Latin America (for example, Svampa 2015), Africa (for example, The WoMin Collective 2017) and Asia (for example, Rao 2012). Generally, postcolonial (eco-)feminisms are often closely linked to critiques of development (Aguinaga et al. 2013) and engage, for example, with questions of extractivism, collective modes of social reproduction or caring for the human and more-than-human. Drawing on the example of feminist perspectives on (neo-)extractivism in Latin America, it is important to acknowledge that the effects of resource extractivism are not gender (or race or class) neutral but multiply existing vulnerabilities (Deonandan et al. 2017; Cielo and Coba 2018). The resistance against these intersectional inequalities is led by local, often indigenous, communities that in many cases reject the anthropocentric understanding of nature as fundamentally distinct from humans, thereby offering a window of opportunity for post-extractivism. While this is by no means a call to exoticize an ‘indigenous’ Other and her life in harmony with nature (Argyrou 2005), there is plenty to learn from postcolonial feminisms regarding alternatives to ‘unfettered economic growth, extractive capitalism, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, who have known plenty but cared too little’ (Johnson and Wilkinson 2020, p. xxi). One of the main lessons is arguably that in most postcolonial feminisms, the concept of ‘care’ from the very beginning also includes care for surrounding nature, based on a non-anthropocentric notion of interdependence that transcends the nature/culture divide (Singh 2013; Cielo et al. 2016).

Feminisms and the environment  63 Feminist Political Ecology Overcoming anthropocentric dichotomies is a topic that also plays a role in feminist political ecology (FPE), a stream that offers yet another perspective on critical feminist environmental scholarship by linking the previously mentioned political economy debates to critical geography. Similar to materialist ecofeminism, FPE thus shares the basic assumptions that both women and the environment are exploited in patriarchal capitalism and that hierarchical dualisms, such as human/nature, reason/emotion, male/female or North/South need to be overcome. More specifically, FPE applies feminist perspectives to the interdisciplinary research area of political ecology that emerged in the 1970s and, in its original coinage, studies ecological distribution conflicts. In analysing topics such as access to resources or, more generally, the power relations inherent in the society/nature relationships, political ecology offers a contextual and holistic perspective on versatile relations of exploitation between societal and ecological systems. With their edited volume, Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experience Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slaytern and Esther Wangari (1996) founded FPE as a distinct stream of thought that links political ecology with central insights from feminist cultural ecology, feminist geography and feminist political economy. The editors emphasize that FPE ‘rejects dualistic constructs of gender and environment in favor of multiplicity and diversity, and emphasizes the complexity and interconnectedness of ecological, economic, and cultural dimensions of environmental change’ (Rocheleau et al. 1996, p. 289). Feminist political ecology takes a power-sensitive and grounded approach to studying the gender(ed) dimension of, for example, resource endowment, environmental policies or environmental activism, where conceptual weight is given to the ways in which capitalism transforms and produces nature, and as such processes intersect with gender hierarchies at different scales, patterns of enclosure and marketization are seen as having important gender effects. (Elmhirst 2015, p. 62)

FPE analyses are often driven by case studies, and those case studies often take a post-structuralist and performative approach to gendered subjectivities (Elmhirst 2011). For example, Andrea Nightingale (2011) thoroughly analyses the strong ties between the ecological materiality of space and social inequalities, drawing on anthropological fieldwork that illustrates how intersecting power dynamics with regard to caste/purity and gender are inscribed into everyday practices in north-western Nepal (for another example, see Cole 2017). Recent developments in the field are surveyed in Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care: In Search of Economic Alternatives (Bauhardt and Harcourt 2019). The edited volume hints at a future FPE agenda that aims to create systemic alternatives that are ‘inter-generational, interspecies, and intersectional, based on an ethics of care for human and non-human others’ (Bauhardt and Harcourt 2019, p. 14). Research in this field provides a rich reservoir of case studies on ecological distribution conflicts, which are analysed through the lens of an intersectional feminist, and sometimes also a queer and/or posthumanist perspective.

64  Handbook of critical environmental politics Feminist New Materialism Feminist political ecology, as described above, partly draws from the stream of new materialism for its case study analyses, particularly when it comes to the question of transcending binaries – Haraway’s (2008) ‘naturecultures’ is an example of a new materialist concept that has inspired other streams of feminist thought in transgressing the nature/culture dichotomy, thereby recognizing humanity as an integral part of nature. So what exactly is feminist new materialism? New materialism is an approach that more abstractly deals with meta-questions of materiality, agency and relational ontologies. It is strongly inspired by feminist scholarship, drawing from post-Marxism, parts of ecofeminism and science and technology studies. As a response to poststructuralism’s strong focus on discourses, feminist new materialist scholars align with the ‘material turn’ and highlight the role of matter and materiality, specifically drawing from feminist scholarship engaging with bodies, environment and critical philosophy of science (for example, Barad 2007; Alaimo and Hekman 2008). In doing so, feminist new materialists question to what extent non-human entities are endowed with agency. Karen Barad’s ontology of agential realism, for example, rejects the ontological primacy of ‘things’ that can interact and instead talks of phenomena, which ‘are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting “agencies”’ (2007, p. 139). Such an approach fundamentally questions conceived notions of agency and matter, and proposes radically new ways of viewing the world. Even though it might not be obvious at first sight how this emphasis on materialization, matter and agency contributes to social-ecological transformations, feminist new materialists do offer starting points for engaging in critical environmental politics. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010, p. 20), for example, have argued that global warming precisely forces us to put ‘new emphasis on the material dimensions of social existence’, and that those new emphases are necessary to address environmental crises in any meaningful manner. This type of new materialism is different from the original, Marxian approaches of historical materialism which stress the emancipatory potential of (class conscious, organized) human beings, thereby perpetuating a human-centred ethics. New materialism, instead, aims to overcome the centrality that is often granted to human beings and human bodies in social theory. Instead of combating the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2006) or the Capitalocene (Moore 2016), Haraway (2016, p. 41) argues for making kin in the Chthulucene, an entirely different multispecies story, where ‘human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story’. Such views on posthumanism claim that an anthropocentric worldview is precisely part of the problem that has brought about environmental crises (Braidotti 2013). New materialism thus aims to overcome a range of dualities that manifest anthropocentrism, such as nature/culture, human/non-human or subject/object. Discussions on ‘queer ecology’, then, draw on these transgressions to show how a change of perspective from an anthropocentric to a more ecocentric worldview challenges the putative naturalness of gender and/or monogamous heterosexuality, thereby queering our perspective on feminisms and the environment (Alaimo and Heckman 2008; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010).

Feminisms and the environment  65

FEMINIST ACTIVIST ENGAGEMENT WITH THE ENVIRONMENT We agree with van den Berg (2019, p. 55), who highlights that it ‘is important to recall that feminism and environmentalism were both practices first and theory second’. Therefore, in this section – although it has been partially touched upon in the previous section – we explicitly acknowledge that feminist academic engagement with the environment is inextricably linked with activism and note the crucial role of women and queers in environmental justice struggles around the world (see also Gaard 1997; Perkins 2013). The claim made here is twofold. First, many of the aforementioned scholars not only theorize about feminisms and the environment but are also political activists in the environmental and/or feminist movement. This ranges from the Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, a leading voice in the Navdanya movement, who has been fighting for free (non-privatized) seeds, biodiversity preservation and food sovereignty for about 40 years, to feminist political ecologists who, as described above, often commit to participatory research designs and activist approaches to science. Second, and arguably more importantly, women have been at the forefront of non-theory-led environmental activism around the globe (Perkins 2013; Rodriguez Acha 2017). Examples include Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous and environmental activist, who supported feminist and LGBTQ*IA+ rights and who was murdered for her unyielding fight for territorial rights of the Lenca communities; Patricia Gualinga who tirelessly fights against oil drilling and for indigenous and environmental rights in Sarayaku in Ecuador; or Greta Thunberg, whose ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ from August 2018 has been the starting point of the Fridays for Future movement. It is crucial, however, to acknowledge that the role women and queers play in activism does not exhaust itself in individuals, whose names we read in newspapers. Most of the environmental justice struggles are local struggles against environmental destruction or displacement. In many instances, these local environmental justice struggles are led by women’s and queers’ grassroots activism, an empirical fact that is tied to women’s social roles as ‘carers’ for the health and safety of families, communities and the environment (Rocheleau et al. 1996; Perkins 2013). For example, Deonandan et al. (2017, p. 415) find in their case study on women’s activism against a nickel mining project in El Estor, Guatemala, that women activists often take on the role as ‘bridge leaders’, who are ‘less known outside the group, but who work to build movement strength and cohesion [and in] doing so, they service an equally – or perhaps even more – critical role, within the community itself’.2 Hence, while individual names can be starting points for acknowledging the historical relevance of women for environmental activism, it is women’s and queers’ roles in grassroots organizing, community mobilizing, social movements and lived resistance that should be recognized as building alternative futures.

TOWARDS A CRITICAL-FEMINIST DEGROWTH APPROACH Having introduced various streams of feminist theorizing on the environment and the role of activism, we now transpose this analysis onto our own standpoint as degrowth scholar activists and ask what degrowth can learn from the feminist engagement with the environment. Degrowth, as an interdisciplinary academic discourse and activist movement, does not aim for negative growth rates in a growth paradigm, but seeks to spell out possibilities for a social-ecological transformation towards an economic and cultural system no longer reliant

66  Handbook of critical environmental politics on constant acceleration for social stability (for a more extensive introduction to degrowth, see Chapter 7 in this volume). In its critical analysis of growth and capitalist logics, degrowth shares many positions with the previously discussed streams of feminist environmental thinking. However, when browsing through degrowth founding texts, we may easily get the impression that it rests on all-male theoretical origins, with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, André Gorz or Serge Latouche often named as the ‘founding fathers’. So, after this introduction to feminist academic engagement with the environment, we may ask: But what about the ‘founding mothers’? How does the feminist critique of science or economic growth facilitate a more profound understanding of structures of oppression? What mechanisms of exclusion are in play when these contributions are structurally forgotten and how can we disrupt and overcome them? And what if we queered the founding mother/ founding father binary altogether? We argue that degrowth is in need of a basic analysis of the relation between capitalism/growth and patriarchy, which many of the abovementioned streams of thought offer, as the hope of overcoming the growth paradigm without tackling its patriarchal roots is futile. However, despite the increased engagement with feminist theories in degrowth scholarship (for example, Dengler and Strunk 2018; Gregoratti and Raphael 2019; Hanaček et al. 2020; Saave and Muraca 2021), most notably in the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) network, we contend that a feminist degrowth approach remains a project in the making. We argue that the streams presented in this chapter offer a fertile ground for furthering a feminist degrowth approach. By going back to the early works of subsistence scholar Maria Mies (1986), ecofeminist political economist Mary Mellor (1997) or feminist economist Marilyn Waring (1988), for example, degrowth scholars learn how in a capitalist system there is a structural similarity of the devaluation of female-coded reproductive labour and the destruction of nature. Re-reading the feminist ‘wages for housework’ campaign from the 1970s can inspire degrowth scholars to reason about the dilemma of valuation and thoroughly transformative approaches to the question of how to ‘value’ social reproduction (Toupin 2018; Dengler and Lang, 2022). Queer ecologies as, for example, explored by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (2010) help to move beyond Cartesian dualisms and binary thought structures, as well as to overcome the heterosexism that strongly influences the way we see, approach and experience nature. Engaging with the Spanish ecofeminist Amaia Pérez Orozco’s (2014) work on the ‘sustainability of life’ opens up conceptual space to put collaborative and relational activities necessary to sustain life over time, including both its material and symbolic dimensions, the human and more-than-human as well as their interrelations, at the core of social organization. Moreover, Silvia Federici’s (2019) latest book on feminism and the politics of the commons, as well as a recent special issue on feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning (Clement et al. 2019) show how feminist and degrowth perspectives intersect around questions of collective forms of caring for the human and more-than-human (see also Federici’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 39). These are only some among many examples of where we think a critical-feminist degrowth approach should start digging for its feminist intellectual roots.

Feminisms and the environment  67

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we provided an overview of critical feminist engagement with the environment from the 1970s onward. We first introduced a range of theoretical streams, then discussed the role of women’s and queers’ activism, and finally reflected on degrowth as an activist-academic approach that shares a critical perspective on environmental politics but needs to become integrally more feminist. All approaches share a critical starting point of questioning power hierarchies within capitalism, while focusing on different facets of these power structures. Some recurring themes are, for example, the critique of culturally embedded conceptual dichotomies such as nature/culture, production/reproduction or human/non-human; the highlighting of the structural devaluation of that which is not monetized – often natural processes and social reproduction; and the demand to broaden or entirely overcome particular conceptualizations of ‘the economy’, ‘development’ or ‘nature’. When talking about the role of activism, we noted that not only are feminist scholars often activists but, importantly, it is women and other subaltern groups who – owed to the gendered division of labour that comes along with an increased vulnerability to environmental damages – have historically played a crucial role in environmental justice struggles, and continue to do so today. Thereafter, we engaged in a critical reflection on degrowth to outline where we see open questions and starting points for future research. We argued that degrowth shares a critical perspective on capitalist power structures with many streams of feminist academic engagement with the environment and, moreover, shares an explicitly activist agenda with many of the women-led activist groups. Nonetheless, we argued that even though much of this intellectual heritage of critical feminist environmental thinking of past decades could be made fruitful for degrowth research, it has not yet been integrated sufficiently. We hope that this path will be taken up in future research.

NOTES 1. This classification is subjective in nature. We might also, for example, distinguish materialist ecofeminisms with regard to regional varieties, such as an (hegemonic?) anglophone tradition, Latin American popular (eco-)feminisms, the German subsistence approach and feminist environmentalism in India. Also, some fields as, for example, queer ecology might be considered its own stream of feminist environmental scholarship, instead of a subset of ecofeminisms. 2. For other examples, see Fakier and Cock (2018) on ecofeminist organizing in South Africa, Singh (2013) on the affective labour of growing forests in India and Christiansen (2021) on gendered relinking to indigenous knowledge in the example of water protectors at Standing Rock in the US.

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68  Handbook of critical environmental politics Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barca, S. (2020), Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene, Cambridge: University Press. Bauhardt, C. and Harcourt, W. (2019), Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care: In Search of Economic Alternatives, London and New York: Routledge. Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. and Mies, M. (2000), The Subsistence Perspective. Beyond the Globalised Economy, London: Zed Books. Biehl, J. (1991), Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press. Biesecker, A. and Hofmeister, S. (2010), Focus: (re)productivity: sustainable relations both between society and nature and between the genders, Ecological Economics, 69, 1703–11. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Christiansen, J. (2021), The water protectors at Standing Rock: survivance strategies for gendered relinking, Women’s Studies in Communication, 44 (3), 278–300. Cielo, C. and Coba, L. (2018), Extractivism, gender, and disease: an intersectional approach to inequalities, Ethics & International Affairs, 32 (2), 169–78. Cielo, C., Coba, L. and Vallejo, I. (2016), Women, nature, and development in sites of Ecuador’s petroleum circuit, Economic Anthropology, 3 (1), 119–32. Clement, F., Harcourt, W., Joshi, D. and Sato, C. (2019), Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning, International Journal of the Commons, 13 (1), 1–15. Cole, S. (2017), Water worries: an intersectional feminist political ecology of tourism and water in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia, Annals of Tourism Research, 67, 14–24. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (2010), Introducing the new materialisms, in D. Coole and S. Frost (eds), New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, pp. 2–43. Crutzen, P. (2006), The ‘Anthropocene’, in E. Ehlers and T. Krafft (eds), Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 13–18. Dengler, C. and Lang, M. (2022), Commoning care: feminist degrowth visions for a socio-ecological transformation. Feminist Economics, 28 (1), 1–28. Dengler, C. and Strunk, B. (2018), The monetized economy versus care and the environment: degrowth perspectives on reconciling an antagonism, Feminist Economics, 24 (3), 160–83. Deonandan, K., Tatham, R. and Field, B. (2017), Indigenous women’s anti-mining activism: a gendered analysis of the El Estor Struggle in Guatemala, Gender & Development, 25 (3), 405–19. Elmhirst, R. (2011), Introducing new feminist political ecologies, Geoforum, 42 (2), 129–32. Elmhirst, R. (2015), Feminist political ecology, in A. Coles, L. Gray and J. Momsen (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Development, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 58–66. Fakier, K. and Cock, J. (2018), Eco-feminist organizing in South Africa: reflections on the feminist table, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 29 (1), 40–57. Federici, S. (2019), Re-Enchanting the World. Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Gaard, G. (1993), Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gaard, G. (1997), Toward a queer ecofeminism, Hypatia, 12 (1), 114–37. Gregoratti, C. and Raphael, R. (2019), The historical roots of a feminist degrowth: Maria Mies’s and Marilyn Waring’s critiques of growth, in E. Chertkovskaya, A. Paulsson and S. Barca (eds), Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 83–98. Hanaček, K., Roy, B., Avila, S. and Kallis, G. (2020), Ecological economics and degrowth: proposing a future research agenda from the margins, Ecological Economics, 169 (106495), 1–13. Haraway, D. (1988), Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, Feminist Studies, 14 (3), 575–99. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Harding, S. (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives, New York: Cornell University Press. Henderson, H. (1980), Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics, New York: Perigee Book.

Feminisms and the environment  69 Jochimsen, M. and Knobloch, U. (1997), Making the hidden visible: the importance of caring activities and their principles for any economy, Ecological Economics, 20 (2), 107–12. Johnson, A. and Wilkinson, K. (2020), All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, New York: One World. Kings, A. (2017), Intersectionality and the changing face of ecofeminism, Ethics & the Environment, 22 (1), 63–87. Luxemburg, R. (1913), The Accumulation of Capital, repr. 2003, London and New York: Routledge. Maathai, W. (1985), Kenya: the Green Belt movement, IFDA Dossier 49, September–October, 3–12. MacGregor, S. (2006), Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care, Vancouver: UBC Press. MacGregor, S. (2017), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, London and New York: Routledge. Mellor, M. (1997), Feminism & Ecology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Mellor, M. (2009), Ecofeminist political economy and the politics of money, in A. Salleh (ed.), Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology, London: Pluto Press, pp. 251–67. Mellor, M. (2016), Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice, London: Pluto Press. Merchant, C. (1980), The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, repr. 1990, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Mies, M. (1982), The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market, London: Zed Books. Mies, M. (1986), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books. Mies, M. and Shiva, V. (1993), Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books. Moore, J. (2016), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Mortimer-Sandilands, C. and Erickson, B. (2010), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Nelson, J. and Power, M. (2018), Ecology, sustainability, and care: developments in the field, Feminist Economics, 24 (3), 80–8. Nightingale, A. (2011), Bounding difference: intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal, Geoforum, 42 (2), 153–62. O’Hara, S. (1997), Toward a sustaining production theory, Ecological Economics, 20 (2), 141–54. O’Hara, S. (2009), Feminist ecological economics: theory and practice, in A. Salleh (ed.), Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology, London: Pluto Press, pp. 180–96. Oksala, J. (2018), Feminism, capitalism, and ecology, Hypatia, 33 (2), 216–34. Pérez Orozco, A. (2014), Subversión Feminista de la Economía, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Perkins, P.E. (2007), Feminist ecological economics and sustainability, Journal of Bioeconomics, 9 (3), 227–44. Perkins, P.E. (2013), Environmental activism and gender, in D. Figart and T. Warnecke (eds), Handbook of Research on Gender and Economic Life, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 504–21. Pietilä, H. (1997), The triangle of the human economy: household – cultivation – industrial production: an attempt at making visible the human economy in toto, Ecological Economics, 20 (2), 113–27. Plumwood, V. (1993), Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Power, M. (2004), Social provisioning as a starting point for feminist economics, Feminist Economics, 10 (3), 3–19. Rao, M. (2012), Ecofeminism at the crossroads in India: a review, DEP Deportate, Esuli, Profughe, 20 (12), 124–42. Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B. and Wangari, E. (1996), Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences, London and New York: Routledge. Rodriguez Acha, M. (2017), We have to wake up, humankind! Women’s struggles for survival and climate and environmental justice, Development, 60 (1), 32–9.

70  Handbook of critical environmental politics Saave, A. and Muraca, B. (2021), Rethinking labour/work in a degrowth society, in N. Räthzel, D. Stevis and D. Uzzell (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 743–67. Salleh, A. (1997), Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, London: Zed Books. Salleh, A. (2009), Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women write Political Ecology, London: Pluto Press. Shiva, V. (1988), Staying Alive – Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books. Singh, N. (2013), The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India, Geoforum, 47, 189–98. Svampa, M. (2015), Feminismos del Sur y Ecofeminismo, Nueva Sociedad, 256, 127–31. The WoMin Collective (2017), Extractives vs development sovereignty: building living consent rights for African women, Gender & Development, 25 (3), 421–37. Toupin, L. (2018), Wages for Housework. A History of an International Feminist Movement 1972–77, London: Pluto Press. van den Berg, K. (2019), Environmental feminisms: a story of different encounters, in C. Bauhardt and W. Harcourt (eds), Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care. In Search of Economic Alternatives, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 55–69. Von Werlhof, C. (1988), The proletarian is dead: long live the housewife, in C. von Werlhof, M. Mies and V. Bennholdt-Thomsen (eds), Women. The Last Colony, London: Zed Books, pp. 168–81. Waring, M. (1988), If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

4. Marxism and ecology: an ongoing debate Emanuele Leonardi and Salvo Torre

INTRODUCTION For a long time, the question concerning ecology has been seen as foreign, or even in plain opposition, to Marxism. A particular use of the category of nature, no matter how complex the role it played in Marx’s texts, was often interpreted as a sign of the quasi-positivist, Promethean character of historical materialism. This putative ‘Prometheanism’ attributed to Marx constitutes the spark that, starting in the 1960s, has given rise to the debate on Marxism and ecology that we assess in this chapter. This task, however, is not easy: although, in the 1970s and 1980s, only a few authors participated in the discussion – which, nonetheless, was already global in scope – the new millennium saw a steady expansion of contributions and, at times, the explosion of caustic, when not vicious, polemics. In recent years these global conversations spread at incredible speed so that, at the time of writing, the field of eco-Marxism is vast and growing. What is important to underline, from our perspective, is that it would be impossible to condense in a chapter even a superficial description of fundamental controversies and analytical landmarks. This is why we needed a criterion for selecting materials, on the one hand, and for organising them, on the other. We had to find a socio-historical principle to elaborate on the main split in the debate: some authors accepted (at least partially) the criticism of Marx’s alleged scientistic triumphalism and focused on how to re-frame his methodological and political remarks to new socio-economic configurations; others authors chose the path of re-discovering Marx’s supposedly ante litteram environmentalist insights. Starting from the conviction that Marx’s writings contain both (occasional) elements of positivism – later amplified in official Communist party lines – and (frequent) insights into the metabolic interconnection of humanity and nature which prefigure contemporary ecological thought, we opted for an ambivalent understanding of the notion of a cycle to make sense of different ‘moments’ in the encounter between Marxism and ecology. The main methodological point is that the cycle can be analysed both from the vantage point of capital (cycle of accumulation) and from the viewpoint of labour (cycle of struggles). This means that, as Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999, p. 128) wrote, struggle is intrinsic to the capital-relation’ and that ‘history [is not] the unfolding of pre-given, inevitable and objective laws’ as ‘such “laws” are no more than the outcome of two intersecting vectors – exploitation, and its refusal in the constantly recurrent eruptions of fight and flight by which rebellious subjects seek a way beyond work, wage and profit.

In accordance with the Autonomist Marxist’s version of the Copernican Revolution – namely, the primacy of class struggle over capitalist restructuring (Tronti 1966 [2020]) – we also believe that in order to grasp the specificity of a cycle of accumulation we must closely look at the preceding cycle of struggles. 71

72  Handbook of critical environmental politics The key implication, for our purposes, is that capitalist development (that is, the succession of cycles) constitutively depends on the conflictual interplay between forms of accumulation and forms of struggle. Thus, our hypothesis is that the different historical ‘moments’ of the debate on Marxism and ecology reflect the material conditions embodied in the different cycles they emerged from (Leonardi 2021). It is against this background that we problematise, in the next section, John Bellamy Foster’s and Paul Burkett’s (2016) periodisation of the debate on Marxism and ecology. We contend that the potential of our analytical lens is to investigate how environmental conditions shape class-relations through different cycles of capitalist accumulation/social struggles, on the one hand, and how environmental elements are/can be articulated within a comprehensive eco-politics of the working class and/or the proletariat, on the other. This goal has been pursued in a variety of ways, depending on the specific features of any given cycle: by ‘adapting’ Marx’s tenets to the unprecedented situation of a politicised ecological crisis (third section); by ‘re-reading’ Marx and Engels’ writings to uncover an ecological potential which remained hidden for too long (fourth section); or by employing revisited and/or enriched Marx’s categories to make sense of and act upon the failure of capital’s ‘green’ strategies (fifth section). Finally, we briefly mention one streams of ongoing research within the debate on Marxism and ecology – eco-socialist degrowth – which we consider of particular interest for the current cycle of accumulation/struggles.

PROBLEMATISING THE GENEALOGY OF THE DEBATE ON MARXISM AND ECOLOGY In their influential Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique, Foster and Burkett propose a three-step unfolding of ‘ecosocialist analysis’ – a formula we prefer to substitute with ‘the debate on Marxism and ecology’. Following a period of widespread conservationist prejudice towards Marxism as ‘Prometheanism’, a sign of ‘the hegemony of technological modernism ... in the years of the Second World War and the early Cold War’ (Foster and Burkett 2016, p. 2), the first stage is identified with a prefigurative phase dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. The authors belonging to this group perceived ecological concerns as not only compatible, but immediately associable, with Marx’s critique of political economy: ‘The convergence of Marxism and environmentalism was often viewed as an organic evolution, generating a kind of natural hybrid’. A good example is Kapp’s ‘social/environmental cost theory’, developed during the 1950s, which emphasises that, in a capitalist regime, economic actors are institutionally incentivised to overlook the ecologically nefarious effects of their production and investment decisions. According to Foster and Burkett, things would dramatically change in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of so-called ‘ecologism’. Owing to converging pressures – spread of deep ecology among the youth, penetration of neo-Malthusian ideas within environmentalist movements and poor environmental performances of Eastern bloc countries – even eco-socialist thinkers ended up assuming a definitive incompatibility between Marx’s thought and ecology. This supposedly a-critical assumption is the defining feature of first-stage eco-socialism. What the authors belonging to this group focused on was either ‘graft[ing] Green theory onto Marxism’, or vice versa ‘graft[ing] Marxism onto Green theory’ (Foster and Burkett 2016, p. 3). Examples of the first option are Gorz (1977 [1980]) and O’Connor (1988), whose

Marxism and ecology  73 analyses we discuss in the next section. Examples of the second option are Martínez-Alier (1987), who claims Marx failed to incorporate Sergej Podolinskij’s insights about energetics in his labour theory of value, and Merchant (1980), who emphasised the relevance of sexist assumptions (not just of class-based exploitation) to understand the harmful ecological impact of the Scientific Revolution (sixteenth century). The 1990s would see a reaction to this acceptance of a putative opposition between Marxism and ecology in the form of a second-stage ecosocialism. The main achievement of the authors belonging to this group – among which Foster and Burkett themselves prominently figure – is ‘the rediscovery of the ecological depths of classical Marxist thought’ (Foster and Burkett 2016, p. 4), embedded in his theory of metabolic rift – which we explore in the fourth section. The key objective of this purifying move is twofold: on the one hand, the falsification of the anti-environmental ‘Prometheanism’ wrongly attributed to Marx (and to which even first-stage eco-socialists had fallen prey) and, on the other, the recuperation of the ‘radical conception of sustainability’ which Marx himself had developed but which was obfuscated largely by the twentieth-century fixation on hyper-industrialism (even on the part of the Communist Left). Foster’s and Burkett’s genealogy is particularly useful as it provides historical consistency to the unfolding of the debate about Marxism and ecology. However, it is also problematic, especially as it suggests that even the most recent interventions in the field (at the time of their writing) need to fall either in the ‘first-stage’ box (for example, Moore 2015), whose origins date back to the 1970s, or in the ‘second-stage’ (for example, Malm 2016), whose origins date back to the 1990s. From this perspective is Dwarkasing’s (2019) proposal of third-stage considerations on Marx and ecology, where she groups contemporary applications of metabolic rift theory – especially to agricultural practices and to urban ecologies. In this chapter, we take an additional step with regard to her taxonomy. We would include in the ‘third-stage debate on Marxism and ecology’ all recent contributions that mobilise Marxist tools to make sense of the ecological crisis and critically intervene in environmental politics within a cycle of struggles which is defined by anti-austerity conflicts (from 2011 onwards). This cycle is irreducible, we contend, both to that of the anti-authoritarian (1968 and its aftermath) and to that of alter-globalisation (from 1994 to the early-2000s), to which ‘first-stage’ and ‘second-stage’ roughly correspond. Thus, in the fourth section we analyse not only Moore’s and Malm’s works, but also Salleh’s and Barca’s insights on class-based and intersectional eco-feminism. As we explained previously, this reference to the concept of ‘cycle of struggles’ is key to us; it embodies the main reason why we feel Foster’s and Burkett’s genealogy is important but needs to be problematised. To be fair, they do emphasise the role of social conflict when they argue that ‘Marxist ecological thought only began to reemerge in a big way … as part of the practical struggle, with the development of the environmental movement, in the 1960s and ’70s – itself mainly a response to the acceleration of planetary ecological contradictions’ (Foster and Burkett 2016, p. 2). Yet this emphasis is not politically foundational: ecological struggles mainly served the purpose of illuminating an element of what Luxemburg in a celebratory manner defined as ‘the treasury of Marx’s thought’ (Foster and Burkett 2016, p. 2). Instead, we contend that the encounter between the Marxist theoretical archive and ecological thought has emerged, from the very beginning, as a distinctively political problem. The event that set the stage for this encounter to occur is the global cycle of struggles that emerged in the late 1960s/early 1970s and that marked an unprecedented centrality of what can be defined as the sphere of social reproduction (de-colonial movements, feminist campaigns, health and

74  Handbook of critical environmental politics safety grievances within factories and environmentalist advocacy throughout society). This does not imply that the scope of eco-Marxism should be limited to contemporary mobilisations for environmental justice (Chapter 35 in this volume): instead, it means that these latter function as a site of enunciation for inquiring about the ecological crisis as dependent on the capital–nature nexus. Contemporary struggles inspired by political ecology certainly reject an all-too-easy dismissal of Marx’s relevance, but simultaneously express the need for a re-evaluation of the labour theory of value along socio-ecological lines. To explain this statement, it may be useful to advance an analytical distinction between environmental degradation and ecological crisis: what distinguishes the former – a trans-historical phenomenon owing to dysfunctional configuration of the society-nature nexus – from the latter, is that only capitalism necessarily implies a modality of resource-use which describes a systemic tendency towards expansive accumulation. The concept of environmental degradation belongs to pre-modern ‘nature idolatry’ (Marx 1857–58 [1989], p. 410); the concept of ecological crisis, on the contrary, is a distinctively modern phenomenon. The debate on Marxism and ecology, therefore, is a field of inquiry which focuses on the ecological crisis as an effect of capitalist development, starting from the politicisation of such a crisis as brought forward by the cycle of struggles led by social reproduction. Using a Foucauldian terminology, Luigi Pellizzoni (2016, p. 45) has defined this methodological framing as ‘nested problematization’: first, capitalist modernity produces the ecological crisis; second – confronted with social oppositions – capitalist ‘reflexive’ modernities (attempts to) manage it through the green economy. The green economy is a political rationality (emerging in the late 1980s and refined throughout the 1990s) marked by the internalisation of the environmental limit within the logic of value as an accumulation strategy. No matter how ineffective or ‘ideological’ it turned out to be, it represented a significant shift in the history of capitalism: what was once considered an unsurpassable obstacle to valorisation (the ecological crisis as a political issue, imposed to reluctant elites by social unrest between the 1960s and the 1970s) has been regarded as a profitable opportunity for business (Leonardi 2019a) – at least, up until 2019 with its massive climate strikes and the definitive failure of the Paris Agreement and, more generally, the United Nations (UN)-led Conference of the Parties (COP) system. It is reasonable to establish a line of continuity between the anti-austerity twenty-first century cycle of struggle and the recent wave of climate justice against the background of the planetary factory, as Dyer-Witheford (2018) calls it, or of the planet farm, as Wallace (2016) suggests.

THE ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN CYCLE: USING MARXISM TO BRIDGE ECOLOGY AND CLASS STRUGGLE In this section we explore eco-Marxist interventions that, from the 1960s to the 1980s, have emerged in the context of a cycle of accumulation marked by the rise and decline of the Fordist regime of regulation (Aglietta and Brender 1984), and within a cycle of struggles characterised by class-based anti-authoritarianism, as epitomised by May 1968 (Bologna and Daghini 1968 [2018]). The conventional wisdom of this conjuncture, at least on the Left, is that the ecological crisis constitutes a fundamental obstacle to capitalist valorisation and that social movements can foster their revolutionary agenda both starting from the ‘external’ limit of capital (as in radical environmentalism) and from the ‘internal’ limit of capital (as in Communist or Anarchist formations). Importantly, the ecological crisis is here intended both

Marxism and ecology  75 as brought about by an objective ‘acceleration of planetary environmental contradictions’ (Foster and Burkett 2016, p. 2), and by oppositional subjectivities rooted in the revolt of social reproduction (Federici 2018). Against this background, we identify three key moments of the debate on Marxism and ecology: Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx (1962 [1971]), Gorz’s Ecology and Politics (1977 [1980]) and O’Connor’s (1988) reflection on the two contradictions of capitalism. Schmidt: Materialist Naturalism A turning point in reflections on Marx’s thought and ecological issues is undoubtedly Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx, originally published in 1962. Schmidt was the first exponent of the Frankfurt School to express a comprehensive analysis of this problem, focusing most importantly on the assertion that the category of nature makes explicit what the entire Marxian philosophical project is fundamentally about. Moreover, the book changed the interpretations of some key passages in Marx’s main works. Schmidt draws strong attention to the concept of metabolic interaction, but never mentions passage from Capital (Marx 1992) on ‘the irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism’ that will be central to thinkers in the alter-globalisation cycle. Two assumptions are key to understand the importance of Schmidt’s thinking: for ‘his’ Marx, a naturalistic materialism constitutes the hidden precondition for a correct theory of society; nature, as the substance to which men are faced, can only be regarded as unformed material from the viewpoint of the purposes of human activity. Despite Marx’s critique of the fundamental categories of such reasoning ‒ ‘man’ and ‘nature’ ‒ not being able to match the radicality of subsequent currents, such as eco-Feminism (Chapters 3 and 39 in this volume) and decolonial thought (Chapters 2 and 37 in this volume), the use of both categories in the Marxist debate remains unclear. In Schmidt’s thought, the concept of nature cannot be separated, either in philosophy or in natural science, from the degree of power exercised by social practices over nature at any given time: Although even Marx occasionally used the concept of matter alongside that of nature, the ‘practical’ character of his theory ensured from the outset that materialist economics, not physical factors or speculative notions, determined the reality which these concepts covered. (Schmidt 1962 [1971], p. 77)

Nature becomes dialectical by producing humankind as a transformative force, but humans are the subjects of nature’s transformation. In Marx’s theory, man is the connection between the instrument of labour and the object of labour. Humans change their own nature as they progressively ‘steal’ wealth from external nature and as they make nature work for their own purposes. In this framework, Schmidt’s thesis on nature as the subject-object of labour seems to call for a re-evaluation, not a dismissal, of Marx’s entire value theory. Gorz: The 1973 Crisis of Reproduction As was common among Marxists in the 1970s, Gorz’s analyses of the ecological crisis tend to privilege its social dimension over its environmental side (Leonardi 2019b). That does not mean, however, that the latter is to be considered unimportant. Gorz believes that the best way to face the unavoidable issue of physical limits to growth is not to worship Nature as a divine

76  Handbook of critical environmental politics entity, to enact its conceptualisation as immediately normative, but to develop a theory of the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and its surrounding environment: Nature is not untouchable. The ‘Promethean’ project of ‘mastering’ or ‘domesticating’ nature is not necessarily incompatible with a concern for the environment. The fundamental issue raised by ecology is simply that of knowing: i) whether the exchanges, which human activity imposes upon or extorts from nature, preserve or carefully manage the stock of non-renewable resources; and ii) whether the destructive effects of production do not exceed the productive ones by depleting renewable resources more quickly than they can regenerate themselves. (Gorz [1977] 1980, p. 21)

From this perspective ecology and Marxism are perfectly compatible: while the latter focuses and criticises the internal limits to productive activities, the former deals with its external limits and denounces their crossing when that is the case. On this basis, Gorz can elaborate a twofold theory of the 1973 capitalist crisis (also known as the first Oil Shock). On the one hand, starting from the Marxist approach of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – namely, the impossibility over the long run to substitute the valorising function of living labour with dead labour crystallised in machinery – there is a situation of overproduction to which capital reacts through a number of counter-tendencies, among which are commodities’ planned obsolescence and the creation of artificial needs which are disentangled from their own use-values. On the other hand, Gorz sees a crisis of reproduction owing to the ever-increasing costs capital has to bear to regenerate the environment (up to that point used as a free landfill) so that it can be polluted again – an operation whose consequence is a higher price of final products. From this original analysis, Gorz draws the conclusion that the era of productivism, conceived of as a pre-political field to be inhabited by free-market and planned economies alike, is over. Socialism, to be truly emancipatory, needs to incorporate 1968-inspired social struggles and break capital’s hegemony on economic policies and productive tools (Benegiamo and Leonardi 2021). O’Connor: The Second Contradiction of Capitalism Although O’Connor’s main contribution to the debate on Marxism and ecology is undoubtedly his theory of the two contradictions of capitalism, it is important to recall that the key intuition he will develop up until the late 1980s can be found in his 1973 masterpiece The Fiscal Crisis of the State, more specifically in the appendix to Chapter 6, titled ‘The social expenses of environmental pollution’. The main argument was that government money was needed to clean up heavy industries’ ecological mess, namely, polluted conditions of production. Although these expenses were not even indirectly productive, they were nothing less than necessary to ensure one of the two main functions of the capitalist state: legitimisation (the other being accumulation). More state money for legitimisation means less state money for accumulation in the form of (indirectly productive) policies for social investment and social consumption. Hence, with the progressive rise of monopoly capitalism, environmental pollution is one of the causes of the fiscal crisis of the state. The basic corollary of that argument is the following: the ecological crisis emerges at the intersection between social and environmental issues. The crisis of nature is not external to the economy, to society or politics. Instead, it is their extreme instance, the threshold whose crossing implies the crumbling of the welfare state’s system of compatibilities. Thus, environmental

Marxism and ecology  77 pollution represents a pure cost for corporations, whose attempts to outsource it to the state can only postpone the crisis, not overcome it. From this perspective, just as in Gorz, Marxism and ecology can be easily overlapped: while the former criticises the internal limit of capital (the first contradiction based on labour as the fundamental means of production), the latter is concerned with the external limit of capital (the second contradiction based on nature as the ensemble of conditions of production). This argument is comprehensively developed in the introductory essay for the first issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism, where O’Connor formulated his notorious thesis on the second contradiction of capitalism. The point of departure of the traditional Marxist theory of economic crisis and the transition to socialism is the contradiction between capitalist productive forces and production relations. The specific form of this contradiction is between the production and realisation of value and surplus value, or between the production and circulation of capital. The agency of socialist revolution is the working class. Capitalist production relations constitute the immediate object of social transformation. The site of transformation is politics and the state and the process of production and exchange. By contrast, the point of departure of an ‘ecological Marxist’ theory of economic crisis and transition to socialism is the contradiction between capitalist production relations (and productive forces) and the conditions of capitalist production, or capitalist relations and forces of social reproduction. (O’Connor 1988, pp. 15–16)

This text can be considered as a New Left manifesto aimed at a specifically political ‘use’ of the debate on Marxism and ecology – not least owing to its twin criticism of Communist parties and Marx’s thought. O’Connor argued that socialist states had not even considered the problem of the contradiction between capital and nature, supporting destructive models of development. Marx’s thought, in turn, had underestimated what Karl Polanyi would later refer to as the tendency of the capitalist market to destroy its own social and environmental conditions. Finally, twentieth-century post-Marxist thought had underestimated the ability of an ecological reinterpretation of Marxism to reconnect class struggle with new social movements – most notably environmentalism. It must be stressed, however, that the re-evaluation of Marxism in the wake of rising environmental concerns was not an exclusively North Atlantic issue. A significant number of Latin American contributions to the debate on Marxism and ecology can be ascribed to the anti-authoritarian cycle. We believe the deep roots of this debate should be identified in contributions critically addressing matters such as the decolonisation of knowledge and of social models. In this context, the time span of the debate is much longer, and our hypothesis is that its specific features only emerge after the political consolidation of indigenous movements in the 1990s. The whole debate therefore starts in the first half of the twentieth century and extends well beyond the 1980s, tapping directly into the alter-globalisation cycle struggles. The origins are undoubtedly to be found in Carlos Mariategui’s (1928 [1971]) reflections on the agrarian question and on the specificity of the colonial agricultural model, what Guillibert (2021) calls his practical naturalism. Mariategui started a reflection not only on the relationship between pre-capitalist social forms and the possibility of building a socialist society, but also on the relationship between indigenous communities and nature. The thinking that Löwy (1998) has referred to as a utopian-revolutionary dialectic of the pre-capitalist past and socialist future, is built on relationships with the environment that are radically different from the capitalist relationships. Mariategui’s thought played a very crucial role in the evolution of Latin American

78  Handbook of critical environmental politics Marxism, also in terms of the re-framing of class struggle. In Mariategui’s thought, there is a strong focus on the various forms of community work, including its relation to resources and natural cycles. Löwy (2014) argues that his texts have provided a key to understanding the presence of indigenous communities also in contemporary socio-ecological struggles. Moreover, the encounter between Mariategui and indigenous thought has been originally renewed through interpretations such as Rivera Cusicanqui’s (1984) and Quijano’s, which also find a strong correspondence with Wallerstein’s reflections on the world system (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Both thinkers no longer seek to locate the birth of the proletariat in the restructuring of agricultural production, but shift the focus to the indissoluble relationship between colonisation and the birth of capitalism. Elmar Altvater: Globalisation and the Social Limits to Growth During the 1990s, Altvater (1990) shifted the focus to the relationship between ecological and economic limits. Altvater’s theses are closely linked to his long reflection on labour and the theory of value, which began in his writings of the early 1970s. The new reflection on the functioning principles of biological systems and human labour starts from the relationship between ecological and economic crises. Altvater (1989) initially takes inspiration from Georgescu Roegen’s theories on the bioeconomy, but focuses on the relationship between the economic crisis and natural limits. One of the prerequisites for his thinking is the analysis of the material conditions of production, which also involve social metabolism as a whole. The material conditions of production are also biological, as well as spatial and temporal. According to Altvater, the analysis of the economic system must start from the processes of social metabolism, the overall consumption of energy and the use of biological reproductive capacities. During the same years, he began an elaboration of the critique of what he names fossil capitalism, focusing mainly on the entropic dimension of labour previously organised by capital. Thus, fossil industrial capitalism is a different system from the previous systems, and the role of fossil fuels has been decisive in shaping that society. Fossil capitalism is that specific system built on an acceleration of capitalist extraction and valorisation processes. This is a first analysis on which Altvater’s thought will meet many of the reflections of the anti-globalisation movements of the following years. For Altvater, the global dimension of economic processes represents an advanced stage in the functioning of the capitalist system. The author thus theorises an initial relationship between the financialisation of nature and the processes of reproduction of the social order: With the creation of an economic world-system and a political world order, the ‘metabolism’ of humankind, society and nature has now reached a global scale. The societal relationship with nature is global and its regulation thus requires global rules. (Altvater 1998, p. 20)

In this context, ecological limits take a different role and lead to the reasoning on the category of growth as a general problem; the transition to a global society has led, according to Altvater, to an acceleration of the destructive processes of capital: Ecological limits manifest themselves are ‘social limits of growth’ on a global level. (Altvater 1998, p. 30)

Marxism and ecology  79

THE ALTER-GLOBALISATION CYCLE: METABOLIC RIFT THEORY AND META-INDUSTRIAL WORKERS In this section, we explore eco-Marxist interventions that, starting from the 1990s, have emerged in the context of a cycle of accumulation marked by the emergence of the green economy (market integration policies as opposed to command-and-control regulation, but also commodification of nature as in carbon trading). Not surprisingly given our methodological framework, to grasp the capitalist innovation embodied in the green economy rhetoric we must look at previous ecological critiques. As historian Sergio Bologna clearly saw already in 1987, ‘only environmentalism is today capable of providing a powerful boost for product-innovation (not only process-innovation). Capitalism needs environmentalism to reach the frontier of a new industrial revolution’ (Bologna, 1987–88, p. 38). The novel cycle of struggles, instead, was characterised by global engagement in alter-globalisation efforts, as epitomised first by the Zapatista uprising in 1994, then by the massive riots of Seattle 1999 and Genoa 2001. As far as environmental politics was concerned, the Left was split between more institutional sectors who considered a self-portrayed ‘green capitalism’ a better-than-nothing option, and those who rejected it as an ideological smokescreen and gave rise to a plural ‘movement of movements’ deeply critical of neoliberalism. The proposal to unite various claims into a single, oppositional general framework was built in close connection with the critique of both colonial experiences and patriarchy, issues that still challenged Western Marxism (Barca 2019a). Against this background, a group of critical scholars linked to the Monthly Review (John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett from the very beginning, and Kohei Saito later on) proposed a back-to-the-origins strategy aimed at contesting the legitimacy of any ‘Promethean’ reading of Marx’s thought, as well as at rediscovering its ecological relevance. Following a different path, eco-feminist Ariel Salleh focused her practical as well as theoretical attention on the possibility of expanding the notion of ‘working class’ along gender and ‘green’ lines. Foster, Burkett and Saito: The Ecological Element in Marx’s Thought In his landmark book Marx’s Ecology (2000), Foster assumes as a starting point the metabolic separation between workers and nature, opening up an interpretative strand that directly attributes to Marx’s texts a foundational relevance for ecological thought. Foster’s masterful reading is centred on the notion of metabolic rift. Although Marx never directly used the term, he alluded to it by mentioning several times the word ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechsel) and by arguing, in the third volume of Capital, that an ‘irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism’ (Marx 1992, p. 949) was caused by the historical development of the capitalist mode of production. Even more than philological accuracy, however, what Foster is able to show is the consistency of the theory of metabolic rift with Marx’s thought in general. By reviewing Marx’s engagement with Malthus, Ricardo and, especially, chemist Justus von Liebig, Foster argues that the capital-driven process of ‘urbanization of the countryside’ (Marx 1857–58 [1989], p. 479) broke the naturally balanced (at least to a certain degree) interaction between economic circular flows and ecological circular flows. In so doing, capital accumulation produced the ‘proper conditions’ for the ecological crisis to arise. There may be several ‘starting points’, when it comes to a theory of origins. For example, primitive accumulation and its impacts on the emergence of capitalist agriculture in the sixteenth century, both in the UK and in the colonial plantations, is mentioned. Another key shift is provided by the

80  Handbook of critical environmental politics evolution of the town–countryside relationship from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. In this period, known as the first agricultural revolution, the rapid diffusion of capitalist farming techniques represented the apex of a slow and gradual process which brought to its extreme limits the closed energetic circle binding town and countryside: whereas the latter provided food and raw materials, the former returned organic waste to be employed in agriculture as fertiliser. Although capitalistic innovations significantly increased the yields, they also involuntarily entailed progressive soil exhaustion. In order to solve this debilitating problem, capital heavily recurred to soil chemistry in agriculture. Chemical intervention constitutes the kernel of the second agricultural revolution (1830–80), whose main character was a decisive global dimension, since soil depletion was to be fought particularly by means of massive imports of guano from Peru and nitrates from Chile (Cushman 2013). Although these innovations fostered a short-term recovery in agricultural productivity, the contradiction between economic circular flows and ecological circular flows was by then an established reality and, with it, the very notion of ecological crisis made its historical appearance. By showing capital’s systemic tendency towards biophysical degradation in the countryside and towards increasing pollution in the city, Foster aims to place the emergence of environmental issues within the development of capitalism itself. He does so by arguing that the crisis of the earth, based on the contradiction between ‘natural distinctness’ and ‘economic equivalence’ (Marx 1857–58 [1989], p. 141), accompanies the periodic crises of accumulation that marks the dynamic of capitalistic reproduction. Foster’s theory of metabolic rift provides a solid argument against Marx’s putative indifference towards ecological issues and it articulates, from an internal perspective, the rise of capitalism and the degradation of the biosphere. Along similar lines, Burkett proposes a reassessment of Marx’s labour theory of value which sheds new light on the problem of historical relations between human producers and natural conditions of production. The assumption that (wage) labour is the substance of value is valid only if capitalist self-referentiality is already fully deployed. As Burkett (1999) emphasises in his influential Marx and Nature, as far as wealth-creation (which is not to be confused with value-production) or use-value is concerned, labour and nature performs an equally important role. Put differently, Burkett argues that Marx’s category of ‘free appropriation’ is the key to understanding the contradiction between the primary source of wealth (a combination of nature and social labour) and capitalistic value as abstract labour time. Moreover, Burkett’s theses concern the Hegelian legacy in Marx’s thought. In a seminal article written with Foster (Foster and Burkett 2000), it is argued that Marx’s ecological insights are to be conceived of as a critique to Cartesian dualism. The two authors react to widespread criticism in the environmentalist debate on Marx’s allegedly dualistic conception of the humanity–nature relationship. Critics argue that Marx sees human beings and nature as existing in perpetual antagonism. This position, variously expressed by Capra (1982), Clark (1989) and Salleh (1992), focuses on two additional aspects: one concerning Marx’s anthropocentric position, his insistence on human exceptionalism, on a separation between humans and nature; and the other on the instrumental view of nature. The question concerns the distinction between ‘organic body’ as a distinctively human body, and the vision of nature as ‘inorganic body’. Burkett and Foster argue that the perspective should be quite simply reversed as what occurs in Marx’s thought is exactly the opposite. This distinction should be grasped in its dialectical unity, and lies at the heart of Marxist critiques of the capitalist system. This dialectical unity between human beings and nature is an ontological

Marxism and ecology  81 presupposition which only becomes problematic once the separation-moment is unilaterally enforced as it occurs under capitalist conditions of production: In Marx’s materialist dialectic of organic/inorganic relations, one finds neither instrumentalist, anthropocentric perspective nor a flight into mysticism, but the core of an ecological critique of capitalist society – a critique that should allow us to translate ecology into revolutionary praxis. (Foster and Burkett 2000, p. 422)

Burkett’s and Foster’s analysis have been developed recently both by themselves (Burkett 2006; Foster and Burkett 2016; Foster 2020) and by other scholars. Most notable among the latter is Kohei Saito, whose acclaimed Marx’s Ecosocialism (2017) is largely recognised as the latest ‘upgrade’ of the metabolic rift theory. The main argument is that the structure of Capital suggests an attention to ecological issues that has been overlooked by critics, probably because Capital is an unfinished work. According to Saito, Marx started to elaborate an ecological interpretation in volume three, especially in relation to land rent. Having minutely studied Marx’s unpublished notebooks on natural sciences, Saito suggests that the elaboration of the thesis on material conditions of production has a direct reference to the incompatibility between natural cycles and capitalist economies. Returning to Marx’s attention for Justus von Liebig’s critique of modern robbery agriculture, Saito also argues that the issue of deforestation is fundamental to understand Marx’s elaborations about the ever-reducing chances of survival of capitalism as a mode of production. This forgotten element of Marx’s thought leads Saito to perceive the foundation of ecosocialism – namely, the incompatibility between environmental sustainability and capitalist accumulation – as already present in the argumentative structure of Capital. As a consequence, Marx’s theory of revolution also contains a constitutive ecological dimension in that it would pose as a task the re-composition of the metabolic rift. Salleh: Meta-Industrial Labour and Metabolic Value In addition, a ‘return to Marx’ aimed at rediscovering the ecological dimension of his oeuvre, the alter-globalisation cycle also saw attempts to expand the notion of the ‘working class’ as the subjective bearer of revolutionary agency. Salleh (2010) redefines the terms of discussion of the metabolic rift theory by transposing it in the eco-feminist field, proposing a general reinterpretation of the theory of value (Salleh 1997, 2009). The starting point of her reflection remains a form of political elaboration stemming from social movements: Climate change, biodiversity loss, and social precarity are each results of capitalist overproduction. In responding to this globalizing overshoot, activists need a materialist analysis of social relations, as well as a materialism that engages with ecological processes. (Salleh 2010, p. 205)

This constitutive link with activism is central to Salleh’s formulation of a comprehensive theory of social change. Starting from the fact that humans are embedded in biological systems, a reinterpretation of the composition of global society opens up, which seeks recognition ‘for a vernacular science, an integrated movement strategy, and more inclusive social theory’ (Salleh 2010, p. 207). Ecofeminist thought acknowledges that capitalist production undermines its own social metabolism, but believes that the criticism should be more radical. The metabolic rift also concerns an ideological separation between ecology and political economy. This implies that a space of confrontation in which excluded identities could express

82  Handbook of critical environmental politics themselves should be built for a Marxist revolutionary process to be effective. What needs to be taken into account is the twofold conceptual figure of meta-industrial labour – which ‘denotes workers, nominally outside of capitalism, whose labour catalyses [positive, negentropic] metabolic transformations, be they peasants, gatherers, or parents’ – and of metabolic value – which ‘denotes the value sustained and enhanced by this kind of worker in supporting ecological integrity and the social metabolism’ (Salleh 2010, p. 212). As far as the debate on Marxism and Ecology is concerned, the recognition of the metabolic value offers the possibility of implementing political strategies aimed at organising meta-industrial workers, who represent the largest social class worldwide but whose contribution to keep society functioning remains mostly hidden.

THE ANTI-AUSTERITY CYCLE: CRITIQUING FOSSIL, FINANCIAL AND GROWTH-BASED CAPITALISM In this section we explore eco-Marxist interventions that, in the course of the 2010s, have emerged in the context of a cycle of accumulation marked by the progressive undermining of a finance-led regime of regulation (Lucarelli 2010) as expressed by the 2007–08 meltdown of financial markets and the ensuing budget cuts in large parts of the world. From the perspective of critical ecological politics, this period is characterised by a slow but steadily worsening legitimacy crisis of global environmental policy – most notably climate governance since the fiasco of the COP 15, held in Copenhagen in 2009 (Chapter 13 in this volume). As for the cycle of struggle, anti-austerity conflicts emerged at a global level in the form of a variety of experiences, such as (among many others) the Arab uprisings of 2010–11, Occupy Wall Street, and the Indignados Movement. From the perspective of critical environmental politics, this cycle saw the strengthening of territorial – but not localistic – movements such as climate justice-inspired Ende Gelaende and a myriad mobilisations, all over the world, against harmful mega-projects. Their common goal is to defuse the twin roots of the twenty-first century ecological crisis: fossil fuels extraction and financialisation of nature. Moreover, given the close connection with the planetary trans-feminist movement, patriarchy is a key target of contemporary conflictual practices. Similarly, a new wave of indigenous movements and the rise of decolonial thought have led to a specific interpretation of the relationship between human communities and the biosphere, especially in Latin America. The main contributions to the debate came from authors associated with political ecology, who proposed theories on social metabolism (González de Molina and Toledo 2014), on the deconstruction of economy (Leff 2009) and on neo-extractivism (Svampa 2019). The starting point of the discussion was a critique of environmental rationality, closely linked to Mariategui’s tradition of Marxism. Subsequently, however, most of the authors strongly criticised a Marxist interpretation of the category of nature, inserting it within the tradition of Western rationality. The focus on energy consumption and extractivism produced a reading that was very orientated not only to ways of decolonising experience, but also to the political organisation of the sphere of reproduction – bringing their analyses into a neo-Marxist field (Zibechi 2007). An interesting step that has also led to reasoning on the question of state action in relation to nature is the spread of an ecological debate within Chinese Marxism in recent years. The first diffusion of the debate was undoubtedly brought about by Wang (1986), who published the first Chinese texts on the analysis of Marxist and socialist ecology. In the past two decades,

Marxism and ecology  83 attention to the issue has increased sharply and most of the texts belonging to the debate have not only been translated but are also present in many university courses (Wang 2012). The debate translation efforts conducted by Xueming (2017) have supported the dissemination of many of the theories of US Marxism. His thesis is that Marxism can lead to the construction of an ecological civilisation, the foundations of which are already to be found in historical materialism. Against this background, we identify three key moments of the debate on Marxism and Ecology: Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016), Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) and the elaboration of a class-based and intersectional eco-feminism in Barca’s Forces of Reproduction (2020). Andreas Malm: At the Roots of the Fossil Economy In The Progress of This Storm, Swedish human ecologist Malm (2018, p. 4) lays out the basis of his overall research, namely, an extreme diachronicity of our society – ‘We can never be in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of [the] ongoing past’. His main achievement is a general theoretical reframing of the history of energy use and of its environmental consequences. In his influential Fossil Capital (2016), Malm distinguishes between three forms of energy: flow, animate, and stock. He argues that the Industrial Revolution embodies the history of the replacement of flow and animate energy by stock energy. The decision to turn to fossil fuels was more expensive than sticking to flowing energy, and logistically more problematic. It ultimately depended on the restructuring of capitalist society: the rise of coal, in other terms, can only be explained by interpreting the history of class struggle. Hence: the power derived from fossil fuels was dual in meaning and nature from the very start. Steam as a form of superior power was just that. … It is proven beyond all reasonable doubt that global warming does not have natural causes … Once we cross that line, we immediately encounter power – indeed, this happens as soon as we use the term ‘fossil fuels’. They are, by definition, a materialisation of social relations. (Malm 2016, pp. 12–13, original emphases)

For centuries humans had been using coal for heating, but it was only from the second decade of the nineteenth century that the use of fossil fuel as a primary source became established. In those years, it became the focus of accumulation processes and supported a shift in the power structures of society. That is, the steam engine prevailing over waterpower was not because it was more efficient and reliable or because coal was cheaper and more abundant than water. What lies at the core of this decisive transition is not an energy crisis; instead, it is the need for workforce control. Waterpower was cheaper and easier to manage. It did, however, have one main flaw: distance from the large concentrations of workers. Hydraulic power provided a centrifugal dynamic to the spatial development of the first Industrial Revolution, moving factories away from urban centres. Coal was imposed as a consequence of the emergence of the first forms of workers’ organising. An essential point of Malm’s argument concerns precisely the forms of refusal of work and the conflict around the use of the old energy sources. The transition to steam power was a strong reaction of the bourgeois class against collective ownership models. Malm claims that this framework also explains the relationship between technological innovation and the establishment of new accumulation regimes in the capitalist system. There is a strong connection between the social conflicts that lead to the crisis of

84  Handbook of critical environmental politics accumulation regimes and the development of new techno-energetic systems, eventually to become dominant. In his most recent Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020), Malm states that climate change and the coronavirus pandemic share a common capitalist aetiology and must, consequently, be contrasted by a resolute Communist agenda, epitomised in his call for an ecological Leninism. The theoretical basis for this option – as controversial as it may be (Gallo Lassere 2020, Rübner-Hansen 2021) – is the attempt to politicise the climate crisis while bringing through a renewal of the debate on Marxism and ecology. Global warming as well as the COVID-19 emergency express a roaring back of nature. Thus, re-instantiating the distinction between the natural and the social becomes fundamental in order to effectively grasp the ecological crisis, and to politically act upon it. Assuming a posture not too dissimilar to that of the early Marx, Malm asserts that only human beings are endowed with agency and can solve the current crisis. Jason Moore: The Ecological Dimension of Finance and Negative Value Moore suggests a peculiar, anti-Cartesian reading of the relationship between capitalism and socio-natural interactions upon which he builds a new framework to grasp the transition to capitalism from an ecological perspective. Such a framework is defined world-ecology: the main claim is that capitalism does not have an ecological regime; instead, it is an ecological regime. Thus, world-ecology refers to an original mixture of social dynamics and natural elements that make up the capitalist mode of production in its historical development, in its tendency to unfold as world-market. It is against this background that, in the sixteenth-century shift from land productivity to labour productivity, capitalist value (im)poses space as flat and geometric, time as homogeneous and linear, nature as external, infinite and free. Posing capitalism as an ecological regime is a fundamental theoretical move – reminiscent of Merchant’s (2010) intervention through the concept of ecological revolution – which allows Moore to account for the historicity not only of capitalism as a specific mode of production, but also as a mode of production which develops through history presenting a variety of different socio-natural crystallisations. Moore further specifies how ‘Capitalism-in-nature’ is characterised by a complex and multi-layered process of simultaneous internalisation and externalisation of nature: while abstract labour becomes the measure of value through which nature is mediated, the free appropriation of its ‘free gifts’ does not cease to foster the increase of profits. That is, capitalist circuits of exploitation do not act upon nature but pass through it. To better understand this passage (especially in historical terms), Moore introduces the concept of commodity frontier, according to which capital’s further expansion is possible only in so far as, beyond the frontier, non-commodified land and labour are available. The historical succession of different commodity frontiers shows the irreducible contradiction between the logic of capital, which does not account for nature unless in the form of free source of raw materials/free waste disposal container, and the real history of capitalism with its uncountable episodes of plunder and degradation. Here, Moore approaches the key issue of the temporal definition of environmental change, which has been widely discussed in eco-Marxist circles. Marco Armiero, for example, proposes the use of the term ‘wasteocene’ to underline the imposition of toxic ecologies on subaltern human and more-than-human communities (Armiero and De Angelis 2017; Armiero 2021). Against this background, capitalist development fosters the exhaustion of the very biospheric conditions necessary to sustain accumulation; the history of

Marxism and ecology  85 capitalism has seen several frontier movements aimed at overcoming this exhaustion, through the appropriation of nature’s free gifts (defined as cheap nature) which, up to that time, were or seemed to be unavailable to profitable use. For our purposes, of particular interest is Moore’s attempt to read the relationship between the capitalist tendency to exhaust environmental resources and the ever-increasing commodification of nature through the lenses of the process of financialisation. Moore (2015, p. 36) aptly states that ‘Wall Street is a way of organising nature’, whereby two interrelated dynamics can be read simultaneously: first, financial markets’ further entrenchment in mining, oil and gas extraction, farmland, and agricultural production through dense linkages and new speculative arrangements. Second, financial markets’ rising reliance on new tools that involve new engagements with more-than-human natures, such as catastrophe bonds, commodity index funds and weather derivatives. What is important to underline is that, in Moore’s account, the failure of a ‘green growth’ strategy based on the financialisation of nature engenders the rise of an unprecedented phenomenon, namely, the transition from surplus-value to negative-value: In this transition, the ‘old’ contradictions of depletion are meeting up with the ‘new’ contradictions of waste and toxification. The old productivist model … has been adept at finding fixes to resource depletion. But it is ill suited to dealing with negative-value, those forms of nature that elude and frustrate Cheap Nature ‘fixes’. [Nowadays] both direct and indirect toxification from capitalist agriculture feeds, with increasing force, into new forms of negative-value: climate change, cancer epidemics, and so forth. (Moore 2015, p. 267)

Thus, Moore seems to propose a renewed, ecological version of breakdown theory: commodity frontiers are nowhere to be seen and the expanded reproduction of capitalism seems to be seriously at risk. Stefania Barca: For a Class-Based Eco-Feminism beyond Industrial Modernity In her ground-breaking Forces of Reproduction (2020), historian Stefania Barca frames her critique to fossil capitalism and to the process of financialisation of nature against the background of a more comprehensive deconstruction of what she terms modern economic growth, a purportedly heroic narrative of human liberation from nature to be achieved via the uncontested socio-political primacy accorded by industrialism to the forces of production. The most recent instantiation of modern economic growth is to be found in the notion of Anthropocene (Chapter 5 in this volume), which Barca considers a specifically neoliberal master’s narrative. Providing intellectual resources for undoing such master’s narrative, then, is the very goal of her reflection. Step one consists in ‘relativising’ the conventional wisdom of the Anthropocene debate: the We implicit in the anthropos obfuscates the historically well-documented fact that capitalist/ industrial modernity has developed by means of constantly marginalising ‘racialized peoples and their ontologies from the realm of humanity proper’. Moreover, Barca accurately points out that such exclusion has a lot to do with the question concerning the environment, as ‘the ecological crisis has emerged from the annihilation of alternate possibilities of inhabitation of the earth’ (Barca 2020, p. 27). What is of particular interest, for the purposes of investigating the debate on Marxism and ecology, is that Barca’s analysis grounds this critique of the Anthropocene in a solid feminist as well as historical-materialist perspective. Seen from this angle,

86  Handbook of critical environmental politics the working class, or proletariat, and metabolic rift originate from a unique, global process of violent separation of people from their means of subsistence, which also disrupts the biosphere. The ecological crisis is thus a direct consequence of class making. (Barca 2020, p. 42)

By concealing this violent separation among humans and between humans and non-humans, the false universalism of the Anthropocene narrative fosters what Barca compellingly name, paraphrasing Mark Fisher, eco-capitalist realism. On the one hand, there are quite evident environmental grounds under both the TINA-syndrome (There Is No Alternative) and the well-known saying according to which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. More importantly, however, Barca convincingly shows that the goal of eco-capitalist realism is in no way to address capitalist modernity’s nefarious impacts on the environment, or undo the damage done, but instead to find a ‘safe operating space’ for the profit-imperative to keep moulding the planet. The main idea is that social progress and well-being solely depend on the ‘unleashing’ of the productive forces. To undo this framework, as well as its unsustainable logic of class-making, what needs to be put to question is the putative neutrality of those forces of production. To frame it as a positive task, it is urgent to operate a political re-evaluation of the role of reproductive forces (largely comprising subsistence and care workers) in (1) sustaining both human communities and the biosphere and (2) leading an ecological revolution against capitalism. What Barca has in mind is a revolutionary strategy based on intersectionality, with specific reference to four axes: Coloniality, gender, class and species all matter to the Anthropocene: the struggles to undo each of them are intersected with each other and cannot be separated. Together, they form the essence of what the climate justice movement calls ‘system change’. (Barca 2020, p. 60)

CONCLUDING REMARKS As we stated at the outset of this chapter, it is impossible to properly review the debate on Marxism and ecology in a handbook chapter. We had to find a criterium for selection in order to meaningfully organise an extremely vast ensemble of materials. Similarly, it would be too hard a task to even briefly map out the several lines of development sprouting from such debate. Thus, in this concluding section we simply mention one (among many) ongoing eco-Marxist discussion which we believe is going to produce interesting results in the next few years. In the cycle of struggles, we believe the anti-austerity one has been recently intensifying along two main conflictual lines: the rise of climate justice as a centripetal political framework throughout 2019 – some scholars write of a progressive climatisation of global debates (Aykut et al. 2019) – and the planetary crisis brought about by pandemic capitalism (throughout 2020 and, unfortunately, still ongoing; Malm 2020; Wallace 2020). From the viewpoint of critical environmental politics the main novelty is the polarisation of the ecological field between climate justice (whereby effectively tackling global warming necessary entails fighting inequality worldwide)1 and neoliberal denialism (defined by the openly proclaimed primacy of profit over human and non-human health alike). This does not mean that the green economy as a distinctively neoliberal project – in which justice is framed as a matter of economic development rather than social transformation – is dead for good; it simply means that the system of governance which was built upon it has lost its legitimacy and will need significant changes to regain it.

Marxism and ecology  87 Against this background, a stream of thought worth exploring is that situated at the intersection between eco-Marxism and degrowth, a rising social movement and academic community (Muraca 2013; D’Alisa et al. 2015; Kallis et al. 2020; Burkhart et al. 2020; Muraca and Saave 2021). This encounter has occurred, and is intensifying, both at the level of the critique of political economy (Barca et al. 2019; Leonardi 2019b; Pirgmaier and Steinberger 2019; Pirgmaier 2021) and at the level of eco-socialist strategy (Andreucci and Engel-Di Mauro 2019; Barca 2019b; Kallis 2019). Recently, Chertkovskaya and Paulsson (2020) have widened the scope of the debate on Marxism and ecology by exploring the link between capitalist destructive forces and ecological crises through the lenses of corporate violence. Moreover, they compellingly propose to counter this violence by organising productive and reproductive forces alike under the framework of degrowth – as developed in close connection with 2019 global climate actions (Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2020). Finally, it is worth mentioning – as confirmation of an ongoing discussion – the well-attended panel organised by the mailing list ‘Degrowth Communism’ at the Vienna Degrowth conference in May 2020.

NOTE 1. Although internally differentiated, we contend that the whole debate on the Green New Deal belongs to the field of climate justice (Aronoff et al. 2019; Klein 2019; Ajl 2021; Mastini et al. 2021).

REFERENCES Aglietta, M. and Brender, A. (1984), Les métamorphoses de la société salariale, Paris: Calman-Levy. Ajl, M. (2021), A People’s Green New Deal, London: Pluto Press. Altvater, E. (1989), ‘Ecological and economic modalities of time and space’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1 (3), 59–70. Altvater, E. (1990), The foundations of life (nature) and the maintenance of life (work): the relation, International Journal of Political Economy, 20 (1), 10–34. Altvater, E. (1998), Global order and nature, in R. Keil, D.V.J. Bell, P. Penz and L. Fawcett (eds), Political Ecology. Global and Local, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 19–44. Andreucci, D. and Engel-Di Mauro, S. (2019), Capitalism, socialism and the challenge of degrowth: introduction to the symposium, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30 (2), 176–88. Armiero, M. (2021), Wasteocene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Armiero, M. and De Angelis, M. (2017), Anthropocene: victims, narrators, and revolutionaries, South Atlantic Quarterly, 116 (2), 345–62. Aronoff, K., Battistoni, A., Cohen, D.A. and Riofrancos, T. (2019), A Planet to Win. Why We Need a Green New Deal, London: Verso. Aykut, S., Foyer, J. and Morena E. (eds) (2019), Globalising the Climate. COP 21 and the Climatisation of Global Debates, London: Routledge. Barca, S. (2019a), Labour and the ecological crisis: the eco-modernist dilemma in Western Marxism(s) (1970s-2000s), Geoforum, 98 (January), 226–35. Barca, S. (2019b), The labor(s) of degrowth, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30 (2), 207–16. Barca, S. (2020), Forces of Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barca, S., Chertkovskaya, K. and Paulsson, A. (eds) (2019), Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth London: Rowman & Littlefield. Benegiamo, M. and Leonardi, E. (2021), André Gorz’s labour-based political ecology and its legacy for the twenty first century, in N. Räthzel, D. Stevis and D. Uzzell (eds), Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 721–41.

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Marxism and ecology  89 Mariategui, J.C. (1928), Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, repr. 1971, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Martínez-Alier, J. (1987), Ecological Economics, London: Blackwell. Marx, K. (1857–58), Grundrisse, repr. 1989, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1992), Capital – Volume 1, London: Penguin. Mastini, R., Kallis, G. and Hickel, J. (2021), A green new deal without growth? Ecological Economics, 179, 1–8. Merchant, C. (1980), The Death of Nature, Chicago, IL: Harper & Row. Merchant, C. (2010), Ecological Revolutions, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Moore, J. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso. Muraca, B. (2013), Décroissance: a project for a radical transformation of society, Environmental Values, 22, 147–69. Muraca, B. and Saave, A. (2021), Rethinking labour/work in a degrowth society, in N. Räthzel, D. Stevis and D. Uzzell (eds), Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 743–67. O’Connor, J. (1973), The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York: St Martin’s Press. O’Connor, J. (1988), Capitalism nature socialism: a theoretical introduction, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1, 11–38. Pellizzoni, L. (2016), Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Pirgmaier, E. (2021), The value of value theory for ecological economics, Ecological Economics, 179, 106790, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.ecolecon​.2020​.106790. Pirgmaier, E. and Steinberger, J. (2019), Roots, riots and radical change – a road less travelled for ecological economics, Sustainability, 11 (7), https://​doi:​10​.3390/​su11072001. Quijano, A. and Wallerstein, I. (1992), Americanity as a concept or the Americas in the modern world-system, International Social Science Journal, 134, 549–57. Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (1984), ‘Oprimidos pero no vencidos’. Luchas del campesinado aymara y qhechwa 1900–1980, La Paz: La Mirada Salvaje. Rübner-Hansen, B. (2021), The kaleidoscope of catastrophe – on the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm. Viewpoint Magazine, 14 April, accessed 11 Dec. 2021 at https://​viewpointmag​.com/​2021/​04/​ 14/​the​-kaleidoscope​-of​-catastrophe​-on​-the​-clarities​-and​-blind​-spots​-of​-andreas​-malm/​. Saito, K. (2017), Marx’s Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Salleh, A. (1992), Marxism and ecofeminism, Fifth Estate, 27, 21–7. Salleh, A. (1997), Ecofeminism as Politics, London: Zed Books. Salleh, A. (ed.) (2009), Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice, New York: Pluto Press. Salleh, A. (2010), From metabolic rift to metabolic value: reflections on environmental sociology and the alternative globalization movement, Organization & Environment, 23 (2), 205–19. Schmidt, A. (1962), The Concept of Nature in Marx, repr. 1971, London: Penguin. Svampa, M. (2019), Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina. Conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias, Bielefed: Bielefed University Press. Tronti, M. (1966), Workers and Capital, repr. 2020, London: Verso. Wallace, R. (2016), Big Farms Make Big Flu, New York: Monthly Review Press. Wallace, R. (2020), Dead Epidemiologists, New York: Monthly Review Press. Wang, J. (1986), Ecological Marxism and eco-socialism, Teaching and Research, 6, 39–44. Wang, Z. (2012), Ecological Marxism in China, Monthly Review, 63 (9), 36–44. Xueming, C (2017), The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital, Leiden: Brill. Zibechi, R. (2007), Autonomías y emancipaciones. América Latina en movimiento, Lima: UNMSM, Programa Democracia y Transformación Global.

PART II CONTESTED NOTIONS

5. Anthropocene Marija Brajdić Vuković and Mladen Domazet

INTRODUCTION This chapter deals with the concept of Anthropocene, a techno-scientific label proposed by specialists in earth system sciences, as a technical name for a geological epoch marked by a significant impact of purposeful human activity on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. In environmental politics it is also a conceptual framework within which to observe the constraints and potentials of contemporary natures and societies through the interrelationship between ecology and justice. The simplistic reading of the Anthropocene is one in which humanity’s propensity for broadly understood development (as an instrument of emancipation), resulted in a systemic destabilizing of non-human nature. This, in turn, is now undercutting the attainments of that development and threatening to bring down the whole process. Yet with a multitude of subsistence, control, learning, conflict, contraction and expansion activities taking place in the everyday interactions between over 7 billion humans themselves (with varying consequences for the biosphere: human and non-human life) a new way of presenting some of that interaction is needed in order to fight to extinguish the destructive and unjust interactions while amplifying those that are regenerative and emancipative. The hegemonic conception of development is unable to articulate a globally just and sustainable universal format of these interactions, differentiating between the political and economic obstinacy to deviate from a destructive path and the existing instances of climate-restorative livelihoods. In this chapter we overview the concept of Anthropocene in the literature, from the origins in geology to contemporary variations in social sciences and humanities, presenting questions and critique with the aim of proposing a systemic paradigm shift (in the Kuhnian sense) in how science explains its reproduction and origins. This paradigm shift leaves open the details of applicability of the surveyed critiques to particular instances and experiences. Also, it is proposing a loose intellectual structure of constraints on historical progress of human emancipation and socio-metabolic patterns (see Chapter 21 in this volume), and through it provides holistic future perspective without invalidating the complexity of particular current and historic instances. It proposes to leapfrog the intricacies of explaining how Anthropocene happened to the Earth (let alone by whom exactly it has been brought about and when) by focusing on explanatory unification of seemingly widely disparate phenomena associated with it and explanatory conceptual clarification provided by a principle theory model1 (cf. Van Camp 2011; Domazet et al. 2020). We argue that Anthropocene is a condition of combined ideological (through growth for profit accumulation) and socio-technical organization (capital-driven fossil fuel combustion), whose non-catastrophic conclusion requires regeneration, degrowth (Chapter 7 in this volume) and commons governance (Chapter 14 in this volume) in diverse locally meaningful ways. Otherwise, the hegemonic growth ideology remains intellectually locked into the paradox of emancipation and self-destruction on multiple levels of scale. 91

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EVERYDAY REALITY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE: THE CONCEPT OR THE TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC LABEL According to Steffen et al. (2007), in 1873 an Italian geologist and priest Antonio Stoppani wrote about the ‘anthropozoic era’. The first to use the word ‘anthropocene’ was a Russian geologist, Aleksei Pavlov, in 1922, describing the ‘present day’ as a part of an ‘Anthropogenic system (period) or Anthropocene’ (Lewis and Maslin 2015, p. 171). It was brought to general attention by the Ukrainian geochemist, Vladimir Vernadsky, as an idea that the biosphere, combined with human cognition, had created the Noӧsphere (from the Greek for mind), with humans becoming a geological force (Vernadsky 1945). However, the chronostratigraphic Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), founded by the International Committee on Stratigraphy (subfield of geology), sees the term as widely used since it was coined by Crutzen and Stoermer in 2000 to ‘denote the present geological time interval, in which many conditions and processes on Earth are profoundly altered by human impact’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p.17). As is explained by Cruzten and Stoermer, this impact has intensified significantly after 1800 CE with the Industrial Revolution’s rapid course, taking us out of the Earth System state typical of the climatically remarkably stable Holocene Epoch. Geological changes hitherto only attributed to asteroids, tectonic plate shifts and volcanoes are now causally ascribed to gross human activity with a cumulative intensity of a geophysical force profoundly affecting the planet, from major biogeochemical cycles to the evolution of life (Lewis and Maslin 2015). We are currently witnessing visible human alterations of the biological fabric of the Earth (increased erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture), of stocks and flows of main elements in the planetary machinery, such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus and silicon, and of energy balance at the Earth’s surface (Steffen et al. 2007). Environmental changes caused by these include global warming (Chapter 32 in this volume), sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading of oceanic ‘dead zones’, rapid changes in biosphere both on land and in the sea as a result of habitat loss, great loss of biological diversity (the sixth mass extinction), and the proliferation and global dispersion of new minerals, such as concrete, fly ash and plastics (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010). Lewis and Maslin (2015, p. 172) note that human actions may well constitute the Earth’s most important evolutionary pressure, as ‘the development of diverse products, including antibiotics, pesticides, and novel genetically engineered organisms, alongside the movement of species to new habitats, intense harvesting and the selective pressure of higher air temperatures resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, are likely to alter evolutionary outcomes’. The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been widely used in environmental sciences for the past 15 years. It has been popularized in prominent science journals and even in popular periodicals such as The New York Times. There have been many conferences on the topic, as well as art exhibitions and performances. As a concept, the Anthropocene caused debates in the field of earth sciences, and has been contested, and even renamed, within the social sciences. Nichols and Gogineni (2018) notice that natural sciences and social sciences/humanities have different motivations for establishing a new geological era, and different parameters for identifying it. There have been voices advocating for a more interdisciplinary definition coming from both camps (Ellis et al. 2016; Trischler 2016; Nichols and Gogineni 2018). Although the differences in conceptual delineation and use of the term in earth sciences and social sciences/humanities are primarily ontological and epistemic, their consequences are also thoroughly political.

Anthropocene  93 The problem with the natural and technical sciences, the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, is related to their capacity to change methods, paradigms, but especially the viewpoint of the culture/nature distinction and/or boundaries. In 2007, Steffen et al. described the Earth System (the holistic approach to the Earth adopted by scientists in the 1980s) as ‘the suite of interacting physical, chemical and biological global scale cycles and energy fluxes that provide the life support system for the life on the surface of the planet’, but in the last paragraph of the description the authors add ‘Finally, the Earth System includes humans, our societies and our activities; thus, humans are not an outside force perturbing an otherwise natural system but rather an integral and interacting part of the Earth System itself’ (Steffen et al. 2007, p. 615). This addition was novel for geologists who are socialized into thinking from the ‘third person point of view on the world’ in which humans are detached from nature, as opposed to a ‘first person point of view of the world’ in which humans are inseparable from nature (Bilgrami, 2014). Anthropocene scientists now challenge this long-standing disciplinary view of nature, and are currently changing the main standpoint related to nature in the STEM fields. The conceptual standpoint, paradoxically, resulted in human domination over nature and in its irreversible damage through a 400-year long detachment from nature (Nichols and Gogineni 2018). This change has moral and political implications, and many argue for a firmer ‘paradigm shift’ in the natural sciences (Hamilton 2016). However, geologists from the AWG remain mostly interested in the methodology of defining the start of an epoch (stratigraphy), as they have been trying to establish the ‘golden spike’ – a signal in geological data that would indicate a change in the Earth System related causally to Homo sapiens. After agreeing that the Holocene Epoch is not best suited for current times, there are intense and lasting debates within the community of exactly when, in terms of a geological timescale, the new epoch – Anthropocene – started. There are two main perspectives, called the Orbis spike and the bomb spike (Lewis and Maslin 2015). The Orbis (‘the world’ in Latin) spike dates the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch in 1610, when the wide-scale swapping of species between continents that began in 1492 was first truly felt, and the core samples of the Antarctic ice showed a dramatic dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at that point. Scientists theorize that this was caused by the rampant death that followed the colonizers in the New World as around 50 million people were exterminated, by a combination of warfare, enslavement and infectious diseases (Newson 1992; Lewis and Maslin 2015). Since many of those people were farmers – especially in South America – when their fields were no longer tended, trees were able to grow back and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Many argue that this view of the Anthropocene is wrong because it divorces the concept from the modern industrialization and burning of fossil fuels. According to a recent AWG report (Subramanian 2019), it seems that for the majority on the panel the bomb spike2 is considered to be a better candidate for the beginning of the epoch in a geological time scale. The bomb spike denotes the starting of the new epoch in the mid-twentieth century. At that time, a rapidly rising human population accelerated the pace of industrial production, the use of agricultural chemicals and post-war construction boom. Also, the first atomic-bomb blasts littered the globe with radioactive debris that became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record. All of this marks the beginning of the great acceleration, the sharp rise in the destructive environmental effects of human industry since the second half of the twentieth century (Steffen et al. 2015).

94  Handbook of critical environmental politics This, almost purely technical, use of the Anthropocene in the field and subfields of geology, becomes reinterpreted for different purposes within the fields of social sciences and humanities. As Lorimer (2017) sums up, the scientific categorization question in natural sciences provoked an intellectual fury in social sciences, owing to political consequences of a seemingly disinterested naming and dating issue. From the perspective of social sciences these can be described as issues related to intellectual zeitgeist, as an ideological provocation, as new ontologies of shared planet and culture, and science fiction. Anthropocene in social sciences has connections to, and implications for, family, education, politics, social movements, class, gender, race, law, work, culture, care, history, time, space, science, technology, language, the arts, religion, and what it means to be human on this endangered planet (Sklair 2017). As an ideological provocation (Lorimer 2017), the Anthropocene becomes contested as a grand narrative about human–environment relations and recast as Capitalocene (Moore 2015, 2017; Angus 2016; Malm 2016), Anthrobscene (Parikka 2014), Chthulucene (Haraway 2015, 2016) and Plantationcene (Harraway 2015). Researchers are focused on the debates about the social, ecological and planetary implications of development, capitalism, modernity and humanism. The arguments for Capitalocene and Anthrobscene are predominantly related to ‘metabolic rifts’ (Chapter 4 in this volume) and social inequalities caused by capitalism, recently in neoliberal form and related to half of cumulative emissions of climate-altering gasses. This perspective, rooted in structure of ownership of the means of production and structure of its output distribution, warns that humanity cannot go on living and consuming as we do now, that we must radically change our lifestyles and socio-economic organization by changing/ending capitalism and creating new types of societies. However, there are persuasive warnings that although capitalism makes anthropogenic damage to the planet worse (by exponentially intensifying growth of throughput, for example), its cessation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for overcoming the injustice and unsustainability of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2009; Haraway 2015). We also need new types of relationships with nature and other non-human beings, as elaborated by Chtulucene (Haraway 2015; Tsing et al. 2017), which invites a subsequent epoch devoid of human exceptionalism in a multiple species world. Furthermore, feminists have contested the notion of Anthropos being linked to all of humanity, rather than the narrow masculinist logic of resource extraction (Gibson-Graham 2011), with Raworth (2014) even suggesting the neologism ‘Manthropocene’. For the postcolonial researchers (see Chapters 2 and 37 in this volume), Anthropocene becomes Anglocene, a problem caused, named and only discussed by Northern, anglophone ‘anthropocenologists’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016); and Plantationocene – a problem started with the colonization and social and ecological predations of colonial capitalism (Haraway 2015; Lewis and Maslin 2015). We should also mention the group still wedded to the third-person perspective on historical roots of the contemporary global challenges, tightly related to the AWG of stratigraphy geologists (predominantly Caucasian men), proclaiming a ‘Good Anthropocene’. Self-described as ecomodernists, they imagine the epoch in which humans achieve their Enlightenment destiny as the ‘Good Species’ through efficient, but not polluting technology, urbanization and decoupling of human subsistence from nature (Bloomquist et al. 2015). Ecomodernists fail to acknowledge the links between the global environmental destruction and the social metabolism of capitalist modernity, which is why critics describe their vision as a Promethean technofix (Hamilton 2015).

Anthropocene  95

(RE)THINKING THE ANTHROPOCENE Anthropocene as a concept on a metaphorical level successfully connects deep time with the future of humans (Lorimer 2017). However, the concept within itself contains paradoxes, seemingly strikingly implausible conceptions indicating a hidden and important truth, such as the universal human distribution of benefits and impacts containing waste inequalities, comparison of meagre humans and their short lives with mighty tectonic events, development through destruction, and similar (Domazet 2017). As Bonneuil (2015) argues, it seems that we need a plurality of narratives from many voices rather than a single grand narrative, but that would invite a plurality of concepts leaving us without the signifier for a unique global situation we are all in (though not all directly experiencing it in the same way). Who Are ‘We’ in the Anthropocene Even positioning yourself in relation to Anthropocene is a harder task than simply accepting that you are an individual from a species that plays a special role in a recent, though specific, geological epoch. Consider an analogy to Lewis’s (2019) illustration of a well-known cultural reference from a book on surrogacy and feminism. Lewis (2019) portrays Atwood’s (1985) The Handmaid’s Tale, as a type of wishful dystopia, or ‘dystopia that functions as utopia’. Although counterintuitive (that is, paradoxical) at first, Lewis asks us to imagine how much easier politics would be if the only thing standing in the way of peace and harmony were ‘evil religious fundamentalists with guns’ (Lewis 2019, p. 19). We would not need to worry about capitalism or racism, our own complicity in both or either, all women are equally oppressed. Applying this to climate change and environmental degradation, how much easier it would be if all of humanity were equally responsible for, and vulnerable to the environmental degradation and breakdown of stable climatic conditions. Would it not be easier if the only thing standing between unified humanity and mitigation of climate catastrophe were some fundamentalists with ‘smokestacks’? To think like that we would have to completely ignore the history of colonialism, oppression, capitalism and extractivism, together with the everyday social inequalities related to race, gender and poverty. However, we would also have to ignore our daily reliance on benefits of modernity. Climate change universalizes the future of humanity (Jasanoff 2011), and the Anthropocene conceptualized as a consequence of ‘human’ activities universalizes the guilt for the far-reaching and deadly changes to all of humanity. When humanity is portrayed as a unified historical and political body, we end up hiding the vast inequalities in wealth and power that characterize the contemporary 7-plus billion people on the planet. The educated and well-fed few then end up speaking for all, in constructing the history of how humanity got to the current state, and what ought to be done to overcome it (Domazet et al. 2014). Less than a fifth of the currently living humans live in nation states whose economies account for more than a half of greenhouse gas emissions and command most of the military and political power (UNDP 2013). Even the educated and well fed are of different socio-demographic backgrounds, if they are women, women of colour, or represent some other ‘minority group’, that they are probably well situated, and that their norms echo the hegemonic norms deeply rooted in the political institutions of their society, makes them prone to be in favour of the (capitalist) status quo. As Magnusdottir and Kronsell (2015) have found when studying the connection between the

96  Handbook of critical environmental politics representation of women in climate politics and the nature of climate governance policies in the Scandinavian countries; when female policy-makers are not ‘vulnerable’ or ‘activists’ (‘virtuous’ as authors say), but are a part of a high-consuming elite with large per-capita emissions, they often fit their views to the patriarchal institutional environment, and the outcome is that there is no difference in policies related to climate governance, despite greater female representation in the political bodies. There are humans on Earth who have at various times in history been considered more disposable than others, but there are also non-human beings who have no voice at all despite significant roles played in the stability of the planetary climate and metabolic circulation (Patel and Moore 2018). Tsing et al. (2017) write of ‘ghosts and monsters’ of the Anthropocene. Ghosts are broken interdependencies between species as a consequence of environmental destruction, erosion of soils, industrialization and extinction that multiplies across species. The leaky sewers and stinking garbage are also ghosts of the Anthropocene. Monsters of the Anthropocene pertain to all the living creatures living in symbiosis with other living creatures. For example, human bodies contain more bacterial cells than human cells; without bacteria our immune system does not develop correctly. When conditions suddenly shift, former life-sustaining relations sometimes turn deadly, as is explained in the example of the mutating gut bacteria in humans owing to low-dose chronic exposure to radioactivity (Tsing et al. 2017, p. M3). Another example is the commercial hunting of sea otters off the Pacific North America which led to a dramatic reduction of the marine kelp forests by removing the otters that keep sea urchins in check. The sea urchins overpopulated the area and destroyed all the kelp forests that were previously abundant, which became apparent only when otters were no longer there (Parker 2017). Ghosts and monsters are exposing the challenges of the Anthropocene in terms of complex relations, intersectionality of culture and nature, past and present times, and entanglements of all lives on Earth. For our purposes here, they are contenders for agents in the conception of Anthropocene beyond simple humans vs. nature perspective. Questions of Scale and of Universals in Friction The Anthropocene (as well as the Earth System concept, and global climate change) is a conceptual construct of world-making in which the living Earth is imagined and represented as a unitary object in need of an integrated governance, and not as a space of agreements among biological and political collectives (Miller and Edwards 2001). As noted by Jasanoff (2015, p. 44) ‘Seen as a collective phenomenon, aggregated at a global level, [global climate change] reduces the possibility of attributing responsibility to agents at lesser scales, such as specific nations or forms of consumption’. It disconnects nature from culture with profound ethical and political consequences (Latour 1993; Kinchy 2014). Dissociation of atmospheric carbon from the activity that produces it completely ignores the hybridity of nature–culture networks (Neimanis et al. 2015), and upscaling also makes the environmental crisis less governable (Kinchy 2014) as hardly anyone lives daily in the global realm. The reality of the Anthropocene in the globalized world is hard to comprehend. Tsing (2005) writes about friction, encounter between local and global in which a new messy reality is produced depending not only on culture, but also on different actors and their negotiation related to the universals. Universals are universal aspirations, as Tsing (2005, p. 1) notes: ‘Capitalism, science and politics all depend on global connections. Each spreads through aspi-

Anthropocene  97 rations to fulfil universal dreams and schemes.’ Those are, for example, ‘prosperity’, ‘human rights’, ‘freedom’, ‘growth’, ‘environmentalism’, but also ‘emancipation’ and ‘development’. However, the universal is what we cannot not want, even if it so often excludes us (Spivak 1999). That is, the universals offer us a most direct (and conceptual) chance to participate in the global stream of humanity. We cannot turn universals down, whether we place ourselves inside or outside the West; we are stuck with universals created in a cultural dialogue (Tsing 2005). However, universal claims do not make everything everywhere the same. As Tsing (2005) reminds us, the global in connection with the local produces a new reality, a reality of a universal co-produced in friction. Frictions are, therefore, ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnections across difference … Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’ (Tsing 2005, pp. 4–5). A great deal of our understanding of the Anthropocene arises in this way, through a combination of our own and our community’s particular position and the global material and historical flows. There are, nonetheless, considerable efforts in descaling, and at the same time integrating and managing the problem of the mentioned complexities. We know the global phenomenology of the Anthropocene and we know it is connected to contingent human activity; it did not just spring up on any of us. In spatial, rather than temporal, and geographical, rather than historical, thinking we find the connected concept of ‘anthromes’ (as opposed to more familiar biomes). Anthromes, or ‘anthropogenic biomes’, present the view of the terrestrial biosphere that takes into account the ‘sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems’ (Ellis and Ramankutty 2008, p. 439), providing an alternative global framework for ecological understanding of the terrestrial biosphere as it exists today. Unlike biomes, anthromes form heterogeneous landscape mosaics, which are moreover fractal in nature, reproducing the said heterogeneity across spatial scales from family units to global extent of networked human civilization (Domazet et al. 2020). We can attempt to understand the concept’s familiar patterns even when instantiated at different scales, from local to continental. When combined with a mapping of human cultural institutions collating the intentional aspect of human populations inhabiting an anthromic unit, this conception allows us to model the sustainability potential of a chosen unit under the global constraints. This puts the concept to use in constructing a mental model of a downscaled (for example, nation level) and therefore operational Anthropocene thinking (Domazet et al. 2020). Culture thus emerges as a key to explanation of how ‘we’ got here, how our aspirations and fulfilment led the planet to Anthropocene dead ends, and how and where to we could advance from this point on. Culture interprets the past and is making futures. Human Agency The history of how we got here is necessarily related to (1) the technological (material and intellectual) structures of energy conversion (incoming solar into intentional human use), (2) social structures that distribute energy and maintain the energy conversion structures, and (3) cultural institutions of governance of energy and society (Domazet 2017). Ever since there have been stable human groups, as humans are essentially social animals, there have been forms of (1)–(3), however basic from a current perspective. For Anthropocene to be a special

98  Handbook of critical environmental politics configuration on the face of the planet, something radically different had to have taken place in these groups. The techno-scientific understanding of Anthropocene (above) tends to argue that a discovery, an abrupt change, innovation in the domain of energy conversion technology (1 above) pushed the changes in the social organization of energy conversion (2 above) and the imaginary of social reproduction (within 3 above). Following on from the structure outlined in Domazet (2017), human agency’s most direct impact on (1)–(3) is in the domain of cultural institutions of governance of energy and society (that is, 3 above). Anthropocene, material, biological and socio-structural is an effect of how some humans wanted to govern energy distribution and maintenance of socio-technical structures in their own community, and eventually most of the world. Predictably, it is a question of power and agency. Anthropocene is an age of intense power accumulation (through profit) resting on intense utilization of energy from fossilized stocks of historical solar energy input. This framing matters as we need new intellectual paradigms within which to seek reversals of Anthropocene’s devastating impacts on the stability of the biosphere, without consigning human communities to misery. In the short time available for the deep structural change required, we are forced to try out novel reorganizations of the interaction between technology, society and cultural imaginary without waiting for lengthy causal-mechanical analyses of how exactly their multiple hypothesized fundamental entities around the globe impact each other. We can bridge the gap between the shock warnings of imminent catastrophe (Chapter 16 in this volume) and a purposeful reaction to them by the principle theory paradigm, summarizing the basics of the unexceptionable generalizations of the global phenomena. The fundamental intellectual task within this paradigm is to generate explanations of the Anthropocene and its possible non-catastrophic outcomes, derived from a set of formally expressed necessary conditions or constraints on possible phenomena in ontological domains (1)–(3) sketched previously (cf. Domazet 2017 for a lengthier exposition). Instead of debating the possible past alternative trajectories, it is of crucial importance to understand what type of cultural aspirations, universals, got us here, and drove the development in those domains. Who got where? (How) can we change? In what way should some change, and what should others do? This is the type of urgent questions within the concept of Anthropocene; urgency but not described as a crisis, for which the technocratic solutions would be sought (as proposed by the ecomodernists and other techno-managerialists), and as a grand challenge in need of radical solutions, first and foremost mental, or normative, followed by structural and technical ones. First we ought to discuss development, growth, technological innovation, freedom, humanity and nature. Second, we have to discuss not just universal aspirations toward human development, but also capitalist narratives of growth and the aims of technological innovation. Vying for dominance here are narratives of extraction of resources from nature’s cyclical processes through increasing collective knowledge of these cycles’ causal-mechanical structure (Mokyr 2017), aspiration to understand world ecology from the perspective of autonomous individuals dependent solely upon each other for survival (Pagden 2013), or from the perspective of capitalism’s hunger for constant cheapening of nature and labour (Patel and Moore 2018). In all these it was the change in cultural institutions of governance of energy and society that initiated the phase shift in the dominant technological mechanisms of energy conversion, and the distributional structures of useful energy and technology maintenance (1 and 2 above).

Anthropocene  99 Latour (1993) argued that the separation of nature from culture is a constitutional move of modernity. The rise of the Enlightenment ideals, primarily of rationality, has indeed brought to the (Western) modern world a new medicine, and science and technology, making a significant contribution to what we today understand as health and wealth we enjoy. However, this was powered by the fossil fuels, and the expectations of capitalist production. We did not produce a culture dematerialized and ontologically separated from nature, but a change in our cultural institutions which was sustained by a change in distributional structures and energy conversion technologies. Growing widespread use of fossil fuels through the 19th and 20th centuries was not driven by population growth – more healthy, long-lived people wanting more stuff – but by the competitiveness of capitalist production and an ever increasing effort to lower the cost of input: energy and labour, while accumulating profit (Malm 2016, Domazet 2017, Patel and Moore 2018). Without the cultural promise and desirability of profit accumulation, fossil energy’s technological infrastructures would not have been widely installed even if the growing human population had clamoured for their direct and indirect output. This does not pertain to humanity’s Enlightenment ideals of useful knowledge expansion and emancipation, but to expansion of capital through continuous incorporation of cheap nature and cheap humans (labour) (Moore 2015). Consequently, modernity brought us illnesses, dominance of economic values (see Chapter 23 in this volume), especially of the growth paradigm, the exploitation of humans, and alienation. The effects were industrialization, technological innovation as an instrument and utility of mass production and consumption, and exponential exploitation of natural resources. It resulted in environmental degradation, increasing scarcity of essential materials (such as agriculturally useful phosphorus), terrifying loss of biodiversity to the point of the sixth mass extinction, global sea-level rise and climate change, and unprecedented wealth inequality. The West has been aggressively exporting its ideal of modernity, its universals, to other peoples, and now we have come to understand that to continue and further spread the modern way of life we would soon require more than one planet, three would not be enough. In this concept of modernity, we end up with the planet we have tarnished and soon struggle to sustain livelihoods for all humans on it. Is this the modernity that we were all aspiring to as humans? Can we envisage any other type of modernity that can arise from facing the consequences of the ‘modern’ choices, and contingencies and paradoxes that it yielded? We must, but should clear the air of the paralysing intellectual myths that economic growth-driven mitigation of climate change will suddenly become just, that the Anthropocene condition was inadvertently produced by rational technological improvements in human livelihoods the world over, and that a technological change within the same distributional and cultural structures will neutralize the drivers of climate and biodiversity catastrophe (Domazet 2018). In Fossil Capital (2016), Andreas Malm argues that the characteristics of a capitalist organization of the economy were the dominant drivers of the shift from water (renewable) to coal (fossil) in the early industrial period. Malm claims that the modern fossil economy may not have started if it were not for other social, distributional and interpersonal factors favouring a push for its development against other readily available ‘useful-energy’ resources (flowing water). This implies that if we had organized our production around different energy transformations and their associated social distribution and governance aspects, the Anthropocene expansion might not have happened the way it did. The aim is not to open the argument here whether it would have happened in some other damaging way given capitalism’s historical

100  Handbook of critical environmental politics precedence to fossil energy-based industrialization (cf. Patel and Moore 2018), but to point to the role of cultural and distributional drivers of the technological change. The problem with the fossil economy is not just the pollution, environmental degradation and carbon dioxide, but also subjugation, exploitation, inequality and injustice. The established fossil-fuel industry drove the expansion of production and capital, and created instruments for its own further expansion into new territories. Heede (2014) shows that productive organizations (corporations in many cases) that have extracted, refined and sold the fossils fuels driving the climate change of the Anthropocene, account for nearly two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide emitted since 1750. Half of the culpable emissions of these giants have been released since 1986, almost within our lifetimes and well after political action to stop irreversible climate damage had been initiated (Rich 2019). Some humans, by this account, take vastly greater benefits from this than the rest of the human population. While some humans lack the energy for self-realization, others trade it as surpluses. Also, the available solar energy is sufficient for everyone’s nutrition, shelter and education. However, alternative renewable resources have been too often pushed out of the competition with the help of the political, psychological, cultural and economic power of the fossil fuel capital. This is the story of the Anthropocene, an epoch in which particular human power aspirations and parts of human distributional structure dominated the Earth to the sixth mass extinction.

CONCLUSION The community-level strategies of rapidly converting the biophysical, social and cultural characteristics of the Anthropocene into a more sustainable world-ecology outlook will require constructing a functional causal-mechanical understanding of interactions between justice and renewable energy technologies. For example, from a global longue durée perspective these strategies combine understanding of constraints in energy-distribution aspirations into a unified narrative with the decoupling of human self-fulfilment from the capitalist ideology of indefinite exponential economic growth. Given the lack of miraculous and rapidly scalable, impactless energy conversion technologies that would simply replace the useful energy supply without affecting distributional structure and the hegemonic conception of a good life, our change must begin with the cultural imaginary and distributional reorganization to make the fairest use of the available technological mechanisms. A change of the conceptual framework built around energy transformations, social structures, and social expectations and aspirations along the lines of degrowth thinking (Kallis et al. 2015) aims to combine the Enlightenment ideals with the possible society-energy sustainable futures. This will not instantaneously end the Anthropocene, but will steer it towards Anthropocene 2.0 with a non-catastrophic ending. We propose that a way out of paradoxes of the Anthropocene is to view the concept differently from a caricature humanity’s expansion against nature in a zero sum environment of a finite planet. Anthropocene is a paradox felt in friction of past and future, local and global, nature and humanity. It is a novel epoch in geological history given our understanding of human emancipation and cultural intentions, and our observation of the material changes in the biosphere. The key is to retell the story of Anthropocene with understanding of the contingencies in historical causal interactions between culture, society and energy (all broad signifiers for domains (1)–(3) presented previously), instead of as a geologically deterministic effect of

Anthropocene  101 a noble cultural cause. Transformations of the incoming and stored solar energy, distribution channels of that energy within human communities and the human world system, and governance institutions framing justifying and maintaining the transformations and distribution will play a key conceptual role in that retelling. The aspects of justice and injustice, colonization and decolonization as reflected in these concepts will provide the entry points for dissolving the paradox; opening up to a plausible conception based on the concealed truth of how some humans brought all humans to the point of geological significance.

NOTES 1. Principle theory model is a visionary understanding in the physical sciences that can, according to Einstein’s reflection on the development of special theory of relativity, offer a breakout from a conceptual blockade in times of crises of (Kuhnian) paradigms (Einstein 1919). As an explanatory model it does not speculate about a detailed causal mechanism (such as mechanistic gears and pulleys) through which constituent elements of the phenomena are connected, but establishes process generalizations about universal constraints of change of the said phenomena (thus, rules, principles and flow patterns). The latter are ‘based on the self-evident rationalizations of the experiences and axiomatic relationships in the conceptual structure’ (Domazet et al. 2020, p. 279). In an intellectual crisis of paradigm change, advantages of principle theories over constructive theories, according to Einstein, are ‘logical perfection and security of foundations’ (Einstein 1919, p. 13). The principles are generalizations extrapolated from empirical observation of phenomena that have been found to hold without exception, and are thus elevated to status of postulates on which to build interpretative understanding of the situation (Van Camp 2011). We argue that Anthropocene is a condition of combined ideological (through growth for profit accumulation) and socio-technical organization (capital-driven fossil fuel combustion), whose non-catastrophic conclusion requires regeneration, degrowth and commons governance in diverse locally meaningful ways. Otherwise, the hegemonic growth ideology remains intellectually locked-in in the paradox of emancipation and self-destruction on multiple levels of scale. 2. The bomb spike refers to the peak of the excess radiocarbon signal arising from atom bomb tests in 1964. As Waters et al. (2016) explain, detonation of the Trinity atomic device at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945 initiated local nuclear fallout from 1945 to 1951, whereas thermonuclear weapons tests generated a clear global signal from 1952 to 1980, the ‘bomb spike’ of excess 14°C, Pu-239, and other artificial radionuclides that peaks in 1964. The bomb spike is, as suggested by Lewis and Maslin (2015), a competing explanation to the dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in 1610, named the Orbis spike. This ‘bomb spike’ approximation is based upon a peak in atmospheric radiocarbon recorded in annual tree rings from pines in the park by Niepołomice Castle, Poland (Rakowski et al. 2013).

REFERENCES Angus, I. (2016), Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, New York: NYU Press. Atwood, M. (1985), The Handmaids’s Tale, Toronto: McClelland and Steward. Bilgrami, A. (2014), Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard: Harvard University Press. Bloomquist, L., Nordhausand, T. and Shellenberger, M. (2015), Nature Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation, Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute. Bonneuil, C. (2015), Geological turn: narratives of the Anthropocene, in C. Hamilton, F. Gemmene and C. Bonneuil (eds), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, New York: Routledge, pp. 17–31.

102  Handbook of critical environmental politics Bonneuil, C. and Fressoz, J.B. (2016), The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, London: Verso Books. Chakrabarty, D. (2009), The climate of history: four theses, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2), 197–222. Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. (2000), The ‘Anthropocene’, Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17–18. Domazet, M. (2017), Re-reading the anthropocene in ecology and justice, in M. Domazet (ed.), Ecology and Justice, Zagreb: Institute for Political Ecology, pp. 15–46. Domazet, M. (2018), Degrowth – a Sober Vision of Limiting Warming to 1.5°C, Berlin: Heinrrich-Böll-Stiftung. Domazet, M., Dolenec, D., Cvijanović, V., Tomašević, T., Walton, J.F., Doolan, K., et al. (2014), We need to change: ideas of growth and development in a time of crisis of fossil energy and capitalism, Etnološka tribina, 44 (37), 37–71. Domazet, M., Rilović, A., Ančić, B., Andersen, B., Richardson, L., Brajdić Vuković, M., et al. (2020), Mental models of sustainability: the degrowth doughnut model, in M. Goldstein and D. DellaSala (eds), Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes, vol. 5, s. 10, New York: Elsevier, pp. 276–86. Einstein, A. (1919), Time, space, and gravitation, The Times, 28 November, pp. 3–14, repr. 1954 in A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, New York: Bonanza Books, pp. 227–32. Ellis, E.C. and Ramankutty, N. (2008), Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6 (8), 439–47. Ellis, E., Maslin, M., Boivin, N. and Bauer, A. (2016), Involve social scientists in defining the Anthropocene, Nature, 540 (7632), 192–3. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2011), A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (1), 1–21. Hamilton, C. (2015), Getting the Anthropocene so wrong, The Anthropocene Review, 2 (2), 102–7. Hamilton, C. (2016), Define the Anthropocene in terms of the whole Earth, Nature, 536 (7616), 251. Haraway, D.J. (2015), Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6 (1), 159–65. Haraway, D.J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Heede, R. (2014), Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010, Climatic Change, 122 (1), 229–41. Jasanoff, S. (2011), Cosmopolitan knowledge: climate science and global civic epistemology, in J.S. Dryzek, R.B. Norgaard, and D. Schlosberg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–43. Jasanoff, S. (2015), Science and technology studies, in K. Backstrand and E. Lovbrand (eds), Research Handbook on Climate Governance, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 36–48. Kallis, G., Demaria, F. and D’Alisa, G. (2015), Introduction: degrowth, in G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds), Degrowth. A Vocabulary for a New Era, Abingdon and London: Routledge. Kinchy, A.J. (2014), Political scale and conflicts over knowledge production, in D.L. Kleinman and K. Moore (eds), Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 246–62. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewis, S. (2019), Full Surrogacy Now, London: Verso Books. Lewis, S.L. and Maslin, M.A. (2015), Defining the Anthropocene, Nature, 519 (7542), 171–80. Lorimer, J. (2017), The Anthropo-scene: a guide for the perplexed, Social Studies of Science, 47 (1), 117–42. Magnusdottir, G.L. and Kronsell, A. (2015), The (in) visibility of gender in Scandinavian climate policy-making, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17 (2), 308–26. Malm, A. (2016), Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso Books. Miller, C.A. and Edwards, P.N. (eds) (2001), Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mokyr, J. (2017), A Culture of Growth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moore, J.W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso.

Anthropocene  103 Moore, J.W. (2017), The Capitalocene, part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, Journal of Peasant Studies, 44 (3), 594–630. Neimanis, A., Asberg, C. and Hayes, S. (2015), Post-humanist imaginaries, in K. Bӓckstrand and E. Lӧvbrand (eds), Research Handbook on Climate Governance, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 480–90. Newson, L.A. (1992), the demographic collapse of Native Peoples of the Americas, 1492–1650. Proceedings of the British Academy, 81, 247–88. Nichols, K. and Gogineni, B. (2018), The Anthropocene’s dating problem: insights from the geosciences and the humanities, The Anthropocene Review, 5 (2), 107–19. Pagden, A. (2013), The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parikka, J. (2014), The Anthrobscene, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Parker, I.M. (2017), ‘Remembering in our amnesia, seeing in our blindness’, in A.L. Tsing, N. Bubandt, E. Gan and H.A. Swanson (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. M155–68. Patel, R. and Moore, J. (2018), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, London: Verso. Rakowski, A.Z., Nadeau, M.J., Nakamura, T., Pazdur, A., Pawełczyk, S. and Piotrowska, N. (2013), Radiocarbon method in environmental monitoring of CO2 emission, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, 294, 503–7. Raworth, K. (2014), Must the Anthropocene be a Manthropocene? Guardian, 20 October, accessed 15 January 2020 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​commentisfree/​2014/​oct/​20/​anthropocene​-working​ -group​-science​-gender​-bias. Rich, N. (2019), Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change, London: Picador. Sklair, L. (2017), Sleepwalking through the Anthropocene, British Journal of Sociology, 68 (4), 775–84. Spivak, G.C. (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steffen, W., Crutzen, P.J. and McNeill, J.R. (2007), The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature, AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36 (8), 614–21. Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O. and Ludwig, C. (2015), The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the great acceleration, The Anthropocene Review, 2 (1), 81–98. Subramanian, M. (2019), Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch, Nature, 21 May. Trischler, H. (2016), The Anthropocene, NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 24 (3), 309–35. Tsing, A.L. (2005), Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A.L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E. and Swanson, H.A. (eds) (2017), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2013), Human Development Report 2013. The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, New York: UNDP. Van Camp, W. (2011), Principle theories, constructive theories, and explanation in modern physics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 42 (1), 23–31. Vernadsky, V.I. (1945), The biosphere and the noosphere, American Scientist, 33 (1), 1–12. Waters, C.N., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., Barnosky, A.D., Poirier, C., Gałuszka, A., et al. (2016), The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene, Science, 351 (6269), accessed 21 April 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1126/​science​.aad2622. Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Steffen, W. and Crutzen, P. (2010), Response to ‘The Anthropocene forces us to reconsider adaptationist models of human-environment interactions’, Environmental Science & Technology, 44 (16), 6008.

6. Buen Vivir Philipp Altmann

INTRODUCTION The concept of Buen Vivir (in Spanish; in Quechua or Kichwa, Sumak Kawsay or Alli Kawsay,1 in Aymara Suma Qamaña, translated here as the Good Life) reached international attention with the new Constitutions of Ecuador (in 2008) and Bolivia (in 2009) and the debates around them and their innovations, such as rights of nature, and global citizenship. In this context, it was adapted relatively quickly in global environmentalist movements, primarily through the translation of central activists and intellectuals. This chapter presents a condensed overview of the development of the concept of the Good Life in its different moments, always focusing on its political aspects and uses. It explores the development of this concept in the indigenous movement of Ecuador, includes some references to its appearance in Bolivia, sketches the impact of its inclusion in the Constitution of Ecuador, and traces its history since then, especially, on the global level. Thus, this chapter will not engage in a debate on anthropological evidence, such as the Good Life among the Achuar (Descola 1986), the Shuar (Mader 1999),2 or the Canelos Kichwa (Whitten and Whitten 2015). Buen Vivir as a political concept has developed with and through the indigenous movement since its beginnings and served as a condensation of both identitarian strategies and platform to present political demands to the state and the wider society (Chapters 2, 29 and 37 in this volume).

BUEN VIVIR BEFORE BUEN VIVIR For some time, the consensus of many researchers was that the Good Life as a political concept was born in the 1990s in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán 2015). This changed with the work of Inuca Lechón (2017), who, as a member of the indigenous movement and Kichwa intellectual, had access to the archives of the movement and the texts in Kichwa. His research showed that the Good Life developed first as part of an internal discourse or internal framing within the movement that was not intended to communicate demands to the non-indigenous society but to organize and mobilize the members of the movement. The indigenous movement has been a significant political and social actor of Ecuadorian society since the 1920s. While its organizations shifted from a socialist view on society as class-based, influenced by the Socialist and the Communist Party, to an identitarian view on society as based on racist discrimination, influenced by the church, they finally arrived, in the 1980s, at the position that the problems of the indigenous population need to be understood in their double dimension as both class-based and ethnic. The Good Life appeared in the 1930s and 1940s in texts of the organizations of the indigenous movement of that time, mainly land-worker unions connected to the Communist Party. The journal of the movement at that time, Ñucanchic allpa, includes in its edition from 10 104

Buen Vivir  105 February 1939 a call in Kichwa to its readers to send their children to school and to organize in unions, cooperatives or otherwise. This call is backed by the claim that ‘in the past, everyone lived well, they did not lack anything, they knew everything’ (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 159). Thus, in the beginning, the Good Life – still as Alli Kawsay – highlights the relationship of a better pre-colonial past with self-organizing and knowledge. A later edition of the same journal, from 28 May 1940, insists on overcoming 400 years of enslavement and poverty to put the Good Life into practice (Inuca Lechón 2017, pp. 159–60). In the 1940s, this concept was included in the educational material that was also used by the clandestine schools of the indigenous movement (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 158). In the field of education, the Good Life had a first career that later permitted re-translations into a more political usage. Especially in the material produced during the educational expansion and the alphabetization campaigns of the 1980s, the Good Life had a prominent role. In a textbook from 1982, Sumak Kawsay is presented as related to a located knowledge and wisdom (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 164). Other books from 1984 and 1986 went in similar directions. In a textbook from 1990, Alli Kawsay is ‘embedded in the proposal to educate from the knowledges of the Kichwa world’ (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 167). During that time, the Good Life in its different versions was reintegrated into the political discourse of the movement. It was understood as a firm rejection of the attempts to integrate the indigenous peoples into a non-indigenous society, especially by non-government organizations (NGOs) and churches, and a proposal for an internal integration of the indigenous peoples (Inuca Lechón 2017, pp. 162–3). Sumak Kawsay became the motto of a new national indigenous organization created in 1980 that would later turn into the center of the indigenous movement in Ecuador (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 156). In particular, a text written by Conterón and de Viteri in 1984 impacted on the discursive development of the renewed movement. It uses a motto in Kichwa that could be translated as ‘with unity for land, for the beautiful life until freedom’ (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 170). With this, the fight for land and Sumak Kawsay is also a battle for liberation. The Spanish sections of the text contain ideas that show how the organizations of that time inserted the Good Life into the discourse of the movement to strengthen and politicize indigenous identity. Indigenous peoples are consistently understood as indigenous nationalities fighting ‘for land, health, education, social equality, for a change of society, for a new society, without exploitation, domination, and discrimination’ (Conterón and de Viteri 1984, p. 2). As nationalities, they have their own culture and history, their own languages and literatures, elements of their own religions, and proper forms of economic, social, and political organization (Conterón and de Viteri 1984, p. 7). The land is defined as the basis of all this (Conterón and de Viteri 1984, pp. 5, 17).3 This discursive development is not isolated. Around the same time, several regional indigenous organizations pronounced similar demands. During the 1980s, the indigenous movement defined a discourse that from 1986 would be manifested in the national indigenous organization Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). In their first publication, they condense this development into a few lines: The indigenous movement created conceptual instruments, and we discussed the coherence of our theoretical postulates with the daily practice. Thus, we adopted the concept of indigenous nationality, understood as a community of history, language, culture and territory; we fight so that the plurinational, pluriethnic, and plurilingual character of the Ecuadorian society will be recognized; for the recognition of the native territories as they are the basis of our subsistence and of the social and cultural reproduction of the different nationalities; for the respect of the diversity and cultural identity,

106  Handbook of critical environmental politics for the right to an education in the native language with contents according to every culture, for the right to a self-managed development and for the right to have a political representation that allows to defend our rights and raise our voice. (CONAIE 1989, p. 279)

With this, the discursive context where Good Life could develop as a political concept is sketched. However, it would not be until the 1990s that it received more definition as a proper concept, and it would not be until 2007 that it would become part of the discourse of the indigenous movement on a national level.

FROM AMAZONIAN SUMAK KAWSAY TO ECUADORIAN BUEN VIVIR The 1990s were a time of widespread mobilizations of the indigenous movement in Ecuador. During the first national indigenous uprising in 1990, the movement became visible and communicated its ideas of a plurinational state, land reform, agricultural credits and others to the government and the general public. Then, in 1992, the indigenous organizations of the Amazon marched to Quito in order to demand territorial autonomy. Finally, in 1994, in a second national indigenous uprising, the movement showed the stability of its demands and capacity to mobilize. It had become a central actor in Ecuadorian politics. This moment of massive mobilization brought public attention to the movement. Suddenly, its demands were heard – but not always understood. In this context, the Good Life appears for the first time publicly and in a communication that includes the non-indigenous society, in 1992, a few months after the indigenous march. The Plan Amazanga is a study of the Kichwa communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon carried out by a group of indigenous intellectuals led by Alfredo Viteri for the indigenous organization of the Pastaza province. It focuses on the management of renewable resources and refers to the philosophy of the Kichwa peoples of the Amazon as opposed to Western ideas of sustainability (Silva 2003, p. 85). This search for points of contrast shows the step from an internal discourse to an external one. The Good Life shifts from strengthening and politicizing indigenous identity to making it connectable to global discourses, especially those that are development-related. This is connected to the growing importance of NGOs and development actors for the indigenous organizations, especially in the Amazon. With this, it is about making oneself understandable to external actors, the search for allies and the definition of enemies. After the assertion of a general degradation of nature, culture, and society in the region, as well as a weakening of the indigenous organizations, the Plan Amazanga develops a complex cosmovision around spirits and gods where ‘there is a communion of the human with the ecosystem’ (Viteri et al. 1992, p. 4) and a way to maintain this: the Sacha Runa Yachai (knowledge and wisdom of the human beings of the jungle). This specific knowledge is based on three interrelated principles: Sumac Allpa (land without evil), Sumac Causai4 (pure and harmonic life), and Sacha Causa Ricsina (the art of understanding: understand–comprehend– know–convince yourself–be sure–see). Sumac Causai is defined as follows: It is the theory and practice that shows how one ought to live. This principle makes it evident that life is the unifying substrate of everything. It defines the equalitarian, communitarian, integrative and reciprocal sense between the communities of the Kichwa society. Present are: the true word, hospitality, reciprocity and solidarity, sharing, the ethics of communitarian work, respect for wisdom, and

Buen Vivir  107 respect for freedom. The vigor of Sumac Causai is fed from the permanent dialogue with nature and its spiritual dimension. (Viteri et al. 1992, p. 56)

The first text distributed outside of Ecuador5 on this topic, written by another member of the traditionally influential Viteri family of Sarayaku, Carlos Viteri, further develops this cosmovision’s spiritual background. The territory where the Sarayaku-Kichwa live is defined by spirits and gods and the souls of the ancestors. They can communicate with shamans and, thus, establish the rules for the search for a sumac allpa that is a necessary condition for a sumac causai. This idea is also relevant to foreigners and non-indigenous (Viteri Gualinga 1993, p. 150). The Good Life had turned into an invitation to the general society to look for alternatives to a destructive reality. A connection between Plan Amazanga and the text by Carlos Viteri to the earlier development can be suspected: on the one hand, several of the involved leaders were teachers of the system of intercultural bilingual education. They had worked with the textbooks Inuca revised. On the other hand, the already quoted Rosa Vacacela de Viteri was co-founder of the Instituto Amazanga, an indigenous-run institute dedicated to research on indigenous cultures and related to many of the texts discussed here. The detailed conceptual development of the Good Life especially by Viteri Gualinga led some researchers to consider Buen Vivir an ‘Amazonian Ecuadorian social phenomenon’ (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán 2015, p. 329). However, it should be evident by now that it was created through the work of the whole Ecuadorian indigenous movement with inspiration from external actors, such as the Catholic Church and educational actors, and that it goes beyond its anthropological anchoring in the Amazon. The next step, national diffusion within the indigenous movement, was reached in the early 2000s. In 2000 and 2001, the journal of the indigenous organization of the highlands, ECUARUNARI, published two articles that mention Sumak Kawsay, specifying some of the contents already revised here, such as the idea of a harmonious relationship between humankind and nature (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 171). In 2002,6 Carlos Viteri published another text on the Good Life that would become well known. In this text, he explains that there is no conception of development among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, but rather a notion of the Good Life understood as central to the indigenous philosophy of life and in permanent construction (Viteri Gualinga 2002, p. 1). Knowledge is here defined as ‘the basic condition for the management of the local ecological and spiritual bases and the autonomous solution of necessities’ (Viteri Gualinga 2002, p. 2). Therefore, it is the basis for an adequate adaptation to the environment. This is by no means a return to pre-Hispanic times, but instead the planned and controlled integration of external knowledge into local self-management (Viteri Gualinga 2002, p. 5). This text had a central role in the diffusion of the Good Life as it was here where Sumak Kawsay was translated for the first time as Buen Vivir, and, thus, made understandable for the Spanish-speaking society (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán 2015, p. 316). In his unpublished thesis in anthropology, Viteri further develops his reflections on Sumak Kawsay in Sarayaku, shifting its understanding slightly. Quoting Descola (1986) and Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and his proposal of an ethno-development (Viteri Gualinga 2003, pp. 9–10), Viteri defines ‘súmak káusai as the axis of a true self-determination’ (Viteri Gualinga, 2003, p. iv) that is directed against the bad life (llaki káusai), caused by poverty, violence, and ignorance (Viteri Gualinga 2003, p. 82). As the philosophy of life of the Sarayaku-Kichwa, it represents their knowledge, norms and values, and therefore is the basis

108  Handbook of critical environmental politics for the satisfaction of needs for the moment (Viteri Gualinga 2003, p. 1). All that is related to the land and the production of abundance in relation to nature. It is about munai allpa, the ideal and desirable land that is fertile and can be used for different types of activities and crops, as well as about the forest where abundant game can be hunted (Viteri Gualinga 2003, pp. 47–9). The idea would be to have enough and avoid excess – this ‘shows that it is possible to apply the parameters of súmak káusai to the monetary economy’ (Viteri Gualinga 2003, p. 86). By this time, it was evident to Viteri that this concept had an important political potential: The most convincing long-term weapon that the people of Sarayaku have in this unequal economic and epistemological ‘war’, expressed in the exploitation of petrol, is the definition of their present and future process in the paradigm of súmak káusai. This implies the strengthening and the recuperation of values as the basis of the cognitive and identitarian strength of the people of Sarayaku. (Viteri Gualinga 2003, p. 85)

The trajectory of Buen Vivir in the 1990s shows what Inuca Lechón terms yachay tinkuy – a meeting and confrontation of knowledges and cultures. While the earlier versions were directed towards a political redefinition of indigenous identity influenced by leftist parties and, later, the Catholic Church, the Amazonian texts of the 1990s and early 2000s go a step further. The indigenous identity is the unquestionable basis for far more radical demands for autonomy and self-determination and the rejection of capitalism and colonialism (Inuca Lechón 2017, p. 157). Another new idea introduced in the 1990s is the ecological view of Sumak Kawsay as a way to protect nature and the relationship of humankind to its environment. The Good Life was presented explicitly as a possibility for dealing with the destruction of nature and natural resources. This proved to be a promising point of connection to Western discourses. In a widely read article, Viteri Gualinga (2002) was quoted by Acosta (2002, p. 46) in a widely read article, as an example of critique of the Eurocentric location of the idea of development, initiating the discussions on Buen Vivir in the non-indigenous society. Beyond some less influential mentions, the Good Life reappears in discussions on the Ecuadorian Constitution in 2007 and 2008, introduced by Alberto Acosta, Mónica Chuji, Pablo Dávalos, and others.7 The indigenous movement and its main organization, CONAIE, also presented their proposals, where Good Life had a relevant role. For them, Buen Vivir is tied to the ‘construction of a postcapitalist and postcolonial society … a society that recovers the teachings of its ancestral peoples and can live in harmony with our Pachamama’ (CONAIE 2007, p. 1). At that time, CONAIE understood the Good Life as related most importantly to the economy. The economy should not be guided by the idea of rentability but by human well-being (CONAIE 2007, p. 7). This can be achieved through the ancestral indigenous principles of reciprocity around the Sumak Kawsay (CONAIE 2007, p. 21). Finally, the Good Life was introduced prominently in the Constitution of 2008 and, consequently, in state policy, such as the Development Plans 2009–2013 and 2013–2017.8 The Constitution also meant a division of the different groups fighting for a Buen Vivir: the state had a socialist and developmentalist understanding of it, the eco-socialists and post-developmentalists, such as Acosta, saw it as a way by which to overcome destructive capitalist growth, and the indigenous movement as a radicalization of their already established discourse around indigenous nationalities, territorial autonomy and plurinationality (Hidalgo-Capitán and Cubillo-Guevara 2017). These three roughly defined groups had a different way of diffusing the concept, thereby affecting its global perception.

Buen Vivir  109

BUEN VIVIR AS A GLOBAL POLITICAL CONCEPT Alberto Acosta had to step down as the president of the constituent assembly shortly before concluding the draft of the Constitution because he refused to put a hold on the discussions to issue the text quickly, as President Rafael Correa planned. With this, he broke with the government of Correa, president of Ecuador between 2007 and 2017, and turned to intensive work to diffuse globally his understanding of Buen Vivir. His eco-socialist and post-development view of the Good Life was received widely in academia and social movements around the idea of degrowth. Acosta was already well connected internationally, especially in Germany, where he had lived and studied in the 1970s. His first text in English on the topic was published in 2009 and connected Buen Vivir to plurinationality and the rights of nature, both innovations of the Constitution. Buen Vivir is understood as part of planning for development that leads the ‘construction of an equal, egalitarian and free society … only … possible through the participation of all’ (Acosta 2009, p. 109). Thus, the idea of development itself is brought into question, and an age of post-development prepared (Acosta 2009, p. 110). The Good Life is presented as ‘harmonious relations among human beings individually and collectively and with nature’ (Acosta 2009, p. 112). It must be guaranteed by social, economic and environmental rights that expand social capacities and economic solidarity. For Acosta, the Correa government is unwilling to make the necessary changes; instead, it sticks to neo-developmentalist practices that are unable to overcome neoliberalism. A later text by Acosta seeks explicitly for connections to other discourses. While he repeats the main contents already reproduced here, he adds the concept’s potentiality to overcome historical mechanisms of exclusion, as well as a broad series of influences for Buen Vivir: The Buen Vivir, as a proposal in construction, questions the Western concept of well-being and, as a fighting proposal, confronts the coloniality of power. Thus, without minimizing this contribution of the marginalized, we must accept that the Andean vision is not the only fountain of inspiration to impulse the Buen Vivir. Even from circles of the Western culture, many voices have arisen already long ago that could be somehow on the same page with this indigenous vision and vice versa. The concept of Buen Vivir has not only a historical anchoring in the indigenous world, it is also sustained in some universal philosophical principles: Aristotelian, Marxist, ecological, feminist, cooperativist, humanist … (Acosta 2010, p. 13)

The idea of the Good Life being a proposal in construction can be found in Viteri Gualinga (2002, p. 1). However, the step from the general openness of the concept to a wide connectability with similar concepts of different contexts is new. This decisive innovation of Acosta enabled the later global career of the Good Life. This can be seen in a text that Acosta writes with two of the most prominent intellectuals of the degrowth movement. After a short reference to the indigenous background of the Good Life and other concepts, they come to a concise definition of what it means: Buen Vivir does not synthesize a mono-cultural proposal, as is the case of ‘development’. It is a plural concept (it would be better to speak of ‘Good Livings’ or ‘Good co-livings’) arising especially from indigenous peoples, without denying the technological advantages of the modern world or possible contributions from other cultures and knowledge that challenge the presuppositions of dominant modernity. Buen Vivir, as an open and under-construction proposal, enables the formulation of alternative views of life that encompass harmony with nature (as a part of it), cultural diversity and pluriculturalism, co-existence within and between communities, inseparability of all life’s elements (material, social, spiritual), opposition to the concept of perpetual accumulation, return to use values

110  Handbook of critical environmental politics and movement even beyond the concept of value. Buen Vivir, in short, proposes a civilizational change. (Kothari et al. 2014, p. 367–8)

In the enterprise of diffusing Buen Vivir in the context of post-development and degrowth, Acosta is accompanied by another scholar-activist, Eduardo Gudynas. While Gudynas is well-known for developing the concept of neo-extractivism and his defense of the rights of nature, his engagement with the Good Life is more recent. This could be owing to the activities of both Acosta and Gudynas (and other relevant proponents of Buen Vivir) in the Grupo Permanente de Alternativas al Desarrollo (Permanent Group of Alternatives to Development), a working group organized in 2010 by the regional office of the German Foundation Rosa-Luxemburg in Ecuador. In the short text Gudynas contributed to a book on degrowth, he makes clear that the primary meaning of Buen Vivir resides in the critique of and the proposal of alternatives to the conventional idea of development (Gudynas 2014, p. 201). He distinguishes different uses of Buen Vivir, highlighting that its substantive use corresponds closely with degrowth as it would be an alternative to development and not, as other uses, development alternatives (Gudynas 2014, p. 202). This substantive version of Buen Vivir is plural, open, and under construction. It criticizes the ideas of a historical linearity of development in favor of a multiplicity of historical processes and the connection of welfare and well-being with material consumption. This is why it is based on a diversity of knowledges that coexist in an intercultural manner without Western dominance. The separation of society and nature, and therefore the opposition of culture and nature that is constituent of Western philosophy, is rejected in favor of ‘communities of extended or relational ontologies’ (Gudynas 2014, p. 202). All this turns Buen Vivir into a non-essentialist perspective that can be adapted to every context. Its intercultural perspective and relational ontology turn it into a more radical concept than degrowth itself (Gudynas 2014, p. 204). Gudynas distinguishes the Bolivian Suma Qamaña and the Ecuadorian Sumak Kawsay. The main difference is that the Bolivian version has a deep understanding of community (especially the Ayllu) that the Ecuadorian version lacks (Gudynas 2014, pp. 202–3). He is mistaken; the Ecuadorian Sumak Kawsay and its variants build on a strong concept of community beyond the European understanding. Of more relevance for the global diffusion of Buen Vivir is the insistence on its basis in Western thought. ‘The two most important sources are environmentalism, which proposes the rights of Nature, and new feminism, which questions patriarchal centralities and claims an ethic of care’ (Gudynas 2014, p. 203). At this point, the indigenous peoples are effectively expropriated of their culture. Indigenous movements as political actors do not appear at all. For Gudynas: Buen Vivir represents the confluence of knowledge of different origins, and it cannot be restricted to be an ‘indigenous’ idea. This is because there is no such thing as an indigenous knowledge in the singular, as this is a colonial category. Thus, Buen Vivir incorporates some concepts and sensibilities of some indigenous groups, as each one has a specific cultural background the suma qamaña posture of Buen Vivir among Aymara communities is not the same as sumak kawsay of the Kichwas in Ecuador. These are positions pertaining to each social and environmental context, which, furthermore, have been affected, hybridized or mixed in different ways with present-day or modern thought’. (Gudynas 2014, p. 203)

The Buen Vivir developed by the indigenous movement in Ecuador over 80 years is, thus, nothing more than one of many variants, all with the same value and legitimation. This

Buen Vivir  111 weaponized relativism corresponds with what Grosfoguel terms epistemic extractivism: an attitude that ‘tries to extract ideas in order to colonize them by subsuming them under the parameters of Western culture and episteme’ (Grosfoguel 2016, pp. 38–9) instead of trying to understand them in their context and a horizontal dialogue. It is an act of decontextualization and depoliticization in order to resignify indigenous ideas for Western audiences. By this, some intellectuals can accumulate symbolic capital within academia, excluding and invisibilizing the original producers of the knowledge. Therefore, the same people that are stripped from their natural resources by economic extractivism, are stripped of their knowledge by epistemic extractivism. Applied to our example, Acosta and Gudynas appear as the ‘inventors’ of Buen Vivir – at least, in what is relevant to the Western world. This gives them prestige and influence not only within academia, but also in progressive social movements. With this, the unequal global division of knowledge production and the inherent disqualification of non-Western knowledges is reinforced (Grosfoguel 2016, p. 40).9 This leads to the fatal political consequences of depoliticization, anthropologization – in the sense that Buen Vivir is understood as unpolitical cultural artifact – and invisibilization of a politically important concept and the social movement behind it and turns Buen Vivir into an empty concept that contains hardly anything beyond good intentions. This is especially interesting as another intellectual who also is critical to development, but less well connected to European social movements, accomplishes a much deeper and respectful understanding of the Good Life. Arturo Escobar understands the relational ontologies expressed in, for instance, Sumak Kawsay, as part of ontological struggles that ‘have the potential to de-naturalize the hegemonic distinction between nature and culture on which the liberal order is founded’ (Escobar 2010, p. 39). Thus, they could help to overcome ‘two of the most damaging features of modern theory: pervasive binarisms, and the reduction of complexity’ (Escobar, 2010, pp. 40–41). This is also why the integration of Sumak Kawsay into the logic of the European-originated nation-state is at least complicated. Escobar also offers an understanding of the tendency to invisibilize the indigenous movements as originators of the concept: ‘Indigenous claims are usually taken as “beliefs”’ (Escobar 2010, p. 40) and not as systematically produced political demands. This is related to the inability of the Northern traditions of thought to understand the spatiality of Sumak Kawsay and the concepts of interculturality and plurinationality (Escobar 2010, p. 42). Highlighting the constructed character of spatiality and community could also be a way to overcome the essentialist views of some authors. There is not much to say about the state-version of Buen Vivir. The political changes since 2017 connected with the presidency of Lenin Moreno and his break with the project of Correa slowly eliminated it from public policy in Ecuador. Moreover, the discussion within international party politics and parliaments lost track after the end of the Yasuní-ITT initiative10 in 2013. The indigenous movement took a long time to integrate Sumak Kawsay fully into its discourse. While it appeared on the national level for the first time in the discussions over the Constitution of 2008, it was only in the Political Project – a comprehensive text of demands and main concepts – of the CONAIE of 2012/13 that it was included fully and interrelated organically to the other concepts. In this text, CONAIE distinguishes the state-version of Buen Vivir, connected to Western ideas of welfare, from the indigenous version of Sumak Kawsay. Sumak Kawsay is developed in ‘the communitarian life system’ (CONAIE 2013, pp. 38–9). It is about an alternative to capitalism and other destructive forms of development that break

112  Handbook of critical environmental politics with the equilibrium between society and nature and ‘proposes to guarantee the life of human beings in harmonic relationship with nature’ (CONAIE 2013, pp. 39–40). This is connected to principles of other indigenous peoples that refer to a ‘land without evil’. While they repeat the main contents, already known from the texts quoted earlier, the focus is slightly different. In this document, CONAIE openly introduces an indigenous communitarianism as part of its discourse. This shift is expressed in its understanding of Sumak Kawsay: Sumak Kawsay originated from the family and communitarian matrix, in the millennial historical process, it is based on the collective and communitarian vision of the goods, means of production. It is born from the communitarian regime, where there is no concept of property or private, but where the means and property are communitarian. (CONAIE 2013, p. 39)

This definition of the Good Life goes beyond the Amazonian version and includes the socialist and communitarian ideas present in the movement. With this, CONAIE tries to offer a generic Good Life that is inserted in their discourse and main demands and, at the same time, can connect to the different local versions of the Good Life that exist in their member organizations. It is worth noting that CONAIE maintains the idea of an openness of the concept, but grounds it in concrete territories and communities, unlike the other proponents of the Good Life discussed here. The Good Life they demand does not break with the Sumak Kawsay of Sarayaku, for instance; instead, it offers a more general framework that respects the concrete and local contents. Nevertheless, Good Life lost track also in the discourse of the indigenous movement in Ecuador. The Rebellion of October 2019 – a general uprising against the government’s neoliberal policy led by the indigenous movement – took place with significant participation of the indigenous movement and was an opportunity for them to present their demands (Altmann 2020). While Sumak Kawsay is still in those demands, it lost its centrality to other concepts, such as post-extractivism or territorial autonomy. Instead of Sumak Kawsay, other, more localized concepts, such as Kawsak Sacha,11 the living forest, have been put forward in recent years, especially by the Kichwa of Sarayaku. Kawsak Sacha is also the concept that has been more actively promoted than Sumak Kawsay by the indigenous movement and its members on an international level, with several intellectuals, most prominently Patricia Gualinga, presenting it in different countries and focusing mainly on social movements.

CONCLUSION: DEATH OF THE GOOD LIFE? The attentive reader will have noticed that the references to original texts discussed here end around 2015. This is not owing to an end of the academic debate on Buen Vivir, where the work of Hidalgo-Capitán, Cubillo-Guevara, Lalander, Cuestas-Caza, and others continue to introduce new and important aspects and material, especially concerning its development in the Amazon and its local practices in indigenous communities. Instead, there is a double tendency: as already revised in the previous section, since the second half of the 2010s, the Good Life lost relevance in Ecuador and among its defendants there. Also, the social movements outside Ecuador that received Buen Vivir with interest in the years around 2010 shifted their focus towards more local fights or other concepts. For Germany, a decline in the discussions on Buen Vivir can be detected after the Degrowth Conference in Leipzig in 2014 where it was discussed prominently. After that, several influential organizations – political parties and

Buen Vivir  113 foundations, Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action (ATTAC) and local initiatives – lost interest in Buen Vivir and started favoring more concrete fights, for instance, against coal exploitation. For the moment, it seems that the Good Life has been reduced to a debate within a section of the degrowth movement, and is losing ground in the wider ecologist movement. While the Good Life is no longer as appealing as it has been for some years, its short history as a globally relevant political concept can leave some lessons. For its inventors, the indigenous movement, especially in Ecuador, Sumak Kawsay fortified the much older demands for territorial autonomy by including cultural aspects and the role of the community. For the Ecuadorian government (and, to a lesser degree, the Bolivian government), Buen Vivir was the motto for an inclusive social policy with some elements of environmental protection. As the government in Ecuador shifted back to a neoliberal view since 2017, Buen Vivir became pointless for them. In the degrowth and post-development movement, the Good Life was an opportunity to open a new horizon of possibilities. While the international background is not as relevant today as it was in 2010, the new understandings of community and the centrality of locality continues. The Good Life may be dead as a single concept, but it lives on in a new and broader way to understand reality.

NOTES 1. For a discussion of the differences between Buen Vivir, Sumak Kawsay and Alli Kawsay, see Inuca Lechón (2017). 2. This book is the Spanish translation of an unpublished text of 1996. 3. It is worth noting that this text also condemns research on indigenous nationalities that is not controlled by them (Conterón and de Viteri 1984, p. 22). 4. Note that the way how Sumak Kawsay is written changes over time. 5. In the same year, 1993, the Good Life appears in the Bolivian discourse, close to radical Indianist institutions (Nikolaus 2012). The relationship between the Bolivian Good Life and the Ecuadorian Good Life is yet to be established. 6. Circulating since 2000 as a manuscript. 7. A compilation of some major contributions can be found in Hidalgo-Capitán et al. (2014). 8. For an analysis of the Development Plan 2013–2017, see Cuestas-Caza et al. (2020). 9. The criticism of Grosfoguel is directed primarily against Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano who were translators of Buen Vivir and other concepts into the post-colonial and decolonial discourse. 10. This initiative, to not exploit petrol in a natural park in the Amazon in exchange for the creation of an international fund that would be dedicated to education and welfare politics in Ecuador, was developed by Acosta and others and ended owing to the lack of interest in the countries of the Global North. 11. https://​kawsaksacha​.org/​(accessed 3 May 2022).

REFERENCES Acosta, A. (2002), En la encrucijada de la globalización: algunas reflexiones desde el ámbito local, nacional y global, Ecuador Debate, 55 (April), 37–55. Acosta, A. (2009), The rights of nature, new forms of citizenship and the Good Life – echoes of the Constitución de Montecristi in Ecuador, Critical Currents, 6 (October), 108–12. Acosta, A. (2010), El Buen Vivir en el camino del post-desarrollo. Una lectura desde la Constitución de Montecristi, FES-ILDIS Policy Paper No. 9, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Ecuador, Quito, p. 43.

114  Handbook of critical environmental politics Altmann, P. (2020), Eleven days in October 2019 – the indigenous movement in the recent mobilizations in Ecuador, International Journal of Sociology, 50 (3), 220–26. Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) (1989), Las Nacionalidades Indígenas En El Ecuador. Nuestro Proceso Organizativo, Abya-Yala, Quito. Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) (2007), Propuesta de La CONAIE Frente a La Asamblea Constituyente. Principios y Lineamientos Para La Nueva Constitución Del Ecuador. Por Un Estado Plurinacional, Unitario, Soberano, Incluyente, Equitativo y Laico, CONAIE, Quito. Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) (2013), Proyecto Político Para La Construcción Del Estado Plurinacional e Intercultural. Propuesta Desde La Visión de La CONAIE 2012, CONAIE, Fundación Pachamama, Quito. Conterón, L. and de Viteri, R. (1984), Causaimanta Allpamanta Quishpirincacaman Tantanacushunchic. Organizaciones Indígenas Del Ecuador, Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Quito. Cubillo-Guevara, A.P. and Hidalgo-Capitán, A.L. (2015), El sumak kawsay genuino como fenómeno social amazónico ecuatoriano, OBETS. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 10 (2), 301–33. Cuestas-Caza, J., Lalander, R. and Lembke, M. (2020), Andean intercultural eco-socialism in times of buen-vivir? A red-green-culturalist approach, in R. Latham, A.T. Kingsmith, J. Bargen and N. von and Block (eds), Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination, Winnipeg: Fernwood. Descola, P. (1986), La Nature Domestique: Symbolisme et Praxis Dans l’écologie Des Achuar, Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Escobar, A. (2010), Latin America at a crossroads: alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, or post-development? Cultural Studies, 24 (1), 1–65. Grosfoguel, R. (2016), Del extractivismo económico al extractivismo epistémico y ontológico, Revista Internacional de Comunicación y Desarrollo (RICD), 1 (4), accessed 15 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.15304/​ricd​.1​.4​.3295. Gudynas, E. (2014), ‘Buen Vivir’, in G. D’Alisa (ed.), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 201–4. Hidalgo-Capitán, A.L. and Cubillo-Guevara, A.P. (2017), Deconstruction and genealogy of Latin American good living (Buen Vivir), the (Triune) good living and its diverse intellectual wellsprings, International Development Policy/Revue Internationale de Politique de Développement, 9 (9), 23–50. Hidalgo-Capitán, A.L., Guillén García, A. and Deleg Guazha, N. (2014), Sumak Kawsay Yuyay: antología del pensamiento indigenista ecuatoriano sobre Sumak Kawsay, Centro de Investigación en Migraciones, Universidad de Huelva, Huelva. Inuca Lechón, J.B. (2017), Genealogía de alli kawsay/sumak kawsay (vida buena/vida hermosa) de las organizaciones kichwas del Ecuador desde mediados del siglo XX, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 12 (2), 155–76. Kothari, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (2014), Buen Vivir, degrowth and ecological swaraj: alternatives to sustainable development and the green economy, Development, 57 (3–4), 362–75. Mader, E. (1999), Metamorfosis del poder: persona, mito y visión en la sociedad Shuar y Achuar (Ecuador, Perú), Quito: Abya-Yala. Nikolaus, T. (2012), Die Konzeption Des Vivir Bien. Kernideen, Implementierung, Rezeption, Diplomarbeit, Universität Köln, Köln, 22 November. Silva, E. (2003), Mushuk Allpa. La Experiencia de Los Indígenas de Pastaza En La Conservación de La Selva Amazónica, COMUNIDEC, Quito: Instituto Amazanga. Viteri, A., Tapia, M., Vargas, A., Flores, E. and González, G. (1992), Plan Amazanga. Formas de manejo de los recursos naturales en los territorios indígenas de Pastaza, Ecuador, in A.L. Hidalgo-Capitán and A.P. Cubillo-Guevara (eds), El Origen del Buen Vivir. El Plan Amazanga de la OPIP, Huelva: Ediciones Bonanza, pp. 205–69 (facsimilie pages 1–60 cited within text). Viteri Gualinga, C. (1993), Mundos Míticos, Runa, in N. Paymal and C. Sosa (eds), Mundos Amazónicos. Pueblos y Culturas de La Amazonía Ecuatoriana, Quito: Sinchi Sacha, pp. 148–50. Viteri Gualinga, C. (2002), ‘Visión indígena del desarrollo en la Amazonía’, Polis. Revista Latinoamericana, Centro de Investigación Sociedad y Politicas Públicas (CISPO), no. 3, accessed 8 November 2020 at http://​journals​.openedition​.org/​polis/​7678.

Buen Vivir  115 Viteri Gualinga, C. (2003), Sumak Kawsai. Una Respuesta Viable al Desarrollo, BA thesis, Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, Quito. Whitten, N. and Whitten, D. (2015), Clashing concepts of the ‘Good Life’. Beauty, knowledge, and vision versus national wealth in Amazonian Ecuador’, Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-Being in Indigenous Amazonia, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, pp. 191–215.

7. Degrowth Ekaterina Chertkovskaya

INTRODUCTION This chapter is written against the background of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has already taken 6.3 million lives. Having purportedly been transmitted from a wild animal, COVID-19 spread quickly across the world via global travel and trade channels. Healthcare systems have experienced severe capacity restrictions, not being able to provide intensive care on time or lacking the basic protective equipment. This appalling situation is in many instances the consequence of austerity policies following the 2008 financial crisis, aimed at boosting economic growth by supporting financial institutions and taking funding away from the welfare system. Suffering from the virus, in turn, has reflected social inequalities, with the less privileged groups being both more exposed to and more affected by it. The pandemic has been argued to be the result of anthropogenic intervention into natural habitats, in particular industrial farming (Wallace 2016; Spinney 2020). Parallel to this, the climate crisis has been unfolding fast in front of our eyes, with hottest temperatures recorded in Antarctica, bushfires of a scale not seen for a long time in Australia and other extreme weather events that started the third decade of the twenty-first century. While urgent climate action has been called for, the key frameworks for addressing sustainability still prioritise economic growth, such as the circular economy or the widely celebrated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Moreover, interests of for-profit corporations are heavily present in the governance mechanisms put into place to foster transition, such as the European Green Deal that was launched by the European Commission in December 2019. These socio-ecological crises are laying bare the problems of the capitalist system and indicate the need for system change. Degrowth scholarship and activism call for and give a vision of this change, being one of the many radical alternatives that make up the pluriverse – a post-growth and post-development world where many worlds fit (Kothari et al. 2019). It is an umbrella term that critiques the centrality of economic growth and, more generally, the economy in contemporary societies, and embraces alternatives that are ecologically sustainable and socially just (Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2016). In line with degrowth thinking, biophysical throughput – resource, energy and material flows – should decrease while ensuring well-being for all (Kallis 2018). Ultimately, degrowth is about reorganising societies on different principles and represents a particular ethical and political worldview. The word ‘degrowth’ itself was coined in 1972 as ‘décroissance’ by André Gorz, whose work has been an important inspiration for the degrowth community (Kallis et al. 2015a; Leonardi 2019). Having been taken up in activist circles in France in the late 1990s, degrowth spread to Italy and Spain in the early 2000s, and has since emerged into an international academic-activist research area and, arguably, a social movement (Kallis et al. 2015a). Within academia, degrowth might be said to have roots in the fields of ecological economics and political ecology, but currently it is a truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussion (Barca et al. 2019). 116

Degrowth  117 This chapter is devoted to introducing degrowth to anyone interested in environmental politics and making connections between the two areas. It is structured as follows. First, the degrowth critique of economic growth is articulated. Second, degrowth as a concept for alternative socio-material organisation of economies and societies is presented. Third, one of the most contentious issues in degrowth today – politics and governance – is addressed. Finally, I conclude by discussing how to foster the transformative potential of degrowth.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH GROWTH? For the degrowth scholarly and activist community the centrality of economic growth in societies is key to the diagnosis of the multiple crisis of capitalism (Brand and Wissen 2012). However, it is important to explain the types of growth that are questioned and why. The types are (1) the goal of gross domestic product (GDP) growth and quantitative expansion of national economies, (2) growth of biophysical throughput, and (3) capital accumulation and productivism (Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2016). GDP Growth and Quantitative Expansion of National Economies Economic growth may be referred to as ‘the monetary value of goods and services exchanged in a given market, calculated in each country as its Gross Domestic Product (GDP)’ (Kallis et al. 2020 p. 9). Among economists, policy-makers and businesses there is currently a common view that economies need to keep growing perpetually and at compound rates. Global aggregate GDP growth rates are usually expected to be around 3 per cent per year, so that the economy would double in size in 24 years (Hickel 2019; Kallis et al. 2020). For degrowth scholars, this aim is both absurd and destructive. To avoid any misunderstanding, it is worth articulating that degrowth is not about decreasing GDP, recession or austerity, with the latter implemented in the name of growth. Instead, perpetual economic growth on a finite planet is argued to be impossible but also not needed for good life (Kallis et al. 2015b). Gross domestic product is the key indicator for prosperity, used by most countries across the world. This indicator, however, prioritises monetised economic activity and does not include ecological degradation that comes with it, nor does it include non-monetised activities – such as unpaid care work – that are essential for economies and life (Dengler and Strunk 2018). Note that the founding father of this indicator, Simon Kuznets, was explicitly saying that it was not a measure of welfare (NBER 1934). He developed the predecessor of GDP – the gross national product (GNP) – during the Great Depression in the US to analyse its economy during hardships, but was not arguing for universal use of it. Nevertheless, the indicator was given its own life outside that context. While alternative indicators need to be introduced, it is important to remember that quantitative expansion of economies should not be a goal in itself (Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2016). The pursuit of growth is not just about GDP, but is a way of thinking – sometimes referred to as growthmanship, growth machine politics or growth paradigm (Clark 1962; Molotch 1976; Dale 2012) – that has gone into different spheres of society, such as economy, education, healthcare and urban planning. Deprioritising the goal of economic growth is thus key to the degrowth agenda.

118  Handbook of critical environmental politics Biophysical Throughput Growth of biophysical throughput – material and energy flows in and out of economies – is problematic as it is key to ecological degradation. Since the 1950s, exponential economic growth has been associated with exponential growth of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste and other indicators of biophysical throughput (Steffen et al. 2015). The mainstream discussions on sustainability – represented by organisations such as the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), individual nation states and many companies – have engaged with this problem. However, instead of questioning the pursuit of economic growth, these organisations have come up with new conceptions of growth that assume the possibility of growth without environmental degradation, such as green economy, green growth and circular economy. These conceptions are based on the hypothesis that it is possible to decouple economic growth from growth of biophysical throughput, via innovative technologies, efficiency improvements or the expansion of supposedly less resource-intensive sectors of the economy, such as services. The decoupling hypothesis has been powerfully debunked by degrowth scholarship (for example, Hickel and Kallis 2019; Parrique et al. 2019), complementing the vast research on this topic in the field of ecological economics. First, there is no empirical evidence of decoupling economic growth from biophysical throughput at the global level and over a sustained period of time, and while it might be possible for carbon emissions, this decoupling would not happen fast enough to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C or well below the 2°C goal of the Paris Agreement (Hickel and Kallis 2019). The growth rates targeted by the SDGs require efficiency improvements three to six times faster than ever before in history to achieve decoupling, which shows how unrealistic these targets are and also contradictory with environmental targets within SDGs (Hickel 2019). The service sector and the digital economy depend on very tangible processes and infrastructures, whether mining for minerals, energy for data centres or materials for undersea cables. The information and communication technologies already account for 3.7 per cent of global greenhouse emissions, which are expected to rise to 8 per cent by 2025 (The Shift Project 2019). Degrowth scholars also note the rebound effects, and the Jevons’ paradox, as efficiency gains in production tend to bring about increases in overall production, consumption and, hence, the corresponding throughput, thus partially or totally counterbalancing the efficiency gains (Parrique et al. 2019; Ruzzenenti et al. 2019; York and McGee 2016). In the IPCC emissions scenarios, there is a reliance on technological solutions, such as bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) or other forms of geoengineering, even if they do not seem to be viable in the nearest future (Allwood et al. 2019). Moreover, these solutions are also seen as ethically problematic from a degrowth perspective. For example, there can be potentially dangerous unexpected consequences, such as carbon spills due to seismic activities, or local communities not being able to have control over the technologies directly affecting them (Muraca and Neuber 2018). Thus, to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, only a low energy demand scenario is seen as viable from the degrowth stance (Hickel 2019; Hickel and Kallis 2019). For this to happen, a radical reorganisation and dematerialisation of economic activity are needed.

Degrowth  119 Capital Accumulation and Productivism The unlikelihood of decoupling economic growth from growth of biophysical throughput is an important insight from degrowth scholarship, informed substantially by work in the related field of ecological economics. However, degrowth is not just about downscaling economic activity to live within planetary boundaries. This type of reorganisation can be achieved in a myriad of problematic ways – for example, benefiting the privileged while putting others into extreme hardships. Degrowth, however, is calling for a just society where well-being is equitably distributed (Muraca 2013; Kallis 2018). The capitalist system is geared towards growth, and the key economic agents within it are corporations. The profit motive can be seen as the striving for growth at the organisational level. Thus, ecological limits of growth seem to be unresolvable within capitalism (Kallis 2019a). Furthermore, capitalism is an extremely unjust system, with sharp divisions between and within societies, and growing inequalities, based on extractivism, dispossession and exploitation (Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2021). It is also a particular idea of ‘good life’ that capitalism promotes, with consumerism and social acceleration at its centre. Not only do these go hand in hand with massive extraction, resource use, overproduction and waste, but they are also seen as lacking meaning from a degrowth stance. Work and production are key to defining us as human beings today, but few are privileged enough to have dignified and secure jobs, while work in exploitative conditions is key to the economy and contributes to environmental degradation (Chertkovskaya and Stoborod 2018; Barca 2019). The focus on growth and development within capitalism also comes with marginalisation and oppression of other ways of living and worldviews, with, for example, indigenous groups having to fight for the survival of their ways of life and the spaces they inhabit (Milanez 2019). Thus, degrowth is not compatible with capitalism and calls for society to be organised on different principles (Andreucci and McDonough 2015; Chertkovskaya and Paulsson 2021). Even if a different and a more just system is in place – say, socialism – but it still has pursuit of growth or constant expansion of the economy at its core, the problems would remain (Kallis 2019a). The experience of former communist countries, such as the Soviet Union, shows how the pursuit of growth and economic expansion were key for their economies, which was achieved at the cost of environments and people (Chertkovskaya 2019). Thus, from a degrowth stance, economic growth is a focal point, and deprioritising it is key for any socio-ecological transformation. Also, it is important to clarify that deprioritisation of growth does not mean that growth will not occur at all, and that no organisations or sectors of the economy could expand. Degrowth, instead, is about not making growth the goal of economic activity and about refocusing the economy on sufficiency, ecological sustainability and social justice, which I elaborate in the next section.

DEGROWTH AS AN ALTERNATIVE Degrowth puts ecological sustainability, social justice and human flourishing at the core of societies, therefore the economy is seen as a means to a good life rather than the dominating sphere it is currently. Care, conviviality, mutual aid, solidarity and direct democracy are some of the key terms in the degrowth vocabulary, which gives an idea of the type of society the degrowth community strives for. This would be a society based on cooperation, bottom-up

120  Handbook of critical environmental politics organising and that is joyful to live in. Well-being in line with degrowth is associated with satisfaction of material needs, and gratification from a myriad of activities and processes that do not require much resource use, namely, ‘doing’, ‘loving’ and ‘being’ (Helne and Hirvilammi 2019). Thus, degrowth offers a decommodified and more relational understanding of well-being, which comes with slowing down, more time for reflection, contemplation and even idleness. Degrowth is about living well with limits, both biophysical and ethical (Kallis 2019b). These limits are to be collectively decided, reflected on and (re)negotiated. The rest of this section elaborates on a degrowth vision for the economy and then on degrowth as a research area and a social movement within the pluriverse of alternatives. A Degrowth Economy When it comes to the economy, decommodification and eco-sufficiency are some of the key words to describe it. Decommodification is where many activities that make up the current economic sphere will exit the realm of the monetised economy (Fournier 2008). Areas such as education and healthcare, as well as many other spheres of public welfare, would be organised and evaluated on their own terms – for example, the value of knowledge and human life – instead of in monetary terms, and accessible to everyone. Or, spheres such as housing would be seen as a basic human need rather than an asset for speculation. Trade would be openly relocalised (Liegey et al. 2016) and based on cooperation and solidarity, while being open to connections with other spaces and to new people. In the current growth-centric economy the key and most dominant economic agent is the corporation, and the most visible economic practices are for-profit, obscuring the whole variety of economic activity that is out there. However, not-for-profit organisational forms (Hinton 2020) would be most compatible with degrowth. These include cooperatives, commons, community organisations or social enterprises, guided by the principles of eco-sufficiency and justice (Johanisova et al. 2013). In an openly relocalised economy, organisations would usually be smaller and of medium size, but united into networks that share knowledge and tools. However, for some spheres of life, such as public transport, larger scales and more centralised planning might be needed. Thus, organisations can be operating at different economic and geographical scales. Non-hierarchical practices and direct democracy would be common in these organisations, and relations with suppliers and similar organisations would be built on solidarity and mutual aid. When identifying particular organisational forms and practices as connected to degrowth, it does not mean that these would not (re-)produce contradictions and power relations. Thus, it is important for anyone who is part of these initiatives to be self-reflective and self-critical, redefining and renegotiating organisational practices in line with degrowth values. This has been termed a ‘nomadic utopianism’ approach for doing degrowth in practice (Barca et al. 2019). The organising principles described above already exist in many spaces across the world. Post-2008 Greece is one place that has become a centre for various collective and not-for-profit initiatives, which are organised on non-hierarchical principles, with direct democracy decision-making at the core (for example, Kokkinidis 2015). These initiatives sometimes unite in networks, which enables them to support each other and act as political agents. An example is the Renewable Energy Cooperatives (REScoop) network, which unites more than 1500 cooperatives across Europe (Huybrechts et al. 2017), already contributing to energy transition. Another example are ‘design global manufacture local’ models, which are

Degrowth  121 based on the idea of creating and sharing open source designs across the world, while enabling local production, whether of wind farms or prosthetic arms (Kostakis et al. 2018). Rural communities and farmers are using digital tools to create solidarity trade networks that enable a direct connection between producers and consumers. Some groups use community currencies as part of their local exchange and trading systems, organising money and even markets on the principles of decommodification and mutualism (Joutsenvirta 2016; Lloveras et al. 2020). In some contexts, these practices embody what Sekulova et al. (2017, p. 2362) have named ‘fertile soil’, that is, ‘a particular quality of the social texture, characterized by richness, diversity, unknowns but also by multiple tensions and contradictions’. Acknowledging these contradictions and reflecting upon them act as nourishment for these groups, and are key to determining their continuation. This speaks to what has been referred to previously as nomadic utopianism. Degrowth in the Pluriverse of Alternatives Degrowth as a concept comes from the European context and can be seen as a response to the crisis of capitalism in a modernised and industrialised world (Kothari et al. 2014). Thus, it speaks most to the Global North, but aligns with the broader discussion on the pluriverse. Different while synergetic, alternatives from all over the world that make up the pluriverse challenge the ontology of modernity as universal and call for a world where different worlds fit (Kothari et al. 2019). They have a common understanding of the roots of the crisis, and compatible worldviews of an ecologically sustainable and socially just world beyond growth and development; ‘[a]rising from different cultural and social contexts, they sometimes differ upon the prognosis (what and how shall be done), but they share the main characteristics of the diagnosis (what is the problem and who is responsible for it)’ (Kothari et al. 2014, p. 366). Together, these efforts help to decolonise both social relations and the socio-ecological imaginary itself. Scholars in a broad range of geographical contexts have been making connections to degrowth and articulating how it speaks (or not) to these spaces (for example, Xue et al. 2012; Chertkovskaya 2019; Gerber and Raina 2018; Milanez 2019). While degrowth has been particularly inspired by the late twentieth-century intellectuals such as André Gorz, Cornelius Castoriadis, Ivan Illich, Serge Latouche or Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (Kallis 2018; Leonardi 2019), there is no single and key founding author whose thought has to be drawn on when engaging with degrowth. Earlier traces of degrowth-connected thinking can be identified in the thought of nineteenth-century anarchists and socialists (Chertkovskaya 2019; Koch 2019; Chapter 4 in this volume). The work of feminist scholars since the late twentieth century has a great deal in common with degrowth, and can help to nuance the discussion on economy, work and care, centring them on social reproduction instead of growth (Chapter 3 in this volume; Gregoratti and Raphael 2019). Moreover, there is a continuous discussion and reflection on how to integrate the multiplicity of voices into the degrowth scholarship and movement, making sure that degrowth is not only a critique of growth and capitalism, but also a feminist and decolonial endeavour (for example, Dengler and Seebacher 2019; Nirmal and Rocheleau 2019). Degrowth is a burgeoning interdisciplinary research area and, arguably, a social movement that brings together academics and activists who share the ideas of degrowth. Repoliticisation is an important word, that is, degrowthers are not afraid of being explicitly political, and

122  Handbook of critical environmental politics indicating how what is presented as neutral or scientific is politically shaped. The researchers interested in degrowth connect it to themes in their respective fields, which contribute to challenging the centrality of growth and economy in academia itself. When it comes to environmental politics, the frame of this book, a degrowth approach to it implies looking at how a radical socio-ecological transformation not centred on growth could be conceived within this field of study. This might come with analysis of global or local environmental politics through a degrowth lens, with a focus on grassroots environmental politics or other directions (for example, Ford and Kuetting 2020). This brings me to the discussion of the politics of degrowth.

THE POLITICS OF DEGROWTH The politics of degrowth and the strategy associated with it is a key emerging discussion in the area (Barca et al. 2019). While there are many already existing bottom-up initiatives, it is acknowledged that they are currently at the margins of the mainstream growth-focused economy. Policies and institutions are often shaped to benefit large and for-profit companies, with corporate lobbying shaping different levels of politics. This holds for most national and supranational institutions, and governance frameworks, such as the SDGs put forward by the UN and the European Green Deal currently implemented by the European Commission. Thus, the question of reshaping policies and institutions of society to foster socio-ecological transformation becomes important, and something the degrowth movement cannot avoid addressing if the intention is systemic change. If there is one theoretical concept that can help to characterise the politics of degrowth, it is direct democracy, which refers to a ‘broader social regime that institutes collective forms of decision-making, produces the subjects that internalise its values, and hence realises the ideal of a free, autonomous society, i.e. a collectivity that consciously and reflexively decides and changes its institutions’ (Asara et al. 2013, p. 235). It includes a particular process of decision-making – collective and participatory – but goes beyond it. This principle permeates through alternative organising practices associated with degrowth (for example, Kokkinidis 2015; Sekulova et al. 2017). When it comes to political action, the Indignados, the Occupy movement and the climate justice movement are all examples where direct democracy is key to how protest, direct action or disobedience are organised (Asara 2016; Kaufer and Lein 2020). Ende Gelände direct climate action taking place in Germany, for example, is organised in this decentralised way, where many autonomous action groups make up the multitude that occupies a coal mine, with practices of mutual aid being key to each of these non-hierarchical units (Vandepitte et al. 2019). While it might be difficult to imagine direct democracy in current political institutions, where power is given to representative bodies or experts, it is not impossible either. These types of practices exist in Rojava, where governance is organised via municipal citizens’ assemblies, united into a confederation and has been exercised in the most vulnerable circumstances, such as the war against the Islamic State and attacks by the Turkish state (Cemgil 2016). These principles of governance are based on the idea of libertarian municipalism put forward by Murray Bookchin. Governance based on Bookchin’s principles of municipalism has also been connected to degrowth, with degrowth municipalism understood as orientated

Degrowth  123 towards openness, collective sufficiency and organic abundance, fostered via institutionalisation and cultivation of active political life (Vansintjan 2018). In Europe, attempts have also been made to bring direct democracy into party, the EU and municipal politics. Direct democracy mechanisms, often with the use of digital tools, have been applied in new political parties, such as the Alternative in Denmark (Husted 2018). While not without challenges and compromises when the change from a movement to a party takes place (Husted and Hansen 2017), these parties show how decision-making at party level can be achieved in new ways. Democratising institutions of the EU with direct and participatory democracy mechanisms is on the agenda of the Democracy in Europe (DiEM25) movement, which has thus far coordinated the most degrowth-connected Green New Deal for Europe proposal (GNDE 2019). Finally, the practices referred to as new municipalism have gained traction in many European cities, which are ‘aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy’ (Thompson 2021, p. 1). To work out how to act together as the local states, the municipalities following the new municipalism approach have united into a network of ‘fearless cities’ to share knowledge and support each other (Barcelona en Comú et al. 2019; Russell 2019). It is not surprising that direct democracy mechanisms and the close connection to the grassroots is possible to find at municipal level, which is a small and operationable unit closely connected to the local level. Many current initiatives that are part of the degrowth imaginary – bicycle kitchens (Bradley 2018), makerspaces, repair cafes, urban gardens – are often supported by municipalities. The same initiatives can be justified by different logics though, such as political commitment or investment in the entrepreneurial image of the city (North and Nurse 2014). This holds for the Fearless Cities network too, where municipalities range from pragmatic and entrepreneurial, ‘representing more constrained, reactive responses to neoliberal austerity urbanism, to more proactive, contentious, expansive programmes for transformation of state/capitalist social relations’ inspired by Bookchin (Thompson 2021, p. 2). However, even if aimed at transformation, municipalities are often constrained in their resources and decisions, especially by the state (Eizaguirre et al. 2017). With direct democracy being a key value for the politics of degrowth, there has also been an ongoing discussion of policy mechanisms that could foster degrowth, such as a shorter working week, basic and maximum income, and debt audit (Buch-Hansen and Koch 2019; Kallis 2018). It has been noted that the primary spaces for enacting these policies are nation states, which seems to be in contradiction with the bottom-up politics of degrowth (Cosme et al. 2017). Thus, the possibility of reconciling this contradiction and the role of the state become important and probably some of the most contentious topics in the degrowth movement (D’Alisa 2019). On the one hand, the principle of direct democracy undoubtedly does not apply to current nation states or supranational institutions, such as the EU, which endorse neoliberal policies and are closely connected to powerful corporate structures. Moreover, the state often acts in preventive ways, limiting grassroots activities. For example, a vibrant practice of timebanks in Finland – where people exchanged services outside the monetary system using hours instead of money – was severely challenged when the state demanded these activities to be taxable according to their monetary value (Joutsenvirta 2016). On the other hand, the literature that has theorised the state in relation to degrowth thus far, from Marxist stances, has argued that the state can act in the interests of people rather than corporations and become an enabler of socio-ecological transformation (D’Alisa 2019; Koch

124  Handbook of critical environmental politics 2020). This understanding of the state suggests the possibility of a dialectical relationship between the state and the grassroots groups, where the grassroots would push the state and its institutions to pursue radical change, including transforming the state itself and its institutions to be more responsive to bottom-up demands. While the state is seen as inherently oppressive from an anarchist perspective, this does not mean that attempts to push the state are to be ignored. For example, the dialectical tension with the state is part of Bookchin’s idea of libertarian municipalism, where the word ‘tension’ is key (Bookchin 1991). That is, the emphasis on direct democracy does not necessarily rule out the state and representational politics as a terrain for change, and can reinforce grassroots efforts (Teivainen 2016). Systemic change in state politics requires grassroots organisations, social movements and radical municipalities finding the spaces to challenge states and supranational institutions, and demanding accountability. There are examples where the demands of the grassroots shake up the terrain of representative and expert politics. The youth climate protests contributed to the concept of ‘just transition’ (see Chapter 13 in this volume) making it into the European Commission’s European Green Deal, though devoid of its radical meaning, which brings up the need for continuous dialectical tension with the state to avoid co-optation.

CONCLUSION: SHIFTING THE PARADIGM IN TIMES OF CRISIS In this chapter I have articulated critiques of growth, alternatives associated with degrowth and the politics that would foster radical socio-ecological transformation. However, degrowth and similar alternatives are marginal within the political landscape today. Thus, in the conclusion I reflect on the actions that could build up the transformative potential of degrowth, namely, activating alternative imaginaries and building alliances. Buch-Hansen (2018) identified four criteria that are key to a paradigm shift: deep crisis, an alternative political project, a comprehensive coalition of social forces promoting the project in political struggles and broad-based consent. For him, while degrowth as a political project indicates ways out of the multiple crisis of capitalism (Brand and Wissen 2012), there is neither a coalition of forces promoting it nor a broad-based consent, so the prospects of a paradigm shift towards degrowth remain bleak. While his analysis still holds, new crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic keep exposing fundamental problems with the capitalist system. These crises open spaces for thinking about different pathways for societies, but are also a struggle of different political ideologies, such as attempts to go back to business as usual, political closures and conservatism, or global solidarity. Thus, it is an extremely important time for the degrowth movement to mobilise and activate radical alternative imaginaries. Key to this is to find narratives to articulate the need for socio-ecological transformation built on mutual aid and open relocalisation, and explain how this change would ensure satisfaction of material needs, dignity and social welfare. It should be acknowledged that there is a rising critique of growth in academia and society today, which degrowth scholarship has definitely contributed to, not least due to the problematisation of decoupling (Hickel and Kallis 2019; Parrique et al. 2019). For example, 11 000 scientists who signed a public letter on climate emergency suggest deprioritising growth in policies (Ripple et al. 2020), which has also been called for by institutions such as the European Environmental Agency (EEA 2019), or the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES 2019). There is a great deal of work to be done to have others adopt this position.

Degrowth  125 Another necessary step would be to convincingly communicate the ethical and political alternative associated with degrowth. Organising as a movement and building a strong interconnected network is also key to this endeavour. Degrowth is unlikely to receive broad political support on its own, and does not need to compete for being the alternative. There are many worldviews compatible with degrowth across the globe and different movements that degrowth can connect to. Thus, what is important is to build alliances of radical forces that share a wide set of principles in order to create a broad coalition, including anti-austerity, climate, decolonial, feminist, indigenous and labour movements, progressive political parties and organisations, academic networks and many others. While degrowth is a small movement in itself, being an umbrella term, it might also have the potential to bridge discussions that are currently not connected. This broad coalition of social forces would be more vocal and visible to obtain consent from the wider public, ultimately building the critical mass that can drive the greatly needed socio-ecological transformation.

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Degrowth  127 Joutsenvirta, M. (2016), A practice approach to the institutionalization of economic degrowth, Ecological Economics, 128 (August), 23–32. Kallis, G. (2018), Degrowth, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda. Kallis, G. (2019a), Socialism without growth, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30 (2), 189–206. Kallis, G. (2019b), Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kallis, G., Demaria, F. and D’Alisa, G. (2015a), Introduction: degrowth, in D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F. and Kallis, G. (eds), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Kallis, G., Demaria, F. and D’Alisa, G. (2015b), Degrowth, in J.D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 24–30. Kallis, G., Paulson, S., D’Alisa, G. and Demaria, F. (2020), The Case for Degrowth, Cambridge: Polity. Kaufer, R. and Lein, P. (2020), Anarchist resistance in the German Hambach forest: localising climate justice, Anarchist Studies, 28 (1), 60–83. Koch, M. (2019), Growth and degrowth in Marx’s critique of political economy, in E. Chertkovskaya, A. Paulsson and S. Barca (eds), Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 69–82. Koch, M. (2020), The state in the transformation to a sustainable postgrowth economy, Environmental Politics, 29 (1), 115–33. Kokkinidis, G. (2015), Spaces of possibilities: workers’ self-management in Greece, Organization, 22 (6), 847–71. Kostakis, V., Latoufis, K., Liarokapis, M. and Bauwens, M. (2018), The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: two illustrative cases, Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (2), 1684–93. Kothari, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (2014), Buenvivir, degrowth and ecological swaraj: alternatives to sustainable development and the green economy, Development, 57 (3–4), 362–75. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (eds) (2019), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, Delhi: Authors Up Front. Leonardi, E. (2019), The topicality of André Gorz’s political economy: rethinking ‘Ecologie et liberté’ (1977) to (re)connect Marxism and degrowth, in E. Chertkovskaya, A. Paulsson and S. Barca (eds), Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 55–68. Liegey, V., Madelaine, S., Ondet, C. and Veillot, A. (2016), Neither protectionism nor neoliberalism but ‘open relocalization’, the basis for a new International, Projet-decroissance.net, 16 January, accessed 5 May 2022 at http://​www​.projet​-decroissance​.net/​?p​=​2125. Lloveras, J., Warnaby, G., and Quinn, L. (2020), Mutualism as market practice: an examination of market performativity in the context of anarchism and its implications for post-capitalist politics, Marketing Theory, 20 (3), 229–49. Milanez, F. (2019), Countering the order of progress: colonialism, extractivism and re-existence in the Brazilian Amazon, in E. Chertkovskaya, A. Paulsson and S. Barca (eds), Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 121–36. Molotch, H. (1976), The city as a growth machine: toward a political economy of place, American Journal of Sociology, 82 (2), 309–32. Muraca, B. (2013), Towards a fair degrowth-society: justice and the right to a ‘good life’ beyond growth, Futures, 44 (6), 535–45. Muraca, B. and Neuber, F. (2018), Viable and convivial technologies: considerations on climate engineering from a degrowth perspective, Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (2), 1810–22. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) (1934), National income, 1929–32, Washington, DC, accessed 5 May 2022 at https://​fraser​.stlouisfed​.org/​files/​docs/​publications/​natincome​_1934/​ 19340104​_nationalinc​.pdf. Nirmal, P. and Rocheleau, D. (2019), Decolonizing degrowth in the post-development convergence: questions, experiences and proposals from two indigenous territories, Environment and Planning E, 2 (3), 465–92. North, P. and Nurse, A. (2014), Beyond entrepreneurial cities, Métropoles, 15, accessed 5 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.4000/​metropoles​.5005. Parrique, T., Barth, J., Briens, F., Kerschner, C., Kraus-Polk, A., Kuokkanenand, A. et al. (2019), Decoupling debunked: evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustaina-

128  Handbook of critical environmental politics bility, European Environmental Bureau report, accessed 5 May 2022 at https://​mk0eeborgicuypctuf7e​ .kinstacdn​.com/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​07/​Decoupling​-Debunked​.pdf. Ripple, W.J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T.M., Barnard, P., Moomaw, W.R. and 11,258 scientist signatories from 153 countries (2020), Corrigendum: world scientists’ warning of a climate emergency, BioScience, 70 (1), 8–12. Russell, B. (2019), Beyond the local trap: new municipalism and the rise of the fearless cities, Antipode, 51 (3), 989–1010. Ruzzenenti, F., Font Vivanco, D., Galvin, R., Sorrell, S., Wagner, A. and Walnum, H.J. (2019), The rebound effect and the Jevons’ Paradox: beyond the conventional wisdom, Frontiers in Energy Research, 7 (September), art. 90. Sekulova, F., Anguelovski, I., Argüelles, L. and Conill, J. (2017), A ‘fertile soil’ for sustainability-related community initiatives: a new analytical framework, Environment and Planning A, 49 (19), 2362–82. Spinney, L. (2020), Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus? Guardian, 28 March, accessed 5 May 2022 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2020/​mar/​28/​is​-factory​-farming​-to​-blame​-for​ -coronavirus. Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., et al. (2015), Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet, Science, 347 (6223), art. 1259855. Teivainen, T. (2016), Occupy representation and democratise prefiguration: speaking for others in global justice movements, Capital & Class, 40 (1), 19–36. The Shift Project (2019), Lean ICT: towards digital sobriety, accessed 5 May 2022 at https://​ theshiftproject​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​03/​Lean​-ICT​-Report​_The​-Shift​-Project​_2019​.pdf. Thompson, M. (2021), What’s so new about New Municipalism? Progress in Human Geography, 45 (2), 317–42. Vandepitte, E., Vandermoere, F. and Hustinx, L. (2019), Civil anarchizing for the common good: culturally patterned politics of legitimacy in the climate justice movement, VOLUNTAS, 30 (April), 327–41. Vansintjan, A. (2018), Urbanisation as the death of politics: sketches of degrowth municipalism, in Nelson, A. and Schneider, F. (eds), Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities, London: Routledge, pp. 196–209. Wallace, R. (2016), Big Farms Make Big Flu, New York: Monthly Review Press. Xue, J., Arler, F. and Naess, P. (2012), Is the degrowth debate relevant to China? Environment Development and Sustainability, 14 (1), 85–109. York, R. and McGee, J.A. (2016), Understanding the Jevons paradox, Environmental Sociology, 2 (1), 77–87.

8. Limits Erik Gómez-Baggethun

INTRODUCTION Limits to growth, the idea that the economy cannot expand forever in a finite planet, are the central proposition of environmentalism (Meadows et al. 1972; Kallis 2020). Modern formulations of this idea are often grounded in the thermodynamic vision of the economy first formalized by ecological economist forerunner Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971). Ecological economists portray the economy as a subsystem of the biosphere. The Earth is a closed system for materials (except for the negligible event of meteorites) and solar energy enters at a fixed rate, so physical resources are finite. Entropy prevents complete recycling and renewable technologies depend on finite materials. Hence, the thesis goes, the economy cannot grow perpetually: the scale of the economic sub-system is constrained by the physical limits of the host ecosystem (see also Daly 1973, 1996; Martínez-Alier and Schlüpman 1987). In 1972, Club of Rome’s Report Limits to Growth set the thesis of physical limits in the policy agenda, triggering a heated debate, and convincing many political leaders about the impossibility of growing perpetually in a finite planet (Martínez-Alier 2014a). Ideas about social limits to growth also followed. Hirsch (2005) called attention to how affluent societies produce social scarcity. As societies become richer, larger shares of the new goods and services become unavailable for many. In this economic competition, growth fails to deliver its promise of generalized abundance, as those with less wealth aspire to equal the rich. The affluent society, Hirsch argues, is a frustrated society, trapped in a hamster wheel of growth and consumption that is incapable of improving human satisfaction through increased material standards. After an initial highpoint in the 1970s, the thesis of limits declined during the 1980s and 1990s (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015), but only to resurge in the twenty-first century around notions of planetary boundaries, peak oil, post-development, post-growth and degrowth. Limits is a contentious concept in environmental politics, full of paradoxes and conundrums (Dobson 2016). Attacked and defended with equal passion, they define major ontological and ideological divides, and have been scenario of enduring confrontations between environmental scientists, economists and political scientists (Ehrlich 1968; Beckerman 1974; Bruckner 2013). Limits split scholars across disciplines and environmental philosophies but also within them, for example, confronting neoclassical economists against ecological economists (Solow 1973; Daly 1985, 1997; Stiglitz 1997) and green growth against degrowth advocates (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015, Kallis and Bliss 2019; Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2020; Robbins 2020). Conversely, limits have given way to diverse affinities of intent. These include those that are intuitive, such as policy and business in defense of growth, but also those that are counterintuitive, such as liberals siding with Marxists in defense of growth and industrial technology (Simon 1981; Philips 2015; Robbins and Moore 2015; Huber 2021). 129

130  Handbook of critical environmental politics The contentious nature of limits makes it an idea of particular interest for critical environmental politics. This chapter engages with the thesis of limits, assesses critical reactions to it, and scrutinizes disputes regarding their nature, relevance, and political implications. It shows how, since the 1970s, mainstream economics and policy have reframed limits, turning them into an increasingly abstract and toothless idea. It also makes the case that authors from political ecology and degrowth have also contributed to this tendency by means of framing limits as social constructs devoid of material content. The chapter is organized in three main parts. Following this introduction, the next section puts debates on limits in historical perspective. The third section discusses contentious issues and standpoints. The final section concludes with a summary of key messages.

THE ETERNAL RETURN OF LIMITS The first conceptualization of limits is attributed to Archimedes of Syracuse, who developed the idea to measure curved figures and the volume of a sphere in the third century BC. Thereafter the concept has become a commonplace in mathematics, and has made its way into political, economic and environmental debates. Throughout history, debates on limits have repeatedly flourished, declined and returned. While a comprehensive history of limits is beyond the scope of this chapter, we will point to episodes during which limits gained salience in philosophical, economic or political debates. Without pretense of representativeness (the sample is definitely biased to western history and debates), we provide below a brief overview of three of these episodes: Ancient Greece, the establishment of economics as a discipline, and modern environmental policy. Ancient Greece as a Culture of Limits Few other civilizations have been so concerned with limits as Ancient Greek culture (Castoriadis 2005; Kallis 2020). ‘Nothing in excess’, the second aphorism inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, stands as testimony to this concern. Aristotle defined limits as the last point, form, end of substance of things.1 This account is consistent with the view of limits as ‘accomplishment’, the open and the endless being instead regarded as incomplete, confused or hubristic (Pellizzoni 2021). Castoriadis (2005, p. 82) notes that the idea of limits was intrinsic to the Greek notion of ‘development’. Development was not understood as an indefinite process, but as directed to a desired state of maturity. Development, Castoriadis states, could only be conceived in relation to this state, defined by a citizen norm (kalós kagathós) or limit (peras),2 that could not be transgressed (doing so meant moving backwards). Hence, development could only be conceived in relation to a final state or destination. The unlimited and the infinite (ápeiron) was correspondingly regarded as unfinished and imperfect. (Castoriadis 2005, p. 83). Greek philosophers, statesmen and lawmakers instituted limits in morals, policy and law. Prudence (φρόνησις, phrónēsis), the ability to discern the appropriate course of action in each situation, was (together with justice, fortitude and temperance) one of the four cardinal virtues of mind in classical philosophy and one of the most esteemed personal qualities in Ancient Greece. First derived from Plato’s Republic, and then expanded by Cicero, it was considered by ancient Greeks as the cause, measure and form of all virtues.

Limits  131 Notions of limits, moderation and prudence were deeply embedded in law and the societal norm. Kallis (2020, p. 76) notes that ‘the very creation of the Athenian polis at the sixth century BCE was an act of legislating limits’. The central thesis of classicist Richard Seaford on the invention of money, Kallis (2020, p. 77) writes, ‘is that much of Greek culture and philosophy was shaped in reaction to money’s seemingly limitless character’. For Seaford, the potentially unlimited nature of money, described disapprovingly by many Greeks, from Solon to Aristotle, explains the anxiety Greeks had around limits. Greek culture can be read as a reaction to the unlimited power of money that was beginning to be unleashed at the time (Kallis 2020, p. 78). Classical philosophy appraisals of prudence and limits were preserved through the Middle Ages by Christian philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas), until finally declining around the fourteenth century. A comprehensive account of the historical developments that turned the negative conception of the ‘unlimited’ into a positive one is beyond our scope, but Castoriadis (2005, p. 84) emphasizes a set of factors that were decisively involved the transition to modernity and the emergence of capitalism, including the collapse of the medieval worldview, the expansion of the bourgeoisie, the enthronement of science and technology, the idea that natural forces can be controlled through reason, and emerging notions around the indefinite progress of knowledge (see also Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). Temporary Emancipation from Limits A second episode of interest in the history of limits concerns the evolution of ideas in economic thinking that took place between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, when economics took form as a discipline (see, for example, Naredo 2003; Vatn 2016). Notions of physical limits were strong among early schools of economic thinking. The French physiocrats of the eighteenth century conceived nature as the source of all wealth, and held limits central in their maxim that economics should aim to expand the production of renewable resources (richesse renaissante) without undermining the underlying resource base (biens au-fond). The idea that the economy could not expand without limit also prevailed in the classical economics period (1770–1870s). Notions of limits and scarcity have been most notably attributed to Malthus (1798) but are also present in David Ricardo’s thesis on the decreasing returns on land, in Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift, and in John Stuart Mills’s forecasts of a stationary state economy (reviewed in Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). In the nineteenth century, industrial development, technological innovation and access to fossil energy triggered fundamental changes in the conception of limits (Pellizoni 2021). Economic analysis gradually changed focus towards more abstract analytical categories: (1) from land and labor to capital, (2) from physical to monetary analysis, and (3) from use values to exchange values (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). These changes gradually shifted the economic spotlight from tangible phenomena (such as agriculture and labor), to the more abstract notions of utility, money and capital, where ideas of the limitless could be more easily accommodated (Naredo 2003). This epistemological drift continued with the establishment of neoclassical economics, around 1900. By the early twentieth century, a few authors, such as Jevons, Gray, Ramsey, Ise and Hotelling, kept paying attention to limits, raising concerns on impacts of resource depletion on future generations (Martínez-Alier and Schlüpmann 1987). However, concerns over resource limits languished from the 1930s, as economists theorized that technological change

132  Handbook of critical environmental politics would allow for substitution of scarce resources, spreading the belief that there are virtually no limits to growth (Crocker 1999; Vatn 2016). By the mid-twentieth century, land and natural resources had been entirely removed from economic production functions, and economic concerns on limits had mostly disappeared (Hubacek and van den Bergh 2006). It was not until the 1970s that economics turned its interest back to limits, through the work of ecological economists, such as Boulding (1966), Mishan (1967), Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Daly (1973, 1996) and Martínez-Alier (Martínez-Alier and Schlüpmann 1987), who set questions of limits and scale as central economic concerns, setting the molds of current discussions on steady-state economics, degrowth and post-growth. Rise, Fall and Resurgence of Limits in Environmental Policy In the 1960s, environmentalists brought limits back onto the agenda, calling attention to the adverse effects of pollution and raising the prospect of ecological catastrophe (Ehrlich 1968). The publication of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) decisively established limits as an important issue in political and economic policy debates. Sicco Mansholt, incoming President of the European Commission, proposed that Europe should not aim at maximizing economic growth (measured by gross domestic product, GDP), stating elsewhere that ‘the central question is how we can reach a zero-growth economy’ (quoted in Martínez-Alier 2014a). In the years that followed, however, the thesis of limits was countered by neoclassical economists, which made the case that price systems and resource substitution enabled by technology turned limits irrelevant for the foreseeable future (Stiglitz 1979). Ideas of limits to growth were also attacked by political ecologists on the grounds that they served neocolonialist agendas that shift responsibilities on to the poor and marginalized (Harvey 1979; Hartmann 1995; Mehta 2013; Benjaminsen et al. 2015). In 1974, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) convened an international symposium at Cocoyoc, publicizing the idea of ‘ecodevelopment’ as a compromise to harmonize the right to development in poor countries with concerns over the Earth’s biocapacity. Advancing ideas that resonate with current discussions on the ‘just and safe operating space for humanity’ (Raworth 2017), the declaration emphasized the need to reconcile the ‘inner limits’ of human rights and the ‘outer limits’ of resource depletion, favoring redistribution over economic expansion, and rejecting the idea of ‘growth first, justice later’. The notion of ecodevelopment was, however, short lived. Henry Kissinger, as chief of US diplomacy, rejected the text entirely in a cable sent to UNEP and UNCTAD directors, de facto vetoing the term ‘ecodevelopment’ in international forums (Galtung 2010). In the 1980s, the Bruntland report (WCED 1987) established sustainable development as a new guiding principle for international sustainability policy, flipping upside down the framing of environmental problems and solutions that had prevailed over the 1970s. Growth was no longer presented as the cause, but as the solution to environmental decline. The report stated that ‘the international economy must speed up world growth’ (WCED 1987, para. 74) and advocated ‘more rapid economic growth in both industrial and developing countries’ (WCED 1987, para. 72). Advancing current theories on green growth and decoupling of economic expansion from environmental impacts through technology, the report stated that ‘more rapid growth could be sustainable if nations shifted the content of their growth towards less material and energy intensive activities and develop more resource-efficient technologies’

Limits  133 (WCED 1987, para. 32). The expectation that growth would be gradually dematerialized and decarbonized was later formalized through the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), a hypothesized relationship between environmental quality and GDP growth. To EKC proponents, various indicators of environmental degradation get worse as the economy grows, but only until average income reaches a particular point, after which, proponents argue, they improve. In this way, sustainable development effectively reshaped sustainability principles to fit economic imperatives of growth (Gómez-Baggethun 2019). After sustainable development restored political consensus on growth, the specter of limits faded from political debates, but only to return again decades later. Since the early 2000s, environmental activists and intellectuals influenced by ecological economics and post-development studies revitalized controversies on limits to growth, establishing the idea of ‘sustainable degrowth’ in political debates (Latouche 2009). Meanwhile, confidence in the dematerialization promises of sustainable development eroded as scientists showed that the economy kept materializing (Krausmann et al. 2012) and environmental decline kept accelerating (Ehrlich et al. 2012). In the last fifteen years, the return of limits debates is evident from the momentum of ideas such as ‘post-development’ (Escobar 2007), ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al. 2009), ‘doughnut economics’ (Raworth 2017), ‘prosperity without growth’ (Jackson 2017) and ‘degrowth’ (D’Alisa et al. 2014). Limits have also gained renewed attention in environmental politics, as reflected in revitalized academic debates on the topic (Gómez-Baggethun 2020, 2021; Robbins 2020; Benjaminsen 2021; Kallis 2021; Huber 2021; Pellizzoni 2021).

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND STANDPOINTS Areas where disagreements on limits are particularly strong include precepts regarding their nature, practical relevance and political implications. Reactionary or Emancipatory? Prominent strands in political ecology assume default associations between the case for limits to growth and Malthusian narratives of scarcity and austerity, allegedly allied with elite power (Robbins 2020). In effect, Malthusian narratives on scarcity and limits influenced some strands of environmentalism, particularly from the late 1960s to the 1980s in the United States (for example, Hardin 1968; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1970). However, a default association of the defense of limits to Malthusianism is misleading. Building on Dale (2012), Kallis (2020) reinterprets the common reading of Malthus, making a compelling case that his preoccupations had little to do with environmental or resource limits, and far more so with combating poverty alleviation policies and the rising egalitarian ideals in his time. Kallis reads Malthus as a founder of an economic ideology favoring market expansion over redistribution and criticizes how influential strands of environmentalism have come to endorse misleading Malthusian notions of scarcity and limits. Malthus’s concerns were not motivated by ecology, but by fear of the upper class of losing their privileges. Authors in ecological economics and degrowth (as two prominent literatures that defend limits

134  Handbook of critical environmental politics to growth) explicitly oppose Malthus and top-down population control (D’Alisa et al. 2014; Martínez-Alier 2014b). It should also be noted that contested meanings of austerity serve different and sometimes antagonist political agendas (Gomez-Baggethun 2020). In contemporary debates, the word austerity often evokes neoliberal policies of fiscal discipline. Yet, proponents of limits and degrowth have attacked such austerity as an attempt to resume the engines of growth by cutting on social spending (D’Alisa et al. 2014; Hickel, 2019). Furthermore, the meaning of ‘austerity’ is by no means restricted to this economic ideology, nor to the sense of sacrifice implied by some authors (for example, Robbins 2020). The idea of austerity as a virtue has longstanding leverage in philosophical thinking, from Aristotle to Aquinas (Illich 1973), and has been an important element of egalitarian imaginaries. For example, austerity was defended with pride by Italian Communist Party secretary, Enrico Berlinguer, who claimed that ‘austerity’ brought by the 1973 oil crisis would force us to ‘shelve the delusion that we can preserve a development model based on a fabricated expansion of individual consumption, which is a source of waste, parasitism, privilege, resource depletion, and financial disarray’ (from a speech in 1977, cited in Mingardy, 2015). Austerity and simple ways of living are also advocated by former guerrilla partisan and later socialist President of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, in the name of environmental sustainability and social justice. Physical Realities or Social Constructs? Another contentious point concerns the ontology of limits. As noted by Vatn (2016), the existence of some physical limits is ultimately trivial, obvious examples including the Earth’s surface (510 million square kilometers) and its volume (about one trillion cubic kilograms). Hence, ontological divides do not typically concern the existence of limits but the notion of ‘hard/soft’, ‘absolute/relative’, ‘external/internal’ limits, expressed through different claims regarding their nature and materiality. The ‘science wars’ between natural and social scientists waged over the 1990s evidenced a polarized opposition between ‘realist’ and ‘constructivist’ ontological positions (Sokal and Bricmont 1998). While the former (prominent among natural scientists) emphasize the material dimensions of limits, often resorting to physical parameters for studying thresholds and tipping points, the later emphasize their politically constructed character. Over the 1970s and 1980s a great deal of literature in the social sciences was influenced by the developments in Western philosophy brought about by the ‘linguistic turn’ induced by French post-structuralist thinkers in the 1970s. Authors such as Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Deleuze, challenged and deconstructed predominant beliefs surrounding scientific panaceas and universal truths. Strands in environmental politics and sociology influenced by these ideas have expressed skepticism towards approaches – common among ecologists – conceiving limits as objective realties that could be deciphered by scientists. Literatures in this tradition emphasize that limits are relative and politically constructed, calling attention to arbitrariness and large uncertainties involved in their definition (Kallis 2020; Robbins 2020). Over recent decades, however, ontological positions have evolved and diversified to cover a continuum in the realist–constructivist spectrum, including soft and hard constructivists (Hacking 1999), critical realists (Archer et al. 2013) and positions that depart from this spectrum. The ‘material turn’ of the 1990s has been depicted as a reaction against the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real (Barad 2003). According to Pellizzoni

Limits  135 (2016), key features of this ‘new materialism’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012) include a rejection of the binaries traditional to modern thinking (nature/culture, natural/artificial, reality/knowledge) in favor of an outlook on matter exhibiting agency and where biophysical phenomena are increasingly conceptualized as porous boundaries. How have these ontological diatribes affected conceptions of limits? A main tendency is that the idea of limits has been devoid of its material content. Environmental science and politics in the 1970s described the ecological crises as an issue of material limits to growth, but since the 1980s, a new narrative built around notions of sustainable development, ecological modernization, and eco-efficiency transformed limits into an increasingly vague idea, where limits are seen as flexible barriers surmountable by technological progress (Gómez-Baggethun 2022). Perspectives that emphasize the relative and constructed nature of limits are common in ecomodernism (for example, Asafu-Adjaye 2015), including their left-wing variants in political ecology (see, for example, Robbins 2020). Robbins (2012, p. 124) notes that: ‘as normative researchers, political ecologists pursue these [constructionist] claims because they believe that these [categories], in the current socio-political context, are doing pernicious work or helping to secure the power of an elite community’. We have argued elsewhere (Gómez-Baggethun 2020, p. 2) that ‘[t]he irony is that in today’s post-truth era, banalizing research on ecological limits as mere narratives or social constructs pays service (albeit unwillingly) to the same elites and business powers against which such claims were initially conceived’. In effect, however well intended these approaches may be, the intellectual climate of relativism they contribute to generate is now successfully exploited by business power that manufactures uncertainty to undermine environmental regulations in the name of progress and growth (Harremoes et al. 2002). Emphasis on the relative and constructed nature of limits has also permeated into the second generation of degrowth proponents. For example, Kallis claims that ‘limits are relative. Defined in relation to society’s wants … constructed under capitalism’ (Kallis 2020, p. 122), and makes the case that ‘there are no external limits’ (Kallis 2020, p. 119). Limits, Kallis argues, are not external imperatives imposed upon us, but social choices. For those inclined towards a materialist philosophy, however, defining properties of the material world in solely normative terms seems problematic. Limits cannot tell us what we should do, but they do tell us what we cannot do as they define the material frames within which human agency operates and autonomy can be realized (Gómez-Baggethun 2021). The discursive shift from external physical constraints to normative choices feeds into a broader tendency to devoid limits from their material content and accommodate them into a framework where restraint becomes a question of lifestyle choices, rather than something encoded in the ontological character of the world (Pellizzoni 2016; see also Gomez-Baggethun 2022). Natural versus Regulatory Limits One consequence of the discursive shift that devoid limits from material content seems to be the blurring of the social and physical dimensions of limits. In effect, the fundamental distinction between regulatory and natural limits seem to be a recurrent omission in the literatures that have shifted the spotlight from the materiality to the social construction of limits. Regulatory limits (for example, caps on emissions) should not be conflated with natural limits (for example, threshold and tipping points) (Johnson 2013). The former are social

136  Handbook of critical environmental politics constructs by definition, whereas the latter relate to physical realities, observable as abrupt (non-linear) changes when thresholds are surpassed owing to disturbance or cumulative change. Distinctions of natural and regulatory limits have long existed in environmental policy debates. Ciriacy-Wantrup (1968) distinguished ‘critical zones’ in the environment from ‘safe minimum standards’ in policy, paralleling the differentiation that Earth-system scientists make today between ‘thresholds’ and the boundaries defining a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity (Rockström et al. 2009). Thresholds are defined by ecological parameters, while notions of ‘safe’ boundaries are contingent on, for example, risk aversion. The distinction matters for several reasons. First, perceptions of limits can deviate substantially from the reality of limits (Vatn 2016). Second, threshold and tipping are difficult to measure, and their precise location remains elusive to scientists (Dudney and Suding 2020). Furthermore, thresholds are difficult to define ex ante, often revealing themselves only after they have been crossed. Hence, the need to resort to the precautionary principle when defining regulatory limits. Third, even when they can be measured with some accuracy, natural limits rarely, if ever, match regulatory limits. Carbon emission caps are informed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendations but do not reflect them directly. Natural limits are set based on scientific criteria under specific knowledge regimes; by contrast, regulatory limits are set through lobbying and negotiating conflicting values, aims, interests and agendas (Jax 2016). They are shaped by compromises and power relations between parties. Finally, limits can be subject to very different degrees of enforcement. They can be formally sanctioned rules (for example, regulations of nitrate or pesticides levels in drinking water), or reflect merely aspirational (non-binding) targets, such as the 1.5°C of the Paris Agreement. When limits affect environmental problems ranking lower than climate in the political agenda, they may not be enforced at all. Limits versus Scarcity Finally, the blurring of the social and physical dimensions of limits contributes to perpetuate persistent confusions between scarcity and limits. Importantly, recognition of environmental limits does not equate to endorsing a worldview of scarcity (Gómez-Baggethun 2020). Frugal and egalitarian small-scale societies from which degrowth takes inspiration are characterized by a cosmology of abundance, and research has portrayed these societies as affluent (Sahlins 1974). Some degrowth advocates have therefore made a case for ‘frugal abundance’, where scarcity could be allegedly overcome by means of voluntary simplicity and institutionalized frugality (Alexander 2017). Something unlimited cannot be scarce but something limited may or may not be scarce. For a small community of fishers that subsists on a large fishery, resources may be abundant but not unlimited. Natural limits exist to the amount of fish they can extract, which can be defined by physical parameters, such as the fisheries’ regeneration rates. Scarcity (defining what we cannot use as much as we want) is a relation between means and ends, and is socially defined. Limits (defining what is finite) are a property of the material world, and are physically defined.

Limits  137

CONCLUSION Limits are a key and contentious topic in critical environmental politics. Attacked and defended with equal passion, limits define ontological and ideological divides, and have been scenarios of enduring confrontations between environmental scientists, economists and political scientists. In this chapter, I have scrutinized disputes regarding the nature, relevance and political implications of limits. I problematized how limits have been gradually reframed over recent decades, from their foundational conception as physical barriers to growth to an increasingly vague and toothless idea devoid of material content. Reframing of limits owes primarily mainstream economic and policy arguments reframing them as flexible barriers surmountable by technology, but has also been furthered by strands in political ecology and degrowth that reframe limits as constructs pertaining to the domain of choices and lifestyle politics. I claim that critical environmental politics should be wary of this tendency. Critical environmental politics should acknowledge the political dimensions of limits, while also recognizing material constraints as a foundational rationale for economic and political transformations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the editors of this book and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to previous drafts of this chapter. This research received partial funding from the Norwegian University of Life Science (NMBU) through the Sustainability Arena ‘Embedding Planetary boundaries in science policy and education’ (Grant No. 1850092016AA).

NOTES 1.

‘Limit’ means (1) the last point of each thing … part, and the first point within which every part is; (2) the form, whatever it may be, of a spatial magnitude or of a thing that has magnitude; (3) the end of each thing …; (4) the substance of each thing, and the essence of each … . Evidently, therefore, ‘limit’ has as many senses as ‘beginning’, and yet more; for the beginning is a limit, but not every limit is a beginning (Aristotle 1933, Metaphysics, 17). 2. Greek dictionaries refer to at two different words to denote limits: (1) peras (a) a boundary, limit, extremity, or (b) an end, conclusion), and (2) horos (stint, ceiling, border, bound, confine).

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140  Handbook of critical environmental politics Pellizzoni, L. (2016), Catching up with things? Environmental sociology and the material turn in social theory, Environmental Sociology, 2 (4), 312–21. Pellizzoni, L. (2021), Nature, limits and form-of-life, Environmental Politics, 30 (1–2), 81–99. Phillips, L. (2015), Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts: A Defense of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff, Winchester: Zero Books. Raworth, K. (2017), Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. Robbins, P. (2012), Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Robbins, P. (2020), Is less more … or is more less? Scaling the political ecologies of the future, Political Geography, 76 (January), 102018. Robbins, P. and Moore, S. (2015), Love your symptoms: a sympathetic diagnosis of the ecomodernist manifesto, Entitle blog, accessed 23 May 2022 at https://​undis​ciplineden​vironments​.org/​2015/​06/​19/​ love​-your​-symptoms​-a​-sympathetic​-diagnosis​-of​-the​-ecomodernist​-manifesto/​. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A.A., Chapin, F.S. III, Lambin, E.F., et al. (2009), A safe operating space for humanity, Nature, 461, (7263), 472–5. Sahlins, M. (1974), Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock Publications. Simon, J.L. (1981), The Ultimate Resource, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1998), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York: Picador. Stiglitz, J.E. (1997), Georgescu-Roegen versus Solow/Stiglitz, Ecological Economics, 22 (3), 269–70. Solow, R.M. (1973), Is the end of the world at hand? Challenge, 2, 39–50. Vatn, A. (2016), On limits, in J. Farley and D. Malghan (eds), Beyond Uneconomic Growth, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 83–105. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987), Our Common Future, Bruntland report, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9. Sustainability: buying time for consumer capitalism Ingolfur Blühdorn

INTRODUCTION Sustainability is a lead concept, a discursive master-frame, that has dominated eco-political debates and official environmental policy-making for some considerable time, but that may be about to lose its hegemonic power. For the moment, it still seems impossible to think, articulate and discuss issues relating to the biophysical environment and socio-ecological relations without using the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’. This is exactly what hegemonic concepts or master-frames do: They make us believe that there are no alternative ways to conceive of and speak about particular issues – in the current example, the ecological issue or the ecological question – to politically negotiate them and take related decisions. At first sight, these concepts just seem to be terms, interchangeable with other terms, such as, in this instance, nature conservation, environmental protection or climate protection. However, they come with considerable baggage. For, they selectively frame the particular issue that is at stake, what is perceived as problematic about it and for what reasons, what should best be done about it, who should take responsibility, and so on. As regards environmental politics, it is worth calling to mind, therefore, first, that related debates have had a long history well before the notion of sustainability became prominent, that is, the ecological issue or the ecological question has been perceived through other lenses and formulated from other perspectives. Secondly, there is no reason to assume that the currently prevailing lens, frame or paradigm will always continue to be as prominent as it currently still is. Indeed, an increasing number of scholars are suggesting that sustainability and sustainable development are an exhausted eco-political paradigm (Blühdorn and Welsh 2007; Benson and Craig 2014; Foster 2015). Also, in the affluent consumer societies of the Global North, in particular, an order and ‘politics of unsustainability’ (Blühdorn 2007, 2011, 2017; Blühdorn and Deflorian 2019) now seems more entrenched than ever before. Mainstream eco-political discourse has noticeably narrowed to focus on global warming and decarbonisation. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has triggered unprecedented new investment in the further stabilisation of the established socio-economic order, may have delivered the final blow to the project of an international sustainability transformation, shifting the focus, instead, to the individual and societal ability to absorb and cope with – to become resilient towards – social and environmental catastrophes which are now, increasingly, perceived as normal and unavoidable (Benson and Craig 2017). Thus, the contours of new patterns of framing ecological issues, formulating the ecological question and shaping official policy responses are already becoming visible. For the moment, backward-looking concepts, such as post-sustainability or unsustainability, are used to signal that a paradigm shift is ongoing – until, eventually, critical environmental sociology manages to capture in more specific terms which new frames came to supersede the sustainability paradigm. 141

142  Handbook of critical environmental politics The rise, decline and ongoing substitution of sustainability as an eco-political master-frame are the subject of this chapter. As a further preamble, it is worth re-emphasising that critical environmental sociology can be critical in two different ways: first, it contests, politicises and seeks to change established societal conditions, institutions, power structures and socio-ecological relations. This is the activist, normative and transformative dimension of critical environmental sociology in which particular norms are practically applied for purposes of political mobilisation and change. Secondly, critical environmental sociology has a theoretical and reflective dimension that explores which assumptions, epistemologies and norms underpin particular framings of, and proposed solutions to, eco-political questions. In this reflective dimension, critical environmental sociology calls to mind that the eco-political diagnoses and imperatives which eco-political activists articulate and from which they derive the legitimacy and authority of their demands are never objectively valid and incontestable, but always the outcome of earlier processes of contestation and struggles for hegemony. As such, all supposedly categorical eco-imperatives embody the world views, value preferences and power relations prevailing in a particular community or society at a particular time, and they always have a best-before date attached to them. They retain their validity and authority for no longer than these underlying world views, norms, interests and power-relations prevail. For the purposes of this chapter, this second dimension of critical environmental sociology is particularly important. That is, the primary question is not how environmental problems and crises might best be resolved, nor to critique the sustainability paradigm for the particular ways in which it frames and addresses eco-political issues. Instead, the agenda is, first, to sketch under what conditions the paradigm of sustainability emerged, historically, and how it understands the ecological question. On this basis, the second objective is to offer an explanation why this paradigm became so powerful. In exploring these questions, I am using an ideal-typical understanding of sustainability as the point of reference. That is, while there have always been more ambitious, strong notions of sustainability and modest weak notions (Jacobs 1999); and while in current public discourse, in particular, the terms ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ are being used in a diversity of contexts – sustainable finance, sustainable tourism, sustainable profit, sustainable fashion, sustainable marketing, and so on – where they often signify little more than a claim to some unspecified deviation from the standard understanding of the noun to which the addition sustainable is attached, I am assuming here an ideal-typical understanding of sustainability and sustainable development that I contrast with other eco-political paradigms, such as traditional conservative conservationism, technology-orientated reformist environmental protection or emancipatory, radical political ecology. Methodologically, my emphasis here is not on the analysis of particular actors, institutions or power relations, but I am adopting an approach guided by eco-political and sociological theory. This allows for a critical perspective that adds innovatively to the wealth of existing accounts of sustainability. From a current viewpoint, I argue, the overwhelming success of the sustainability paradigm over these alternative framings may be explained, not least, by a dual impasse that had emerged in the latter half of the 1980s, first, in eco-political thinking and mobilisation and, secondly, for European and Western modernity, at large. That is, around the turn of the 1990s, the paradigm of sustainability seemed to offer a viable solution both to specifically eco-political dilemmas of the time and to a dilemma the European and Western project of modernity had to confront. It was this dual promise that rendered the paradigm of sustainability irresistibly attractive – until, eventually, it became evident that it had only bought time for eco-critical thinking, capitalist consumer society and Western modernity

Sustainability  143 at large, but was not able to resolve their underlying problems and transform their logic of self-destruction. The next section maps out the emergence of the sustainability paradigm and its rise to hegemony. The third section explores from which perspectives this paradigm may be perceived as having failed or as being successful. The concluding section then looks beyond the paradigm of sustainability, both in relation to the framing of eco-political issues and the European and Western project of modernity.

THE RISE TO HEGEMONY The notions of sustainability and sustainable development were first introduced to environmental policy and governance through the 1987 report Our Common Future – often referred to as the Brundtland Report – published by the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). They were fully mainstreamed through the UN’s 1992 Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio. These concepts are widely portrayed as constituting an eco-political paradigm but, as signalled above, they are much more than that; and their emergence as a hegemonic master-frame can only be understood, if placed in the context of not only the eco-political debates at the time, but also of international politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, more generally. The Eco-Political Impasse As regards the eco-political background, environmental debates and policy-making had at the time moved beyond traditional-style approaches of conservationism which had mainly focused on setting bits of nature and cultural heritage aside in order to protect them from being spoilt. Nature reserves and cultural heritage organisations continued to play a role at the time, but since the early 1970s, the environmental side-effects of rapid industrial development had become increasingly visible, and citizens placed ever more emphasis on quality of life issues including, for example, matters of health and environmental pollution (Inglehart 1977, 1997). Initially, the primary way in which public authorities were addressing these concerns was reliance on add-on or end-of-pipe solutions. Technological fixes, such as filters, contributed a great deal to cleaning the emissions from industry chimneys or waste water pipes. Yet, they left the underlying causes of environmental degradation in place. They were unable to address, for example, that the capitalist economy is inherently based on the principle of growth, that it exploits finite resources, that its logic of competitiveness and profitability necessarily implies the instrumentalisation and exploitation of nature as well as human beings, that the rule of the market is inherently incompatible with the democratic principles of equality and self-determination, or that the capitalist economy is neither orientated towards, nor regulated by, social needs but driven by its own systemic imperatives of growth, competition and profitability. Taking account of these more encompassing concerns, a different, much more ambitious strand of eco-political thinking had emerged – strongly informed by the post-Marxist tradition of critical theory – that, in the course of the 1970s, gradually evolved into what some observers later conceptualised as a political ideology in its own right – ecologism (Dobson 1990). Ecologist thinking was much more than just about the natural environment in the narrow sense, but entailed a radical critique of modern society and life at large. It drew attention to

144  Handbook of critical environmental politics the re-emergence of mass-unemployment in the industrialised North, the persistence of deep poverty in the Global South, capitalist power relations and, closely related, the dominance of forms of rationality which regard nature and human beings in a purely instrumental way, systematically oppressing their autonomy, intrinsic value and inalienable right to authentic self-determination and self-realisation (Marcuse 1972; Gorz 1987). That is, ecologist thinking raised a range of concerns to which neither traditional-style conservationism nor the new technology-oriented environmental protection programmes which some progressive national governments were implementing at the time addressed. It diagnosed a profound crisis not only in ecological terms, but in the social, economic and cultural dimensions of modern societies too. Radically challenging the established socio-economic as well as political order of the industrialised countries, including their relationship with the developing world, ecologists demanded a comprehensive transformation of economic structures. Radical democratisation was their primary strategy for empowering and giving a voice to all those, including nature, who had so far remained oppressed. Ecologism envisaged a radically different society in which the tensions between economic, social and ecological concerns would be fully overcome and socio-ecological relations fundamentally reorganised so as to allow for the full realisation of autonomy. In this, ecologism was – unlike the more traditional approaches of conservationism and technology-orientated environmental protection – profoundly political. Accordingly, it is often also referred to as political ecology (Gorz 1987; Lipietz 1995). Yet, although its demands for comprehensive sociocultural change – in particular its emancipatory agenda of self-determination and democratic empowerment – echoed many concerns of the new educated and politically articulate middle classes, and entailed many promises to less privileged social groups, radical ecologism also triggered substantial resistance: To the less privileged parts of society, its critical stance towards economic growth and the consumer culture was perceived as a threat to their aspirations for further economic development, social equality and inclusion. To others, the anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist critique of political ecology appeared as a threat to their achievements and the pleasures and conveniences of their established lifestyles. The heart of the matter was, on the one hand, ecologist thinking pursued an agenda of liberation and empowerment but, on the other, it also promoted an ethics of limitation and self-restraint – leaving uncertain how this limitation would be practically achieved and whether it would secure forms of self-determination and self-realisation superior to the supposedly perverted offerings of alienating consumer capitalism. To many, the ecologist critique, therefore, appeared excessively idealistic and anti-modernist. The belief that the protection of the natural environment, the realisation of human autonomy and the achievement of social and ecological peace necessarily demand that the capitalist consumer economy be abandoned seemed overly ideological to them and triggered deep political divisions. This conflict of perspectives gave rise to an eco-political deadlock in which ecological and economic interests seemed mutually incompatible. In this conflictual constellation the new paradigm of sustainability and sustainable development appeared to be the magic solution. It recognised the new ecological and socio-political concerns articulated, in particular, by the younger, materially secure cohorts in Western, post-industrial societies. However, it also accommodated the interests of those – in the industrialised countries as well as the Global South – who were desperately hoping for further economic development and the improvement of their material situation. The Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) explicitly acknowledged the problems of international inequality and poverty in the Global South, as well as the unsuitability of the industrial countries’ model

Sustainability  145 of development as an example to be emulated in other parts of the world. It emphasised that the protection of the natural environment would, henceforth, have to be a priority concern in all policy-making and confirmed that there are bio-physical limits which must be respected. In line with ecologist thinking, the report also stipulated that the industrial countries would need to undergo a structural transformation in order to make sure that their development remains within ‘the bounds of the ecologically possible’ (WCED 1987, p. 55). However, the Brundtland Commission also suggested that there is no need for any radical departure from the established trajectory of modernisation, for the abandonment of consumer capitalism or for ‘the cessation of economic growth’ (WCED 1987, p. 40). On the contrary, the report explicitly underlined that the international economy ‘must speed up world growth’ (WCED 1987, p. 89). The development of new, resource-efficient technologies, improved management and monitoring schemes, and the internalisation of social and ecological costs which had thus far been discounted were presented as suitable means by which to hold on to the capitalist economy and the principle of economic growth, but would still ‘avert economic, social and environmental catastrophes’ (WCED 1987, p. 89). Just as Ulrich Beck had suggested that a second, ‘reflexive’ modernity (Beck 1993 [1997]) would resolve the problems of the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1986 [1992]), a programme of ‘ecological modernisation’ (Mol und Sonnenfeld 2000) was supposed to address the detrimental side-effects of industrial modernity and ensure that all further development would be socially and ecologically benign. Thus, the paradigm of sustainability bridged the abyss between ecology and economy. With its promise of qualitative, green and sustainable growth, in particular, it allowed diverse societal groups to hold on to their achievements and aspirations. It also helped ecologists to appease the tension inherent in their commitment to both liberation and limitation (Blühdorn 2022) and to overcome their problem of being perceived as overly radical, ideological and anti-modernist. The Impasse of Western Modernity Yet, the overwhelming success of the sustainability paradigm was conditioned, at least as much, by parameters well beyond this specific constellation in eco-political debates. At the turn of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a wave of huge optimism that the end of the East–West conflict would imply the extension of the Western system of liberal democratic consumer capitalism across the world, trigger a large new wave of economic growth and expansion, initiate a new era of global integration and pave the way towards a world society that would resolve all remaining problems – most notably those related to poverty, the biophysical environment and global warming – in a cooperative manner. The 1992 United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro – often also referred to as the Earth Summit – was a powerful expression of this new forward-looking spirit and confidence in an integrated world politics under the leadership of the UN. Yet, this hope and prospect emerged at a time when fundamental doubts about the viability of the Western project of modernity and its suitability for globalisation had become so widespread that – as noted previously – even the UN’s Brundtland Commission had acknowledged that this project was deeply problematic and the Western system of liberal consumer capitalism not a model to be emulated by other parts of the world. While the problems of resource depletion and the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) had already been highlighted in the early 1970s, a crisis and the possible unsustainability of liberal democracy had been debated since the mid-1970s too (Crozier et al. 1975; King 1975).

146  Handbook of critical environmental politics The inability of the economic system to sustain full employment and secure welfare and social inclusion for all parts of society had become evident since the turn of the 1980s, at the very latest. In the latter half of that decade, the diagnosis of the risk society (Beck 1986 [1992]) powerfully renewed the much older critique of the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944 [1972]) further explicating how the very logic that had secured the enormous success of Western modernity – the logic of rationalisation, individualisation, scientific and technological development, and so on – would lead to a condition of unmanageable risk and probable catastrophe – not just ecologically, but socially, economically, culturally and politically too. Also, social theorists such as Niklas Luhmann powerfully demonstrated that Western societies, whose success he traced back to the principle of functional differentiation, are structurally incapable of resolving the systemic crises, which exactly this principle and logic invariably bring about (Luhmann 1986 [1989], 1987 [1995]). Thus, at the turn of the 1990s, the increasingly widespread awareness of inherent and potentially insurmountable problems which profoundly threaten the viability of the project of Western modernity and its constitutive ingredients coincided with the historical opportunity to expand exactly this system to the globe as a whole – an opportunity that appeared hugely desirable not only from the perspective of the Western economy, but also for all those who had been struggling for so long for human rights, liberal democracy, material improvement and social justice. In this situation, the paradigm of sustainability promised to provide guidance on how the Western system and project might be retained, and the seemingly inescapable risks avoided. In addition to its new emphasis on qualitative growth that was to replace the traditional fixation on quantitative economic growth, two particularly important elements of its strategy were, first, the shift from traditional centralised, top-down government towards decentralised structures of governance and, secondly, a significant effort to strengthen scientific research in order to put policy on a strong scientific footing, enabling it to foresee, avoid and manage the manifold side-effects which in the past had gone unnoticed until they accumulated to turn modern societies into risk societies. As regards the former, the UN envisaged a new network and action programme of local and regional initiatives, named Local Agenda 21, to become the counterpart to the new transnational and global structures (UN 1993). These initiatives were supposed to push for, help devise and practically implement policy measures and make democratic participation and the engagement of diverse local actors a core principle of sustainable development. Thus, traditional, state-centred environmental politics, which during the course of the 1980s had become increasingly institutionalised, was supplemented by a supra-national as well as a sub-national level of policy-making, and in the aftermath of the Rio Summit, multi-level governance became the mantra (not only) in environmental and climate politics (Pierre 2000; Bäckstrand et al. 2010). This reflected, on the one hand, the new post-Cold War desire for international integration and a one-world politics to address the common problems of the envisaged cosmopolitan society and, on the other, the greatly increased expectations of citizens regarding opportunities for democratic participation. These new forms of governance were said to take into account that in an increasingly complex world, environmental problems have multifaceted causes and implications which can only be addressed through constructive collaboration of diverse stakeholders (Lemos and Agrawal 2006). They were expected to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of environmental policy-making (Pierre 2000), as cooperative, voluntary approaches would engage even those actors which might otherwise oppose environmental policies or obstruct their effective implementation (Newig 2007; Dietz and Stern 2008).

Sustainability  147 As regards the role of science in environmental politics, the mainstreaming of the sustainability paradigm gave a significant boost to academic disciplines dealing with environment-related issues and to the development of relevant scientific infrastructures. Historically, environmental movements (see Chapter 35 in this volume) had based their demands primarily on aesthetic and religious criteria. Political ecologists – in line with the tradition of critical theory (Marcuse 1964, 1972) – then strongly based their diagnoses and demands on the Marxian argument that the system of capitalism alienates, dominates and enslaves both human beings and nature, violates their inalienable dignity and denies them the right to the autonomous realisation of their authentic self. Thus, the older norms of aesthetics and religion were supplemented by a strong ethics of liberation and emancipatory commitment. Yet, these eco-political strategies of legitimation and securing authority still remained weak. As with the earlier aesthetic and religious norms, these eco-emancipatory and eco-ethical imperatives, too, proved incapable of unhinging the established logic of modernisation and the rule of consumer capitalism. However, with the rise of the sustainability paradigm, the objectivation and legitimisation of eco-political diagnoses and demands was referred, first and foremost, to the sciences. Empirically orientated environmental researchers now started to document and analyse environmental change more systematically, calculate ‘ecological footprints’ (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) and ‘rucksacks’ (Schmidt-Bleek 1999), measure material flows and identify ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al. 2009) which must not be crossed. Their objective was to specify solid, reliable, scientific criteria of sustainability, liberate environmental politics from its traditional dependence on soft, subjective and cultural criteria, and thus make sure that a socio-ecological transformation to sustainability would, finally, succeed. For an internationally and globally integrated sustainability politics, in particular, this cross-culturally valid foundation was indispensable. Thus, sustainability and sustainable development were far more than just eco-politically led concepts; and the sustainability paradigm’s rise to hegemony was conditioned by parameters reaching well beyond environmental concerns in the narrow perception. Essentially, the sustainability paradigm embodied a firm commitment to all core ingredients of the Euro-American or Western project of modernity, such as universal human rights, individual self-determination, liberal democracy, private property, consumer capitalism and the belief in scientific rationality as the basis of truth, knowledge and decision-making. It helped to stabilise and sustain this project at a time when, beyond its enormous strengths, its glaring weaknesses and limitations had become visible, too – but a historical opportunity had emerged for this project to realise its global ambition.

ASSESSING SUCCESS A decade later, at the UN Rio+10 Summit in Johannesburg (in 2002), there were signs that the sustainability-optimism and the dynamic of the early 1990s was cooling down. Yet, the point when sustainability had visibly lost its radiance as an eco-political lead concept and its ability to galvanise the international community and energise the joint project of a socio-ecological transformation was the UN climate summit in Copenhagen (in 2009), where global leaders failed to reconcile the conflicting interests of their respective countries and agree an effective climate protection programme (Blühdorn 2011). At the time, the collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers and the subsequent crisis of the global banking and finan-

148  Handbook of critical environmental politics cial system triggered a global economic downturn. Many governments imposed draconian austerity programmes on their countries, and the project of a socio-ecological transformation suffered a significant setback. Meanwhile, sustainability and sustainable development had degenerated into fuzzy concepts unable to guide any restructuring of liberal consumer capitalism or give orientation for a socially and ecologically benign development of the Global South. At the Rio+20 Summit of 2012, again held in Rio de Janeiro, national governments and international institutions then signalled ‘little political appetite for anything but very modest change’ (Linnér and Selin 2013, p. 983). Yet, global warming, resource extraction, biodiversity loss and social inequality continued to worsen in an essentially unabated manner, which put ‘both sustainability governance and the sustainable development concept under growing pressure’ (Bulkeley et al. 2013, p. 958). ‘Mainstreamed as sustainability or sustainable development’, John Foster (2015, p. 2) noted, ‘environmentalism has failed to reduce, even remotely adequately, the impact of humans on the biosphere’. The paradigm that had once been invested with so much hope was increasingly regarded as ‘an irretrievably misconceived framework and a delusive policy goal’ (Foster 2015, preface). A world characterised by unprecedented ‘complexity, radical uncertainty and [a] lack of stationarity’, Benson and Craig (2014, p. 777, original emphasis) noted, ‘must face the impossibility of defining – let alone pursuing – a goal of sustainability’. In the wake of the financial crisis, in particular, critical observers increasingly came to believe that the notions of sustainability and sustainable development are not ‘actually part of the solution’ to the socio-ecological crisis, but – given their firm commitment to the established logic of European-American modernity and modernisation – a ‘deeply embedded part of the problem’ (Foster 2015, p. 35). In public discourse, the concept of sustainability, nevertheless, remained very prominent, not least because in large parts of the eco-political literature, the term continues to be used as if it were semantically and normatively neutral, that is, giving no recognition that the concept carries considerable baggage in relation to a specific framing of the ecological issue which essentially reconfirms rather than challenges the established logic of western modernity and consumer capitalism. Also, in 2015, the UN undertook a new attempt to update and revitalise its sustainability agenda. The document Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN 2015) restated the commitment to achieving a genuine transformation, not just marginal reforms, and to achieving it on a global scale. The document specifies 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ranging from the elimination of poverty (1) and hunger (2), the provision of quality education (4) and the enforcement of gender equality (5) to the creation of decent work and economic growth (8), the promotion of responsible consumption and production (12) and the guarantee of peace, justice and strong institutions (16). Contrary to suspicions that the concept may be impossible to define, the document holds on to the belief that a globally integrating understanding and agenda of sustainability can be achieved – and implemented. In the wake of debates about a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002), the idea of science-based and technology-supported earth systems governance (Biermann 2012; see also Chapter 5 in this volume) mustered additional support. Yet, the UN’s SDGs are defined in very general terms; many of them seem mutually incompatible, and the time frame set for achieving them – by 2030 – seems unrealistic. Also, when the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was agreed, the international tide of right-wing populism – which is explicitly anti-egalitarian, neo-nationalist, anti-environmental and illiberal – had been well under way, and supranational organisations, such as the European Union (EU) or the UN itself, had run into a profound crisis. The COVID-19 pan-

Sustainability  149 demic then further darkened the perspective for a structural transformation of the established socio-economic order. It exacerbated social inequalities, further entrenched the power of international corporations, massively reinforced what Bauman (2001, pp. 50–57) termed the secession of the successful – the emancipation of the privileged from social commitments and liabilities (Blühdorn 2022, pp. 40–45) – and it triggered unprecedented investment in the re-stabilisation, instead of transformation, of consumer capitalism. It further cemented the established fixation of governments worldwide on economic growth and competitiveness. Also, it has left national governments – and future generations – with a level of debt that further reduces the leeway for any genuine structural change. From the current perspective, the profound doubts about consumer capitalism and the European–American project of modernity, which had become visible in the latter half of the 1980s, but had then been suspended by the sustainability paradigm, have re-emerged powerfully – and have become far more forceful than ever before. Most notably, perhaps, the central pillar of the sustainability paradigm – the idea that by means of technological innovation economic growth may be decoupled from increasing resource exploitation and eco-system destruction – has proven untenable. While there are substantial achievements and, undoubtedly, further potentials for increasing resource efficiency, there is mounting scientific evidence that ongoing economic development and growth consistently over-compensate these gains and thus perpetuate the trajectory of unsustainability (Haberl et al. 2020; Wiedenhofer et al. 2020). Also, there is nothing to suggest that the Green Deal and ecological modernisation programmes, issued by many national governments and the EU as a means of post-COVID economic recovery, will avoid these pitfalls. A second core element of the sustainability agenda, the vision of an integrated and cooperative world society that collectively addresses and resolves issues such as climate change, global justice and the protection of the bio-physical environment, has come under substantial pressure from powerful trends of renationalisation and the new competition of systems that is unfolding between the US and Europe, on the one hand, and China, on the other. Right-wing populist movements and governments are most explicit about their agenda of our country first, but the EU and its member states, too, have demonstrated their inability and unwillingness to engage in a serious politics of redistribution, human rights, social inclusion and ecological integrity, both nationally and internationally. On the contrary, the profound crisis which both the UN and the EU have been facing in recent years signals that the belief in a socially and ecologically pacified world society has given way to the (ever less) tacit recognition that the freedom, rights, values and lifestyles which citizens of the affluent countries of the Global North – and global consumer elites, more generally – regard as non-negotiable, cannot be generalised and that, accordingly, their sustainability for some is predicated on policies of social inequality and the exclusion of others (Brand and Wissen 2018; Lessenich 2019; Blühdorn 2011, 2022). Also, and by implication, the belief in liberal democracy and democratic governance, another central pillar of the sustainability paradigm, has been profoundly shattered. Already in the early 2000s, discourses of ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004) and ‘post-politics’ (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014) became increasingly prominent. More recently, there has been mounting evidence of a global ‘recession of democracy’ (Diamond 2015, 2021) and an ‘autocratic-authoritarian turn’ (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Blühdorn 2022), which may have to be explained, not least, in terms of a dialectic and multiple disfunctionality of democracy (Blühdorn 2020a, 2020b). These explanations would imply that the prospects for stopping

150  Handbook of critical environmental politics or even reversing these trends may not be favourable. Meanwhile, the often vaunted new forms of collaborative and multi-level governance proved to have little transformative power. They are now widely criticised for systematically eclipsing all matters of fundamental disagreement, tightly restricting how issues may be framed, and only co-opting instead of genuinely empowering citizens (Davies 2011; Boezeman et al. 2014; Blühdorn and Deflorian 2019). Unsurprisingly, therefore, public trust in the democratic qualities and problem-solving capacities of these governance arrangements is diminishing. The perception that China has dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic more efficiently than democratic systems in the West gives new credence to the belief that authoritarian systems may also be more effective in dealing with issues of climate change, eco-politics more generally, and the risks and catastrophes which in the Anthropocene are increasingly part of the normality governments will have to confront (Shearman and Smith 2007; Beeson 2010). Finally, the belief in science and evidence-based policy-making, too, has come under significant pressure. In the 1980s, in the context of debates about Beck’s Risk Society (1986 [1992]), there had been extensive debates about modern science generating at least as many risks and as much uncertainty as it helps to remove. At that time, social scientists had also highlighted that environmental politics is not primarily about empirically measurable conditions but, first and foremost, about social perceptions, values and concerns (Luhmann 1986 [1989]). However, as outlined above, the paradigm of sustainability framed environmental issues primarily as a matter of the natural sciences, technology, the market and professional management. In doing so, it not only ignored the wide range of emancipatory and identity issues which have always figured prominently in environmental movements, but it also failed to take into account that, as a matter of principle, environmental problems, are never objectively identifiable conditions out there in the natural environment, but always perceived violations of sociocultural norms (Latour 2004). That is, the sustainability paradigm systematically eclipsed the irreducibly normative core of all eco-politics. For, what is to be sustained, for whom, for how long, in what condition, by which means and for what reasons are irreducibly political questions which can neither be objectivated nor delegated to the sciences. Currently, the politics of Trumpism, societal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic or the factual management of the unfolding climate crisis powerfully call to mind to what extent political discourse and decision-making are actually governed by subjectively perceived facts rather than scientifically established truths (Fischer 2021). And contrary to common accusations by the liberal left, denialism, post-truth and post-factuality are by no means a phenomenon particular to the populist far right. They are equally widespread in other parts of society which adamantly defend their privileges, values and lifestyles, irrespective of their well-known socio-ecological implications (Blühdorn 2007, 2017, 2022; Blühdorn and Deflorian 2021). Therefore, in many respects, the foundations of the sustainability paradigm, and of the whole project of a second, reflexive modernity (Beck 1993 [1997]), have become very unstable. However, although the beliefs underpinning this paradigm, individually as well as collectively, are themselves becoming unsustainable, it would be wrong to regard this paradigm has having comprehensively failed. Admittedly, the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have proven incapable of guiding a social-ecological transformation taking capitalist consumer societies beyond their underlying logic of instrumentalisation, domination and exploitation. They have not resolved the issue of ever-increasing social inequality, nor have they rearranged established socio-ecological relations or power relations between the Global North and the Global South. However, when assessing the paradigm of sustainability,

Sustainability  151 critical environmental sociology has to be careful regarding the criteria it applies. In its activist dimension, it may judge the paradigm, for example, by the criteria of political ecology, but in its social-theoretical dimension, it ought to judge sustainability by its own criteria and ambitions. For this purpose, it is important to remember that eco-political thinking in terms of sustainability had never intended to reverse the established Western understanding of progress and development, nor to overcome consumer capitalism and its core principles of continuous growth and profitability. On the contrary, its openly declared agenda had always been to defend, sustain and globalise a set of distinctly Western ideas and principles. Sustainability had never been a transformative project but, more than anything, a defensive project. It was, and still is, a strategy for defending the Western claim to progressiveness, superiority and global leadership at a point when this claim was coming under pressure both from the internal contradictions of this project and from the rise of developing countries, such as Brazil, India and China. In this respect the sustainability paradigm was very successful. It managed to appease, at least temporarily, the conflict between the radical critics of Western consumer capitalism and those who were determined to hold on to its core principles and Western modernity. In many respects, sustainability policies helped to ameliorate environmental problems. Also, at least temporarily, the sustainability paradigm appeased the fundamental dilemma of all eco-emancipatory movements, that is, the tension between their commitment to an agenda of liberation and the commitment to an agenda of limitation, which they never managed to resolve (Blühdorn 2022). Thus, while the paradigm of sustainability has not inaugurated any socio-ecological transformation of the world as envisaged, for example, by political ecologists, it has been very successful in sustaining – in negotiating and ‘buying time’ for (Streeck 2014) – the European-American project of modernity. At the current conjuncture, however, this extra time seems to be running out, not only for the eco-political frame of sustainability, but for the project of European–American modernity, more generally – and for the European–American claim to progressiveness, superiority and global leadership. The issues which have been conceptualised over recent decades, in mainstream discourse at least, primarily in line with the paradigm of sustainability will not disappear. But the present constellation gives rise to new concerns and priorities; it changes the way in which ecological questions are being framed, and it reconfigures the political struggles unfolding around them.

BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY Critical observers have suggested that the end of sustainability (Benson and Craig 2014) will force an ‘end of pretending’ (Foster 2015, ch. 1) and move capitalist consumer societies beyond their ‘current state of denial’ (Benson and Craig 2014, p. 778). The quick succession of crises which have recently hit these societies, and the world at large – financial, economic, austerity, refugee and migration, climate, COVID-19 – have much increased public awareness of the social, economic, political and ecological vulnerability of consumer capitalist societies. Energised by these crises, and by the threat of a right-wing populist ‘great regression’ (Geiselberger 2017), social movements have promoted post-growth (Latouche 2009; Jackson 2017), degrowth (Kallis 2018), post-capitalism (Mason 2015), environmental justice (Schlosberg 2009) and other notions for a more ambitious, in many respects neo-ecologist, reframing of the ecological issue and as new lead concepts for a genuine transformation of

152  Handbook of critical environmental politics modern societies beyond their logic of exploitation, inequality, oppression and destruction. Yet, given the power of transnational corporations and globalised financial markets, on the one hand, and the adamant defence by societal majorities of their particular value preferences, interpretations of freedom and visions of a good life, on the other (Blühdorn 2017, 2020a, 2022), the societal and political resonance of these notions has so far remained limited. Although the scientific and public understanding of the social and ecological implications of the established order of consumer capitalism is now more comprehensive than ever before, there is not much evidence of this knowledge – or the manifold crises – triggering any socio-ecological transformation as environmental movements and many scientists have been demanding it for a long time. On the contrary, the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has exposed more than ever the inability and unwillingness of modern societies to move beyond their established ‘politics of unsustainability’ (Blühdorn 2011, 2013): Compared to that which a socio-ecological transformation in the ecologist perception would demand, the measures imposed by some governments in order to contain the pandemic were modest, and they were only temporary; still, these restrictions triggered large protests by a wide range of societal groups, giving governments a glimpse of the type of resistance any serious socio-ecological transformation would have to confront. Thus, the pandemic exposed to what extent, in the affluent Global North, social peace and public psychological health are predicated on the normality of growth and consumerism, and to what extent even a partial and temporary suspension of this normality – that is, of sustained unsustainability – triggers great economic, psychological and political instability. Unsurprisingly, instead of taking the pandemic as a final stimulus for the socio-ecological transformation that had been debated for so long, the primary imperative governing the management of the pandemic was the determination to return to and restore normality as swiftly and fully as possible. Public awareness of the multiple unsustainability of the established order, and scientific knowledge about its causes and implications, may have become more comprehensive than ever before, but the resolve to defend the established freedoms, rights, lifestyles and economic order, nevertheless, seems more unwavering than ever, too. This said, a great transformation is undoubtedly under way. However, instead of being guided by the emancipatory and progressive values which have inspired many eco-movements and critical environmental sociologists so far, this transformation seems to be taking modern societies beyond exactly this normative horizon. Eco-politically, the determined defence of the understandings of freedom, inalienable rights and a good life prevailing in Western consumer societies implies that what environmental movements and sustainability researchers had managed to achieve in respect of a consensus that a profound socio-ecological transformation is both necessary and urgent, is increasingly being challenged and re-politicised – in order to sustain the unsustainable. The deepening division and polarisation within national societies, transnational communities such as the EU and the global community are indicative of a new eco-politics that is – witness the EU’s migration policies – ever more open about the organisation and legitimation of social inequality and exclusion. Looking beyond eco-politics narrowly understood, the exhaustion of the sustainability paradigm also signals the exhaustion of western modernity generally, whose life expectancy this paradigm had successfully extended. Beyond Beck’s notion of a second or reflexive modernity that was supposed to resolve the problems of first industrial modernity and fulfil the promises which the agenda of modernisation had left unfulfilled thus far, a third modernity is visibly emerging. In many respects, it seems set to continue the trajectory of its predecessors.

Sustainability  153 However, it seems to move beyond the specifically European notions of freedom, subjectivity and human rights, and to leave behind the notions of democracy, equality, justice and rule of law which were derived from them. In this emerging third modernity the global power-centre may well move to Asia and the specifically European norms of liberalism, emancipation and progress will lose relative significance. Their ongoing suspension is powered by the interplay of the economic dynamic of market liberalism, the cultural dynamic of second-order emancipation, that is, the ongoing revision of Enlightenment understandings of autonomy, subjectivity and identity (Blühdorn 2020b, 2022), and the technological dynamic of the digital revolution. For critical environmental sociology, given its own normative commitments, this great transformation towards a third modernity represents a significant challenge. In its social-theoretical dimension, it is now confronted with the task of having to diagnose and conceptualise changes which undermine the viability of the transformative project to which it is committed in its activist dimension (Blühdorn 2020b, 2022). Yet, refusing to diagnose and theorise this shift would amount to a ‘refusal to see’ (Foster 2015, p. 7) and thus reproduce the ‘pervasive culture of denial’ (Foster 2015, p. 35) that social movements and critical sociologists have always campaigned against.

REFERENCES Bäckstrand, K., Khan, J. and Kronsell, A. (2010), Environmental Politics and Deliberative Democracy. Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Bauman, Z. (2001), Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (1986), Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, repr. 1992, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (1993), The Reinvention of Politic. Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, repr. 1997, Cambridge: Polity. Beeson, M. (2010), The coming of environmental authoritarianism, Environmental Politics, 19 (2), 276–94. Benson, M. and Craig, R. (2014), The end of sustainability, Society & Natural Resources, 27 (7), 777–82. Benson, M. and Craig, R. (2017), The End of Sustainability. Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Biermann, F. (2012), Planetary boundaries and earth system governance: exploring the links, Ecological Economics, 81, 4–9. Blühdorn, I. (2007), Sustaining the unsustainable: symbolic politics and the politics of simulation, Environmental Politics, 16 (2), 251–75. Blühdorn, I. (2011), The politics of unsustainability: COP15, post-ecologism and the ecological paradox, Organization & Environment, 24 (1), 34–53. Blühdorn, I. (2013), The governance of unsustainability: ecology and democracy after the post-democratic turn, Environmental Politics, 22 (1), 16–36. Blühdorn, I. (2017), Post-capitalism, post-growth, post-consumerism? Eco-political hopes beyond sustainability, Global Discourse, 7 (1), 42–61. Blühdorn, I. (2020a), The legitimation crisis of democracy: emancipatory politics, the environmental state and the glass ceiling to socio-ecological transformation, Environmental Politics, 29 (1), 38–57. Blühdorn, I. (2020b), The dialectic of democracy: modernization, emancipation and the great regression, Democratization, 27 (3), 389–407. Blühdorn, I. (2022), Liberation and limitation: the emancipatory project and the grammar of the autocratic-authoritarian turn, European Journal of Social Theory, 25 (1), 26–52. Blühdorn, I. and Deflorian, M. (2019), The collaborative management of sustained unsustainability: on the performance of participatory forms of environmental governance, Sustainability, 11 (4), 1189.

154  Handbook of critical environmental politics Blühdorn, I. and Deflorian, M. (2021), Politicisation beyond post-politics: new social activism and the reconfiguration of political discourse, Social Movement Studies, 20 (3), 259–75. Blühdorn, I. and Welsh, I. (2007), Eco-politics beyond the paradigm of sustainability: a conceptual framework and research agenda, Environmental Politics, 16 (2), 185–205. Boezeman, D., Vink, M., Leroy, P. and Halffman, W. (2014), Participation under a spell of instrumentalization? Reflections on action research in an entrenched climate adaptation policy process, Critical Policy Studies, 8 (4), 407–26. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2018), Limits to Capitalist Nature. Theorizing and Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Bulkeley, H., Jordan, A., Perkins, R. and Selin, H. (2013), Governing sustainability: Rio+20 and the road beyond, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 31 (6), 958–70. Crouch, C. (2004), Post-democracy, Cambridge: Polity. Crozier, M., Huntington, S. and Watanuki, J. (1975), The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York: New York University Press. Crutzen, P. (2002), Geology of mankind, Nature, 415 (6867), 23. Davies, J. (2011), Challenging Governance Theory. From Networks to Hegemony, Bristol: Policy Press. Diamond, L. (2015), Facing up to the democratic recession, Journal of Democracy, 26 (1), 141–55. Diamond, L. (2021), Democratic regression in comparative perspective: scope, methods, and causes, Democratization, 28 (1), 22–42. Dietz, T. and Stern, P. (2008), Public Participation in Environmental Assessment And Decision Making, Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Dobson, A. (1990), Green Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge. Fischer, F. (2021), Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy: Interpreting the Arguments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, J. (2015), After Sustainability. Denial, Hope, Retrieval, London: Routledge. Geiselberger, H. (2017), The Great Regression, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gorz, A. (1987), Ecology as Politics, London: Pluto Press. Haberl, H., Wiedenhofer, D., Virág, D., Kalt, G., Plank, B., Brockway, P., et al. (2020), A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights, Environmental Research Letters, 15 (6). Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1944), Dialectic of Enlightenment, repr. 1972, New York: Herder and Herder. Inglehart, R. (1977), The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, R. (1997), Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jackson, T. (2017), Prosperity without Growth. Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, London: Routledge. Jacobs, M. (1999), Sustainable development as a contested concept, in A. Dobson (ed.), Fairness and Futurity. Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–45. Kallis, G. (2018), Degrowth, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda. King, A. (1975), Overload: problems of governing in the 1970s, Political Studies, 23 (2–3), 284–96. Latouche, S. (2009), Farewell to Growth, Cambridge: Polity Press. Latour, B. (2004), Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–48. Lemos, M. and Agrawal, A. (2006), Environmental governance, Annual Review of Environmental Resources, 31 (1), 297–325. Lessenich, S. (2019), Living Well at Others’ Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity, Cambridge: Polity. Linnér, B. and Selin, H. (2013), The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development: forty years in the making, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 31 (6), 971–87. Lipietz, A. (1995), Green Hopes. The Future of Political Ecology, Cambridge: Polity. Lührmann, A. and Lindberg, S. (2019), A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it? Democratization, 26 (7), 1095–113.

Sustainability  155 Luhmann, N. (1986), Ecological Communication, repr. 1989, Cambridge: Polity. Luhmann, N. (1987), Social Systems, repr. 1995, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marcuse, H. (1964), One-dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (1972), Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mason, P. (2015), Post-Capitalism. A Guide to our Future, London: Allen Lane. Meadows, D.L., Meadows, D. and Randers, J. (1972), The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books. Mol, A. and Sonnenfeld, D. (2000), Ecological Modernisation around the World. Perspectives and Critical Debates, London: Routledge. Newig, J. (2007), Does public participation in environmental decisions lead to improved environmental quality? Towards an analytical framework, Communication, Cooperation, Participation (International Journal of Sustainability Communication), 1 (1), 51–71. Pierre, J. (2000), Debating Governance: Authority, Steering, and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Stuart Chapin, F., Lambin, E.F., et al. (2009), Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity, Ecology and Society, 14 (2), art. 32. Schlosberg, D. (2009), Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt-Bleek, F. (1999), The Factor 10/MIPS-Concept: Bridging Ecological, Economic, and Social Dimensions with Sustainability Indicators, Tokyo and Berlin: ZEF and United Nations University. Shearman, D. and Smith, J. (2007), The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, Westport, CT: Praeger. Streeck, W. (2014), Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London and New York: Verso. United Nations (UN) (1993), Agenda 21, accessed 15 May 2022 at Agenda21.doc (un.org). United Nations (UN) (2015), Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, accessed 15 May 2022 at https://​su​stainabled​evelopment​.un​.org/​post2015/​t​ransformin​gourworld/​ publication. Wackernagel, M. and Rees, W. (1996), Our Ecological Footprint. Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, Gabriola Island, BC: New Society.Wiedenhofer, D., Virág, D., Kalt, G., Plank, B., Streeck, J., Pichler, M., et al. (2020), A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping, Environmental Research Letters, 15 (6), 1–32. Wilson, J. and Swyngedouw, E. (2014), The Post-Political and Its Discontents. Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987), Our Common Future, Brundtland report, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART III KEY ISSUES

10. Agrarian development and food security: ecology, labour and crises Maura Benegiamo

INTRODUCTION The logic of agrarian development policies has been traced back to colonial times (Sachs 1990), when they arose, first, as the development of the colonial agriculture itself (Hippert 2018) and then, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, as part of the colonial project of ‘indigenous improvement’ (Kumar 2020). They were driven by the willingness of colonial administrations to promote commercial farming, provide raw materials to Europe and sustain urban settlers in the occupied territories. Rooted in this colonial economy, agrarian development has involved the application of technologies, principles and practices from European agro-science, leading to profound changes in landscapes and indigenous agrarian systems, and to the promotion of the plantation model. Although the global context has changed, with the coming of the decolonisation process and the emerging of a post-war global governance system, the idea of development as a dynamic of transformation of ‘traditional’ agriculture has remained (Sachs 1992). The same holds for the resort to top-down techno-scientific solutions embedded in productivism and market-driven policies. Critical agrarian studies (for a review of the field, see Edelman and Wolford 2017) and political ecology (Robbins 2004) are two main academic traditions that have provided critical insight into the dominant modernist approaches in agrarian development, connecting them to a critique of the political rationality of capitalist economy. Although they tend to share common fields of inquiry, objects and theoretical frameworks, they constitute two distinct areas of debate, grounded in different research questions. These involve, respectively, the organisation of food and agro-production and the organisation of nature under capitalism, as well as the role, agency and struggles of peasant and indigenous people in these processes. Particularly since the early 2000s, the spread of conservation and mitigation programmes in rural areas and the central role played by the corporate agri-food system in forging a green-growth capitalism and bio-based economy is making a dialogue between these two debates increasingly necessary. This chapter stands with this perspective to provide a critical overview of how current agrarian development and environmental politics intersect. Most of recent development initiatives have been carried out within the framework of the development guidelines approved in the wake of the 2007–08 food crisis, followed by the breakdown of the global financial system, culminating in a multidimensional food crisis. In this regard, a central question is how the forms of nature exploitation and the evolution in the global agri-food governance allow an understanding of capitalist reorganisation strategies in the context of climate and ecological crises, and the conflicts that arise from them. The chapter begins with a review of the evolution of dominant developmental approaches concerning food and agriculture, and discusses the main concepts, developed both academically and militantly, that inform the critical debate on agrarian development and its political 157

158  Handbook of critical environmental politics ecology. It then focuses on the current phase of agrarian development policies and highlights some of the main contentious issues arising from it. The conclusion moves from this exposition to formulate question and perspectives for future research. Reflecting on political ecology, labour (and social) transformations and struggles engendered by these processes, it suggests the interest is in shifting the critical gaze from a production-based understanding of capitalism to an understanding more attentive to transformation in the field of (socio-ecological) reproduction.

THE POLITICS OF AGRARIAN DEVELOPMENT AND ITS CRITICS Globalisation, Food and Ecology Agriculture and its regulation hold an important place in the development of capitalism, being at the heart of the dynamics of globalisation. The availability of cheap food to feed a growing urban working class was determinant in the development of industrial capitalism, influencing the transformation of rural societies and value relationships on a global scale (Patel and Moore 2017). Since then, the global demand for food and resources has remained dependent on cheap labour and land availability, while it has demanded an intensification and expansion of agricultural production, without taking into account the social and environmental costs of this process. Over the past 40 years, global food regulation has been guided by the idea of food security, which established itself as an operational developmental concept in 1974, at the first United Nations World Food Conference held in response to the food crisis that caused famine in Asia and Africa in the early 1970s (Gerlach 2015). The initial definition indicated food security as the availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic food-stuffs, particularly so as to avoid acute food shortages in the event of widespread crop failure, natural or other disasters, to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption in countries with low levels of per capita intake and to offset fluctuations in production and prices. (United Nations 1975, p. 14)

The concept has been amended several times (Maxwell 1996) until the 1996 World Food Summit aligned with the World Bank’s definition, which describes food security as the ‘access of all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life’ (World Bank 1986, p. 1).1 The shift in attention towards access and availability of food supplies, rather than volumes and stability of national stocks, reflects the shift in focus of global agricultural policies from production to market development. In post-colonial contexts, and Africa in particular, this passage was connected with the liberalisation measures imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for which the notion of food security provided an overall operational framework for new development programmes. To this end, the idea of food security, as a regulatory framework for agrarian development, featured as an alternative to, and in contrast with, the dirigiste policies adopted by post-colonial and socialist governments centred on the modernisation of local agricultural systems to achieve national self-sufficiency. The liberalisation imperative and market-led policies required states to redirect efforts towards ensuring a supply and demand balance by developing domestic storage and transport networks to facilitate imports and specialise in goods and services where they had a ‘com-

Agrarian development and food security  159 parative advantage’ (which meant fostering exploitation of natural resources, particularly mineral extraction) for subsidising food imports. These transformations were also in line with the evolution of global economy and the commitments taken by national governments in the recently born World Trade Organization (WTO), officially established on 1 January 1995. That agriculture was the most contended issue in the Uruguay Round (1986-1994) – the largest reform of the world commercial system which brought about the WTO – attests both to the reluctance of post-colonial states in adopting the new economic rules and to the centrality of the agrarian sector for the neoliberalisation of global economy. The food regime approach developed by Friedmann (1987) and McMichael (Friedman and McMichael 1989) is one of the most systematic theorisations of the role of food for global political economy and the evolution of geopolitical relationships. Grounded in a Marxist and world-history perspective, the approach of food regime is opposed to the linear representations of agriculture modernisation theory, relating global regulation transformations to the historical form of capitalist contradictions and crises, and to the geopolitics of the world system. Scholars generally agree on the characteristics of the first two food regimes: the British-centred regime, incorporated into the organisation of colonial economy, which lasted until the eve of the First World War; and the US-centred food regime, embedded in the ‘development project’ that influenced the process of African decolonisation, strengthening the US leadership in the context of the Cold War. More controversial, instead, is the idea of a current, third food regime (and its ongoing transformations, discussed in the next two sections), that emerged with the process of neoliberalisation in the 1970s and 1980s and is referred to as the corporate food regime (McMichael 2005). Favoured by the establishment of economies of scale, agri-business corporations have grown in power and monopoly to the detriment of small-scale and peasant farmers, promoting the financialisation, verticalisation and specialisation of production chains (Patel 2012). Supply chain bottlenecks, global standardisation and regulatory quality control have eroded local production-overseeing capacity, preventing autonomous market access to many local producers. Also, economic fragmentation and differentiation of the inhabitants of rural areas have expanded, increasing socio-economic differences among small farmers and the conversion of a large part of the peasant world into petty commodity producers (Bernstein 1986) tied to global agro-value chains and forced to exploit themselves and their familiars. This has led to a debate – addressed in the previous section – on the current composition of agrarian capitalism, its crises and contestations owing to the high deterioration of environments and livelihoods across the rural world. The relationship between environment and development is a central theme for political ecologists. The political ecology of development emerged in the 1980s (see Schubert 2005 and Robbins 2004 for a review). Scholars helped in deconstructing modernist narratives providing alternative explanations of main environmental issues, such as scarcity, famine and desertification, connecting them to socio-economic inequalities, environmental injustice, gender imbalances and resource organisation under capitalist market economy. They emphasised the persistence of a colonial vision that devaluates the rationality and worthiness of indigenous systems and criticised the dominant idea about ecological degradation as being caused by poverty and overpopulation and requiring, to be countered, a top-down diffusion of technology, private property and the institutionalisation of market price valuation. In line with the above, food regimes are also intended as ecological regimes. In this perception, and in accord with Moore’s (2010) idea of capitalism as a way of organising nature, each

160  Handbook of critical environmental politics food regime constitutes a strategic node in the trajectory of the development of global ecology towards the present climate crisis and the reach of planetary limits. Key notions here are that of metabolic rift, developed by Foster (1999), which sees in the opposition between city and countryside the pivotal trait of the capitalist geography; and the idea of commodity frontiers (Moore 2000), which expand into territories and natures not yet commodified. Commodities frontiers are both expansive and intensive, external and internal: they range from the creation of new sites for the extraction of fossil fuels and minerals to the expansion of plantations and the biological exploitation of bodies, genes and cells. They are also sites of struggles, where the production of knowledge, norms and nature that are likely to shape human ecology and political structures at a multi-scalar level are strongly opposed. Ecological Struggles and Alternative Paradigms Neoliberalisation dynamics have also influenced the responses of rural movements with a surge in ecological claims and environmental conflicts. Political ecologists have paid attention to these struggles, which have been read as ‘ecologism of the poor’, ecological distribution conflicts, and as part of a global movement for environmental justice (Martínez-Alier 2003). Rural populations have often found themselves struggling not only against the processes of privatisation of land and seeds (Shiva 1991) but also against environmental pollution and in defence of the ecosystems, as well as in defence of their production systems and work, increasingly threatened by the expansion of the extractive industry and mega-projects (mines, dams, plantations, energy and transport infrastructures) in rural areas. These processes were also matched with a reframing of rural movements centred on the notion of ‘autochthony’ as a principle of internal negotiation between the state and various social groups in deciding territorial policies and mobilising against the exploitation of resources (Li 2000; Geschiere 2009). Based on these struggles, alternative ideas and concepts that rethink human well-being beyond growth-based development have been elaborated (Kothari et al. 2019). Concerning agrarian development, a particular relevance was gained by the notion of ‘food sovereignty’ promoted by the international movement la Via Campesina since the early 1990s. Food sovereignty, here, is intended as ‘the right of peoples, Countries or State Unions to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries’.2 Initially conceived as an instrument that allows states to claim autonomy in the definition of agricultural policies, the notion of food sovereignty has increasingly become the symbol of a global struggle of small farmers to denounce the failure of agricultural liberalisation policies centred on the paradigm of food security, and to affirm the central role of peasant, small-scale and family production in the realisation of the human right to food. In addition, urban agriculture in public spaces, such as urban gardening, is similarly practised and supported as a form of (urban) food sovereignty, which can link food justice issues with practices that democratises access to food, improve community control and autonomy, and challenge urban landscapes (Clendenning et al. 2016). The notion of food sovereignty is often coupled with that of agroecology, conceived as a tool to ensure the economic and ecological sustainability of small-scale agriculture and to address the unbalanced participation of farmers in determining food system models (Rosset and Martínez-Torres 2012). As a technique, agroecology promotes farmers’ autonomy from the agricultural input market and focuses on the regeneration of agroecological biodiversity and soil. The idea of agroecology has received recent attention from institutional donors

Agrarian development and food security  161 and development organisations, in particular the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), becoming an element in the reformulation of the global political discourse on food and agriculture (Pretty 2006). However, together with a progressive institutionalisation, the term has undergone a process of co-optation that restricts the scope of agroecology to a reformist process for industrial agriculture (Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2013). In its soft version, agroecology tends to be seen mainly as a multifunctional approach to agricultural production based on a set of eco-management principles, so it is easily confused with the intensification of ‘sustainable agriculture’ and combined with the more traditional technologies of capital-intensive industrial agriculture. On the contrary, a strong agroecological approach, such as that promoted by La Via Campesina, combines key biological principles with a critical analysis of the whole structure of the food system. Consequently, an agroecological transition is not limited to improving agricultural sustainability, but also needs to address issues of access to land and water, energy regulation and consumption patterns.

GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY AND THE 2007–2008 MULTIDIMENSIONAL CRISIS A New Development Paradigm? Significantly, the outbreak of the second food crisis in 2007 occurred in the middle of a heated debate on the future of global food and agriculture governance. Since the turn of the millennium, a series of both internal and independent reports exposed large failures in the operation of the main global organisations involved in agrarian development (see McKeon 2011 for a discussion). Perhaps, the most relevant of these reports is that edited by the World Bank in 2007, which acknowledged the failure of structural adjustment policies and considered the development programmes conducted in Africa since 1990 ineffective in addressing agriculture constraints (World Bank 2007). The report also critically highlighted the neglect of the agricultural sector by governments and bilateral donors. Triggered by a sudden surge in energy and food commodity prices (especially of staples such as maize, wheat and rice), the food crisis contributed to exacerbating urban and rural discontent about poverty and deterioration of everyday life (Bush 2010). Food riots and cost-of-living demonstrations that spread throughout the world (protests have been documented on almost every continent; see Schneider 2008), contributed to make clear the failure of liberalisation policies, questioned the capacity of markets to ensure food security and highlighted the shortcomings of the global food governance system. Global reactions followed rapidly, with the food security initiatives developed by the UN together with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Bretton Woods institutions and the G8/20 (HLTS-GFSC 2010). Particular emphasis was placed on articulating public-private partnerships and facilitating development programmes promoted by private actors (such as the New Vision for Agriculture launched by the World Economic Forum with the support of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), or the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa co-founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Although global governance is not a homogeneous arena, and different visions of food and agriculture regulation have been confronted since before the crisis (McKeon 2011), the interconnection between these different initiatives has led to the strength-

162  Handbook of critical environmental politics ening of a common framework for agrarian development (Margulis 2012). These initiatives have brought agricultural production back to the centre of development strategies after almost 50 years of neglect, and triggered a new phase of the ‘green revolution’ (Patel 2013). However, while referring to the definition of food security established in the 1990s, current approaches differ from previous development paradigms on at least six aspects: 1. a reframing of the food security issues on a global scale, more linked to concerns about global geopolitical destabilisation, world demography trends, with a demand for the adoption of a global water-food-energy nexus approach (FAO 2008); 2. a deeper connection between food security and the climate issue, largely made under the green and bio-economy perspectives; 3. a renewed focus on agricultural productivity, linked to a demand for the expansion of arable land (Deininger et al. 2011; Morris et al. 2014); 4. a new vision of agriculture as an engine of growth, rather than functional to a subsequent industrialisation, as was the case with previous development paradigms (World Bank 2007); 5. market-led approaches replacing previous state-led development strategies (Patel 2013); 6. the centrality of the African continent as the place I which to combine economic growth and local and global food security (World Bank 2007). Land, Genes and the ‘Agro-Bio-Data Nexus’ Together with the items listed in the previous sub-section, two main trends are shaping environmental politics in the context of agrarian development: the first concerns the role of land in contemporary capitalist expansion and agrarian transformation. The peak of land deals that occurred since the early 2000s – labelled as global land grabbing (Borras and Franco 2010), mainly targeting sub-Saharan African territories and predominantly driven by public and private interests on agro-fuel production – has highlighted a new interest in primary production by governments, the agri-business and the financial sector. Expanding land access was considered relevant for the implementation of insurance strategies based on the internalisation of supply chains and their geographical differentiation against the risks posed by the volatility of commodities markets and the climate change impacts on agricultural production. Also, arable and rural lands are taking on a new productive and speculative role in the context of green and conservation economy (Fairhead et al. 2012) and have emerged as an inflation hedge, becoming a financial asset (Fairbairn 2014). Against this backdrop, a big issue concerns the continuities and ruptures with past trends, which were already favouring the expansion of the farming scales (Amanor 2012). The expansion of monoculture systems and the further transformation of African agrarian systems into global agro-commodity suppliers is also a relevant issue, as well as the persistence of mapping approaches and regulation schemes that are sustained by, and reproduce, colonial narratives about idle land and underutilised resources (Li 2014). All these processes raise questions concerning the institutional, regulatory and, therefore, social restructuring that the land resource is facing currently. This is a central issue also considering the recent recovery of the old positions about land titling as a compulsory element to spur economic development and securing access to local producers (Byamugisha 2013). The current trend is defining legal frameworks, such as occupancy land registers, capable of rendering traditional and collective land systems compatible with the market. This is likely to

Agrarian development and food security  163 legitimise a de facto transition away from customary tenure towards an increased commodification of land and thus a land market (Benegiamo 2020). Another main trend concerns the merging of genetic engineering and bio-re/generation agriculture. Old concerns about yield gaps combine in new developmental programmes with attempts to promote transition and mitigation in the face of the climate threat, bringing conservation objectives and the exploitation of natural capital to the agricultural sector. This is also promoting a further interpenetration of key trends related to environmental market and governance, namely: 1. agri-business intensification, driven by the importance of monopolies, corporations and market concentration in the food system governance; 2. green economy, indicating the resort to market logics to address environmental concerns; 3. financialisation, with firms raising profit primarily through financial channels instead of trade or pro-market commodity production; 4. biocapitalism, or the increasing relevance of bio-capital for value production, entailing biology commodification through biotech and the financialisation of the life sciences. These tendencies are well encapsulated by the idea of bio-economy (Chapter 11 in this volume), a paradigm of production promoted by the OECD since the beginning of the 2000s, which is increasingly advocated as a privileged strategy for the development of sub-Saharan African economies (Liavoga et al. 2016). Connected to this is the move from concerns about genetic improvement to interests in genetic engineering opportunities opened by new recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technologies (Holt-Giménez 2008). In this context, and in addition to plant genetics, a field of development is animal genetics, including genetically modified insects promoted as way to reduce the use of pesticides. Synthetic meat and biotransformation through bacteria, fungi or enzymes are further frontline research areas related to agro-innovation, based on the smart-plant factory model, which is strongly advocated in the context of the bio-economy (Kozai 2018). Another relevant paradigm in agrarian politics is climate-smart agriculture (CSA), as a way to simultaneously address yield gaps, climate change and biodiversity conservation concerns. An operational definition of CSA is still under discussion and for the moment it translates into an attempt to maintain value in production processes through biotechnological fixes and reliance on financial markets for raising capital and realising value (Taylor 2018). This is testified, for example, by the insistence on research for climate-smart seeds or climate-resistant crop varieties, which comes together with attempts to expand control over genetic resources through restrictive seeds laws and genetic privatisation (Abergel 2011). In global governance discourses, CSA is also intermingled with agroecology, outlining a conflict between different conceptions on the future of food and agriculture, and testifying the co-optation of peasant political demand in a reformist process for industrial agriculture (Giraldo and Rosset 2018). Yet, at the moment, pro-poor smart agriculture is more likely an umbrella term under which furthering climate finance initiatives and payment for ecosystem services schemes (Neate 2013; FAO 2014; Chapter 27 in this volume). The notion of climate-smart agriculture is also associated with that of precision agriculture,3 encouraging the digitalisation of the inputs through the application of data science to agrarian production. This draws attention to the expanding connection between the main agri-business corporations and the Silicon Valley (Delgado Wise 2017). It raises, in turn, questions about data-grabbing as a new form of agrarian accumulation (Fraser 2019) and how this intertwines

164  Handbook of critical environmental politics with land-grabbing dynamics, given that the adoption of smart technologies (for example, yield meters, sensors and satellite images) is better suited for large-scale estates, being therefore in favour of their expansion. Yet, current agrarian development programmes are also promoting pro-poor smart technologies, such as web-based information systems and mobile devices that sell climate information, or the promotion of microinsurance systems against climate risks.

OPEN QUESTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL The predominance that the issue of ecological limits to growth has assumed in the context of agrarian developmental politics confirms the idea that food and agriculture play a central role in the trajectory of global capitalist development. Recent evolutions of global agrarian development policies have been read as part of the transformations of the current food regime in response to the crisis of capitalist ecology (Moore 2008; McMichael 2012). They also attest to the growing importance of ‘bio and green value’ extraction in the development of capitalism. Against this backdrop, agrarian development continues to represent a strategic site for the study of the historical relations between nature, technology and power that sustain capitalist accumulation, expand the sphere of commodification and render new natures appropriable. This also demands an understanding of how environmental governance and resource politics are reshaped, both at the global and the local scales, as a consequence of the emergence of new environmental knowledge and its incorporation in public policies. A related issue concerns the reshaping of the visions of politics, the environment and society that these practices bring about. Political ecology debate has largely contributed to disclosing the progressive transformation of critical environmental issues into a source of profit (Smith 2007). This has been read against the backdrop of a post-Fordist regime characterised by a growing financialisation of economy, influencing in turn resource governance (McCarthy and Prudham 2004). However, if the financial and technological fix has allowed capitalism to create a strategy of accumulation based on the limits of growth (Pellizzoni 2015), the features that the latter assume today and the possibility for capitalism to overcome them, or instead their role in leading to systemic crises, requires further debate and research. Scholars also widely resort to the Marxian idea of primitive accumulation, or its updated version of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003). The debate on new enclosures is prominent, especially in the context of new land-grabbing and green-grabbing (Kelly 2011; White et al. 2012). However, as noted by Hall (2013), the analytical clarity of notions such as primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession in grasping current dynamics of agrarian change and shifting of land relations, is not immediately evident. This is both because there is a discrepancy between the processes to which they exactly refer (that is, return to dispossession as a response to crises, extra-economic forces as leading accumulation processes, and expansion and reproduction of capitalist social relations), and because there is no straightforward relationship between the assumptions conveyed by these processes (that is, the transformation of social relations and creation of free labour, effective land dispossession and prominence of the state over the free market) and the dynamics empirically observed. A different research direction might be to understand how current trends of nature accumulation, in the context of agrarian development, require – and perform – a re-elaboration of the classic (Marxist) distinction between productive and reproductive activities. The enhancement

Agrarian development and food security  165 of the re/productive capacities of organic matter by way of a deeper integration of the generative capacities of living organisms and ecosystems in the production process attests to the emergence of commodification dynamics that seem to blur the distinction between exploitation and appropriation. Operations such as the exploitation of ecosystem services or the genetic manipulation of insects and bacteria seem to suggest a shift in the task of commodity production to the natural world and call for attention to the issue of ‘non-human productivity’. One way to address these questions might be to interrogate the place of non-human labour (Chapter 41 in this volume), and whether nature’s dynamics can be defined as such, in emerging processes of commodification. Research into animal labour and lively commodities is of particular interest here. What distinguishes labour from other actions in these contexts remains an open question. A related set of questions concerns how the deeper incorporation of non-human re/production in productive dynamics reshapes the connection between human labour and the environment within the accumulation process, generating new forms of exploitation and exclusion. This can be addressed for example by focusing on how farmers are increasingly involved in non-traditional forms of valorisation, such as data collection, participation in medical trials (for example, when they undergo testing to assess the nutrition value of given plants) and the increase in debt relations, which include purchasing climate insurances and micro-financing green schemes alongside loans and other form of debts (Benegiamo 2021). A second set of questions concerns the socio-ecological relationships established in different production sites, such as farms, factories and laboratories, and how these production sites interact with each other. We can, by this, address the question of circulation and the creation of common frameworks through which previously considered very different sectors (agriculture, biodiversity management, financial services and biomedicine) become entangled. These issues might also bring new perspectives to the ‘agrarian question’, or ‘agrarian question of capital’, which has established itself in the rural sociology debate, particularly English-speaking, since the 1960s. In that context, capitalist penetration of the countryside was seen as engendering peasant disappearance as a consequence of a class division between landowners and agricultural workers. Peasant resistances were thus read in relation to opposition to agrarian capitalism. However, the persistence of peasant agriculture has revealed more complex dynamics within the capitalist transformation of agriculture, with hybrid forms of labour subsumption which do not necessarily lead to the classic process of proletarianisation. These observations have also recently led to a split in the academic debate, stimulated by Bernstein’s (2006) article ‘Is there an agrarian question in the 21st century?’, for whom the transnational agro-industrial regime has shown that it no longer needs to promote the complete transformation of forms of peasant production at the national level in order to integrate them, nor is it forced to bring about the emergence of a national agrarian capitalism. If there is an agrarian question, Bernstein writes, this is an agrarian question of labour under capital, namely, the struggles connected with the reproduction of the labour force in a context of progressive insecurity, degradation and impoverishment of labour conditions. Against this perspective, recent dynamics of agrarian development, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, show that an agrarian transition is still a central requisite for global capitalism (Moore 2008; Oya 2013). Alternatively, the ‘peasant debate’ (Van der Ploeg 2009; McMichael 2014) emphasises the importance of peasant struggles as struggles that are not limited to reclaiming the means of production and the defence of labour, going far beyond redistributive demands as they involve food systems democratisation, climate justice and new

166  Handbook of critical environmental politics relations with science and technology. This would make the contradiction between peasant movements and the corporate global food regimes one of the main obstacles to the development of capitalism. As Jansen (2015) notes, a central contentious issue in this debate is about accumulation by ‘dispossession’ and expanded reproduction, as addressed separately in the analysis. This led to focusing either on the process and conflicts related to labour subsumption or on resistance to pillage, enclosure and exclusion, neglecting the links between these two processes. Moreover, exploring the political ecology of agrarian labour might provide interesting insights for better relating these two strands of research, as it make sit possible to grasp how the two main contradictions of capitalism, labour and the ecological-reproduction, are directly put in relation both by capitalism’s transformation strategies and by their opponents. This implies the need to investigate how the integration of the ecological issue in the context of agrarian development renews or affects classic processes of domination and exploitation but, also, how the resistance these processes generate at the local level challenges dominant notion of wealth, work and re/ production, offering the opportunity to update and de-colonise Marxist and Western/anthropocentric thinking, potentially challenging the logic that sustains capitalist accumulation. Gender dynamics require particular attention in this context. Women are largely affected by transformations involving access to land and market development (Chapter 3 in this volume). Moreover, especially in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, women are increasingly entering labour markets to be employed in agricultural processing activities (Ampadu-Ameyaw and Omari 2015). A second line of research concerns migrant subjects, their relationship with their place of origin, and the struggles and bonds they engage in along the way. Finally, and related to the rise of an ecological-peasant movement conveying deep-ecologic claims, it is also crucial to understand how the rethinking of the role of non-human biological re/production and the opening of a post-human understanding of production and appreciation of multi-species forms of co-dependence, instead of a ready-made way out of capitalism, is a contested terrain where anti-capitalist struggles, reformist position and systemic transformations meet and clash.

NOTES 1.

2. 3.

This was subsequently refined by the FAO in 2001, which defined food security as ‘a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO 2002, p. 49). See https://​viacampesina​.org/​en/​food​-sovereignty/​ (accessed 18 January 2021). See, for example, http://​www​.fao​.org/​e​-agriculture/​news​-and​-events/​topics/​1237 (accessed 8 December 2021.

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168  Handbook of critical environmental politics Hall, D. (2013), Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession and the global land grab, Third World Quarterly, 34 (9), 1582–604. Harvey, D. (2003), The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hippert, C. (2018), Agriculture and colonialism, in P. Thompson and D. Kaplan (eds), Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 1–7. High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis (HLTS-GFSC) (2010), Updated Comprehensive Framework for Action, FAO, Rome. Holt-Giménez, E. (2008), Out of AGRA: the green revolution returns to Africa, Development, 51 (December), 464–71. Holt-Giménez, E. and Altieri, M.A. (2013), Agroecology, food sovereignty, and the new green revolution, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 37 (1), 90–102. Jansen, K. (2015), The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism, dispossession and agroecology, Journal of Peasant Studies, 42 (1), 213–32. Kelly, A.B. (2011), Conservation practice as primitive accumulation, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38 (4), 683–701. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (eds) (2019), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, New Delhi: Tulika Books. Kozai, T. (ed.) (2018), Smart Plant Factory: The Next Generation Indoor Vertical Farms, Singapore: Springer. Kumar, P. (2020), ‘Modernization’ and agrarian development in India, 1912–52, Journal of Asian Studies, 79 (3), 633–58. Li, T.M. (2000), Articulating Indigenous identity in Indonesia: resource politics and the tribal slot, Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics, Working Paper 007, Institute of International Studies, University of California Berkeley, accessed 9 April 2020 at https://​escholarship​.org/​uc/​item/​6h82r72h. Li, T.M. (2014), What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 589–602. Liavoga, A., Virgin, I., Ecuru, J., Morris, J. and Komen, J. (eds) (2016). Fostering a Bio-Economy in Eastern Africa: Insights from Bio-Innovate, Nairobi: ILRI. Margulis, M. (2012), Global food security governance: the Committee on World Food Security Comprehensive Framework for Action and the G8/G20, in R.G. Rayfuse and N. Weisfelt, (eds), The Challenge Of Food Security: International Policy And Regulatory Frameworks, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 231–54. Martínez-Alier, J. (2003), The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Maxwell, S. (1996), Food security: a post-modern perspective, Food Policy, 21 (2), 155–70. McCarthy, J. and Prudham, S. (2004), Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism, Geoforum, 35 (3), 275–83. McKeon, N. (2011), Global Governance for World Food Security: A Scorecard Four Years after the Eruption of the ‘Food Crisis’, Berlin: Heinrich-Boll-Stiftung. McMichael, P. (2005), Global development and the corporate food regime, in F. Buttel and P. McMichael (eds), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development, Bingley: Emerald, pp. 265–99. McMichael, P. (2012), The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39 (3–4), 681–701. McMichael, P. (2014), Historicizing food sovereignty, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41 (6), 933–57. Moore, J.W. (2000), Sugar and the expansion of the early modern world-economy: commodity frontiers, ecological transformation, and industrialization, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 23 (3), 409–33. Moore, J.W. (2008), Ecological crises and the agrarian question in world-historical perspective, Monthly Review, 60 (6), 54–63. Moore, J.W. (2010), The end of the road? Agricultural revolutions in the capitalist world‐ecology, 1450–2010, Journal of Agrarian Change, 10 (3), 389–413. Morris, M., Binswanger-Mkhize, H.P. and Byerlee, D. (2014), Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant. Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in The Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond, Washington, DC: World Bank. Neate, P.J. (2013), Climate-smart agriculture success stories from farming communities around the world, Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and the Technical

Agrarian development and food security  169 Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, CGIAR, accessed 9 April 2020 at https://​ccafs​.cgiar​ .org/​publications/​climate​-smart​-agriculture​-success​-stories​-farming​-communities​-around​-world​#​ .XCZBpc3jJPY. Oya, C. (2013), The land rush and classic agrarian questions of capital and labour: a systematic scoping review of the socioeconomic impact of land grabs in Africa, Third World Quarterly, 34 (9), 1532–57. Patel, R. (2012), Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, New York: Melville House. Patel, R. (2013), The long green revolution, Journal of Peasant Studies, 40 (1), 1–63. Patel, R. and Moore, J.W. (2017), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Pellizzoni, L. (2015), Ontological Politics in a Disposable World. The New Mastery of Nature, Farnham: Ashgate. Pretty, J. (2006), Agroecological approaches to agricultural development, background paper for the World Development Report 2008, World Bank, Washington, DC. Robbins, P. (2004), Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rosset, P.M. and Martínez-Torres, M.E. (2012), Rural social movements and agroecology: context, theory, and process, Ecology and Society, 17 (3), 17, accessed 8 December 2021 at https://​www​ .ecologyandsociety​.org/​vol17/​iss3/​art17/​. Sachs, W. (1990), The archaeology of the development idea, Interculture, 23 (4), 1–10. Sachs, W. (1992), Introduction, in W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, pp. xv–xx. Schneider, M. (2008), ‘We are Hungry!’ A summary report of food riots, government response and states of democracy in 2008, working paper, accessed 9 June 2020 at https://​www​.researchgate​.net/​ publication/​237113525. Schubert, J. (2005), Political ecology in development research: an introductory overview and annotated bibliography, NCCR North-South, Bern, accessed 9 April 2020 at http://​www​.nccr​-north​-south​.unibe​ .ch/​Upload/​Schubert​_NCCR​_Dialogue​_13​-(1)​,pdf. Shiva, V. (1991), The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics, Penang: Third World Network. Smith, N. (2007), Nature as accumulation strategy, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds), Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register, Monmouth: Merlin Press, pp. 16–36. Taylor, M. (2018), Climate-smart agriculture: what is it good for? Journal of Peasant Studies, 45 (1), 89–107. United Nations (UN) (1975), Report of the World Food Conference, Rome, 5–16 November 1974, United Nations, New York. Van der Ploeg, J.D. (2009), The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization, London: Routledge. White, B., Borras, S.M. Jr, Hall, R., Scoones, I. and Wolford, W. (eds) (2012), The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals, London: Routledge. World Bank (1986), Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2007), World Bank Assistance to Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa: an IEG Review, Washington, DC: World Bank.

11. Bioeconomies Kean Birch1

INTRODUCTION In November 2019, I was sitting in Brisbane Airport in Australia looking out at the eerie, red haze enveloping the country as the wildfires tore through the countryside with little regard for human politics. Writing in early 2020, over two months later, those same wildfires are still going and have headed south to the state of Victoria. Again, human politics is a sideshow to the destruction the fires have wrought, including the deaths of over half a billion animals. For those of us living in more northerly or temperate climes, such as Canada where I live, it is hard to appreciate the devastation, although we can certainly empathize with Australians. It is harder yet to understand the head-in-the-sands attitude of many Australian politicians and their media cheerleaders, wilfully denying any link to climate change, or posing for highly inappropriate photo ops in burnt out communities. ‘That would never happen here’, we might say. However, it has happened here: in Canada, the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, was laid waste by wildfire in 2016; in the USA, California has faced recurrent wildfires over the past three years, at least; and there have been huge wildfires in Siberia, Russia, and the Amazon Forest in Brazil in 2019. All of this is going to get worse, and it will do so unless there is a concerted political effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within the next 10 years. We need, then, to find ways to reduce GHG emissions quickly in order to achieve a low-carbon society and economy. Carbon pricing or taxes and emissions trading (see Chapter 27 in this volume) do not seem enough to achieve this objective. Many low-carbon pathways have been and are being proposed, but one that has received increasing political and policy attention – if not public awareness – is the bioeconomy, or bioeconomies (Birch 2019). At its core, the bioeconomy represents the substitution of renewable biological material for fossil fuels as the underlying resource base of our societies and economies – it is a (neoliberal) political project, designed to change social institutions as much as our economic lives without upsetting market imperatives (Pavone and Goven 2017). For example, the bioeconomy entails replacing petroleum with biofuels, oil-based chemicals with biochemicals and plastics with bioplastics; and it entails changing the way we understand resource use and waste – especially with the integration of ‘circularity’ into the bioeconomy concept (see Klitkou et al. 2019). However, and this is critical, it does not challenge the political-economic status quo exemplified by pro-market discourses characteristic of something many people call ‘neoliberalism’ (Birch 2017a). A growing number of countries and jurisdictions around the world have developed bioeconomy strategies or bioeconomy-related strategies, including the European Union (EU), USA, China, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. Consequently, the bioeconomy reflects diverse political and policy visions, projects, and policy objectives. As mentioned, it has involved and will continue to involve significant societal, political and environmental change, which raises an important question: are there environmental or biophysical limits to the bioeconomy? An example of these potential limits is evident in the backlash against first-generation biofuels 170

Bioeconomies  171 derived from feed crops (for example, corn and wheat) that had no better sustainability profiles, or even worse ones, than existing fossil fuels (Searchinger et al. 2008). This raises other questions: how do the biophysical materialities of biological materials enable and constrain particular (neoliberal) bioeconomies? To what political-economic effect and consequence? This chapter answers these questions. I start by considering our climate futures, as a way to illustrate the relevance and importance of the bioeconomy as a political-economic policy agenda and strategy. I then present the analytical framework I use in the chapter, which I define as ‘material political economy’; it combines a concern with political economy and with the materialities of that political economy (Birch 2016a, 2016b, 2019). Then I briefly outline what I mean by ‘bioeconomy’, before, in the following section, analysing the particular material limits to the bioeconomy as a policy agenda and strategy. I then conclude.

OUR CLIMATE FUTURES … OR THE LACK THEREOF Cataloguing the devastation from proliferating wildfires mentioned in the introduction often makes human policy responses to climate change seem laughable. The Canadian federal government, for example, has recently introduced carbon pricing through the 2018 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (GGPP Act), which acts as a backstop should provincial governments not develop their own, more rigorous policies (World Bank 2019). The GGPA Act introduces a regulatory charge on fossil fuels of C$20 per ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalents, rising by an extra C$10 per year until 2022 (World Bank 2019). Revenues from carbon pricing are then returned to the provinces or households through rebates. A number of Canadian provincial governments, including the Conservative government in Ontario, have resisted the imposition of carbon pricing, with little indication that they have a viable alternative, or any desire to find an alternative. All that political effort to introduce a relatively minor incentive to reduce GHG emissions – leading to a less than 10 per cent decline in GHG emissions by 2022 – illustrates the continuing political and policy limits facing policy-makers trying to address climate change … and address it we need to do, urgently. It’s almost impossible to comprehend what the Earth would be like if the worst effects of climate change happen, but luckily others have done so for us. A 2009 article in New Scientist provides a ‘sci-fi’ vision of a future world following a 4°C global temperature rise. Much of the world will be uninhabitable, including the currently most populated parts; whole swathes of land will be converted into solar farms; Antarctica, New Zealand, and parts of Northern Eurasia will comprise ‘compact, high-rise cities’ often built on large areas of warmed permafrost. This vision hides the huge disruption, violence and death that will accompany such a dramatic transformation of world demography, as well as the political will needed to bring it about. None of this can happen without wholesale political change to make the massive movement of peoples acceptable.

MATERIAL POLITICAL ECONOMY All economies are material economies. That is, all economies have an underlying material resource base. Contemporary economies are carbon based, in that prevailing political-economic

172  Handbook of critical environmental politics actions, institutions and infrastructures are entangled with the particular materialities of environmental, energetic, and natural processes and systems relating to the extraction, processing, distribution and consumption of carbon resources (for example, coal, oil and natural gas). As Mitchell (2009, 2011) argues, we can talk about the politics of ‘carbon democracy’, since materialities both enable and constrain particular political actions, choices and narratives. I use this emphasis on biophysical materialities as the analytical starting point for the discussion of a specifically material political economy, acknowledging a theoretical debt to many other thinkers in addition to Mitchell (for example, Bridge 2009). As regards Mitchell’s work, he claims that contemporary democratic politics emerged out of a particular carbon economy, namely coal, in the nineteenth century; and, a contrasting, less democratic politics emerged from the carbon economy of oil in the twentieth century. It is the materiality of coal and oil that enabled and constrained the emergence of a particular form of politics, but in different ways. On the one hand, coal production enabled the development of mass social movements of workers whose capacity to threaten energy supply – through blockages, strikes and disruption – provided a key impetus to the development of democratic politics. On the other, oil production constrained mass political movements as a consequence of its biophysical materialities, including that the extraction and piping of oil limits the capacity of workers to block energy flows. These different materialities create particular political possibilities and limit others. Similar to the political possibilities (or their negation), entangled with these biophysical materialities are the political-economic technologies and epistemologies necessary to embed energy processes in societal systems. With oil, these included epistemic practices and technologies of national accounting developed after World War II: ‘the related networks, of international finance, for example, of technical knowledge, and of economic theory that different forms of energy depended upon and made possible’ (Mitchell 2010, p. 190). That is, a carbon economy is a carbon democracy dependent upon carbon economics, entailing wholesale transformations of economies and polities as well as the ways we understand both. Oil, for example, became bound up with Keynesian demand management in which new (carbon) technologies of calculation and price-setting ‘were built into the financial institutions’ (Mitchell 2011, p. 135). How does all this relate to the bioeconomy? Mitchell (2011, p. 7) makes the very salient point ‘that the political machinery that emerged to govern the age of fossil fuels, partly as a product of these forms of energy, may be incapable of addressing the events that will end it’. Therefore, we cannot rely upon the material political economy of the prevailing and incumbent energy regime to either understand its shortcomings or create pathways to exit the regime. Any low-carbon transition will necessarily entail a wholesale rethinking of politics that both enacts and legitimates a new material political economy (Birch and Calvert 2015). In more recent work, I have linked this material political economy with the critique of neoliberalism, especially as this relates to the neoliberalization of nature (for example, Birch 2019). My key contribution to these neoliberalism debates is to stress that we need ‘to analyse how markets are embedded within and bounded by a range of social, technical, and material relations, which precludes treating them [that is, markets] like some sort of distortion of those same relations’ (Birch 2019, p. 34, original emphasis). I am trying to emphasize here the co-construction of markets and materialities – as did Mitchell – which entails problematizing the notion that biophysical materialities have been transformed by the installation of (neoliberal) markets (for example, McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Castree 2008). Instead, my argument is that nature and markets are co-constitutive of

Bioeconomies  173 each other, meaning that a key political task we are now facing is to find a way to rehabilitate markets by reframing them as socio-material institutions that we might want to use to achieve some ends but not others (for example, production of bio-plastics instead of oil-based plastics), thereby avoiding the analytical trap of seeing them as some sort of aberration of society or the environment. We cannot have markets without the biophysical materialities that enable, legitimate and sustain them; just as we would not have particular environmental processes, systems and politics without markets (for example, the bioeconomy).

BIOECONOMIES: VALUES, POLITICS AND POLICIES What might a new material political economy look like? I would suggest that we can look at what is emerging as an alternative to the carbon economy and polity; one of these alternatives could be the bioeconomy, with the stress on ‘could’. Whether or not it ends up being so depends, in turn, on what particular bioeconomy emerges (see Kitchen and Marsden 2011; Schmid et al. 2012). So, a bioeconomy could challenge the ongoing industrialization and scientization of agricultural and forestry by focusing on agro-ecological approaches (for example, organics and multi-functional farming); that most bioeconomy strategies do not, makes its material political economy more interesting than if it did. It provides a useful insight into the environmental politics of neoliberalism. The emerging bioeconomy now reflects a continuation of the current political-economic materialities, namely, the reproduction of a carbon regime with biomass ‘add-ons’ or ‘drop-ins’ (Birch and Calvert 2015), which sit alongside neoliberal notions of finding ‘substitutes’ for unsustainable products and services (Birch 2019). Previously, I have spelt out – with Kirby Calvert – how bioenergy (as a prime example of the bioeconomy) has a particular material political economy, echoing the work of Mitchell discussed previously. In extending Mitchell’s arguments, we contended that the energy density, feedstock immobility, and transboundary emissions calculations of bioenergy (for example, biofuels) explain the political and policy emphasis on ‘drop-in’ biofuels that will slot into existing institutions (for example, markets) and infrastructures (for example, petrol distribution). Drop-in biofuels are not meant to challenge incumbent carbon industries; instead, they reinforce them by buttressing the materialities underpinning those incumbents. The wider dominant view of the bioeconomy sits within the same set of political expectations. The bioeconomy emerged as a policy vision and then an agenda in the mid-2000s when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission (EC) both produced bioeconomy policy strategies (CEC 2005; OECD 2006). Some have put the emergence of the bioeconomy at this time and in this particular place, that is, mid-2000s Europe, down to the public hostility to agricultural biotechnology (for example, genetically modified organisms, GMOs) (see Bonaccorso 2015). Whatever the reason, the bioeconomy has been taken up subsequently around the world. Various countries – in the Global North and Global South – have developed an array of bioeconomy or bioeconomy-like strategies (German Bioeconomy Council 2015a, 2015b). A number of scholars have produced some excellent reviews of these developments, so I will not repeat them in great detail here (see McCormick and Kautto 2013; Staffas et al. 2013; de Besi and McCormick 2015; Bugge et al. 2016; Hausknost et al. 2017; Birner 2018; Birch 2019). Usually framed as the conversion of biomass into energy, products and services – as distinct from food production – these

174  Handbook of critical environmental politics policy strategies still differ in their framing of the bioeconomy. For example, McCormick and Kautto (2013) highlight the difference between the OECD, the EC and the USA (OECD 2006; CEC 2005, 2012; White House 2012). The OECD strategy has primarily centred on the development of bio-based products and services (that is, substitute goods); the EC strategy is both product-centred and biomass-centred, concerned with the sustainable and efficient use of natural resources (that is, substitute resource base); and the US strategy is more focused on biotechnological research and innovation (that is, substitute research and development, R&D). As Staffas et al. (2013) argue, these types of differences illustrate a split between ‘bio-based economy’ and ‘bio-economy’ approaches, where the former is more concerned with the natural resource base than the latter, which is more concerned with technological conversion processes. From my own research on Canada – after earlier work I undertook on the EU (for example, Birch et al. 2010; Levidow et al. 2012) – I identified a more fragmented and diffuse bioeconomy, largely as a consequence of the way that Canadian policy-makers sought to develop and enact bioeconomy policies. In the Canadian context, it is evident that most policies are driven by sectoral concerns rather than concerted and unified visions of future world (Birch 2016a, 2019). As an emergent policy strategy, the bioeconomy in Canada reflects a series of conflicting and overlapping policy narratives: (1) the need to develop more sustainable bio-based goods as alternatives to compete with existing goods; (2) the need to substitute bio-based products and services with existing products and services; (3) the conflation of renewable with sustainable in promoting the bioeconomy; and (4) the promotion of low-carbon societal transitions, in which the bioeconomy plays a part. As a consequence of these diverse policy visions, Canadian policy frameworks remain fragmented, driven by different, yet specific, sectoral interests: for example, the forestry sector’s goal is to find new markets for timber following the collapse of the paper and pulp industry, which has led to support for developing new bio-based energy production and manufacturing. What brings all these bioeconomy strategies together, however, is their tendency to present a win–win–win scenario as the key political rationale for promoting and supporting the bioeconomy; everyone is meant to win, politically and economically (Richardson 2012; Pfau et al. 2016). In particular, Frow et al. (2009) note that the bioeconomy originally appealed to politicians and policy-makers because it could be presented as a solution to multiple political and policy problems, including: (1) energy security, a growing concern for jurisdictions such as the EU, where a reliance on Russian energy sources was seen as a problem; (2) sustainable development, following Kyoto but before issues with biofuels arose in the late 2000s; and (3) rural employment, with an expectation that demand for biomass would support rural economies. Although this ‘something for everyone’ vision has failed to emerge, the reasons why are worth exploring here.

MAKING THE ‘NEOLIBERAL’ BIOECONOMY This leads me to consider the political issue of how to create a market. As Polanyi (1944 [2001]) noted, and many others have since emphasized, markets are social constructs; they are instituted or made. I emphasize that markets are also defined by their biophysical materialities; that is, the material context of production, consumption, transportation, waste, and so on (Birch 2019). This implies that markets are not inherently anti-social (or anti-environmental)

Bioeconomies  175 institutions; they emerge from socio-material relations and processes. Therefore, we cannot politically or normatively naturalize either the market or society or biophysical environment as some pristine starting point that is disrupted or corrupted by some alien ‘other’; markets are made socially and materially, as much as society and materiality are economically constituted. We can look at the various bioeconomy policy visions and strategies to see how politicians and policy-makers might imagine the bioeconomy, but to get at how it is made in any particular context necessitates that we look at what policies are enacted to make it. I and others call these ‘market development policies’ (MDPs) – see Birch (2019). It is possible to see how the bioeconomy is made through the introduction of research and innovation (R&I) policies, as I have done elsewhere with colleagues (Levidow et al. 2012, 2013). These R&I policies are generally focused on funding specific research agendas through the reconfiguration of existing R&I schemes; for example, the EU’s Framework Programme, which introduced a series of European Technology Platforms in the mid-2000s to early-2010s to support a ‘knowledge-based bioeconomy’ (KBBE) in and across farming, agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and organics research (Birch 2019, p. 137). These policies are often, although not always, designed to support the expansion and/or diversification of specific bioeconomy sectors (for example, forestry) and are, in many instances, led by government ministries rather than private sector actors. There is, according to some, a differentiation between research policies implemented in pursuit of ‘biotechnology’ applications versus those implemented to support ‘bio-based’ applications: for example, biotechnology policies reinforce a technological approach based on laboratory-based life sciences, while bio-based policies emphasize the pursuit of efficiencies in the harvesting and use of biomass (Befort 2020). As the bioeconomy has taken root in some jurisdictions (for example, EU), there seems to have been a policy shift in emphasis from the former to the latter (for example, CEC 2012), but in other jurisdictions (for example, the USA) there seems to be a continuing emphasis on high-technology solutionism (for example, White House 2012) (see Staffas et al. 2013). Research and innovation policies, however, only cover a small part of the MDPs rolled out to institute the bioeconomy. Other MDPs include: regulations, mandates, subsidies, procurement, technology transfer, standards and certification and labelling (Birch 2019). Regulations create markets by banning products (for example, plastic bags) or providing incentives (for example, green taxes), such as the Italian government’s 2011 law banning non-biodegradable plastic bags. Mandates create markets too; for example, biofuels blending mandates create markets by specifying production targets for specific biofuels – these can vary, being volumetric (for example, the USA) or percentage-based (for example, the EU), for instance, which then entail different market priorities. Subsidies provide incentives that support new markets, whether they are for the production of goods (for example, biofuels) or for the construction of facilities (for example, biorefineries); for instance, the UK provided financial support for the development of demonstration and pilot biofuels refineries. Procurement can be used to create market demand through directing government purchasing towards specific goods and services, thereby stimulating consumption. Technology transfer supports can be introduced to encourage the commercialization of particular research agendas; for example, the EU established a Biobased Industries Consortium to do this. Standards and certification are also key in the construction of new markets, such as the EU’s bio-based product standard (CEN/TC 411); standards are central to markets since they establish the threshold for new products. Standards are also hotly debated, such as the proposed sustainability criteria for biofuels production at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

176  Handbook of critical environmental politics Finally, labelling is another way to create markets through raising consumer awareness of new bio-based products and their sustainability dimensions (cf. existing products); for example, France has established a label for bio-based buildings. Many types of MDPs, then, come to constitute the bioeconomy. As we can see from this brief outline, markets do not spring unbidden from the air or from the ground, and that means that the emergence of a bioeconomy follows a particular trajectory; it reflects the political and policy logics that underpin and legitimate the particular material political economy of the bioeconomy in its specific configuration and context. An example of this is evident in the push behind drop-in biofuels in, for example, the USA and Canada (Birch and Calvert 2015). Drop-in biofuels represent new advanced biofuels that can simply slot into existing physical infrastructures (for example, pipelines, refineries and blending stations), as well as prevailing market institutions (for example, energy trading and centralized markets). The material political economy here legitimates the development of a specific form of biofuel and, ultimately, of a specific form of bioeconomy – for example, with bio-based products and services simply replacing those that are carbon based. It does not necessarily legitimate, though, the transition to a more sustainable and low-carbon future, as the development of bio-based alternatives need not be aligned with low-carbon objectives (for example, GHG emissions reductions). Following Mitchell (2011), I argue that this is because the politics of the bioeconomy emerge from the prevailing material political economy, which means that its objectives are framed by energy incumbents (for example, oil firms); for instance, liquid biofuels are seen as a substitute for more toxic additives in petroleum instead of as a way to reduce emissions produced by petroleum.

MATERIAL LIMITS TO BIOECONOMIES Although some forms of bioeconomy are legitimated as particular material political economies, this does not mean that there are no material limits on the emergence of a bioeconomy. This issue that has evident political import. Here, I focus on Canada but extend my analysis to longer-term political considerations. In the Canadian context, the introduction of MDPs to institute a bioeconomy has run up against particular material limits, primarily involving the biophysical materialities of the biological material (that is, biomass) expected to underpin the bioeconomy. I outline three examples, but there are more that illustrate this issue. First, the biofuel mandates introduced in Canada, and elsewhere, have often been premised on moving from first-generation to second-generation biofuels; that is, from feedstock-based biofuels (for example, ethanol) to biofuels derived from non-food crops (for example, lignocellulose). Unfortunately for their proponents, these cellulosic mandates, in particular, have come up against the biophysical limits of production from non-food crops, including differing climatic implications for biomass growth. As a consequence, the USA’s Environmental Protection Agency gave up on enforcing the requirements for cellulosic biofuels production in the 2010s, despite strong mandates to that effect (Dahlman et al. 2016). Second, subsidies have faced similar biophysical limits, especially when it comes to biofuels production facilities. As Calvert et al. (2017) note, the size of biofuels production – especially in comparison to oil production – entails extensive and massive biomass supply chains, with 2-4 tonnes of biomass needed to replace 1 tonne of oil in energy terms; therefore, even a modest biofuels refinery would require biomass

Bioeconomies  177 supplies from dozens of farms every day. The impact on the landscape and road system of trucking the biomass needed by a modest biofuels refinery would be huge, and would probably become a highly politically charged issue for inhabitants (Birch and Calvert 2015). Finally, the biophysical qualities of biomass – its energy density, bulkiness, and so on – mean that any feedstock supply chain has geographical limits. It is not economically feasible to extend the supply chain beyond around 100 miles from any biofuel refinery; similarly, it is not feasible to truck biofuels for consumption beyond that 100 miles radius (Birch 2019). Consequently, biofuels production – or any bioeconomy initiative – is necessarily highly localized, so that only some places will be able to develop strong bioeconomies while others will not have the biomass resources to do so. A key issue arising in the context of all these material limits is that environments are being transformed into private (and public) assets, which the bioeconomy will exacerbate in particular cases (for example, forests), and this is occurring in many different ways – for example, to carbon or mineral deposits, farmland, ecosystem services and agriculture (Birch and Muniesa 2020). As Harvey (2003, p. 149) argued, this can be seen as an ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – which he framed as a violent process of enclosure and extraction – with the ‘release of assets’ into global capitalist circulation. Following Harvey, many scholars have identified different forms of dispossession and their effects, especially when it comes to global land grabs and the global inequalities they engender (for example, Backhouse 2015). This dispossession creates and/or enforces local and global inequalities, all ably assisted by the state. The outcomes and causes of this dispossession can be seen in Canada when it comes to access to forestry; the state – in this instance the Ontario provincial government – enters into specific socio-material arrangements that configure forests as a ‘resource’ (Bridge 2009). While forests have always been seen as a resource in Canada, bioeconomy policies in Canada are a substitute for the declining pulp and paper sector. Dispossession is tied to the continuing state role in harvesting trees through the Crown’s claims to land and resource ownership, long-term licensing arrangements, publicly funded forest access roads, and similar. It is not a swift release of assets: instead, thinking of this as dispossession suggests that it is a long-running and ongoing process (for similar arguments, see Wang 2020 on edamame production). The material limits to this dispossession suggest that it is a far longer-term project than it at first appears, and is facilitated by a rethinking and reworking of political-economic processes. In particular, the material limits of the bioeconomy often reflect growing and harvesting time frames of biomass, especially of trees. Considering the growing time for many trees is longer than 10 years, and for some it is in the 80-year range, the politics and political economy of forestry entails significant long-term planning and management (Muniesa et al. 2017). These timescales lend themselves more readily to resource assetization (Birch 2017b) – that is, their conversion into assets – rather than commodification. By this, the valuation of the biological matter underpinning the bioeconomy depends on its capitalization, which reflects valuation practices using the discounting of future revenues – at a suitable discount rate – to account for future risks, such as political change (Birch and Muniesa 2020). Although only a brief comment here, this is meant to illustrate the extent to which a material political economy perspective can bring specific political questions and issues to the fore that might be ignored or side-lined otherwise.

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CONCLUSION It is important to think about how to disrupt or contest the socio-material configuration of local or global inequities and democratic challenges in ways that interrupt and disrupt these far longer-term processes of capital accumulation. For example, and unlike Harvey’s contribution, scholars such as Leitner and Sheppard (2018) emphasize that ‘asset’ dispossession involves consent and co-optation as well as coercion and violence. Therefore, it makes sense to think about how the transformation of, for example, nature and environment into assets entails a range of knowledges, practices and devices, all of which we have to understand in order to be able to intervene. For example, an increasingly significant proportion of agricultural land around the world is being turned into a new ‘asset class’ according to several researchers (for example, Ducastel and Anseeuw 2017). Ouma (2020) stresses the importance of morality in this transformation, suggesting that political contestation depends on highlighting and bringing these processes and moralities to the fore in debates. The bioeconomy can be seen as part of a broader process of capital accumulation that has been ongoing for centuries (Moore 2015). It is not necessarily a new dynamic, nor a new problematic, with the latter reflecting the concerns in the neoliberal natures literature about the implications of neoliberal processes (for example, commodification and marketization) on environmental quality. There is still room, though, to find spaces to contest and shape the emergence of the bioeconomy, which we should better think of as a range of potential bioeconomies. There is room for localized bio-regions (Kitchen and Marsden 2011), as well as agro-ecological bioeconomies (Schmid et al. 2012), which need to be highlighted in order to avoid policy prescriptions based on the pursuit of one vision and strategy for the bioeconomy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this research (Ref: 430-2013-000751). This chapter draws from previous work, including Birch and Calvert (2015) and Birch (2019).

NOTE 1. With Kirby Calvert (Guelph University, Canada): this chapter was written by me, but draws on some research and written work undertaken with Kirby Calvert (for example, Birch and Calvert 2015).

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Bioeconomies  179 Birch, K. (2016a), Emergent policy imaginaries and fragmented policy frameworks in the Canadian bio-economy, Sustainability, 8 (10), 1–16. Birch, K. (2016b), Materiality and sustainability transitions: Integrating climate change into transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada, Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, 34 (3–4), 191–206. Birch, K. (2017a), A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Birch, K. (2017b), Rethinking value in the bio-economy: finance, assetization and the management of value, Science, Technology and Human Values, 42 (3), 460–90. Birch, K. (2019), Neoliberal Bio-economies? The Co-construction of Markets and Natures, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Birch, K. and Calvert, K. (2015), Rethinking ‘drop-in’ biofuels: on the political materialities of bioenergy, Science and Technology Studies, 28 (1), 52–72. Birch, K. and Muniesa, F. (eds) (2020), Assetization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Birch, K., Levidow, L. and Papaioannou, T. (2010), Sustainable capital? The neoliberalization of nature and knowledge in the European knowledge-based bio-economy, Sustainability, 2 (9), 2898–918. Birner, R. (2018), Bioeconomy concepts, in I. Lewandowski (ed.), Bioeconomy, Cham: Springer, pp. 17–38. Bonaccorso, M. (2015), An interview with the ‘father’ of EU bioeconomy, Il bioeconomista, blog, 19 November, accessed 16 May 2022 at https://​ilbioeconomista​.com/​2015/​11/​19/​chris​-patermann​-talks​ -to​-il​-bioeconomista​-an​-interview​-with​-the​-father​-of​-eu​-bioeconomy/​. Bridge, G. (2009), Material worlds: natural resources, resource geography and the material economy, Geography Compass, 3 (3), 1217–44. Bugge, M., Hansen, T. and Klitkou, A. (2016), What is the bioeconomy? A review of the literature, Sustainability, 8 (7), 691. Calvert, K., Birch, K. and Mabee, W. (2017), New perspectives on an old energy resource: biomass and emerging bio-economies, in S. Bouzarovski, M. Pasqualetti and V. Castán Broto (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Energy Geographies, London: Routledge, pp. 47–60. Castree, N. (2008), Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation, Environment and Planning A, 40 (1), 131–52. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2005), New Perspectives on the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy: Conference Report, Brussels: DG-Research, Commission of the European Communities. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2012), Innovating for Sustainable Growth: A Bioeconomy for Europe [COM(2012) 60 Final], Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Dahlman, K., Fowler, L. and Smith, P. (2016), United States law and policy and the biofuel industry, in Y. Le Bouthillier, A. Cowie, P. Martin and H. McLeod-Kilmurray (eds), The Law and Policy of Biofuels, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 102–40. De Besi, M. and McCormick, K. (2015), Towards a bioeconomy in Europe: national, regional and industrial strategies, Sustainability, 7 (8), 10461–78. Ducastel, A. and Anseeuw, W. (2017), Agriculture as an asset class: reshaping the South African farming sector, Agriculture and Human Values, 34 (1), 199–209. Frow, E., Ingram, D., Powell, W., Steer, D., Vogel, J. and Yearley, S. (2009), The politics of plants, Food Security, 1 (1), 17–23. German Bioeconomy Council (2015a), Bioeconomy Policy: Synopsis and Analysis of Strategies in the G7, Berlin: Office of the Bioeconomy Council. German Bioeconomy Council (2015b), Bioeconomy Policy (Part II): Synopsis of National Strategies Around the World, Berlin: Office of the Bioeconomy Council. Harvey, D. (2003), The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hausknost, D., Schriefl, E., Lauk, C. and Kalt, G. (2017), A transition to which Bioeconomy? An exploration of diverging techno-political choices, Sustainability, 9 (4), 1–22. Kitchen, L. and Marsden, T. (2011), Constructing sustainable communities: a theoretical exploration of the bio-economy and eco-economy paradigms, Local Environment, 16 (8), 753–69. Klitkou, A., Fevolden, A. and Capasso, M. (eds) (2019), From Waste to Value: Valorisation Pathways for Organic Waste Streams in Circular Bioeconomies, London: Routledge. Leitner, H. and Sheppard, E. (2018), From Kampungs to condos? Contested accumulation through displacement in Jakarta, Environment and Planning A, 50 (2), 437–56.

180  Handbook of critical environmental politics Levidow, L., Birch, K. and Papaioannou, T. (2012), EU agri-innovation policy: two contending visions of the knowledge-based bio-economy, Critical Policy Studies, 6 (1), 40–66. Levidow, L., Birch, K. and Papaioannou, T. (2013), Divergent paradigms of European agro-food innovation: the knowledge-based bio-economy (KBBE) as an R&D agenda, Science, Technology, and Human Values, 38 (1), 94–125. McCarthy, J. and Prudham, S. (2004), Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism, Geoforum, 35 (3), 275–83. McCormick, K. and Kautto, N. (2013), The bioeconomy in Europe: an overview, Sustainability, 5 (6), 2589–608. Mitchell, T. (2009), Carbon democracy, Economy and Society, 38 (3), 399–432. Mitchell, T. (2010), The resources of economics: making the 1973 oil crisis, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (2), 189–204. Mitchell, T. (2011), Carbon Democracy, London: Verso. Moore, J.W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso. Muniesa, F., Doganova, L., Ortiz, H., Pina-Stranger, A., Paterson, F., Bourgoin, A., et al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide, Paris: Presses des Mines. New Scientist (2009), Surviving in a warmer world, New Scientist, 25 February, accessed June 2020 at https://​www​.newscientist​.com/​article/​mg20126971700​-surviving​-in​-a​-warmer​-world/​. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2006), The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda, Paris: OECD. Ouma, S. (2020), This can(’t) be an asset class: the world of money management, ‘society’, and the contested morality of farmland investments, Environment and Planning A, 52 (1), 66–87. Pavone, V. and Goven, J. (eds) (2017), Bioeconomies, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pfau, S.F., Hagens, J.E., Dankbaar, B. and Smits, A.J.M. (2016), Visions of sustainability in bioeconomy research, Sustainability, 6 (March), 1222–49. Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation, repr. 2001, New York: Beacon Press. Richardson, B. (2012), From a fossil-fuel to a biobased economy: the politics of industrial biotechnology, Environment and Planning C, 30 (2), 282–96. Schmid, O., Padel, S. and Levidow, L. (2012), The bio-economy concept and knowledge base in a public goods and farmer perspective, Bio-based and Applied Economics, 1 (1), 47–63. Searchinger, T., Heimlich, R., Houghton, R.A., Dong, F., Elobeid, A., Fabiosa, J., et al. (2008), Use of US croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land-use change, Science, 319 (5867), 1238–40. Staffas, L., Gustavsson, M. and McCormick, K. (2013), Strategies and policies for the bioeconomy and bio-based economy: an analysis of official national approaches, Sustainability, 5 (6), 2751–69. Wang, K.-C. (2020), The art of rent: the making of edamame monopoly rents in East Asia, Environment and Planning E, 3 (3), 624–41. White House (2012), National Bioeconomy Blueprint, Washington, DC: The White House. World Bank (2019), State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2019, Washington, DC: World Bank.

12. Cities and the environment Hug March

INTRODUCTION In the context of impending environmental and climate crises combined with accelerated urbanization patterns on a global scale, new urban sustainability paradigms have emerged. It is widely recognized, both by urban experts and international institutions, that the twenty-first century is the urban century: cities will concentrate most of the global population, and the patterns of consumption and mobility within urban areas are essential factors behind global environmental change. Progressively, the ‘local’ scale is championed as the site to experiment with innovative solutions to tackle the climate crisis (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013a, 2013b). The New Urban Agenda of the United Nations (2017) recognizes the crucial role of cities in tackling global issues such as climate change. Elsewhere the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations and, specifically, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly refer to ‘sustainable cities and communities’ in Objective 11: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. In an exhaustive review of more than 1400 scientific articles on urban sustainability, de Jong et al. (2015, p. 26) show how urban areas ‘are engaged in a multitude of initiatives variously aimed at upgrading urban infrastructure and services, to create better environmental, social and economic conditions and to enhance cities’ attractiveness as well as their competitiveness’. The pursuit of urban sustainability, while promoting economic development and improving citizens’ quality of life, embraces a broad multiplicity of concepts, from widely spread paradigms from the 1990s (for example, sustainable cities and green cities) to more recent paradigms, some of them closely related to climate change mitigation and adaptation and with widespread use (such as resilient cities or smart cities). A number of those strategies may be used at the same time, with urban practitioners developing separate strategies and having different departments developing them, or directly combining them (sometimes, in a lax way or using them as synonyms). Academics and practitioners may use some of those concepts at the same time to define ongoing twenty-first century urban strategies: low-carbon eco-cities, smart sustainable cities and green resilient cities, among other combinations. Most importantly, all those imaginaries encapsulate a more liveable city, that is, less carbon-intensive and greener. While behind all those emerging urban sustainability paradigms there might be a genuine intention to move towards more sustainable urban futures, we might argue that it is crucial to scrutinize and problematize them critically. This chapter, deeply influenced by (urban) political ecology (Robbins 2004; Heynen et al. 2006), focuses on two of the most significant urban paradigms of the early twenty-first century, in relation to policy impact in both the Global North and the Global South as well as academic relevance: smart cities and urban resilience. While the former involves the intensive use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to streamline urban management and improve urban sustainability, the latter is closely related to how cities can cope with (socio-environmental) disturbances while preserving its function181

182  Handbook of critical environmental politics ing, with particular emphasis on climate change adaptation. This chapter, based on previous research on smart cities (March and Ribera-Fumaz 2016; March 2018, 2019; Charnock et al. 2021) and urban resilience (Satorras et al. 2020 and Spanish-funded RESCITIES project [PGC2018-100996-A-I00]) aims to critically scrutinize the evolution, as well as the problems and contradictions, of both paradigms. Beyond the necessary and constructive critique, the chapter succinctly puts forward the idea that both paradigms may open up transformative and progressive possibilities for cities to tackle the ongoing and future socio-environmental crisis.

A CRITIQUE OF THE SMART CITY The ‘smart city’ has emerged in the past few years as a buzzword that impregnates urban narratives around sustainability, liveability, low-carbon, green growth and urban efficiency (Batty 2013; Vittanen and Kingston 2014; Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015; Cugurullo 2016; White 2016). Cities across the globe have embarked on a ‘quest for technologically enhanced urban management’ (Taylor Buck and While 2017, p. 503; Wiig 2016) to enable ‘a more efficient use and organization of urban systems’ (Wiig 2016, p. 538). Technology, specifically ICT, through sensors, smart grids, smart meters, big data, integrated platforms, or similar, is a cornerstone of many smart urban interventions to address global environmental change, and more specifically to tackle climate change. The smart city is composed of some of the ICT elements and infrastructures mentioned previously, as well as new forms of governance, shifting towards private and civil society participation, and new processes of urban innovation (Caragliu et al. 2011). The concept has been capturing the attention not only of cities and states but also of private capital (from large information technology corporations, transnational utilities and international consultancies to local entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized companies) and supranational institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank or the European Union, among others. The New Urban Agenda (United Nations 2017, p. 19) also refers to smart cities: ‘We commit ourselves to adopting a smart-city approach that makes use of opportunities from digitalization, clean energy and technologies, as well as innovative transport technologies, thus providing options for inhabitants to make more environmentally friendly choices and boost sustainable economic growth and enabling cities to improve their service delivery’. Smart cities encapsulates the desires and prospects on the transformative and disruptive role technology will have in solving urban issues (March 2018, 2019). The smart city concept has its roots in the 1980s debates about concepts such as technopolis, wired cities, or intelligent cities (Bunnell 2015; Kitchin 2015; Shelton et al. 2015). The linchpin of the concept is the promise of a more sustainable urban environment and a radical change in the provision of urban services through the production and integration of urban data (Batty 2013; Taylor Buck and While 2017; March and Ribera-Fumaz 2016). That is, through the continuous capture of fine-grained data on urban metabolism through the pervasive and intensive deployment of applications (apps), sensors, smart meters, smart grids, integrated management platforms and similar, the smart city seeks a more efficient and optimal use of resources, a decrease in urban pollution and a better quality of life, while fostering economic growth (March 2019). The smart city travels through different Global North and Global South geographies (Crivello 2015), articulating a techno-utopian imaginary based on the emancipatory role of technological progress (Gibbs et al. 2013; Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015; Hollands 2008;

Cities and the environment  183 Kitchin 2015; Taylor Buck and While 2017). We can find its bases in a multiplicity of smart cities in Europe or Asia aiming to retrofit the existing built environment, but also including cities built from scratch that work as technological testbeds and showcases (Carvalho 2015; Cugurullo 2016; Shelton et al. 2015). Notwithstanding its global expansion, the smart city is a contested and complex imaginary (Carvalho 2015; Shelton et al. 2015; Taylor Buck and While 2017; White 2016). This paradigm impacts upon disparate (urban) geographies, with different urban problems and with diverging socio-economic, environmental and demographic realities, which has led some to state that the concept is ambiguous and malleable (Hollands 2008), or even chaotic and nebulous (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015). Given the pervasive diffusion of the concept setting up (or impacting upon) the urban agendas of global metropolitan areas, but also as small and medium-sized cities, and the dominance of self-congratulatory and enthusiastic discourses around its virtues, the articulation of a critical perspective towards the smart city may seem counterintuitive. Several scholars have called for a critical analysis on ‘why, how, for whom and with what consequences’ (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015, p. 2106) this phenomenon is emerging in different urban contexts (for a comprehensive list of literature see March 2018). As Hollands (2015, p. 73) argues, the smart city ‘raises more questions than it answers’. In what follows I summarize some of the most pressing critiques of the smart city (for an extended version, see March 2018, 2019), which focus on technological determinism, pervasive penetration of private logics into urban sustainability questions, a-geographic vision, depoliticization of socio-environmental issues, and unexpected, uneven or contradictory socio-environmental outcomes. Technological Determinism Under the smart city imaginary, technological change spearheads social and environmental transformation (Kerschner and Ehlers 2016). Mainstream discourses around the smart city ‘are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change’ (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015, p. 2105). The smart city is infused with an ontological perspective that frames sustainability and urban challenges primarily as engineering and technical problems, overestimating the transformative power of technology and underestimating or ignoring the non-technological aspects of urban problems (Bell 2011; Hollands 2015). Technological solutionism is privileged as a way to tackle any existing problem. The intensive use of ICT is a-critically assumed as an obligatory passage through which cities need to pass if they want to become smart and sustainable (Söderstrom et al. 2014; Vittanen and Kingston 2014). This may entail the prefiguration of strategies to tackle socio-environmental problems in a-geographic, a-spatial and decontextualized way (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015; Shelton et al. 2015; Wiig 2016). Privatization of Urban Management, Private Appropriation of Data and Potential Technological Lock-In The smart city paradigm is also criticized by some scholars as being a product of the search for new markets during phases of low economic growth and neoliberal urban restructuring and austerity urbanism (Söderstrom et al. 2014; Vanolo 2014; Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015; Wiig 2016). It could be interpreted as a way of disciplining the city to fit it into new political-technological assemblages (Vanolo 2014), naturalizing new rationalities of capital

184  Handbook of critical environmental politics circulation and rent extraction. This framework, therefore, could be understood as an example of technologically driven climate change governance (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015) in which ICT companies, large international consultancies and private utility companies become key players in the design, experimentation, deployment and management of urban sustainability interventions (Viitanen and Kingston 2014; Carvalho 2015). In doing so, the smart city discourse has accelerated to an ‘unprecedented degree’ the involvement of private capital in the prefiguration of urban futures (Vanolo 2014; Bunnell 2015, p. 46). Private capital is given in many instances full reign and monopolistic control over technology implementation and management of the urban data produced. There is the risk that the city progressively encapsulate the desires, images and values determined by private capital (Vanolo 2014; Hollands 2015). Furthermore, depending on private monopolistic control over smart infrastructure and proprietary technologies may lead to a socio-technical lock-in thwarting the emergence and development of alternative socio-technical arrangements (Söderstrom et al. 2014; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015). Last, the massive deployment of urban sensors, smart meters, smart mobility cards and smart grids, among others, combined with the proliferation of mobile apps, generate a continuous and massive production of big data that are integrated into urban platforms to be analysed (Kitchin 2015). In many instances, the owners of these data are not the public administrations but private companies that can obtain large profits derived from the exploitation of these data (sometimes named data extractivism). Depoliticized and A-Geographic Vision of (Urban) Society The dominant paradigm of Smart City, as argued before, often prefigures interventions in an a-geographic, a-spatial and decontextualized way (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015; Shelton et al. 2015; Wiig 2016). Fuelled by a depoliticized grandiloquence, the smart city paradigm overestimates the transformative capacity of technology while it overshadows the structural (political-economical) dimensions of socio-environmental urban problems, such as poverty, discrimination or inequality (Hollands 2015). The overemphasis on technical parameters, such as efficiency, may act ‘to obscure both the relations which prefigure and maintain those technological assemblages, as well as the social and political configurations which might, conceivably, be pursued in the service of more effective and long-lasting solutions’ (White 2016, p. 585). Even though sustainability is at the core of the smart city discourse, its social and equity dimensions are often neglected (Carvalho 2015), as the democratization of technology and digital participation replaces more material social and environmental justice concerns (Viitanen and Kingston 2014). In relation to this, and connecting with the ongoing debates on the right to the city, Hollands (2015, p. 72) contends that most smart city initiatives encapsulate the idea of the ‘right to use technology’, instead of ‘the right to shape the city using human initiative and technology for social purposes to make our cities better and more sustainable’. This can lead to the strategies of Smart City intensifying the processes of urban splintering (Graham and Marvin 2001), producing new sorts of privileges and exclusions (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015), as some social groups can have limited access to ICT (Angelidou 2014), and reinforcing uneven power relations (Viitanen and Kingston 2014).

Cities and the environment  185 (Unexpected) Environmental Impacts of the Smart City In the vast majority of cases, a primary driver and justification of the implementation of smart city strategies is the alleged improvement of the sustainability and metabolism of the city. Some empirical studies report increases in energy efficiency in smart cities (Yu and Zhang 2019). However, this apparent translation of the implementation of smart city strategies into urban sustainability improvements must be subjected to further critical scrutiny, as the relation between the implementation of ICT-intensive smart interventions and environmental improvements is not unidirectional, but complex, uncertain and dependent of the geographic scale (local benefits may bring about socio-environmental impacts elsewhere) (Berkhout and Hertin 2004). Despite the de-materialization and sustainability promises of digitalization, specifically around its possibilities to mitigate greenhouse emissions, the production, operation and disposal of digital technologies should be critically scrutinized (Williams 2011; Chapter 7 in this volume). First, there are important concerns about the massive use of energy to sustain the operation of data servers (Siddik et al. 2021). Second, technologies require the use of scarce elements, including critical metals and rare earths (Chancerel et al. 2015), with important impacts during the process of extraction (feeding conflicts in the areas of extraction) and disposal (Ali 2014). Third, even if smart technologies lead to more efficient resource use at the consumption level, there is also the risk that this may lead to a rebound effect (Jevons paradox). In summary, while some benefits of smart city strategies have been empirically documented, more efforts to shed light on that issue are necessary.

A CRITIQUE OF URBAN RESILIENCE In parallel to the emergence of the smart city paradigm, cities across the globe, especially when dealing with efforts to tackle climate change, have embraced the notion of urban resilience. The concept of resilience has long been used in psychology, engineering and risk management (Matyas and Pelling 2015), as well as in change, dynamics and uncertainties of complex socio-ecological systems (Gunderson 2000). From the latter, resilience is understood as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and reorganize to cope with a shock while still retaining the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks (Walker et al. 2004; Chapter 16 in this volume). Critical scholarship has raised some questions around how resilience translates into real adaptation to climate change and transformation (Berrang-Ford et al. 2011). In the urban realm, resilience thinking has spread in the context of changing urban conditions and the emergence of complex challenges requiring integrated approaches (Galderisi and Colucci 2018). While early approaches to urban resilience, mostly focused on infrastructures, considered that a resilient city should be capable of withstanding a strong shock event without the outbreak of chaos or permanent deformation or tearing (Godschalk 2003), in the past few years new approaches to urban resilience, more sensitive to the climate questions and amplifying views towards socio-environmental concerns, have emerged in academic and policy debates (de Jong et al. 2015). United Nations-related strategies have championed the notion of resilient cities through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG11), the UNISDR campaign of ‘Making cities resilient!’ or the City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP, UN-Habitat). Private actors, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, have also had a critical role in the promotion of the concept through the 100 Resilient Cities network, that later became the Resilient

186  Handbook of critical environmental politics Cities Network (https://​re​silientcit​iesnetwork​.org/​, accessed 29 April 2022). Still, and in an analogue way to smart cities, there is a degree of ambiguity and fuzziness in the mobilization of the concept of urban resilience, especially from an academic perspective. Scholars such as Archer et al. (2014) and Stumpp (2013) have identified dissonances between the theory and practice of urban resilience, and hence there might be unexpected socially unjust outcomes (Anguelovski et al. 2016; Ziervogel et al. 2017). Despite the massive use of the concept, there is, arguably, a lack of consensus on the definition of urban resilience, and this has implications in its implementation at the municipal level. Meerow et al. (2016) carried out a comprehensive review of the use of urban resilience in the academic field, analysing more than 25 definitions of the concept. They argue that the existence of inconsistencies between the use of the concept by different authors makes it difficult to operationalize. Specifically, they identify six conceptual tensions concerning urban resilience: (1) characterization of ‘urban’ (complex and/or networked versus neither or unclear); (2) notion of equilibrium (non-equilibrium versus equilibrium); (3) resilience as a positive concept (versus resilience as a normative and contested concept); (4) pathway to resilience (transformation versus some change/transition vs. none/persistence only); (5) understanding of adaptation (adaptability versus adaptation); and (6) timescale of action (rapidity versus not specified). Following the identification of those tensions, Meerow et al. (2016, p. 39) elaborate a definition of urban resilience: Urban resilience refers to the ability of an urban system – and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales - to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity.

Finally, these authors raise very pertinent questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why?), opening up a critical research agenda on urban resilience (Meerow et al. 2016, p. 46), which arguably could also be applied to other urban sustainability paradigms: ● Who? Who determines what is desirable for an urban system? Whose resilience is prioritized? Who is included (and excluded) from urban systems? ● What? What perturbations should the urban system be resilient to? What networks and sectors are included in the urban system? Is the focus on generic or specific resilience? ● When? Is the focus on rapid-onset disturbances or slow-onset changes? Is the focus on short-term resilience or long-term resilience? Is the focus on the resilience of current or future generations? ● Where? Where are the spatial boundaries of the urban system? Is the resilience of some areas prioritized over others? Does building resilience in some areas affect resilience elsewhere? ● Why? What is the goal of building urban resilience? What are the underlying motivations for building urban resilience? Is the focus on processes or outcomes? Beyond the seminal work of Meerow et al. (2016), urban resilience has received attention from urban political ecologists and critical environmental and urban scholars. First, some authors have pointed out that urban resilience represents old wine in new bottles (Kaika 2017), being ultimately biased towards maintaining the status quo and reinforcing neoliberal postulates (Saurí 2018). Indeed, there is an ongoing discussion as to whether it will be con-

Cities and the environment  187 verted to a meaningless umbrella concept, or keep particular value and meaning as an agenda for cities (Porter and Davoudi 2012). There is an emerging set of studies that have started to delineate differences and overlaps of urban resilience with other city agendas (de Jong et al. 2015; Galderisi and Colucci 2018). Nevertheless, they tend to overlook resilience practice and focus their analyses on academic literature. Second, political ecology scholars claim that resilience studies should not just focus on how the urban system copes with single stressors, such as climate-related impacts (Ajibade and McBean 2014; Harrison and Chiroro 2017). In contrast, they advocate not masking the multiple and combined threats, including pre-existing structural vulnerabilities, to which societies seek to be resilient (Wilbanks and Kates 2010). Third, there is a need to consider better the socio-spatial patterns of urban resilience: within and across social actors (Sapountzaki 2007; Elliott and Pais 2006), places (Pike et al. 2010) and cities (Suárez et al. 2016). Questions such as ‘whose resilience is being addressed?’ have been posed, pointing out the fact that cities are not composed by uniform landscapes and communities (Vale 2014). The incorporation of equity issues into the resilience agenda has long been a demand for advocates of a more socially grounded resilience (Leichenko 2011; Brown 2014; Matin et al. 2018). Fourth, the inclusive engagement of stakeholders remains a crucial challenge to democratize urban resilience decision-making. For instance, only 36 per cent of the community resilience programmes reviewed by Sharifi (2016) had been developed through participatory processes. Along these lines, there is an increasing interest by scholars on co-production of resilience and bottom-up initiatives of community resilience (Stevenson and Petrescu 2016; Muñoz-Erickson et al. 2017; Satorras et al. 2020).

WHOSE SMARTNESS AND RESILIENCE? OPPORTUNITIES FOR A PROGRESSIVE SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL URBAN TRANSFORMATION Against the impending critical impacts of climate change on the urban scale, together with unsustainable urban trends regarding urban pollution, urgent action in the form of socio-environmental urban strategies must be taken into account. Smart cities and resilient cities emerge as two broad paradigms that may entice practitioners and policy-makers with their promises to tackle twenty-first century urban socio-environmental problems. We have observed, in this short critical chapter, that both paradigms still open more questions than they answer, not only whether they deliver what they promise (something that this chapter is not able to evaluate, given the relative infancy of those concepts) but in the unexpected (negative) impacts they may have, especially in social, political, and economic terms. What might be problematic about the smart city are not smart technologies per se but the political economy underpinning technocratic and corporate, technological determinist, a-spatial smart city imaginaries (March 2018, 2019). However, progressive, bottom-up and emancipatory subversion of the use of smart city technologies may be viable and desirable. Critical scholars have been discussing how the shift to the debate of the right to the smart city may empower citizens and open up new avenues of progressive urban citizenship and urban transformations (Kitchin 2019; Kitchin et al. 2019). Trencher (2019), for instance, reflects on the possibilities of a new wave of smart cities (smart cities 2.0) in advancing social agendas and actively involving the community. Cities such as Barcelona have been embracing, in the past few years, an alternative understanding of the potential of digital and smart technologies to foster

188  Handbook of critical environmental politics progressive socio-environmental urban transformation (see Charnock et al. 2021). Concepts such as technological sovereignty (Charnock et al. 2021), digital commons (Kostakis et al. 2018) and ‘data as commons’ (Beckwith et al. 2019), which are being taken into consideration in progressive smart city development, may open new possibilities and avenues in reconfiguring the political economy and the social justice outcomes of that paradigm. These alternative discourses and practices involve the collaborative redistribution of ‘intelligence’ and open the possibility to a progressive civic, democratic, cooperative, citizen-based and community-led urban transformation neither controlled by the technocratic elites and capital nor subsumed to the fetishism of a-geographic technological determinism. Something similar might occur with the concept of urban resilience. If it is subjected to a critical scrutiny, it can enable transformative avenues for the most vulnerable to socio-environmental problems, especially when developed with citizens or directly by the community (see Camps-Calvet et al. 2015; Bródy et al. 2018). Especially interesting are the avenues that the co-production of urban sustainability policies, including urban resilience, may open up (Satorras et al. 2020). When shifting towards politically engaged and progressive forms of resilience, more interest should be orientated towards social and distributive questions, therefore, addressing issues such as whose resilience or who is taken into account in the governance of urban resilience. By focusing explicitly on arguably the two more pervasive paradigms of urban sustainability, namely, smart cities and urban resilience, in this chapter, I have argued that they encapsulate the current political economy and the political ecology of the relation between nature, capital, technology and society, in a context of climate emergency and socio-economic crisis. Many efforts by critical scholars have focused on uncovering fascinating stories of the unexpected outcomes of smart cities in different geographies, or problematizing the notion of urban resilience, including critical socio-environmental questions (in distributive and procedural terms). In pandemic and post-pandemic times, it is a task of critical scholars to continue parsing those initiatives through a critical lens, not only to show their contradictions but also to imagine opportunities and innovative frameworks that allow for a progressive urban socio-environmental transformation that does not leave anybody behind.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author is Co-PI of the RESCITIES project (‘The political ecology of urban resilience to hydro-climatic events in Spain’, funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation, Plan Nacional (PGC2018-100996-A-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)).

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Cities and the environment  191 Satorras, M., Ruiz-Mallen, I., Monterde, A. and March, H. (2020), Co-production of urban climate planning: insights from the Barcelona Climate Plan, Cities, 106 (November), 1–11. Saurí, D. (2018), From sustainability to resilience: the hidden costs of recent socioenvironmental change in cities of the Global North, in K. Ward, A.E.G. Jonas, B. Miller and D. Wilson (eds), The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 157–66. Sharifi, A. (2016), A critical review of selected tools for assessing community resilience, Ecological Indicators, 69 (October), 629–47. Shelton, T., Zook, M. and Wiig, A. (2015), The ‘actually existing smart city’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8 (1), 13–25. Siddik, M.A.B., Shehabi, A. and Marston, L. (2021), The environmental footprint of data centers in the United States, Environmental Research Letters, 16 (6), 064017. Söderstrom, O., Paasche, T. and Klauser, F. (2014), Smart cities as corporate storytelling, City, 18 (3), 307–20. Stevenson, F. and Petrescu, D. (2016), Co-producing neighbourhood resilience, Building Research & Information, 44 (7), 695–702. Stumpp, E.M. (2013), New in town? On resilience and ‘resilient cities’, Cities, 32 (June), 164–6. Suárez, M., Gómez-Baggethun, E., Benayas, J. and Tilbury, D. (2016), Towards an urban resilience index: a case study in 50 Spanish cities, Sustainability, 8 (8), 774. Taylor Buck, N. and While, A. (2017), Competitive urbanism and the limits to smart city innovation: the UK Future Cities initiative, Urban Studies, 54 (2), 501–19. Trencher, G. (2019), Towards the smart city 2.0: empirical evidence of using smartness as a tool for tackling social challenges, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 142 (May), 117–28. United Nations (2017), New Urban Agenda, Quito: United Nations. Vale, L.J. (2014), The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city? Building Research & Information, 42 (2), 37–41. Vanolo, A. (2014), Smartmentality: the smart city as disciplinary strategy, Urban Studies, 51 (5), 883–98. Viitanen, J. and Kingston, R. (2014), Smart cities and green growth: outsourcing democratic and environmental resilience to the global technology sector, Environment and Planning A, 46 (4), 803–19. Walker, B., Holling, C.S., Carpenter, S.R. and Kinzig, A. (2004), Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems, Ecology and Society, 9 (2), 5. White, J.M. (2016), Anticipatory logics of the smart city’s global imaginary, Urban Geography, 37 (4), 572–89. Wiig, A. (2016), The empty rhetoric of the smart city: from digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia, Urban Geography, 37 (4), 535–53. Wilbanks, T.J. and Kates, R.W. (2010), Beyond adapting to climate change: embedding adaptation in responses to multiple threats and stresses, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100 (4), 719–28. Williams, E. (2011), Environmental effects of information and communication technologies, Nature, 479 (7373), 354–8. Yu, Y. and Zhang, N. (2019), Does smart city policy improve energy efficiency? Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China, Journal of Cleaner Production, 229 (August), 501–12. Ziervogel, G., Pelling, M., Cartwright, A., Chu, E., Deshpande, T., Harris, L., et al. (2017), Inserting rights and justice into urban resilience: a focus on everyday risk, Environment and Urbanization, 29 (1), 123–38.

13. Climate justice and global politics Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen and Oliver Hunt

INTRODUCTION Issues of social justice are critical to how we think about climate change. This is owing to climate change posing a series of challenges to existing perceptions of what constitutes a just world. Consider that the average per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for someone living in Niger is 0.1 tonnes of CO2, whereas the average per capita CO2 emissions for someone living in the USA is 16.56 tonnes (Our World in Data 2019). The person from Niger is, however, much more likely to experience the catastrophic consequences, than the average American, owing to existing environmental conditions and limited economic resources to adapt to a warming world (Klein 2015). Studies also show that climate change concerns intergenerational issues. It is the younger and future generations who are most affected by a changing climate, yet they did not indulge in lifestyles that are embedded in capitalist modes of production, capital circulation and patterns of consumption that caused this mess in the first place. Further, climate change is racially unjust (see also Chapter 33 in this volume). Non-elite people of color, most of whom have lived in the Global South, have historically contributed less than most global elites and privileged groups. However, many who have contributed very little to the problem are burdened by a warming world (Althor et al. 2016). These relations demonstrate that the consequences of climate change are unevenly distributed and therefore do not affect everyone equally. The discrepancy between cause and effect makes climate change an issue of social injustices, since at the heart of social justice is the idea that all participate as peers in social life (Fraser 2008, p. 36). In response to this situation, climate justice has developed in parallel as a concept in academia and as a global movement. It is a central starting point for this chapter that the knowledge and ideas of the movement need to be represented on a par with theoretical insights. For example, the understanding of climate debt developed out of grassroots intervention in the global climate debate, and the force behind structural arguments for equality has emerged from below before it became a part of theoretical conversations (Roberts and Parks 2007). Hence, climate justice was debated academically in relatively small circles, as it was becoming a rallying concept for a global movement (Jacobsen 2018). In recent years, however, scholars from diverse disciplines have started to develop different theories of climate justice that account for the variegated experiences of climate injustices, hoping that their ethical principles would inform policy debates. We present different suggestions for what should count as the key concepts in climate justice and how these concepts form the basis for conflictual approaches. Claims have been made for historical responsibility, equality, customary rights, needs or climate debt to be the center of gravity for climate justice, and it is important to understand where these differences in emphasis emerge from and how they affect the global political outlook. This chapter also explores how, at a more general level, the concept of global climate justice has come under pressure from several developments relevant to both the grassroots and the 192

Climate justice and global politics  193 academic debate. Our argument is unfolded in three subsequent sections. First, we argue that the theoretical development from ethical principles of climate justice to policy-orientated models has made climate justice less politically and ethically potent. Second, we argue that although grassroots mobilizations have attempted to make climate justice the central rallying concept for a global movement, it has proven difficult to uphold the political momentum for climate solutions from below. As an element of this same section, we emphasize the importance of the tradition for environmental justice demands in the activism for climate justice. Finally, we show how the concept of climate emergency places pressure on both theories and mobilizations for climate justice. As a response to the repeated and intensifying scientific warnings on the urgency of decarbonization, different new voices call for types of rapid climate action that are more focused on fast decarbonization among the high polluters than on the question of representing the demands of the most vulnerable. As examples, we examine both the scientific literature on rapid mitigation and the discourses of Extinction Rebellion (XR) to understand how climate emergency might change both the theoretical and political concept of climate justice. Looking ahead, we propose that the most relevant question moving forward is how to articulate demands for climate justice in a time of climate emergency.

THEORIES OF CLIMATE JUSTICE Acknowledged as a starting point for formal ethical theorizations on climate justice, British philosopher Henry Shue reflected on the central problems for integrating a justice perspective ahead of the negotiations in the annual Conferences of the Parties (COP) meetings in which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Framework for Climate Change (UNFCCC) has convened most countries globally since 1995. Shue’s main focus was ‘justice of the international allocation of the costs of dealing with a global environmental problem’ (Shue 1992, p. 373). Considerations at that time reflected experiences with stronger claims for equity on the United Nations (UN) level, centered on the rejection and failure of the attempts to form strong alliances among poorer countries, such as the New International Economic Order in the 1970s and 1980s (Gilman 2015). Hence, Shue weighed arguments for and against making a strong division between climate action and justice, giving attention to the issue of rich countries depending on land-use change in the Global South and the possible claims for wealth transfer from the North. A crucial point for Shue, and what makes climate justice unavoidable at the level of global negotiations, is that for very poor countries emissions are tied to survival (Shue 1992, 1993). In turn, Shue (1999) has since elaborated his approach to climate justice as a question of rights, which has inspired several other ethicists. Moellendorf (2014) has theorized the right to sustainable development, while Gardiner (2006) and Page (2006) have expanded on Shue for the rights of future generations. While Shue’s argument relied on historical interpretation of countering political interests, climate ethics has since interpreted climate justice as primarily a moral challenge (Gardiner 2004). A consequence of this has been the development of specific areas of study under the general agreement that the main ethical question is ‘how to assign responsibility’ (Moellendorf in Boran 2018, p. 28). Debating the ‘polluter pays’ principle, Caney (2005) argued for an individualist analysis of responsibility instead of Shue’s collective approach, which focused on historical national carbon accounting.

194  Handbook of critical environmental politics An important and complex questions about responsibilities is how to secure justice for actors in the distant future, which climate negotiations often include indirectly, if climate destruction might threaten the very institutions and parties that negotiate about these problems (Skillington 2016). These arguments have formed on the basis of Global South-orientated approaches to distributive justice, specifically Sen’s capability theory, which enables a longer view for assessing just policies (Sowers 2007; Schlosberg 2012). Discussing criteria for the fair share of future emissions, Caney (2009) provided a critique of the concept of grandfathering, which is a principle that modifies responsibility for pollution based on the logic that, ‘prior emissions increase future emission entitlements’ (Knight 2013, p. 410). Grandfathering has been applied in climate policy frameworks for decarbonization1 as a way of allowing countries and companies to emit more than an equal share of carbon if they are perceived to be of strategic importance to infrastructure and the economy. Very few ethicists and political theorists – across differing views of intergenerational justice, individualist or collectivist approaches – endorse grandfathering since it contradicts both the acknowledgement of historical responsibility and the general egalitarian approach in the UNFCCCs principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ (Caney 2009, Goodman 2020, Dooley et al. 2021). The ideas of justice prevalent in climate ethics have come under increasing scrutiny from other sciences only in the past few years. Since the mid-2000s, scholars in international politics and political economy have debated the role of climate justice in climate negotiations and in theories of global developments. Until very recently, however, few political scientists developed climate justice as a theoretical category in its own right in political science. Climate justice was mentioned as a type of framing used by grassroots and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to explain different problems relating to responsibilities and damages, but not as a starting point for analyses (see Newell 2008; Tanner and Allouche 2011). Among important exceptions to this approach in the early 2010s are Bond’s (2012) critical analysis of climate negotiations vis-à-vis the climate justice movement, Tokar’s (2014) work to combine insights from social ecology with climate justice and Martínez-Alier et al.’s (2014) work to obtain insights on the broader environmental struggles in the Global South with climate justice politics. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement2 specifically applied the concept of climate justice, there has been a large growth of literature in political science. As part of this development, a number of policy-orientated social sciences have engaged with the ethical interpretation of climate justice. Different critiques from social sciences argue that most of the ethical claims on climate justice are too idealistic, discussing unrealistic demands for both scientific dialogue and policy development (Brandstedt 2019). Indeed, the starting point for many climate policy schemes is very distant from the ethical debates on climate justice. For example, the grandfathering principle is used as a basis for allocating emissions in the European Union’s emission trading system (ETS) scheme and strongly counteracts historical responsibilities of emissions. Storey (2019, p. 38) attempts to apply different social science approaches to address the ‘failure of ethics to penetrate climate policy, and of climate policy to gain political traction’. Looking at climate justice through the lens of national mitigation problems, Bailey (2019, p. 52) similarly seeks to highlight ‘how climate justice negotiates its relationship with other economic and social justice concerns affected by climate initiatives’. Bailey suggests scholars should spatialize the arguments for climate justice to account for other interpretations of justice and provide a defense for existing climate action plans against the right wing. These types of critique of the normative foundations of climate justice seem to regard the concept as a corrective to

Climate justice and global politics  195 existing social power structures, rather than to account for the problem of climate injustices at the global scale. In recent social science studies that focus on climate-related issues, such as historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and climate debt, there is a sharp divide between different conceptions of climate justice (Warlenius 2013, 2018). Olivier Godard (2017, p. 126) has criticized the arguments for historical responsibility as ‘retrospective illusions’ since it might assume to complete an insight about the destructive nature of the GHGs emitted by rich countries’ inhabitants before the 1990s (Pottier et al. 2017). Godard seems to disregard the historical fact that large oil companies produced research-based knowledge that warned against their plans for fossil fuel use as long ago as the 1970s (Supran and Oreskes 2017). However, Godard (2017) places the onus on proponents of historical responsibilities to avoid any problems of attributing climate debtors and creditors, and rejects the possibility of finding a proper role for climate debt in international negotiations. Instead, Godard (2017) discusses market-based solutions as the only way forward, moving the question of climate justice into the domain of economics. In wider scientific communities, there are indications that the policy-based approach to just carbon allocation is more dominant than the ethics-based. This is both a reflection of scientific appeal and of the alarming status of the atmosphere. For example, in attempts at calculating national carbon budgets and decarbonization pathways, an inclusion of historical responsibilities tends to diminish the current available carbon budgets of rich countries, even into the negative at the present (Van den Berg et al. 2020). However, disregarding historical responsibility would mean using only a per capita justice criterion, which can also be problematized in the climate budgeting literature. Paradoxically, the defense of historical responsibility can lead back to grandfathering as a guiding principle, the approach otherwise heavily criticized in climate ethics. With the explicit aim to include historical responsibilities, Anderson et al. (2020, p. 7) argue that grandfathering provides a ‘more functional, comprehensive and arguably fairer amalgamation of factors’ than allocating emissions equally per capita. Importantly, different scientific communities seem to view the philosophical debate on responsibilities as purely theoretical vis-à-vis the research on the global allocation of carbon-intensive activities. Hence, climate justice has been adapted in different fields of research – for example, climate governance, climate economics and international law – as a tool for ongoing academic debates and institutional development. This technical adaptation of climate justice has put pressure on both the understanding of climatic facts and the ethical call for rapid social change in the face of increasing global climate injustices.3 A consequence of the policy-orientated and economic interest in climate justice is that scholars and decision-makers tend to use the concept as a mere corrective to mainstream problems of climate governance and climate diplomacy. This places climate justice within the incremental framework of climate mitigation of the UNFCCC, EU ETS and other international collaborations, and pushes it away from the acknowledgement of the existence of survival emissions and basic rights. This forms a sharp contrast to the transformative, and even revolutionary, notion of climate justice from grassroots movements, which preceded the policy-orientated conceptualization and arguably placed the concept center stage of the global climate debate.

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CLIMATE JUSTICE FROM BELOW Almost simultaneous with the emergence of the concept of climate justice as an academic discourse, the concept started to figure prominently in social movement struggles in the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, Henry Shue’s ethical starting point – the juxtaposition of ‘survival’ and ‘luxury’ CO2 emissions – originated in a 1991 report issued by the Delhi-based environmentalist NGO, Centre for Science and Environment (Agarwal and Narain 1991). The climate justice movement (CJM) was one of the principal drivers of the climate justice discourse emerging from below (Jacobsen 2018). It consisted of a loose network that brought together many different actors, from the Global South as well as the Global North, in the fight for climate justice. The movements framing of climate justice was shaped by historical struggles over social and environmental justice. One of its main sources of inspiration is the environmental justice movement (EJM), which rose to prominence in the US in the 1980s, when different movement actors began contesting waste dumping in black communities (Schlosberg and Collins 2014, p. 362). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the EJM showed that ecological issues were embedded in power relations and injustices, and the struggle against asymmetric power relations and injustices became an integrate part of furthering the movement’s ecological interests (Bullard 1990). The San Francisco-based NGO, CorpWatch, which was also active in the EJM at the time, was one of the early and significant contributors to the development of the idea of climate justice. CorpWatch drew on concepts from grassroots movements from Latin America, India and sub-Saharan Africa, where different notions of ecological debt and environmental colonialism has arisen as part of criticism of heavily polluting oil extraction processes (Martínez-Alier et al. 2014). In 1999, CorpWatch issued a report entitled ‘Greenhouse gangster vs. climate justice’ (GGCJ), which linked climate change to issues of justice. Inspired by the EJM’s focus on power relations, CorpWatch argued that climate negotiations were dominated by the economic interests of multinational corporations and, further, it employed statistics showing that multinational corporations accounted for the majority of global emissions: ‘just 122 corporations account for 80% of all carbon dioxide emissions’ (Bruno et al. 1999, p. 1). CorpWatch argued that multinational corporations dominated the UN process because companies with profits tied to the fossil-fuel industry lobbied against a green-energy transition and misled scientific debates by producing and circulating scientific knowledge that questioned the correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change (Bruno et al. 1999, p. 13). Ensuring corporate accountability therefore became part of CorpWatch’s expansive definition of climate justice: ‘climate justice means to hold transnational corporations accountable for the central role they play in contributing to global warming and stripping away the tremendous power they hold over our lives, and in its place building democracy at the local, national and international levels’ (Bruno et al. 1999, p. 3). Further, the report contested the differentiated causes and effects of climate change and called upon ‘industrialized nations, which historically and currently are most responsible for global warming, [to] lead the transformation’ (Bruno et al. 1999, p. 3). CorpWatch’s emphasis on the asymmetries between cause and effect showcased how climate change was a question of justice. As one of the authors of this chapter has argued elsewhere, many of these demands were debated in activist circles during protest at COP 6 in The Hague in 2000 (Jacobsen 2018). Here, climate justice mobilizations continued the anti-corporate discourse that was advanced in the GGCJ report and its focus on the uneven causes and effects of climate change. This could, for example, be seen in a short statement

Climate justice and global politics  197 issued on the occasion of the climate justice summit, in which climate activists claimed that the COPs were dominated by multinational corporations (Dissenting voices 2000, p. 11). Also, the statement argued that the uneven responsibilities for climate change amounted to an ecological debt that the Global North had to repay the Global South (Dissenting voices 2000, p. 11). Adding to this, the statement expressed climate activists’ sceptical stance towards the Kyoto Protocol: it emphasized that the Kyoto Protocol was an unjust and insufficient measure to address the scope of the climate crisis and instead called for a minimum of 60 percent immediate reductions (Dissenting voices 2000, p. 12). Many of these demands would steer the trajectory of the discourse of climate justice in the coming years. In the streets of New Delhi, India, during COP 8 (in 2002), a few thousand activists marched for climate justice, declaring that they ‘reject the market-based principles that guide the current negotiations to solve the climate crisis: Our World is Not for Sale!’ (Roberts and Parks 2009, p. 386). A similar critique appeared in the Bali Principles of Climate Justice issued the same year.4 Further, the 2004 Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading expanded the critiques of the Kyoto Protocol. However, at this stage the emerging CJM was still very small and predominantly composed of few active organizations and radical activist networks (Hadden 2015, p. 120). A great deal of this changed at COP 15 in Copenhagen (in 2009), where the movement experienced new momentum. It brought new actors from the Global South into the network and managed to gather around 100 000 people outside the official UN negotiations, becoming the largest cycle of climate-related protests recorded up until then (Hadden 2015). Copenhagen: System Change Not Climate Change Several historical developments had made tackling climate change an increasingly urgent matter. Scientists began to link devastating weather events, such as Hurricane Katrina and European heatwaves, to global warming. That scientists emphasized climate change was not an abstraction but causing a series of devastating events unfolding in real time helped make climate change an increasingly important issue in national politics. Concerns over climate change, was also fueled by the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which highlighted that climate change was happening at a faster rate than previously anticipated and argued that the consequences would be more severe, making the need for climate action increasingly urgent. This furthered inter-movement spill-over. Activists from the alter-globalization movement argued that rising public concerns over climate change, according to long-standing anti-capitalist and social justice activist Tadzio Müller, made COP 15 ‘the perfect opening for a reenergised anti-capitalist politics that can manage to connect to people’s widespread worries about climate change, and the impression that what is being done … is far too little, far too late’ (Müller 2008). In Copenhagen the CJM incorporated critiques of corporate power similar to those seen during previous climate justice mobilizations. Yet, the movement expanded its focus from primarily advancing a narrative holding single actors accountable for climate change, that is, multinational corporations and nation states, to relating the issue to uneven capitalist development. The main argument behind this assessment of climate change was that in a world that has ecological limits, capitalism’s imperative of endless economic growth remains premised on a world of endless resources (Müller 2008). Accordingly, capitalism was considered

198  Handbook of critical environmental politics incompatible with sustainable modes of living. Activists related climate change to broader systemic issues through slogans such as ‘system change, not climate change’ and in the goals that guided the climate justice summit held in Copenhagen. One particular goal for the summit was ‘[t]o both sharpen our understanding of, and to address, the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis towards a total systemic transformation of our society’ (quoted in Russel et al. 2012, p. 17). Further, instead of treating climate change in isolation, climate justice activists linked global warming to several key issues, such as water, energy and food insecurity, arguing that these insecurities were caused by uneven capitalist development (Klimaforum 2009). This framing established a connection between climate change and more place-based struggles over land rights, water and food sovereignty, which many movement participants were also heavily engaged in at the time. Connecting seemingly isolated struggles with one another creates links of solidarities and constructs political identification against a common enemy or towards a common cause (Featherstone 2012). This was crucial in relation to bridging internal differences in the movement that had arisen in Copenhagen, given the new justice-oriented actors that participated in the network. It was not only the movements’ analysis of the drivers of climate change that took on new forms and meanings in Copenhagen, but the discourse of climate justice was also broadened and fused together a range of progressive ideas and demands. Demands for energy democracy, food sovereignty, a just transition for workers, community-led solutions, development that prioritizes people’s needs over profits and repayment of ecological debt, became part of the discourse of climate justice (Klimaforum 2009). As evidenced by the mention of ecological debt, the discourse of climate justice was still pursuing reparations for countries in the Global South, but climate justice meant more than that. It became an attempt to create a more just world in a broader sense by reversing and overcoming multiple injustices brought about by processes of market-led globalization since the late 1970s. Thus, insofar as the struggles of the CJM could be seen as struggles related to the uneven causes and effects of climate change, they were also connected to wider justice struggles against agribusiness’s dominance of the world’s food system, extractivism, land dispossessions, corporate control and other socio-economic relations that were enabled or reinforced under processes of neoliberal globalization (Harvey 2005; Patel 2008). After Copenhagen, the CJM began losing momentum. At COP 16 and the subsequent COPs in Durban (2011) and Doha (2012), the CJM was nowhere near mobilizing the same number of people as it had achieved previously (Jacobsen 2018, p. 25). This was expressed by Müller in 2012 when he and fellow activist-scholar and climate-justice organizer Nicola Bullard claimed that ‘the CJM was something of a flop: it failed to establish an anti-capitalist CJ-discourse that was visible and understandable beyond the subcultures of activists and policy-wonks, and thus failed to provide a visible alternative to despair’ (Bullard and Müller 2012, p. 57). Their gloomy assessment of the ‘failure’ of the movement was underpinned by the number of strong individual voices in the network having diminished. There was a general sense, among climate activist, that the UNFCCC would never be able to provide an ambitious, binding climate agreement (Hadden 2015, p. 174). As a consequence, many coalitions moved on and reorientated their focus towards climate justice struggles at the local and national level, where activists believed they could have greater impact. This trend is exemplified in the emergence of movements such as Ende Gelände and Reclaim the Power, which continue climate justice and decolonial struggles at a trans-local level.

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CLIMATE JUSTICE IN A TIME OF EMERGENCY Up until now the UNFCCC has been unable to reach a legally binding treaty that will significantly curb emissions, and international agreements are still premised on voluntary commitments, as was last seen in the implementation of the Paris Agreement in 2015. The inability to rapidly reduce global emissions, together with the IPCC’s calls for unprecedented action to tackle climate change, and the European heatwaves in the summer of 2018, created conditions for a new cycle of climate-related mass protests. Since the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature rise focus and the subsequent publication of the IPCC (2018) report providing insights to consequences of breaching the 1.5 °C rise, the concept of climate emergency has become pivotal for activists and scientists.5 While the scientific debate on climate emergency had previously mainly focused on justifications of geo-engineering (Markusson et al. 2014; Sillman et al. 2015), it has now spread to other fields, widening the scope of political and social analysis.6 One consequence of this turn, has been an intense research debate on the war-time mobilization for rapid climate mitigation (Delina 2016; Kester and Sovacool 2017; Hulme 2019; Malm 2020). Many of these scientific considerations of the climate emergency seem to have stimulated pre-existing ideas of climate mobilization from below. New grassroots organizations with explicit demands to declare a climate emergency have emerged in the past decade. This is an addition to recent movements based explicitly on climate justice and decolonial principles mentioned previously. Fridays for Future, which has expanded throughout Europe and globally since 2018, has adopted a rhetoric and school-based version of the strike, which underpins a demand for politicians to engage with scientific warnings of the climate emergency (Pellizoni 2019). UK-based XR is our main example, since it has the strongest and most comprehensive appeal to the emergency discourse (see Chapter 16 in this volume) among the new movements. Extinction Rebellion was publicly launched in 2018 having developed a strategy of civil disobedience to force British media and the UK government to declare a state of emergency. Activists have disrupted metropolitan areas of the UK, targeting transportation systems, media headquarters and government offices. Extinction Rebellion spokespersons have particularly focused on the comparison between earlier IPCC reports and recent scientific observations on the pace of ice-sheet disintegration and biodiversity loss as a consequence of climate change. This has led XR to demand that the UK government declare a climate crisis and reducing GHGs to zero by 2025. There are two main reasons for considering XR and other emergency-orientated movements as part of our understanding of climate justice as a movement. First, there are overlaps in the role XR plays as a locus for climate mobilization, although many new groups of activists have emerged before or alongside XR. Second, viewed through the lens of the theoretical debate on climate justice, the emergency-driven climate movement places itself on the side of climate justice in key aspects: compared with policy-orientated and feasibility-orientated defense of grandfathering, XR’s uncompromising demands for decarbonization in rich countries, such as the UK, within half a decade is an implicit rejection of grandfathering or other arguments for prolonging the decarbonization process. The demand seems to be about speed – reaching zero emissions as soon as possible regardless of any customary right of citizens and business in rich countries. Although there is agreement on acting faster or differently than global political elites, XRs ways of justifying its mobilization is radically different from discourses of climate justice in the climate justice movement. Rapid transformation is demanded as a matter of survival rather

200  Handbook of critical environmental politics than justice. In several protests, XR has attempted to disrupt everyday life in cities not yet heavily affected by climate change in order showcase the seriousness of future risks facing populations universally. One main success criterion for the organization is to create very concrete breakthroughs ‘from within’ in some of the most powerful and rich countries within very few years. A letter issued by prominent members of XR epitomizes this point. Explaining how government inaction on climate change meant that ‘the “social contract” ha[d] been broken, and that it is therefore not only our right but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty and to rebel to defend life itself’ (Green et al. 2018). When launching XR in 2018, spokespersons from the organization did not predominantly base their analysis of the climate crisis on political resistance in poor countries at a great geographical distance. Instead, XR argued that ‘we are in a life or death situation of our own making’ (Extinction Rebellion 2019), at protest held in London banners read ‘Rebellion or Extinction’, ‘Rebel for Life’, ‘Business as usual = Death’. Although XR now claims to have activities in 75 countries worldwide, the vast majority of interventions and groups are registered in Europe, Australia and North America (Extinction Rebellion n.d.). Extinction Rebellion’s starting point is that an imminent or cataclysmic end to life on the planet as we know it will occur in a near future, if we do not act now. These discourses were underpinned by the 2018 IPCC report, in which scientists called for urgent and unprecedented action in the next 12 years to stay below 1.5ºC of global warming and that this would reduce the risk of droughts, floods and extreme heatwaves significantly (IPCC 2018, p. 177). By comparison, the CJM formulated demands when the concentration of atmospheric GHGs was lower, hence focusing less on the lack of time and more on setting a path away from a colonial pattern of oppression and inequality. In a way, XR strategies have turned the logic behind certain climate justice slogans and methods on the CJM itself. On 17 October 2018, XR occupied the London Greenpeace office, asking the organization to take leadership and help ‘ordinary people’ combat ‘climate breakdown’ by pressing the UK government apart from engaging in geographically distant environmental struggles (Rising Up 2018). Similarly, XR’s focus on extinction and death is a radicalization of the just transition slogan ‘there are no jobs on a dead planet’. Following XR’s logic, there are neither jobs nor any relevant claims for justice on a dead planet. This disrupts the logic of long-term global movement building with claims that political and democratic agency will be threatened almost equally in all parts of the world. However, in moving this radical focus on extinction and temporality into protests and movement-building, XR has encountered a re-emergence of arguments for a stronger sense of class struggle and racism, especially among climate activists in metropolitan areas of the UK (Shand-Baptiste 2019). As a consequence, the XR movement has been dealing with both public criticisms and inner tensions (Cowan 2019). Importantly, climate justice is re-emerging as a key concept for younger climate activists as an answer to these questions. Extinction Rebellion Youth emphasizes their work on climate justice and has formed ties with Internationalist Solidarity Network (Murray 2019).

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CONCLUSION AND OPEN QUESTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE JUSTICE We have documented some of the key differences between the demands of climate justice as they have developed in theoretical and activist circles, respectively. Despite these differences, both the theoretical and the activist conception of climate justice are challenged by the renewed sense of urgency as GHG emissions have not begun to drop significantly. New groups of activists translate the concept of climate emergency from the biophysical indicators to a political demand with a short deadline. We have argued that both the ethical research agenda and the activists’ demands for climate justice have gone through a period of renegotiation as a consequence of the confrontation with developments in global policy-making. This has both resulted in pressure to dilute basic ethical principles and to alter the focus from global networks of solidarity to rapid, state-driven decarbonization. An important question moving forward is, what does it mean to articulate demands for climate justice in a time of climate emergency? With the challenge of climate emergency discourses came a moment of simultaneity and overlap between grassroots ideas and academic conceptualization. As our overview shows, this overlap marks a difference from the separate pathways of climate justice as movement politics and as a policy-informing concept respectively. The question is, however, how might the moment of shared emergency discourses form climate justice debates in the future? Apart from initial responses to Delina’s (2016) work, we have yet to see stronger impacts of the climate emergency concept on the theoretical climate justice literature. One visible tendency is for climate ethicists and policy scholars alike to take a stronger interest in negative emissions, set to increase without limit if decarbonization occurs too slowly (Shue 2017; Robinson and Shine 2018). Some types of negative emissions technology rests upon natural resources, such as forests and ocean life, and political ecologists have warned that the claim on land and resources could displace poor and marginalized groups (Carton 2019). Although the climate emergency debate has appeared in the context of nation-state action, the pathway to net zero leads back to question of justice on a global scale. This mirrors the process of re-emerging concepts of climate justice within an emergency-orientated organization such as XR. Although climate justice has not emerged as the singular and stable concept for social climate mobilization, the challenge of justice will probably continue to re-emerge as the basis for real solutions to the climate crisis. It seems less probable, however, that climate justice will become a meaningful theoretical category in the policy-orientated research that seeks to adapt it to current trends in international negotiations. The solutions to global warming proposed in the framework of the UNFCCC have hitherto relied on further pressure on land and resources in the Global South and other vulnerable parts of the planet. This is becoming clearer to both researchers, activists and politicians, but further delays to a changed course of action limit the possibilities for credible climate justice pathways. Despite its recent expansion of use, climate justice seems to function very poorly as a mere corrective to the UNFCCC, regional, or national climate policy processes. Hence, the future of global climate justice seems to lie in transformative, perhaps even revolutionary, responses to the climate emergency.

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NOTES 1. For example, in the Kyoto Protocol and in the European Union’s emission trading system, which both use a system of tradeable emission reduction units. 2. Signed at the end of COP 21. 3. As a counterweight to the emerging technical approaches to climate justice, Bhavnani et al. (2019) have collected a large number of essays, which challenge the mainstream theoretical and empirical understanding of climate (in)justice by revisiting key perspectives including colonialism, queer-theory, indigeneity and temporality. 4. The principles were developed by a coalition of international groups, including members from CorpWatch, Third World Network, Oil Watch, the Indigenous Environmental Network. They stipulated that all communities have the right to be free; it affirmed the rights of indigenous groups to represent themselves; and called for clean and locally controlled low-impact energy sources (CorpWatch 2002). 5. Since 2016, Australian organization Climate Emergency Declaration has been documenting the number and type of declarations of a state of emergency in political jurisdiction globally – from minor municipalities to large bodies such as the Argentinian Senate and the British Parliament. 6. For example, Google scholar ‘climate emergency’ hits rose from 728 in years 2010–15 to 6380 in years 2015–20.

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Climate justice and global politics  203 Cowan, L. (2019), Are Extinction Rebellion whitewashing climate justice? Accessed 15 February 2021 at https://​gal​-dem​.com/​extinction​-rebellion​-risk​-trampling​-climate​-justice​-movement/​. Delina, L. (2016), Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation, Abingdon: Routledge. Dissenting voices – Climate Talks (2000), The Hague, accessed 10 February 2021 at https://​issuu​.com/​ platform​-london/​docs/​dissenting​_voices​_cop​_6​_climate​_tal. Dooley, K., Holz, C., Kartha, S., Klinsky, S., Roberts, J.T., Shue, H., et al. (2021), Ethical choices behind quantifications of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement, Nature Climate Change, 11 (4), 300–5. Extinction Rebellion (2019), Our future: funeral protest march, accessed 28 June 2021 at https://​ extinctionrebellion​.uk/​event/​our​-future​-funeral​-protest​-march/​. Extinction Rebellion (n.d.), Rebellion – global, accessed 28 June 2021 at https://​rebellion​.global/​. Featherstone, D. (2012), Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism, London: Zed Books. Fraser, N. (2008), Abnormal justice, Critical Inquiry, 34 (3), 393–422. Gardiner, S. (2004), Ethics and global climate change, Ethics, 114 (3), 555–600. Gardiner, S.M. (2006), A perfect moral storm: climate change, intergenerational ethics and the problem of moral corruption, Environmental Values, 15 (3), 397–413. Gilman, N. (2015), The new international economic order: a reintroduction, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 6 (1), 1–16. Godard, O. (2017), Global Climate Justice: Proposals, Arguments and Justification, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Goodman, J. (2020), Prospects for climate justice, in S.H. Hosseini, J. Goodman, S.C. Motta and B.K. Gills (eds) (2020), The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 301–13. Green, A. et al. (2018), Facts about our ecological crisis are incontrovertible. We must take action, Guardian, accessed 6 July 2022 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​environment/​2018/​oct/​26/​facts​ -about​-our​-ecological​-crisis​-are​-incontrovertible​-we​-must​-take​-action. Hadden, J. (2015), Networks in Contention, New York: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, D. (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, M. (2019), Climate emergency politics is dangerous, Issues in Science and Technology, 36 (1), 23–25. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2007), Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva: IPCC. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018), Impacts of 1.5ºC global warming on natural and human systems, An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty, S.G. Jacobsen (ed.), accessed at https://​www​.ipcc​.ch/​site/​assets/​uploads/​sites/​2/​ 2019/​06/​SR15​_Chapter3​_Low​_Res​.pdf. Jacobsen, S.G. (2018), Climate justice as anti-corporate economic mobilization, in Climate justice and the Economy: Social Mobilization, Knowledge and the Political, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 3–31. Kester, J. and Sovacool, B.K. (2017), Torn between war and peace: critiquing the use of war to mobilize peaceful climate action, Energy Policy, 104 (May), 50–55. Klein, N. (2015), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, London: Penguin Books. Klimaforum (2009), System change, not climate change, accessed 1 February 2021 at http://​klimaforum​ .org/​declaration​_english​.pdf. Knight, C. (2013), What is grandfathering? Environmental Politics, 22 (3), 410–27. Malm, A. (2020), Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, London: Verso. Markusson, N., Ginn, F., Singh Ghaleigh, N. and Scott, V. (2014), ‘In case of emergency press here’: framing geoengineering as a response to dangerous climate change, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5 (2), 281–90.

204  Handbook of critical environmental politics Martínez-Alier, J., Anguelovski, I., Bond, P., Del Bene, D., Demaria, F., Gerber, J.-F., et al. (2014), Between activism and science: grassroots concepts for sustainability coined by environmental justice organizations, Journal of Political Ecology, 21 (1), 19–60. Moellendorf, D. (2014), The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, T. (2008), The movement is dead, long live the movement, Turbulence, accessed 15 February 2021 at http://​www​.turbulence​.org​.uk/​turbulence​-4/​the​-movement​-is​-dead​-long​-live​-the​-movement/​ index​.html. Murray, J. (2019), ‘Older generations can’t understand’: XR youth on being heard, Guardian, accessed 10 February 2021 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​environment/​2019/​oct/​19/​older​-generations​-will​ -never​-understand​-extinction​-rebellion​-xr​-youth​-on​-being​-heard. Newell, P. (2008), Civil society, corporate accountability and the politics of climate change, Global Environmental Politics, 8 (3), 122–53. Our World in Data (2019), Where in the world do people emit the most CO2? Accessed 15 February 2021 at https://​ourworldindata​.org/​per​-capita​-co2. Page, E.A. (2006), Climate Change, Justice and Future Generations, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Patel, R. (2008), Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Pellizzoni, L. (2019), Climate crisis and new ecological mobilisations – undisciplined environments, 8 November, accessed 15 April 2021 at https://​undis​ciplineden​vironments​.org/​2019/​11/​08/​climate​ -crisis​-and​-new​-ecological​-mobilisations​-part​-i/​. Pottier, A., Méjean, A., Godard, O. and Hourcade, J.C. (2017), A survey of global climate justice: from negotiation stances to moral stakes and back, International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics, 11 (1), 1–53. Rising Up (2018), Extinction Rebellion occupy Greenpeace offices, https://​risingup​.org​.uk/​extinction​ -rebellion​-occupy​-greenpeace​-offices. Roberts, J.T. and Parks, B.C. (2007), A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy, Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Roberts, J.T. and Parks, B.C. (2009), Ecologically unequal exchange, ecological debt, and climate justice: the history and implications of three related ideas for a new social movement, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 50 (3–4), 385–409. Robinson, M. and Shine, T. (2018), Achieving a climate justice pathway to 1.5 C, Nature Climate Change, 8 (7), 564–9. Russel, B., Pusey, A. and Sealey-Huggins, L. (2012), Movements and moments for climate justice: from Copenhagen to Cancun via Cochabamba, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11 (1), 15–32. Schlosberg, D. (2012), Climate justice and capabilities: a framework for adaptation policy. Ethics & International Affairs, 26 (4), 445. Schlosberg, D. and Collins, L.B. (2014), From environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice, WIREs Clim Change, 5 (3), 359–74. Shand-Baptiste, K. (2019), Extinction Rebellion’s hapless stance on class and race is a depressing block to its climate justice goal, Independent, accessed 10 February 2021 at https://​www​.independent​.co​.uk/​ voices/​extinction​-rebellion​-climate​-crisis​-race​-class​-london​-arrests​-xr​-a9156816​.html. Shue, H. (1992), The unavoidability of justice, in A. Hurrell and B. Kingsbury (eds), The International Politics of the Environment: Actors, Interests, and Institutions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 373–97. Shue, H. (1993), Subsistence emissions and luxury emissions, Law & Policy, 15 (1), 39–60. Shue, H. (1999), Global environment and international inequality, International Affairs, 75 (3), 531–45. Shue, H. (2017), Climate dreaming: negative emissions, risk transfer, and irreversibility, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 8 (2), 203–16. Sillmann, J., Lenton, T.M., Levermann, A., Ott, K., Hulme, M., Benduhn, F. et al. (2015), Climate emergencies do not justify engineering the climate, Nature Climate Change, 5 (4), 290–92. Skillington, T. (2016), Climate Justice and Human Rights, New York: Palgrave. Sowers, J. (2007), The many injustices of climate change, Global Environmental Politics, 7 (4), 140–46.

Climate justice and global politics  205 Storey, D.E. (2019), The world as it is: a vision for a social science (and policy) turn in climate justice, in P.G. Harris (ed.), A Research Agenda for Climate Justice, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 38–51. Supran, G. and Oreskes, N. (2017), Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014), Environmental Research Letters, 12 (8), 084019. Tanner, T. and Allouche, J. (2011), Towards a new political economy of climate change and development, IDS Bulletin, 42 (3), 1–14. Tokar, B. (2014), Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change, Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press. Van den Berg, N.J., van Soest, H.L., Hof, A.F., den Elzen, M.G., van Vuuren, D.P., Chen, W., et al. (2020), Implications of various effort-sharing approaches for national carbon budgets and emission pathways, Climatic Change, 162 (4), 1805–22. Warlenius, R. (2013), In defense of climate debt ethics: a response to Olivier Godard, Working Paper in Human Ecology No. 5, Lund University. Warlenius, R. (2018), Climate debt, in S.G. Jacobsen (ed.), Climate Justice and the Economy: Social Mobilization, Knowledge and the Political, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 32–47.

14. The Common(s) Angelos Varvarousis

INTRODUCTION AND GENEALOGY The Commons, the common, common-pool resources, common goods, urban commons, common ground, cultural commons, the common good, the global commons, commoning, uncommons, undercommons, common property, digital commons, and liminal commons. The discussion on the commons in their different forms is simultaneously omnipresent and underexamined. There are so many different variations of the term ‘commons’ and so many uses that point in different – often complementary and oppositional – directions, which render the process of an intellectual clarification and taxonomization of this new vocabulary a very necessary and urgent exercise for transformative politics. As correctly stated by Bollier and Helfrich (2019), the eclecticism of the commons is no wider than that of other concepts that try to explain forms of social organization, such as the ‘market’ or the ‘public’. This vocabulary remains so mystified primarily because it belongs to an incipient body of literature that tries to make sense of a new array of social phenomena (for example, peer-to-peer production, urban encampments, refugee camps, climate camps, and so on). Moreover, our perception is not yet fully trained to understand the variations of the commons in our everyday activities and thus commons, in their plurality, remain to a degree still invisible to the majority of their actual practitioners (Bollier and Helfrich 2019). Despite its complicated and often frustrating nature, the exercise of better defining and linking the commons-related terms with real-life examples and everyday activities is not a solely academic task. The creation of an alternative vision for the future necessarily passes through the creation of a new, alternative vocabulary, and the incipient language of the commons has been at the forefront of this effort for the past 15 years or so. It is crucial to protect this incipient language from being transformed into a set of unconnected ‘plastic words’ that can connote almost anything and hence lose their dynamism and their capacity to inspire new social interactions and new subversive political actions (see also Van der Laan 2001). The terms that appear in the first paragraph of this chapter are only a small fraction of the plurality of the concepts that are being employed in the current literature on the commons. Their genealogical roots can be traced and are embedded in different disciplines and schools of thought. For instance, both ‘common goods’ and ‘common-pool resources’ have their roots in neoclassical economics and they primarily denote types of goods – objects – and thus they pay very little attention to the social relationships and systems of governance that are related to the overuse, depletion or, in contrast, long-term sustainability of the resource systems (see, for instance, Hardin 1968 for overuse and depletion, and Ostrom 1990 for long-term sustainability). ‘Commoning’, on the other hand, a term coined relatively recently by the historian Linebaugh (2009), was employed to portray the commons as an activity and as a living system – a social process – rather than a mere idea or a material resource. Other concepts, such as the ‘urban commons’ or the ‘global commons’, try to shift the focus to the geographical dimension 206

The Common(s)  207 of the commons. Originating from disciplines such as architecture, urban planning, sustainability science and geography, they highlight that scales and geography matter for the organization and better governance of the commons (see Harvey 2012; Stavrides 2016; Huron 2017; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). Concepts such as the ‘digital commons’ or the ‘cultural commons’ attempt to distinguish between commons that refer to different types of goods (for example, rivalrous or not, digital or physical, and so on), and examine how commons systems with different attributes can be better governed as well as expand on principles that differ from those that Ostrom suggested through her study of small-scale natural common-pool resources (for example, Benkler 2006; Kostakis and Bauwens 2014). Finally, ‘liminal commons’ (for example, temporary occupations, self-organized refugee camps, or even self-organized urban fiestas) focus more on issues of temporality and examine the symbolic and transformative power of ephemeral and transient commons systems, which do not aspire to last long but rather to facilitate transitions (Varvarousis and Kallis 2017; Varvarousis 2022). Are all these concepts necessary for the promotion of a large-scale cultural shift towards a commons-based production and type of sociality? Are there any controversies in the adoption of this terminology? If so, of what type? Can we mitigate them and find the points of convergence instead of dwelling on their persistent points of conflict? These are some of the questions that this chapter explores.

POSITIONING AND FRAMING THE DEBATE A comprehensive review of all the aforementioned concepts is beyond the scope of this chapter, since it is impossible to retrace in such a short space the history and current use of concepts that linger between so many disciplines and schools of thought. My intention is to focus on a particular aspect of the effort in order to juxtapose, clarify and eventually synthesize some parts of the incipient vocabulary of the commons and, more specifically, to examine the history, the intellectual usage, and the transformative potential of one of the most central and vivid debates that have emerged in the recent revival of the scholarship on the topic: the commons (plural) versus the common (singular). The debate between the commons and the common is gaining new impetus now that commons are largely operating as a new beacon for imagining and framing a societal transformation towards what has been framed as ‘the communism of the commons’ (Hardt 2011). However, its origins go back a long way in intellectual history; in Aristotelian philosophy and the ancient Greeks on the ‘koine sympheron’,1 the history of pre-capitalist England before the period of the enclosures, the rich philosophical debates between the philosophers of immanence such as Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the philosophers of transcendence such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel, as well as in the history of Roman Law and the institutionalization of the ‘res communis’.2 In addition, I argue, the importance of the debate far exceeds the realm of pure linguistics and involves crucial stakes for critical environmental politics and societal transformations in general. In the current burgeoning literature on the topic, we can find authors that use, almost invariably, ‘the commons’ in its plural form. Elinor Ostrom and her affiliates in the Institutional School, Massimo De Angelis, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Yochai Benkler, Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis belong to this first group of scholars. On the opposite side, Michel Hardt and Toni Negri, as well as Pierre Dardot

208  Handbook of critical environmental politics and Christian Laval, belong to the group that has employed ‘the common’ in its singular form instead. Stavros Stavrides and David Harvey use interchangeably the common and the commons in their work. However, it would be misleading to think that all the supporters of the plural form use the commons under the same reasoning and the same goes for the supporters of the singular. What follows is an attempt to describe and analyse these different conceptions grouped in three categories: the supporters of the plural form, the supporters of the singular form and those who make use of both forms interchangeably.

THE SUPPORTERS OF THE PLURAL FORM: THE COMMONS For Ostrom (1990), the commons signify social systems exclusively preoccupied with the management of resources. That is, it is the resource itself that poses ‘the question of the common’ and hence the commons exist in their plural form because the resource systems are multiple and often separated from one another. Moreover, Ostrom did not try to invest the commons with any prefigurative or political function and she did not explore the potential of the commons in fostering social movements aimed at broader societal changes. In her theory, the commons are regarded as nested institutions that exist between and not against the private and the public, and typically require support and recognition from institutions at higher levels in order to operate and thrive (Steins and Edwards 1999). Her primarily economic view of the commons is hence more consistent with the use of the term in its plural form. In her later work together with her colleagues in the Institutional School of economics, Ostrom shifted her focus to issues of scale (Burger et al. 2001). She claimed that ‘part of the reason the commons thinking of the past needs revisiting is that the scale of commons issues has expanded dramatically’ (Burger et al. 2001, p. 6). The ‘global commons’ for her, which include the oceans or the air, might include processes and governing apparatuses that involve the entire globe, nevertheless, they cannot be conceptualized under the concept of the ‘common’ in its singular form because they still belong to different resource systems that require different solutions and technological approaches (Ostrom et al. 1999). De Angelis (2017) has developed one of the most elaborated conceptual and theoretical frameworks about the commons, focused on issues of generation, connection, multiplication and societal transformation. He understands the commons as an autopoietic3 social system, distinct and oppositional to the capital, which is also another distinct –currently dominant – autopoietic social system. Despite this holistic view about the commons, De Angelis maintains his use of the term in its plural form. This is a series of reasons: the commons might constitute an integrated social system but they are not a uniform abstract social form or an undifferentiated mode of production. Instead, this autopoietic system is divided into many molecular subsystems with each being capable of self-generating its own rules, values, measures and codes (De Angelis 2017, p. 103). In his theory, he tries to capture both the micro and the macro scale. In his view of the reproduction of the commons as systems, he foresees two potential different types that this reproduction can take: the first type aims to enhance the autonomy of a unique subsystem (for example, vis-à-vis its surrounding capitalist ones) and the second aims to give rise to more commons systems. In his theoretical endeavor, a group of several micro-commons constitutes a ‘commons ecology’, which includes the environment in which these micro commons operate and connect. Commons ecologies are connected through a process that he terms ‘boundary

The Common(s)  209 commoning’ and the connection of these distinct social systems can take the form either of ‘symbiosis’4 or ‘metacommonality’ (De Angelis 2017, p. 293). Finally, the commons as a distinct social system, when connected with social movements, which also constitute another distinct autopoietic social system different to the commons and the capital, can constitute what he calls a commons’ movement: the ultimate form that the social system of the commons can take, capable of transforming society at large. Bollier and Helfrich prefer to write of the commons in their plural form because they want to emphasize the plurality of the phenomenon as well as the multiple forms and relationships within a commons, sets of rules, and so on. That is, Bollier and Helfrich choose to speak of the commons and not the common as they want to highlight the multiple patterns that the phenomenon can take in different settings and under different circumstances (Bollier and Helfrich 2014, 2015). However, despite their insistence in the multiplicity of the patterns of commoning – a verb that they mistakenly conflate with the concept of the ‘common’ in its singular form as it has been introduced by Hardt and Negri (see Bollier and Helfrich 2019, p. 18) – and their focus on the local scale, they also believe that the commons, apart from being a very particular phenomenon, is also something bigger than a local social system of resource management. In their latest work, they characteristically mention that the commons also constitute ‘a germinal vision for reimagining our future together and reinventing social organization, economics, infrastructure, politics, and state power itself’ (Bollier and Helfrich 2019, p. 3) and that the commons operate as ‘a general paradigm of governance, provisioning, and social practice – a worldview and ethic, one might say’ (Bollier and Helfrich 2019, p. 19). Federici and Caffentzis choose to write of the commons in plural mainly for two reasons. First, they want to emphasize the role of community in the creation and sustenance of the commons; ‘no commons without community’ they claim following Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen (Federici 2019, p. 110). This is also why they argue against the concept of global commons, as it ‘presumes the existence of a global collectivity’ (Federici 2019, p. 94) and it downplays the power geometries that exist within this alleged global community and can operate as a source of justification of unjust policies that can impact poor and indigenous populations in the name of the ‘common good’ or the ‘common heritage’ and so on. A second, more philosophical, reason behind the choice of writing about the commons in its plural form, in the example of Federici and Caffentzis might be owing to their insistence on seeing the commons as something existing ‘outside’ the global capitalist system. In their joint article ‘Commons against and beyond capitalism’, they argue in favor of a type of commons that ‘escapes’ capitalist and market regulations, even though they maintain that this detachment is the goal of ‘anti-capitalist commons’ whereby they envisage to ultimate convergence in a ‘planet of the commons’ (Caffentzis and Federici 2014). Things are slightly different in the realm of the digital commons and the work of the scholars that are primarily concerned with ‘commons-based peer production’ (Benkler 2006), since it is the mode of production here that plays the central role in the definition of the commons and not the integrated commons systems with their different membership, political aspirations, conflicts, rules and negotiations. In this scholarship, the plural form of the commons over the common is primarily employed to signify a multiplicity of outcomes, which still remain common property to all (and this is the main difference between commons-based peer production and simple peer-to-peer production). After Benkler, scholars Kostakis and Bauwens (2014) have attempted to expand their insights from digital commons to other areas, such as community-based manufacturing and the contemporary cooperative movement. Despite their

210  Handbook of critical environmental politics dedication to promoting the commons as a coherent mode of production that is antagonistic and even technically superior5 to the capitalist mode of production, they have maintained the use of the commons in its plural form. However, as I argue subsequently in this chapter, their view bears many similarities with Hardt and Negri when they refer to the ‘common’.

THE SUPPORTERS OF THE SINGULAR FORM: THE COMMON On the other side of the debate, one finds, among others, two of the most prominent and controversial figures of contemporary political theory and philosophy: Hardt and Negri. In the final book of their trilogy that started with the Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), continued with the Multitude (Hardt and Negri 2004) and concluded with the Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri 2009), they introduce the notion of ‘the common’ with which they attempt to describe and theorize a distinct mode of social relations that is developing through the cognitivization and informatization of production and does not simply take the form of a counterpower or resistance to capital but, instead, is immanent in the process of evolution of capitalism. Hardt and Negri’s ‘common’ includes almost everything that is part of the cognitive and immaterial production of our times: languages, codes, metropolitan ambiances, institutions, modes of sociality, and so on; that is, whatever is being collectively created by the multitude, remains open access and involves some sort of inclusive democratic management. More recently, they published another two books named Declaration (Hardt and Negri 2012) and Assembly (Hardt and Negri 2017), in which they try to push further their theory and move from an analysis of the present to the delineation of a political strategy for the transition towards what they call a ‘democracy of the multitude’. Their analysis stems from a vast theoretical exploration of modernity, the anti-globalization and alter-globalization movements, the movement of the squares, the Arab Spring, and the new information technologies. Their main argument is as follows: a continuous expansion of the ‘common’ is inevitable and it happens anyway in the field of social production through the continuous mutation of the capitalist system and mode of production which is becoming increasingly immaterial and abstract, and leads to the creation of commonwealth that escapes the problem of defining rules of inclusion or exclusion (Hardt and Negri 2009; Federici 2019). What they argue is that, since an expansion of ‘the common’ is already at a very advanced level in the field of social production (that is, cooperatives, social networks, digital media, and so on), the multitude has already demonstrated its political capacity for self-government around the common. The main problem thus is not related to the development of more alternative networks, more autonomous self-organized spaces – that is, more commons – but to how to avoid the ‘corruption of the common’ by the market, the state’s ‘sovereign power’, the representative democracy and capital’s domination that are all founded on what they call ‘the republic of property’. Dardot and Laval constitute another prominent intellectual pair that has written extensively in favor of the common in its singular form. Their book, Commun, first published in French in 2014 and translated into English in 2019, tries to become a novel point of reference in the study of revolutionary politics. Dardot and Laval’s common, in contrast to Hardt and Negri’s version, does not refer to an ontological creation concerning an existing expropriated commonwealth that should be reappropriated by the multitude but, instead, refers to a political principle and a call for reinstituting society on a different basis. The authors give to their

The Common(s)  211 work an archaeological purpose; they try to understand the mutations of the concept over history starting from the works of Aristoteles, the Roman Law and others, in order to suggest a conception of the common that is founded on the contemporary quest for ‘real democracy’ as it was expressed in the contemporary social movements of ‘Occupy’ and the ‘Indignant Squares’. Hence, the common in Dardot and Laval’s work is a fundamental political principle that should guide the creation of the commons in the plural. When they refer to the commons, Dardot and Laval (2019, p. 26) are referring to ‘a diverse array of objects or resources managed by the activities of individuals and collectives’ and thus they reserve for the common the role of a sort of ‘guiding spirit’ that drives this activity. In addition, they emphasize that the commons is an ‘older concept’ that was employed in the era of alter-globalization and ecological movements (see Chapter 35 in this volume), to trigger a defensive stance against a new round of enclosures. They contend that the passage from the commons to the common will be important for overcoming this defensive character and kickstarting a collective instituent process. Their overall focus is indeed on the creation of new institutions as well as a culture of collective experimentation with new rules, legal systems and new forms of use rights, to the extent that they try to replace the act of commoning with what they term an ‘instituent praxis’. This instituent praxis is another form of common doing – the same as commoning – which nevertheless seeks to emphasize the production of institutions and not the production of things or resources of any kind to be used in common. Finally, in their effort to put the common at the forefront of their new language for political theory and economy, they try to disentangle their specific use of the term from other popular uses and connotations that it has gained over time. More specifically they refer to three traditions that still negatively shape our conception and use of the common: theological, juridical and philosophical. The theological identifies the goals of the religious and political institutions with the ‘common good’, the juridical associates the common with a specific type of goods (the air we breathe, the outer space, the sun, and so on), and the philosophical tends to connect the common with what we have in common, a universal set of attributes that define all humans.

DAVID HARVEY AND STAVROS STAVRIDES: THOSE WHO USE BOTH FORMS INTERCHANGEABLY Apart from the previous authors and schools of thought that have an evident preference for one term over the other, there are a few authors that use both terms interchangeably in their writings without declaring a specific preference for either. Harvey (2012), in his seminal work on the creation of the urban commons, uses a broad array of concepts interchangeably without providing substantial theoretical clarifications about their different uses. In his short text, Harvey refers to the commons, the common, the common good, commonality, common property, common land, common action, commοning, and more, to describe how different forms of the commonwealth are being produced. Most importantly, he does so in an effort to persuade his readership about the necessity of vertical and often hierarchical forms of management of the commons for an upscale future scenario. However, while Hardt and Negri’s or Dardot and Laval’s focus is on the political or institutional aspects of a commons-based societal transformation, Harvey’s focus is primarily on the more technical and organizational aspects of the organization of the commons in higher geo-

212  Handbook of critical environmental politics graphical scales. This is perhaps why he chooses to use the commons in the plural form when he deals with the separate social systems that should coordinate their actions and systems of management in a confederal system,6 and in its singular form when he deals with the production of common good, such as an urban center or a language. We can find specific similarities in the way that Harvey and Hardt and Negri define the common despite their intense and often conflictual intellectual debates on societal transformations.7 Stavrides’s (2016) work on ‘expanding commoning’ is the final source of information for this chapter. Stavrides, similarly to Harvey, utilizes both forms interchangeably, albeit his focus is completely different. His work is primarily focused on the exploration of the emancipatory potential of commοning if seen as a set of practices with ‘projective’, ‘expressive’ and ‘exemplary’ function in contemporary societies (Stavrides 2016, p. 17). He juxtaposes the emancipatory and transformative character of the open and expanding commons against the claustrophobic and conservative function of the closed or steady commons. This view of the commons as systems that can be either open or closed renders the use of the commons in the plural as the most suitable concept for the execution of this theoretical distinction and juxtaposition. However, Stavrides’s work is heavily influenced by the works of scholars such as Hardt and Negri or Rancière,8 who insist on referring to the common in its singular form. Hence, Stavrides makes various references in his work to the common, mainly when he wants to refer to the creation of a common world – a world that includes many commons – or when he wants to conceptualize the common as a more abstract creation on par with Hardt and Negri’s conceptualization. Finally, he uses the common in its singular form as an adjective followed by a series of nouns, such as common code, common life, common values and common ground. In these examples, the common is used in its more stereotypical sense, simply indicating a series of shared properties held or recognized by all members of a particular group. However, Stavrides neither explains nor provides solid theoretical reasoning behind these multiple uses of the common and the commons in their two forms (plural/singular).

UNTANGLING THE DEBATE AND LOOKING FOR POTENTIAL CONVERGENCES The final section of this chapter aims to shed some light on the most crucial aspects of the debate for future societal transformations and contemporary radical praxis and politics. To do this, I attempt to untangle the various assumptions that guide it, as well as to discuss comparatively its various aspects. Each side in this debate provides important reasons for their decisions to utilize the common(s) in either its singular or plural form. Therefore, it is important to try to illuminate and systematize these different views and to seek points of convergence and synthesis. For instance, the supporters of the common in its singular form, despite their important divergences, try to overcome a potential fragmentation of the commons by offering a theoretical path that connects these diverse attempts in a strong and transformative political movement. Another common goal in both accounts is their effort to shift the discussion about the commons away from the field of economics, where the notions of common goods and the commons (meant as merely shared resources) prevail, towards a more social and processual path, which also includes instituent praxis that can lead to broader societal transformations.

The Common(s)  213 However, the supporters of ‘the common’ ground their endeavors in different theoretical fields. Hardt and Negri’s struggle is mainly fought in the field of immanence, which presupposes the existence of no ‘outside’. Everything takes place here and now, and the tools for making the future should already exist in the present. The possibility of a society based on ‘the common’ belongs to the immanent capacity of the current society to produce it in horizontal and non-hierarchical ways. What remains to be done, is the full realization of this project in all its plurality of forms. Alternatively, for Dardot and Laval (2019), neoliberal capitalism is parasitic and external to their formulation of the common. Hence, their use of the common as a political principle that guides societal transformation belongs to the field of transcendence; the current form of production and organization that is defined by capital in an all-encompassing way should be changed totally through a series of instituent paths that should be guided by the principle of the common. Despite these bold differences, the common in its singular form functions in both intellectual endeavors as a unifying element, which is capable of connecting all the dispersed and potentially fragmented commoning projects into a political movement, aimed at a profound and multilevel societal transformation. This is perhaps the most valuable dimension of framing the discussion on autonomous self-management and societal transformations around the common in its singular form. The common, if indeed taken as a guiding political principle and a prototype of social production already existing in the current society (albeit not as widespread and dominant as Hardt and Negri seem to suggest), can operate as a constant point of reference and inspiration for all the dispersed projects that seek to both reorganize their actions on a local level and demand broader institutional changes. That is, the level of abstraction of the common in its singular form can help all these projects use the concept as an alternative to the equally abstract use that the concept of ‘capital’ has in the current social organization. However, even if I find this all-encompassing usage of the common compelling, I tend to believe that the commons in the plural can operate similarly well in the necessary abstract level but, also, can highlight and underline the necessary work and changes to be actioned in multiple levels for a transition to a commons-based society. One of the main criticisms that the supporters of the common articulate, when they defend their choice, is that the commons can be easily conflated with goods – mere things to be consumed or used in common by a group of people. This is true in the first place. Neoliberal economists, even since Hardin’s (1968) influential article on ‘The tragedy of the commons’, have systematically conflated the commons with mere goods that are ‘non-excludable’ and ‘rivalrous’. Ostrom’s common-pool resources might have changed the focus from overuse to the right use and might have shifted the conservation of the resources, but did not manage to fully disentangle the commons from their close association with the economic jargon. Yet, as previously seen in this chapter, in the past two decades we have witnessed the emergence of very important works, which have politicized the use of the commons in the plural. These works managed to sufficiently explain and showcase the manifold nature of the commons as social systems of self-management in various scales; as a prototype mode of production similar to Hardt and Negri’s view, as a vision for future societies, as an autopoietic system that contrasts capital, and as a political principle similar to Dardot and Laval’s conceptualization of the common. In addition, the use of the term in the plural offers some crucial advantages over its singular version. The level of abstraction that the common in the singular implies, is perhaps useful if only seen as a guiding political principle, but renders the crucial issue of commons’ expansion as being external to the commons. More specifically, if we follow Hardt and Negri’s concep-

214  Handbook of critical environmental politics tion of the common as a mode of social relations that define the dominant apparatus of social production in the post-Fordist era, then the issue of its expansion is already resolved since it is immanent in the capital’s continuous mutations. This increases too much the level of abstraction and I argue that this loose theorization, despite its appeal, prevents commoners from finding their place in the necessary task of creating, sustaining and expanding their commons. The use of the commons in the plural instead points to the production of concrete common worlds in which we can participate or not, look after resources or not, and create community bonds and live in common or not. An analogy that can potentially explain this distinction between the immanent expansion of the common and the conscious collective expansion of the commons can be found in the realm of data creation (see Chapter 38 in this volume). The introduction of smartphones and the invention of social networks that followed the expansion of the Internet in past decades has created a huge amount of data that could potentially be framed, in Hardt and Negri’s language, as another form that the immanent production the common is taking in contemporary societies. However, is this huge collection of data a real commons? Does it reveal the capacity of modern ‘singularities’ to autonomously organize what they produce? Also, is it convincing to argue that it is only a matter of political re-organization to turn this mass production and collection of data into something positive? Here we should perhaps look at Zuboff’s (2019) work on ‘surveillance capitalism’, according to which such an immanent production and expansion of ‘the common’ is by default tied to the reproduction of the current predatory system and can hardly ever be transformed into something socially and environmentally positive. In contrast, we can find very promising examples of how real communities consciously share and create data commons. These can take the form of crowdsourcing libraries, online and offline museums, and political campaigns, which constitute forms of commoning that lead to the production of specific commons in which people can participate, set rules and sustain over time. Finally, there are many instances in which the common in the singular (especially in the form of the common good) has been heavily utilized against the commons. Take for instance the case of neo-extractivism in South America and in other parts of the Global South (see Chapter 19 in this volume), where the commons of the indigenous people have been repeatedly threatened in favor of the broader common (good) that is largely defined by the national state – an abstract force in itself. Alternatively, we can look at how several concrete commoning ventures, such as social centers and occupied buildings, recently have been put against the common good of the ‘people’s health’ in the context of the current pandemic. This is not to blame the formulations of the supporters of the common in the singular, but I think these instances necessarily constitute part of the overall debate. To conclude the assessment this chapter put forward, I think the intellectual effort of the supporters of the common in the singular is very important since they tried to overcome the fragmentation and economization of the older discourse on public, private and common goods by linking the commons with a broader social, political and cultural shift and an emancipatory perspective. However, I do not think that the recent advancements of the theory of the commons in the plural lack theoretical depth or scope regarding the same issue. Furthermore, I drew attention to a couple of pitfalls residing in the use of common in the singular form. Using both concepts interchangeably, as Harvey or Stavrides do, seems a promising strategy, although some theoretical clarifications are needed to avoid overburdening the whole debate with unnecessary jargon.

The Common(s)  215

NOTES 1. ‘Common benefit’. 2. ‘Common things’ or ‘things in common’. 3. An autopoietic system, according to Luhmann (2012), is a system that produces and reproduces its own elements as well as its own structures. 4. Borrowing the terms of symbiosis and metacommonality (meta-cellularity) from biology, De Angelis (2017, p. 292) conceptualizes the former as ‘the inclusion of the boundaries of two (or more) commons into one unit’ and the later as the ‘recurring structural coupling among the commons units maintains each common’s identity and internal commoning, while at the same time establishing a new systemic coherence among two or more commons’ (De Angelis 2017, p. 293). 5. In that its flexibility and decentralized mode of expansion can better correspond to the today’s mode of production and consumption. 6. Harvey here is inspired by Murray Bookchin’s ‘confederation of libertarian municipalities’ as a model for the organization of higher administrative scales at the national or international level. 7. See, for instance, Hardt et al. (2009). 8. Although Rancière’s work (for example, 1999, 2006) mostly deals with issues of policy/politics and not of commons/common.

REFERENCES Benkler, Y. (2006), The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets And Freedom, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (eds) (2014), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Amherst, MA: Levellers Press. Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (eds) (2015), Patterns of Commoning, Amherst, MA: Commons Strategy Group and Office of the Common Press. Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (2019), Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, Gabriola Island, British Colombia: New Society. Burger, J., Ostrom, E., Norgaard, R., Policansky, D. and Goldstein, B. (2001), Protecting the Commons: A Framework for Resource Management in the Americas, Washington, DC: Island Press. Caffentzis, G. and Federici, S. (2014), Commons against and beyond capitalism, Community Development Journal, 49, (January), 92–105. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2019), Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, London: Bloomsbury. De Angelis, M. (2017), Omnia Sunt Communia. On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, London: Zed Books. Federici, S. (2019), Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Hardin, G. (1968), The tragedy of the commons, Science, 162 (3859), 1243–8. Hardt, M. (2011), Reclaim the common in communism, guardian.co.uk, accessed 12 July 2013 at http://​ www​.guardian​.co​.uk/​commentisfree/​2011/​feb/​03/​communism​-capitalism​-socialism​-property. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2012), Declaration, self-published and distributed by Argo Navis Author Services. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2017), Assembly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardt, M., Negri, A. and Harvey, D. (2009), Commonwealth: an exchange, Artforum, 48 (3), 210–21. Harvey, D. (2012), Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London: Verso. Huron, A. (2017), Theorising the urban commons: new thoughts, tensions and paths forward, Urban Studies, 54 (4), 1062–9. Kostakis, V. and Bauwens, M. (2014), Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy, New York: Springer.

216  Handbook of critical environmental politics Linebaugh, P. (2009), The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Luhmann, N. (2012), Theory of Society, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, E., Burger, J., Field, C.B., Norgaard, R.B. and Policansky, D. (1999), Revisiting the commons: local lessons, global challenges, Science, 284 (5412), 278–82. Rancière, J. (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (2006), The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum. Stavrides, S. (2016), Commons Space, London: Zed Books. Steins, N. and Edwards, V. (1999), Platforms for collective action in multiple-use common-pool resources, Agriculture and Human Values, 16 (September), 241–55. Van der Laan, J.M. (2001), Plastic words: words without meaning, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 21 (5), 349–53. Varvarousis, A. (2022), Liminal Commons: Modern Rituals of Transition in Greece, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Varvarousis, A. and Kallis, G. (2017), Commoning against the crisis, in Castells, M., Banet-Weiser, S., Hlebik, S., Kallis, G., Pink, S., Seale, K., et al. (eds), Another Economy is Possible. Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 128–59. Zuboff, S. (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York: Public Affairs.

15. The cultural political economy of research and innovation: meeting the problem of growth in the Anthropocene David Tyfield

INTRODUCTION The 2020s will be marked by the many unprecedented environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. It is urgent and imperative that we transform prevailing modes of life globally so that they remain within planetary boundaries. Moreover, we must do so in ways that maximize social justice (as in ‘just transition’; see Raworth 2017; Chapter 13 in this volume). Chief among the ensuing issues is the growth paradox. On the one hand, we have one planet and its finite resources, especially if we are not to interfere catastrophically in natural cycles sustaining life. On the other, the current dominant system of political economy at global scale is capitalism. Capitalism is a system with a growth imperative, so that it is either growing or collapsing. Moreover, that growth has, to date, predominantly and always to some significant extent1 taken the form of an increase in consumption of material resources, founded in exploitation of the ‘free’ (or ‘cheap’; see Patel and Moore 2017) ‘gifts’ of nature (Wood 2002). Yet it is also the case that realizing a future socio-economic structure that is ecologically sustainable – let alone regenerative – will involve significant unplannable socio-technical ingenuity and experimentation from free individuals, and mass deployment of their practical ideas. It also demands that social order does not break down in the meantime, not least because that would frustrate both of these processes of innovation. Growth, however, on some widely motivating definition, is always needed as a primary integrating element of social order, and especially in a society that is dynamic in actuality, as is contemporary capitalism, and/or in aspiration, for example, aiming for the unprecedented goal of deliberate global just transition. We thus cannot live without growth since it is needed for both formulation of a new sustainable society and socio-economic reproduction in the meantime. However, we also cannot live with growth because it is killing the planet. Confronted by this paradox, or what Bateson (1972) calls a double bind, what then can be done? In this context, a key criterion to judge different perspectives on these issues is the extent to which they enable a loosening of that deadlock, towards more constructive engagement with the growth paradox and its flipside of just transition. The cultural political economy of research and innovation (CPERI) is an emerging approach for strategic thinking on major societal challenges involving technology and innovation. In this chapter, we explore how a CPERI approach is particularly promising in opening up ways forward through this strategic paralysis. The usefulness of CPERI hinges on two interdependent factors: one substantive, the other modal. First, this approach foregrounds a complex system perspective that admits, and seeks to work with, the complexity of the issues. In 217

218  Handbook of critical environmental politics particular, substantively CPERI foregrounds the parallel evolution of the dominant regime of political economy and the dominant model of innovation in any given case. Secondly, it adopts a mode of engagement that privileges a strategic and ethical stance, rather than a literalistic and objectivist stance.2 Taken together, CPERI illuminates ways in which prevailing social arrangements and/or, crucially, influential conceptualizations of the issue underpin unwelcome emergent outcomes. This, in turn, offers insights into ways to change these conditions, establishing an iterative and productive momentum exploring new possibilities for ongoing strategic response, but never presuming to present definitive, timeless and universal prescriptions. CPERI is thus a way to enable processes of deep conceptual learning through reflexive strategic enquiry, tailored for an age of complex systems characterized by socio-technical novelty and macro-scale power structures. CPERI thus advances our practical understanding not by directly telling us what we should do next. Instead, it offers ways forward by first taking a step back to examine the predicament itself and the way in which we contribute to the seeming paradox in the very way we conceptualize and/or enact it. Indeed, this approach is so counter-intuitive, and especially to those most concerned with urgently solving the problem, that it can appear, at best, indistinguishable from familiar critical approaches or, at worst, a needless detour. To illustrate the benefits and importance of a CPERI approach we compare it with two other theories that ostensibly occupy much the same substantive positioning as CPERI, namely, degrowth and responsible stagnation (RS). CPERI shares with both these approaches: (1) a fundamental critique of the capitalist growth imperative and its prima facie incompatibility with a finite Earth; (2) thereby also a strong orientation to a critical political economic analysis; and (3) a motivating sense of the urgent need for deep change and for the agency to bring it about. Altogether, these three criteria also make these approaches ‘radical’ vis-à-vis a pro-growth mainstream, sometimes self-consciously so. Furthermore, with RS, CPERI shares a focus on innovation as a primary lever of social change. Yet in its two key characteristics – of a complex system analysis of the relations among political economy and socio-technical change, and its quintessentially strategic stance – CPERI offers insights and reaches conclusions that are different to those of these other perspectives. Moreover, it also sidesteps many problems that arise for them. The rest of this chapter thus proceeds as follows. In the next section, we introduce CPERI in more detail. In the third section, we turn to a key case study that raises particularly challenging elements of the problem of growth as we actually confront it in the twenty-first century, namely, China. In the fourth section, after briefly introducing degrowth and RS, we then compare all three perspectives regarding two key issues raised by the Chinese case. Finally, looking forward, in the fifth section we close by considering the broader agenda regarding sustainability transition that is opened by CPERI, but is as yet barely touched upon.

INTRODUCTION TO CPERI CPERI starts with a step back from any issue of concern, asking ‘what is the strategic predicament in which we find ourselves?’ Its answer is that we are always already situated within a complex system, one which currently is racked with systemic dysfunctions, wicked challenges and crises, epitomized by the growth paradox. We can thus specify the challenge as the

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  219 endless process of learning to govern these complex systems well (Tyfield 2018a). A crucial starting point is thus a theorization of complex systems precisely focused on strategically enabling that skilful government. This remit is met in theorizing complex social systems drawing on the later works of Foucault (for example, 2009, 2010) on power/knowledge. This approach understands power as the asymmetrically distributed but ubiquitous capacity of agents to act in certain ways given the specific arrangement of social relations. Power is thus active and dynamic, not a thing held by some agents over others. These ‘power relations’ are also constitutive of particular social arrangements, not an extra factor imposed on social realities that already exist objectively. Moreover, these relations are of power/knowledge, since power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin, if often (and crucially) analytically distinguishable. Power inevitably has knowledge characteristics in respect of the knowledge it uses to govern (well or badly) and dominate. Conversely, knowledge realizes power in forms of authority it legitimates and propagates. The resulting complex, dynamic constellations of these power/knowledge relations are constantly enacted by diverse acts and practices of living persons. However, these forms of agency, and even subjective identities, are themselves constituted and shaped, in turn, by those power/knowledge relations. The result is an emergent system that is never at rest but always actively reproducing and transforming itself (see Figure 15.1). As constellations of dynamic power/knowledge relations, the difference between a good and a bad society is precisely the extent to which that specific arrangement is capable of working with power and knowledge together to govern itself well.

Figure 15.1

Complex socio-technical power/knowledge systems

If we start from the strategic-ethical predicament of complex system government, this incorporates the following key issues. First, it admits the positioning of any analyst as always already situated within the system at hand and, indeed, themselves constituted by it. In both respects, then, there can be no clear and definitive endpoint to the analysis. We also start, therefore, from a position of explicitly admitted real ignorance about the actual future, or even any definite conclusions of what it ‘should’ be. This marks a significant break with prevailing common-sense approaches; and even more so the more they are focused on solutions. The usual mode of enquiry aims first to get our understanding right before then turning to practical questions. Seemingly sensible, this approach

220  Handbook of critical environmental politics necessarily negates in practice the radical incompleteness, uncertainty and imperfectability of knowledge implicit in a situated complex systems perspective. Instead, the absence of any ex ante well-specified goal forces us to adopt a primarily strategic approach where the challenge is always to start from ‘here’ by illuminating existing power/knowledge relations and the openings therein. The CPERI approach thus asks ‘how are things as they currently are and, hence, how might we act strategically, here and now?’ In contrast, the conventional scientific approach asks ‘what is definitively the case, and why?’ before then asking a second, separate and speculative question of ‘what should be done to resolve the problems, thus defined?’ For CPERI, ‘solutions’ thus emerge iteratively (and always imperfectly) through trying out courses of action that present themselves to this strategic gaze, instead of in formulation of a plan to get from bad ‘here’ to good ‘there’. Adding flesh to the bones of this approach, we may also acknowledge the emergence, now to unprecedented heights, of a particularly efficacious form of agency that acts directly on the transformation and introduction of new levers, or ‘technologies’, of power/knowledge, namely, ‘research & innovation’ (R&I). By incorporating R&I so centrally into this strategic framework, innovation-as-politics is identified as arguably the key substantive concern for any such strategic analysis in the early twenty-first century (Callon et al. 2009; Tyfield et al. 2017). Specifically, the dominant cultural, political and economic model of R&I (in any given place and time) is highly significant in the trajectory of change of the complex socio-technical system as a whole, since these two phenomena evolve in parallel. From here, a more fully fledged cultural political economy of R&I may be developed. In this respect, it is also different to, and transcending of, most political economy and STS, each of which tends to neglect the other (Tyfield et al. 2017). In CPERI, critical political economy and R&I assume equal and inter-dependent billing. This allows analysis of contemporary capitalism as essentially dependent upon the power/knowledge fecundity of R&I. Equally, existing R&I dynamics (dominant and alternative) are unintelligible where the systemic drive to constant capital accumulation (that is, growth) is not taken into account. These two complementary perspectives are connected by the conceptual bridge of a specifically cultural political economy, as a transdisciplinary project inspired by synthesis of the works of Gramsci and Foucault (Jessop and Sum 2006). Altogether, CPERI enables analysis of the crucial contemporary dynamic of the parallel and inseparable evolution, possibly over a longue durée, of specific dominant regimes of capitalism and dominant innovation models. Through empirical examination of the latter, a window is opened for a genuinely open-ended strategic investigation of the former and, therefore, the system as a whole. Harnessing the capacity of empirical enquiry for surprise, and so learning, this even allows for more concrete rethinking of goals, values and worldviews to emerge in the analysis. Nothing, therefore, need be presumed from the outset.

ILLUSTRATION: CHINESE DIGITAL INNOVATION-AS-POLITICS The CPERI approach has been used to illuminate various key elements of contemporary socio-technical and environmental challenges, including: geo-engineering or negative emission technologies (Markusson et al. 2018); carbon capture and storage (Markusson et al. 2017); the Brazilian bio-economy (Garvey et al. 2015); local government responses to climate

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  221 emergency (Yuille et al. 2021); and ‘digital rebound’ (Kunkel and Tyfield 2021). Approaches of similar inspiration have also explored the assetization of the bioeconomy (Birch 2016), innovation for sustainable cities (Castán Broto 2019), the management of water resources in Africa (Whaley et al. 2021), diverse socio-technical controversies (Flyvbjerg et al. 2012) and a wide range of issues in the ‘political economy of science’ (Tyfield et al. 2017). We illustrate its value here, though, regarding the central issue of the growth paradox, as something of a ‘hardest case’. Even stated in the abstract terms above, the problem of growth is paradoxical, demanding a new approach. Yet seeking to tackle it in practice as it actually presents itself reveals even greater complexity, with multiple other factors also intervening. One particularly illuminating and important concrete example of this concerns the likely impact of China in tackling the climate emergency. China is the rising superpower regarding both global economic growth and, arguably, various environmentally significant technologies (whether with good or ill effect). China’s response to the problem of growth is thus set to have an outsized effect at global scale. The likely trajectory of that impact, however, is confusing and unclear. Merely scratching the surface on Chinese innovation and its environmental credentials reveals an arena of strikingly contradictory and confounding evidence; from the largest industrial sector for renewable energy through to the single greatest global source of greenhouse gases in Chinese coal, regarding production, trade, consumption and, increasingly, foreign direct investment (Green and Stern 2017; Hilton 2019). Moreover, situated amid exceptionally high geopolitical stakes that are ever clearer and more polarized, debate on the positive or negative environmental effect of Chinese innovation is contested. This lack of clarity is a significant hole in current understanding regarding the growth paradox. The CPERI approach, however, is particularly illuminating in two key regards. First, exploring contemporary Chinese innovation as a complex power/knowledge system, and from a strategic perspective, can turn these seeming obstacles of politically charged and contested dynamics to its advantage. For CPERI precisely enables a comprehensive empirical examination of this confusing field in terms of a still unfolding dynamic of innovation-as-politics (Tyfield 2018a, 2018b). This, in turn, elicits a fourfold analysis that can accommodate all the contradictory evidence and positions into a synthetic overview from which emerges the broad systemic tendency of the turbulence of Chinese innovation (for more details, see Tyfield 2018a, 2018b). Specifically, it transpires that Chinese innovation is thus best understood as a process of exceptional, world-making dynamism precisely because its characteristic, non-linear innovation model (Breznitz and Murphree 2011) feeds and is fed by systemic disruption – that is, the current global predicament – to an exceptional degree (Tyfield 2018a, 2018b). This emergent tendency then raises a second issue. With its focus on the co-evolution of political economic regimes and innovation models, CPERI foregrounds the contemporary systemic context as unique strategic circumstance situated in a moment of epochal interregnum: the domination of American financialized neoliberal globalization is disintegrating while a new hegemony has yet to emerge and stabilize (Arrighi 2007). This framing is crucial for insight into the titanic momentum with which Chinese socio-economic activity is challenging this incumbent regime of capitalism on a global scale at this specific juncture (Tyfield 2018a, 2018b). Moreover, what this incumbent model is changing to also becomes embryonically traceable, and something qualitatively new and surprising vis-à-vis existing orthodoxies. Plausible, if

222  Handbook of critical environmental politics by no means guaranteed, trajectories of power/knowledge emerge that may deliver a future of sustainable transition (even a ‘just transition’) in some form. Essential to this outcome, however, is precisely the heightened geopolitical tensions elicited by Chinese (digital) innovation and infrastructure projects that are usually discussed purely in terms of being unwelcome developments. For this is what may drive a historically unprecedented process of harnessing socio-technical dynamism to tame global capitalism’s environmental impact, in the emergence of a qualitatively new regime of global political economy (Tyfield 2018a, 2018b). What this (Chinese-propelled) sustainable transition is not, then, is any linear and rationally planned process of ecologizing existing models of economy and innovation. This approach thus unfolds the surprising and idiosyncratic dynamic of China’s disruptive innovation-as-politics, and global responses thereto, both welcoming and antagonistic, as a plausible candidate and process to drive emergence of a new regime of – in the first instance – a Sino-centric greening, digital capitalism. This new and illuminating understanding of the dynamics of increasing global political tension as regards Chinese innovation is a genuine expansion of the understanding of the problem with which we started, and from which the paradox of growth arises. A CPERI analysis thus offers particular insight into a key, and otherwise confounding, concrete issue for the growth paradox. However, the Chinese case also raises two critical considerations regarding humanity’s actual confrontation with the problem of growth at this moment in history. These concern the ‘rear guard’ and ‘vanguard’ of this encounter respectively. First, the problem of growth is especially fraught in developing countries and regions concentrated in the Global South, including (parts of) China and many countries entering into deeper economic and/or industrial relations with China. Global environmental challenges generated by economic growth affect these poorer countries disproportionately (Roberts and Parks 2006). Conversely, economic growth is still a prerequisite for the building of capacities to mitigate those very hazards. Secondly, while transforming existing political economies to more sustainable models undoubtedly requires significant innovation, this can only be achieved by exploiting socio-technical possibilities that currently present themselves. The incumbent model of innovation is thus of utmost significance. Currently the most dynamic field of this socio-technical change, not least in China, is digitalization. The capacity for digitalization to deliver sustainable transition remains at best utterly unproven (Hickel and Kallis 2020; Kunkel and Tyfield 2021). Regardless, both exploration and mass adoption of promising possibilities for this innovation to deliver new sustainable ways of life depends heavily on economic growth and profit. Whether digitalization reduces or heightens the growth paradox is thus a potentially definitive aspect of that challenge. As a self-consciously strategic approach, however, CPERI should be judged against its capacity to enable productive thinking with precisely these issues. To illustrate how it does so, and thus the difference it makes, we turn, finally, to consider each issue in turn, comparing CPERI with two apparently similar perspectives that nonetheless lack the two key characteristics of this framework.

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  223

COMPARISON Before proceeding, we must first introduce the other two perspectives for our comparison. The argument for Degrowth is a simple syllogism of realist, critical political economy (Kallis et al. 2020; Hickel 2020; Chapter 7 in this volume). Growth is killing the planet that is our one and only home, and on which we are entirely and asymmetrically dependent. Humanity wants a future. Therefore we must stop growing, and even ‘degrow’, especially in rich countries and among rich groups that already live well beyond planetary means. In contrast, wholesome, slower, post-capitalist futures that are not just environmentally sustainable but qualitatively nourishing and satisfying are proposed. These futures would prioritize considerations of sufficiency as against the maximized efficiency of capitalism. Degrowth also marshals growing evidence, compiled on methodologically nationalist grounds, of the possibility of still-high standards of living while meeting the hard limits of planetary boundaries (Hickel 2019; cf. O’Neill et al. 2018). In this way, the world will wake up to the catastrophic consequences of (endless) growth, and its dysfunctional hypertrophy of material consumption in the Global North. Degrowth thus dispenses with the problem of growth by denying it is a paradox at all, since it claims that a better world order that neither has nor needs economic growth is a clear and present alternative. Growth, it is argued, is a mistaken and dispensable fetish of modern capitalist society. We might say that the key challenge is thus not so much ‘degrowing’ as ‘de-growth-ing’, a neologism akin to decolonizing or decontaminating: that is, rejecting the malevolent domination of the ideology of growth. Our second perspective, ‘responsible stagnation’ (RS) (de Saille et al. 2020), tackles very similar ground but based primarily in critical science and technology studies (STS). Although RS is a very new perspective, it is significant as an immanent critique of ‘responsible innovation’ (RI), a political/policy discourse that has achieved considerable popular purchase during the past decade. Emerging out of increasing political concern regarding numerous techno-scientific scandals over several decades, by the late 2000s a new discourse of RI began to take shape (Stilgoe et al. 2013; von Schomberg 2013; Guston 2015). ‘Responsible innovation’ presents itself as the optimal outcome for society. Here ‘innovation’, with a dynamic, prosperous, creative society, is set against ‘stagnation’, its apparent opposite. Conversely, RI differentiates ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ forms of both, in terms of their attentiveness to major negative impacts and externalities. RS embraces the most ambitious interpretation of the agenda of RI. But it also points out the existence of a curious and neglected possibility in this set-up, namely ‘responsible stagnation’. Attending seriously to this possibility opens up two key moves. First, it simultaneously clarifies and emphasizes that it is ‘responsibility’ – the R – that is the normative term here, not ‘innovation’; and that there is at least the possibility that in some instances the ‘responsible’ thing to do is not to ‘innovate’ but to slow down, change or reverse course, and/or even close down particular lines of socio-technical possibility (see Szerszynski et al. 2013 on solar radiation management geo-engineering). ‘Stagnation’ is thinkable as ‘responsible’, then, where it connotes a necessary space for pausing and possibly renewing (see Harraway 2016), while continued ‘innovation’, assuming dominant forms, collides with intransigent and real limits. In its second move, this in turn opens up space for rethinking the ‘I’ of innovation; ironically the original agenda of RI. Responsible innovation itself, though, seems increasingly co-opted as gloss for de facto ‘business-as-usual’, shackled by its foundational attachment to ‘innovation’, always already understood in particular prevailing ways (de Saille et al. 2020).

224  Handbook of critical environmental politics Conversely, thinking through ‘responsible stagnation’ enables a ‘growth agnostic’ approach (de Saille et al. 2020, pp. 57, 86, 137) of empirical enquiry that can marshal a generation of STS scholarship to explore different types of innovation otherwise largely overlooked. For instance, RS foregrounds non-market, organization and/or social innovations (Amanatidou 2020) and/or possibly from diverse places including the Global South (Pansera et al. 2020), not just established cores of high-technology innovation. Responsible stagnation thus follows longstanding constructivist STS literatures on R&I democracy (for example, Jasanoff 2011). This approach notes that there are multiple perspectives and no single true position regarding the impact of new innovations, nor only one rational way to organize and shape them. It follows that what is needed is to open up (Stirling 2008) these socio-technical trajectories to maximally democratic oversight in pluralistic, inclusive debate. Arguing similarly, the primary goal for RS is discussion and fleshing out of the ethics of ‘responsibility’ for innovation in such participatory ways. Given essential inclusion of responsible stagnation (thus defined), it is also evident that this ethic should at least prioritize ‘living gently’ and ‘restraint’ (de Saille 2020, p. 19), which RS scholars to date have summarized in terms of an ‘ethics of care’ (Medvecky 2020, pp. 67 ff.). Incorporating the Global South It may seem that acknowledging continued growth in the Global South – whether purely as descriptive fact and/or as normatively defensible necessity – is a prima facie challenge for degrowth arguments. Indeed, the challenge is explicitly admitted (Rodríguez-Labajos et al. 2019; Kallis et al. 2020, p. 103). Yet degrowth may marshal arguments in its defence. Most importantly for our purposes, understood as ‘degrowthing’, there is a strong case – as legion post/de-colonial and post-development scholars have argued – that ‘growthism’ (Hickel 2020, p. 99) is particularly pernicious in its effects on the Global South. Hence ‘degrowthing’ is arguably to place the concerns of the majority of the world as paramount. Problems remain, however, but the reasons for this hinge not primarily on the substantive arguments presented, so much as the type of argument and forms of reasoning degrowth deploys. At its most general, degrowth’s whole programme of identifying realist problems,3 self-evident goals and straightforward ways forward – for example, ‘simple legislation’ for a ‘genuinely rational … economy’ (Hickel 2020, p. 209, original emphasis) – is radically at odds with the palpable complexity and challenges of strategic decision-making and manoeuvring in conditions of relative lack of power. Degrowth’s simplistic policy conclusions incorporate no sense at all of even such crucial conditions as the challenges of social order and government, and their diverse and complex specificities. Yet, it is (countries, institutions and persons in) the Global South that are most exposed to these challenges. Turning to RS, we find work that explicitly highlights the importance of considering the Global South, and multiple bottom-up perspectives therefrom (for example, Pansera et al. 2020 and references therein). Thinking through RS invites recognition that the dominant, emerging narrative of RI per se is overwhelmingly a narrative of and for the existing ‘core’ of high-technology, proprietary, corporate innovation (Macnaghten et al. 2014; de Saille 2020). Indeed, RS seeks to leverage the conceptual possibility of a ‘responsible stagnation’ to challenge the ‘universalistic “global” conception of responsibility’ (Pansera et al. 2020, p. 99) per se. This includes ‘allow[ing] the flourishing of multiple spaces of critical reflection’ (Pansera et al. 2020, p. 105) that are inclusive of voices, and examples, from the Global South.

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  225 Two issues, however, still loom large, as for constructivist STS more generally. First, RS seems so focused on specific localized issues of participatory innovation politics that, at the all-important scale for the growth paradox of the global, political economy is dropped. Secondly, RS explicitly adopts a particular ethics of responsibility, namely, an ethics of care, as its normative foundation. But, this particular ethics may be no less a prematurely universalistic imposition than the supposed mainstream it replaces, albeit from a more maternalistic (Medvecky 2020, p. 69) than paternalistic standpoint. This manifests, for instance, in a tendency only to celebrate the emancipatory potential of greater inclusion of voices and examples from the Global South. This stance largely overlooks the diverse, locally specific and significant – often much greater than in the Global North – challenges of participatory processes and innovation politics in such locations (for example, Whaley et al. 2021). Ironically, the result of such an approach is not to enable and recognize thwarted agency, but rather to ignore and leave unilluminated the multiple complex strategic hurdles in that place for self-governed innovation politics. Turning to CPERI, though, we find neither set of problems. Here, the agenda within the Global South remains simply to examine and optimally illuminate with local stakeholders both: the actual incumbent power/knowledge relations (at all/any relevant scale) shaping and shaped by socio-technical change; and strategic possibilities, emergent from such action research, to draw the entire socio-technical system in positive directions. The CPERI approach makes no presumption, in whichever particular Global South case study is at hand, that capitalist growth is less of a motivation for innovation than in the Global North, nor that conditions there are necessarily uniform and/or more promising for alternative, sustainable innovation. Nor is there any ex ante prescription of less growth or even ‘degrowthing’. The CPERI approach, too, cannot escape the predicament of presuming an ethics in order even to formulate the purpose and method of its (participatory) research. Yet the conflict here is significantly less intense. For CPERI imposes no substantive characterization as ethical programme (as do, for instance, both degrowth and RS), even as it is certainly not – and does not claim or aspire to be – value neutral. Instead, its research can proceed simply by affirming the meta-ethical stance emergent from acknowledging the inescapable predicament of being a strategic agent situated amid power/knowledge relations. This demands only acknowledgement that each and every agent values what they value, and should be enabled to pursue that strategically and/or to learn and amend their values in attempting to do so.4 The CPERI approach thus aims to enable stakeholders in the Global South, as anywhere, to participate in a strategic-ethical learning process; a practical and directly empowering education for themselves regarding the incumbent power/knowledge relations in which they find themselves and the strategic openings they see therein. Crucially, how best to effect such research is itself an open question for localized consideration. In this way, CPERI can actively assist programmes tackling injustices in the Global South in ways the other two struggle to deliver. Momentum of (Digital) Innovation The second key issue concerns the momentum of contemporary innovation and digitalization specifically. Under this rubric are two potentially contradictory issues: first, the manifest need for massive and dynamic socio-technical change if we are to meet the challenge of just transition with sufficient urgency; and, secondly and conversely, the question of how actual

226  Handbook of critical environmental politics and existing momentum in innovation can and/or will affect that challenge. Any approach to just transition must grapple with both of these concerns. While the former is widely admitted, though, far less is done to address the latter. In particular, literature that explores the potential, and dangers, as regards the contribution of what is evidently the most dynamic arena of current innovation, that is, the digital, to sustainability is slight and only just emerging (WBGU 2019; see also, Chapter 38 in this volume). First, given its equal billing of political economy and R&I, a CPERI approach is well placed precisely to acknowledge whatever emergent and/or dominant forms of innovation present themselves and to explore how this socio-technical change is co-evolving with broader systemic forms, as in the China illustration above. For degrowth, though, the focus directly and specifically on the realist problem and associated goal frustrates engagement with these key questions of means and process. Innovation per se is not a primary concern of degrowth literatures in general, and digital innovation even less so. To the extent either gets discussed, it is generally as substance for further critique of capitalism. Illuminating discussion, for instance, has presented the lack of evidence that digital technologies enable the decoupling of gross domestic product growth and material throughput widely presumed by establishment opinion (Hickel and Kallis 2020). In standard critical political economy form, though, degrowth literature tends to reduce (socio-)technical change to the underlying and unchanging social relations of production, typically those of capitalism. Moreover, degrowth argues that it is the state, not private enterprise, that is dominant in driving and shaping innovation trajectories (for example, following Mazzucato 2011). These points are well made, in that a seismic political reversal from prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy against public investment is a sine qua non for any sustainable transformation (for example, on finance and sustainability transition, see Naidoo 2019). Still missing, though, is engagement with the challenges of the existing socio-technical momentum of digital innovation, let alone its political power and undetermined onto-political destination. Nor is there consideration of how neoliberalism, and the dominant forms of digital innovation fashioned in its image, have completely changed the very nature and structure of states from the idealized post-World War II conception these arguments still mobilize (Goldstein and Tyfield 2018). How can the existing, dominant trajectory of digital innovation be redirected and harnessed to support just transition? How can the ongoing, massive growth of digital technologies contribute to just transition, rather than greatly exacerbating the problems (for example, of energy/resource use and waste)? How can the ongoing transformation of power relations and forms of state enabled by the parallel evolution of digital technologies now be grasped as an opportunity, not just a clear and present danger – a hyper-neoliberalism of digital, rentier monopoly power – to just transition? These are essential, central questions for tackling the growth paradox (Kunkel and Tyfield 2021), yet they are simply not asked, nor even readily conceptualized as questions, by a degrowth perspective. Founded in discussions about innovation, RS is on much surer ground. Yet, in RS work itself, as for RI, we find that the digital falls between two pillars that are its explicit interest, respectively: explicitly low-technology, subaltern and neglected modes of innovation; and controversial new-to-the-world frontiers, as in biotechnology, nanotechnology or artificial intelligence.5 What is missing, therefore, is broader engagement with power/knowledge processes of socio-technical change as it is actually taking place, as against a form of analysis that is explicitly normative in starting point and configuration.

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  227 More fundamentally still, there are important questions about the effectiveness and scalability of the slow, ‘care-ful’, inclusive deliberation RS advocates, and especially as regards such powerful socio-technical juggernauts as digitalization. The problems also seem especially grave when grounded in an ethic of care. For this foundation hands a normative veto to an infinite list of considerations, i.e., anything insofar as it is something someone ‘cares’ about and/or could feel hurt by. While, conversely, it asserts that the primary lever through which to compel a course of action is an individual agent’s conscience. Taken together, this process will tend to be: at best, paralysed in reaching a decision and ineffectual in enforcing it given interminable debate about what ‘care’ demands is valued, and how much, with what prioritized over what; at worst, coercive via collective emotion, where ‘care’ is mobilized as the outraged right not to be offended. In short, RS offers little in terms of productively regulating socio-technical developments that already have significant power momentum.

(INTERIM) CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A POST-SECULAR-MATERIALIST STRATEGIC LEARNING PROCESS We have considered three possible ways to grapple with arguably the socio-environmental challenge of the moment, the problem of growth and its flipside of just transition. All three ostensibly share significant common ground in motivation and theoretical/political inspiration. Yet, digging deeper, we have found significant differences in both substantive argument or conclusions and, inseparably, strategic efficacy. At the heart of these differences is the initial orientation to the problem of growth assumed by each perspective. The combination of a complex systems perspective and a strategic approach goes beyond the separate contributions of the two key building blocks of CPERI. It goes beyond co-productionist STS in enabling analysis that can incorporate issues of political economy across all relevant scales, from local to global. Conversely, it transcends critical political economy by opening up socio-technical change as a key window into qualitative change of political economic regimes and with a view to strategic intervention therein. Is degrowth (or ‘degrowing’) needed, especially in the Global North, which has grossly exceeded its fair share of global resources? Undoubtedly. Also, the case for ‘degrowthing’ is even stronger and effectively universal. Similarly, it is unarguable that we need responsibility in our socio-technical ingenuity as never before, in ways that then deliver both responsible stagnation and responsible innovation. But, specifying these crucial, yet partial, goals ex ante as the primary orientation in exploring how to tackle the growth paradox and related challenges, fatally hobbles these admirable programmes. Degrowth and RS assume substantive positions asserted as literally truthful descriptions of the world; respectively realist and constructivist in ontology, consequentialist and deontological in ethics. In contrast, CPERI works from an explicitly strategic starting point founded in the primacy of a perspectivalism that is always already, and so inescapably, situated in dynamic complex systems of power/knowledge relations.6 A CPERI analysis can thereby accommodate a deeper and more effective learning process, and both by any given stakeholder and collectively. This process is intrinsically more strategically enabling, exploring the entire strategic predicament of that agent as it presents itself. Also, it is capable of more profound rethinking of the substantive conceptual understanding from which one starts the investiga-

228  Handbook of critical environmental politics tion. That pre-existing understanding, however, is precisely what sets up the conditions for (the strategic emergency of) the paradox of growth. It follows that CPERI is also capable of grappling constructively with the underlying challenge, that is, of epistemic upgrade in order to elude that paralysis, in ways the other two are not. That is, a CPERI approach ‘solves’ the paradox by aiming to provide optimal conditions of support for transcending it altogether, with new, emergent and dispersed understanding and practice that redefines the ‘growth’ to which society is orientated and committed. Yet, the learning process outlined above is, surely, only the beginning – the embryonic inklings – of the paradigm shift in commonplace, practical thinking actually needed for timely attainment of just transition. Indeed, a deeper exploration reveals precisely these profound challenges to the entire worldview from which this investigation begins (Rosa 2019; Tyfield forthcoming). In pursuing wholeheartedly a strategic CPERI approach, we are inevitably led to question our understanding of the goal, and with that even the conceptions of good and real, to which we have thus far presumed to be strategizing. In particular, in its strategic-ethical orientation, the goal emerges as the progressive cultivation, individually and together, of a situated practical wisdom, or phronesis (Flyvbjerg et al. 2012; Tyfield 2020). The ‘reality’ and ‘value’ of this type of goal, however, is radically at odds with the objectivist secular materialism generally assumed to underpin any sensible discussion of climate emergency (cf. Taylor 2007). Immanently unfolding a worldview – or rather ‘lifeview’ (Schweitzer 1932 [1955]) – that is not thus limited, however, reveals clear and significant benefits for just transition. Given literally insatiable appetites for material wealth and socio-technical advancement, secular materialist social progress must eventually clash with limited planetary resources, whatever its political economy, right or left, fast or slow. So for humanity successfully to transcend to forms of flourishing that do not literally cost the Earth seems impossible insofar as understanding of reality and the good life is confined to a secular materialist framing. Degrowth demands ‘prosperity without growth’ (Jackson 2009, emphasis added), and RS suggests ‘responsibility beyond growth’ (de Saille et al. 2020, emphasis added). The CPERI approach can instead present an enlivening vision of ‘strategic wisdom as and through growth’, providing a strategic learning process for immanent redefinition of ‘growth’, in terms of growth of learning and of the collective mind of humanity (probably enabled by the global interconnection via digital technologies) to as-yet undreamt of futures. In short, and counter-intuitively, the primary problem with these other perspectives is not that they are too radical, but they are not radical enough.

NOTES 1.

That is, only ever, at best, delivering ‘relative decoupling’ of economic and material growth (Hickel and Kallis 2020). 2. By ‘strategic’ here we are drawing on the specific sense of this term elaborated in the later works of Foucault (2009, 2010) and taken up more recently by the ‘real social science’ movement of ‘phronesis’ (Flyvbjerg et al. 2012; Tyfield 2020). A strategic orientation is thus one that recognizes as primary, and is itself primarily interested in, clarification of one’s given situatedness vis-à-vis others in terms of power relations, and with a view to (and assessed against criteria of) practice and action, not knowing and understanding. To inquire into one’s strategic predicament in this way is thus to ask questions that are ‘strategic’ in terms of both substance and mode of enquiry. 3. By ‘realist’ here we connote an approach that aims for definitive representations of phenomena or problems ‘in the world’, and hence as ‘real’; as opposed to ‘pragmatist’ approaches, which treat

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  229 these representations as beholden primarily to pragmatic or strategic criteria. This approach thus tends to privilege causal-explanatory modes of enquiry on the understanding that these are then conclusive and objective, and where their ‘reality’ frequently entails normative conclusions (for example, ‘growth is bad, degrowth is good’). 4. To clarify, this would also apply to the values of capitalist actors pursuing irresponsible innovation. However, this hardly undermines the approach and its goals in that: (1) such an agent is most unlikely to feel compelled to engage in such novels ways of thinking, as already probably empowered; (2) in any event, the empowering of diverse interest groups and values serves to contain and shape these actors significantly more than would otherwise occur (hence, as opposed to comparison with some contrived ‘perfect’ situation where existing power/knowledge relations and imbalance are somehow absented); and (3) engaging seriously with this approach is likely to raise difficult and immanent contradictions, and so shift understanding, in a productive learning process even for such powerful actors, and especially where this involves collective exploration with others. Therefore, it is actually a strength that no one is excluded from this activity or from the benefits of engaging with it, since it actively undermines the dualism of us/them, good/bad, that leads to stalemate and hence the default outcome of reaffirmation of the power status quo. 5. That is, at best, the most science fiction and avant-garde techno-scientific reaches of ‘digital innovation’, but neglecting the much larger and more socially significant issues of percolation of digital technologies ever more deeply into everyday life. For an arguable exception, exploring ongoing efforts on automated driving, see Stilgoe (2018). 6. Note that this is not the animistic ‘perspectivism’ of Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2016) and the broader ‘ontological turn’ of contemporary anthropology and indigenous ethnography (for example, Descola 2013), but builds instead on the work of eco-philosophers such as Skolimowski (1994) and Schweitzer (1932 [1955]).

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230  Handbook of critical environmental politics Foucault, M. (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Garvey, B., Tyfield, D. and de Mello, L.F. (2015), Meet the new boss … same as the old boss? Technology, toil and tension in the agrofuel frontier, New Technology, Work & Employment, 30 (2), 79–94. Goldstein, J. and Tyfield, D. (2018), Green Keynesianism: bringing the state back in(to question)? Science as Culture, 27 (1), 74–97. Green, F. and Stern, N. (2017), China’s changing economy: implications for its carbon dioxide emissions, Climate Policy, 17 (4), 423–42. Guston, D. (2015), Responsible innovation: who could be against that? Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2 (1), 1–4. Harraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hickel, J. (2019), Is it possible to achieve a good life for all within planetary boundaries? Third World Quarterly, 40 (1), 18–35. Hickel, J. (2020), Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, London: William Heinemann. Hickel, J. and Kallis, G. (2020), Is green growth possible? New Political Economy, 25 (4), 469–86. Hilton, I. (2019), How China’s big overseas initiative threatens global climate progress, Yale Environment, 360, accessed 16 December 2021 at https://​e360​.yale​.edu/​features/​how​-chinas​-big​ -overseas​-initiative​-threatens​-climate​-progress. Jackson, T. (2009), Prosperity without Growth, London: Routledge. Jasanoff, S. (2011), Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jessop, B. and Sum, N.L. (2006), Beyond the Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Kallis, G., Paulson, S., D’Alisa, G. and Demaria, F. (2020), The Case for Degrowth, Cambridge: Polity. Kunkel, S. and Tyfield, D. (2021), Sustainable industrialization, digitalization and digital rebound – asking the right questions, Energy Research and Social Science, 82, 102295 accessed 16 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.erss​.2021​.102295. Macnaghten, P., Owen, R., Stilgoe, J., Wynne, B., Azevedo, A., de Campos, A., et al. (2014), Responsible innovation across borders: tensions, paradoxes and possibilities, Journal of Responsible Innovation, 1 (2), 191–9. Markusson, N., McLaren, D. and Tyfield, D. (2018), Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs), Global Sustainability, 1, e10, accessed 16 December 2021 at https://​www​.cambridge​.org/​core/​journals/​global​-sustainability/​volume/​3E​ CCE420C688​46CEC5FEC7​F480633FF5. Markusson, N., Gjefsen, M.D., Stephens, J.C. and Tyfield, D. (2017), The political economy of technical fixes: the (mis) alignment of clean fossil and political regimes, Energy Research & Social Science, 23 (January), 1–10. Mazzucato, M. (2011), The Entrepreneurial State, London: Demos. Medvecky, F. (2020), Putting responsibility centre stage: the underlying values of responsible stagnation, in S. de Saille, F. Medvecky, M. van Oudheusden, K. Albertson, E. Amanatidou, T. Birabi, et al. (eds), Responsibility Beyond Growth: A Case for Responsible Stagnation, Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 57–73. Naidoo, C.P. (2020), Relating financial systems to sustainability transitions: challenges, demands and design features, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 36 (September), 270–90. O’Neill, D., Fanning, A., Lamb, W. and Steinberger, J. (2018), A good life for all within planetary boundaries, Nature Sustainability, 1 (2), 88–95. Pansera, M., with Abeka Arthur, K.N., Jimenez, A. and Pandey, P. (2020), The plurality of technology and innovation in the Global South, in S. de Saille, F. Medvecky, M. van Oudheusden, K. Albertson, E. Amanatidou, T. Birabi, et al. (eds), Responsibility Beyond Growth: A Case for Responsible Stagnation, Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 91–110. Patel, R. and Moore, J.W. (2017), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Raworth, K. (2017), Doughnut Economics, London: Random House.

The cultural political economy of research and innovation  231 Roberts, J.T. and Parks, B. (2006), A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rodríguez-Labajos, B., Yánez, I., Bond, P., Greyle, L., Munguti, S., Uyi Ojo, G., et al. (2019), Not so natural an alliance? Degrowth and environmental justice movements in the Global South, Ecological Economics, 157 (March), 175–84. Rosa, H. (2019), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, Cambridge: Polity. Schweitzer, A. (1932), The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization, repr. 1955, London: Adam & Charles Black. Skolimowski, H. (1994), The Participatory Mind, London: Penguin Arkana. Stilgoe, J. (2018), Machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars, Social Studies of Science, 48 (1), 25–56. Stilgoe, J., Owen, R. and Macnaghten, P. (2013), A framework for responsible innovation, Research Policy, 42 (9), 1568–80. Stirling, A. (2008), ‘Opening up’ and ‘closing down’. Power, participation, and pluralism in the social appraisal of technology, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 33 (2), 262–94. Szerszynski, B., Kearnes, M., Macnaghten, P., Owen, R. and Stilgoe, J. (2013), Why solar radiation management geoengineering and democracy won’t mix, Environment and Planning A, 45 (12), 2809–16. Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Tyfield, D. (2018a), Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China: Global Crisis, Innovation & Urban Mobility, London: Routledge. Tyfield, D. (2018b), Innovating innovation—disruptive innovation in China and the low-carbon transition of capitalism, Energy Research & Social Science, 37 (March), 266–74. Tyfield, D. (2020), Phronesis, in M. Büscher, M. Freudendal-Pedersen, S. Kesselring and N. G. Kristensen (eds), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Mobilities, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 345–53. Tyfield, D. (forthcoming), Beyond the new urban crisis: risk-class and resonance, in D. Curran (ed.), Handbook on Risk Class, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Tyfield, D., Lave, R., Randalls, S. and Thorpe, C. (2017), Introduction: beyond crisis in the knowledge economy, in D. Tyfield, R. Lave, S. Randalls and C. Thorpe (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science, Routledge: London, pp. 1–18. Von Schomberg, R. (2013), A vision of responsible research and innovation, in R. Owen, M. Heintz and J. Bessant (eds), Responsible Innovation: Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society, Chichester: Wiley, pp. 51–74. WBGU (German Advisory Council on Global Change) (2019), Towards Our Common Digital Future, Berlin: WBGU. Whaley, L., Cleaver, F. and Mwathunga, E. (2021), Flesh and bones: working with the grain to improve community management of water, World Development, 138, 105286, accessed 16 May 2022 at https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.worlddev​.2020​.105286. Wood, E.M. (2002), The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso. Yuille, A., Tyfield, D. and Willis, R. (2021), Implementing rapid climate action: learning from the ‘practical wisdom’ of local decision-makers, Sustainability, 13 (10), 5687, accessed 16 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.3390/​su13105687.

16. Disasters and catastrophes Laura Centemeri and Isabella Tomassi

INTRODUCTION AND GENEALOGY Since its emergence in the 1950s, disaster research has been concerned mainly with the development of operational tools for crises management and intervention, resulting in a prevalence of inductive approaches and a limited interest in more general theoretical issues (Calhoun 2004; Quarantelli 2005; Tierney 2007, p. 504). As a research field, disaster studies are still dominated by approaches (mostly North American) that scarcely dialogue with developments in social theory and critical theory. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the theoretical– empirical research on disasters produced in non-English-speaking countries in either the Global South or Europe.1 Gaillard (2019) denounced the persistence of a form of hegemony from the Global North perspective in respect of both concepts and practices, despite the progressive centrality of the ‘vulnerability’ approach, which has sustained a critical turn in disaster research since it first appeared in the 1970s. In spite of this mixed picture, critical disasters research is currently a field of increasing relevance for understanding the socio-economic dynamics of the globalized world. The notion of ‘disaster’ first emerged as a specific social sciences category in the United States in the historical conjuncture of the Cold War.2 Research on disasters was strongly influenced in the early days by governmental and military needs connected in particular with nuclear issues. More specifically, disasters were conceived by public authorities as laboratories for studying social and organizational behaviour in stressful situations. Disasters were seen as ‘a duplication of war’ and human communities as ‘organized bodies that have to react organically against aggression’ (Gilbert 1998, p. 4). In this view, the causes of disasters are situated either on the outside in the form of an external aggression or (less often) on the inside as an internal threat, as in the case of social unrest. As noted by Perry (2018), authors during this ‘classic period’ of disaster research would define disasters as ‘rapid onset events’ in which the impact or threat of an agent causes social disruption that requires readjustments. Early disaster studies thus focused on organizational and emergent social behaviour during and immediately following such disruptive events. Gilbert (1998) distinguished this ‘disasters as war’ paradigm from two successive frameworks in which the definition of disasters was gradually reframed as ‘social phenomena’ (Perry 2018). An important step in this direction was the ‘hazards–disaster tradition’, which paid increasing attention to the socio-ecological preconditions, or drivers, of disasters (Oliver-Smith 1986). An understanding of social systems is crucial when defining and studying disasters ‘since they (not the agent) are the real locus of disruption and vulnerability’ (Perry 2018, p. 10). In the 1970s, there was a shift away from the ‘realist’ techno-engineering and natural sciences approaches when geographers and anthropologists began to study disaster situations, especially ‘natural catastrophes’, as political and cultural phenomena. In particular, critical perspectives from political ecology, environmental justice, feminism and postcolonial thought 232

Disasters and catastrophes  233 were progressively included in their studies (see Wisner et al. 1977; Cutter 1996; Fordham 1998; Gaillard 2019). This has been especially true of the ‘vulnerability approach’ to disasters, which holds that it is critical when discerning the nature of disasters to appreciate ‘the ways in which human systems place people at risk in relation to each other and to their environment – a relationship that can best be understood in terms of an individual’s, a household’s, a community’s or a society’s vulnerability’ (Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004, p. 2). This implies that disasters research should take into account a temporality that goes beyond that of the event. Despite the existence of diverse theoretical and operative definitions of this ‘vulnerability’ notion, this approach to disasters implies that attention is paid to the observable variability in capacities to cope with damages (at the individual and collective levels) and to the sources of inequalities and social exclusion that heavily impair these capacities (Cutter et al. 2000). The vulnerability paradigm has also introduced an interest in ‘local knowledge’ and a critique of the coupling of development policies with top-down processes that increases the vulnerability of entire regions (Cuny 1983). However, it is also true that the notion of vulnerability, as we are going to discuss, has been progressively ‘emptied of its political and social essence’ (Gaillard 2019, p. 10). The vulnerability approach usually maintains a link with a hazards perspective, but the idea that vulnerability is inherent in modes of social organization and their complexity has increasingly gained relevance. These developments have brought disaster research closer to the sociology of risk and collective crises, with an emphasis on the relationship between disasters and uncertainty (see Chapter 22 in this volume).3 In this third paradigm, disasters are defined as entirely social phenomena and are related to the shared perception of an inability to make sense of a situation that is otherwise seen as serious or worrying. Disasters are thus related to the loss of ‘key standpoints in common sense, and the difficulty of understanding reality through ordinary mental frameworks’ (Gilbert 1998, p. 9). This difficulty is considered to be generated by the growing complexity that characterizes the relationship, at the societal level, between human, ecological and technological systems. As shown by Perrow (1999), disasters are normal, unavoidable features of complex, highly connected technical systems. The acceptance of non-anticipatable crises as inevitable features of complex societies explains the observable shift in disaster research from a discourse of prevention to one of resilience and preparedness. Also, an interpretation of disasters that incorporates sense-making activities emphasizes both ‘the intricate interaction between events, individual perceptions, media representations, political reactions, and government efforts at “meaning making”’ (Boin et al. 2018, p. 35) and an understanding of disasters as ‘windows of opportunity that competing interests can exploit for their advantage’ (Tierney 2007, p. 512). This constructivist interpretation implies that the symbolisms of disasters and the diversity of social representations of risk and catastrophe need to be taken into account. It also calls for an investigation of the ‘social amplification of disasters and crises’ (Quarantelli et al. 2018, p. 73) and of the production of ‘disasters as spectacle’ relating to the development of media coverage (Alexander 2005). In addition, it invites the extension of the research on disasters beyond the temporality of the event to investigate ‘the decisions and actions of government, elites and their financial supporters, and global industries and financial institutions that make disasters inevitable’ (Tierney 2007, pp. 509–10), linking disaster research with political ecology.

234  Handbook of critical environmental politics During the 1990s, an increase in the number of disasters and emergencies was accompanied by the consolidation of an international field of activism and humanitarian organizations (see Calhoun 2004) and the professionalization of disaster planners and crisis managers. Influential scholars of the critical approach to disaster research (Wisner and Oliver Smith among others) were involved in the development of both these dynamics from their origins in the 1980s (Cabane and Revet 2015). More recently, new types of disasters have emerged from the interplay between the dynamics of global capitalism, the rise of the information society, the proliferation of transboundary crises and the emergence of ecological threats at the planetary level. They include climate change, pandemics, financial collapses and, after the events of 9/11, terrorism. According to Quarantelli et al. (2018, p. 61), ‘we are at another important historical juncture with the emergence of a new distinctive class of disasters and crises not often seen before’, a phenomenon defined by the German sociologist Urlich Beck as the ‘world risk society’ (Beck 1999, 2006). Cabane and Revet (2015) noted that this juncture is marked by a return to centrality of technical solutions and approaches to disasters that are dominated by the natural sciences, especially climate science, and a side-lining of social sciences, which are confined to the study of local adaptation and resilience capacities. Moreover, recent debates on the Anthropocene (see Chapter 5 in this volume) have refuelled disaster scenarios that revolve around systemic collapse and global catastrophe, and promoted a ‘climate catastrophism’ whose political consequences are the object of critical discussions (Chollet and Felli 2015; Chapter 13 in this volume).

PROBLEM-FRAMING AND KEY CONCEPTS As already mentioned, the notion of vulnerability emerged in the 1970s as a critical tool to counter the reductive understanding of disaster research that was focused exclusively on crisis management and disaster prevention. Methmann and Oels (2014) retraced the genealogy of this category. They highlighted three different interpretations of this concept in disaster research and disaster policies. According to the authors, the first use of the concept was the risk–hazard approach, where vulnerability is a quantifiable condition that requires prevention measures consisting mainly in defining emergency plans. This approach prioritizes the technical–infrastructure perspective over political and socio-economic perspectives. Policy measures inspired by this approach limit population participation and reinforce a form of ‘environmental determinism’. The second approach identified by Methmann and Oels (2014) was that of social vulnerability, which involves identifying groups that are ‘at risk’ (Blaikie et al. 2004) owing to socio-economic characteristics or other social determinants (age, gender and ethnicity) and reducing the gap that separates these vulnerable groups from the rest of the population. Crisis management measures are thus not sufficient to reduce social vulnerability, and structural interventions are needed. These interventions concern primarily the reduction of poverty and social exclusion, but there has been a progressive focus on gender issues in parallel with the development of feminist approaches to disaster research. According to Fordham (1998), disaster studies initially focused on women as invisible victims and then shifted towards issues of empowerment and empowerment policies (Fordham 1999). More recently, official

Disasters and catastrophes  235 programmes (such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015–30) have explicitly sustained female leadership in building resilience and coping with catastrophe. The social vulnerability argument can also be used to justify top-down interventions that leave little room for participation, especially in countries in the Global South. The social vulnerability framework can thus sustain state interventionism, international development programmes and more recently ‘philanthrocapitalism’ initiatives (McGoey 2012). There is a form of continuity here, which is denounced, between the discourse of social vulnerability and the colonial gaze that inferiorizes the other either as an object of fear and a potential threat (and who therefore requires control) or as an object of compassion (who requires assistance) (see Giuliani 2017). The third approach identified by Methmann and Oels (2014) is the most recent, having emerged around the 2000s. It links vulnerability and resilience and promotes a more active role of populations in disaster management, with a specific concern for gender minorities.4 The emphasis on resilience here leads to a focus on the specific characteristics of affected communities that help them respond positively to disasters. As in the instance of vulnerability, one of the main goals of disaster researchers in this approach has been to find a way to measure how resilient communities are and to design policy measures to increase resilience. When applied to disaster research, resilience is defined as ‘a system’s capacity to persist in its current state of functioning while facing disturbance and change, to adapt to future challenges, and to transform in ways that enhance its functioning’ (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 8). Social capital and a variety of other ‘capitals’ (including community and economic capitals) and capacities (such as improvisation and infrastructure resources) have been identified as quantifiable ‘elements of resilience’ (Kendra et al. 2018). The defining and measuring of capacities to persist, adapt and transform has led to a proliferation of ‘recipes’ that are based on implicit normative assumptions concerning what should be considered positive ways of responding to disaster. Against the proliferation of recipes, the alternative approach of the anthropology of dispositifs (Revet and Langumier 2015; see also Revet 2020) analyses how resilience concretely becomes a dominant framework and how this framework is contested or diverted. The notion of resilience has the merit of drawing attention to the need for an interdisciplinary approach to disasters that takes into account the systemic intermingling of ecological, technical, sociocultural and political factors at different scales. However, when approached from the perspective of social resilience, the community-based focus that this notion implicitly supports and the social morphology it encourages profoundly hinder its heuristic potential. The resilience framework has often been co-opted as a justification mobilized by neoliberal projects for withdrawing government support for universalistic welfare measures and more generally public infrastructure investments (Quenault 2016). Communities are then forced to compete for public, and increasingly private, funding to support resilience building. Consequently, the resilience framework in this form conceals the role of the structural factors that the social vulnerability approach had helped to highlight. For this reason, it has been defined as a ‘post-political’ framework (Swyngedouw 2010). In post-Chernobyl Ukraine (Petryna 2013), post-Fukushima Japan (Hasegawa 2013) and post-Hurricane-Katrina New Orleans (Adams 2013), both the communities and individuals had to compete to prove that their victimized conditions justified state assistance or compensation and that they qualified for it by showing that they were learning to become resilient as a community of (acknowledged) victims. Each of these three cases shows how the social resilience framework (see also Hall and Lamont 2013) promotes a specific normativity that is

236  Handbook of critical environmental politics sustained by neoliberal policies and narratives and is based on individual and collective capacities to cope and creatively adapt to unavoidable catastrophes, which are seen as opportunities for change. Moreover, the resilience approach has in some cases led to the use of a psychological approach to disaster relief in order to partially conceal larger socio-ecological implications.5 The mental health consequences of disasters are an important issue for a disaster research agenda as is the specific consideration of people with a mental disability caught up in disaster situations (Lovell 2013). However, as Ribault (2019, p. 98) noted on the subject of resilience narratives after the Fukushima catastrophe, the emphasis on training and psychologically assisting people ‘to act upon themselves hygienically [sic] to measure and mitigate radiation exposure after catastrophic levels of contamination’ highlights adaptability at the individual and psychological levels while also masking the radical transformations to forms of living and the irreparable damage from radiation that nuclear exposure brings from both a biological and an ecological perspective (see also Kimura 2017). In the same way, ‘nuclearists’ in Chernobyl have been promoting a ‘radiological culture’ (for example, the use of a Geiger counter on a daily basis to govern everyday activities in order to reduce exposure to radiation) aimed at turning radioactivity into an ordinary feature of the everyday life experience, de facto producing a form of collective ignorance (Topçu 2013). Together with resilience, preparedness is now the dominant framework for dealing with disaster situations, as Revet (2020) discussed in her ethnography of ‘Disasterland’. These two frameworks reflect the increasing pervasiveness of the theme of catastrophe – considered as inevitable but also unpredictable and exceptional – that has accompanied the emergence of the ‘world risk society’. They sustain the aforementioned ongoing process of re-technicization and de-politicization in disaster research. In line with Lakoff (2006, p. 1), ‘preparedness’ is ‘both an ethos and a set of techniques for reflecting about and intervening in an uncertain, potentially catastrophic future’. It is based on ‘simulations designed to identify points of vulnerability’ (Keck 2015, p. 60) but also on ‘stocks’ and ‘sentinels’ (Keck 2015; see also Keck 2020), and it points to a ‘new form of knowledge about collective life’ (Collier 2008, p. 231) that Collier (2008) defined as ‘enactment’. In a shift away from ‘the archival-statistical knowledge of social insurance’ that played a fundamental role in the development of a modern welfare culture, enactment ‘comes to “know” collective life not through the regular processes of population or society, but through the uncertain interaction of potential catastrophes with the existing elements of collective life’ (Collier 2008, p. 244). While they may be unpredictable, catastrophes are not ungovernable, and new forms of knowledge and assessment are developing. In particular, catastrophe insurance is turning into a key instrument in reshaping ‘our political and moral landscape’ (Collier 2014, p. 288).

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND STANDPOINTS In 2007, the author, film-maker and climate activist Naomi Klein introduced the notion of ‘disaster capitalism’, which has since gained currency among critical disaster researchers and social movement activists (see Gunewardena and Schuller 2008; Fletcher 2012; Schuller and Maldonado 2016). Despite a growing number of international initiatives aimed at disaster risk reduction, including the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990–1999) and

Disasters and catastrophes  237 the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015), the number of catastrophes has been rising steeply over the past two decades. Also, there has been a worldwide increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty, which is a proven cause of vulnerability and an accelerator of risk and disaster (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2019). Disaster capitalism is one way to explain this apparent contradiction. According to Klein, ‘shock’ is a modus operandi of ‘neoliberal capitalism’ and a key component of its ‘accumulation by dispossession’ strategy (see Harvey 2005). As discussed by Fletcher (2012, p. 102), ‘there are two distinct yet interrelated elements in Klein’s disaster capitalism concept: 1) the neoliberalization of structures for governing resources formerly within the public domain and/ or creation of markets for trade in previously non-monetized commodities; and 2) the exploitation of disasters for financial gain’. Therefore, crises and post-disaster situations are exploited, on the one hand, to support political reforms that tend to increase social vulnerability through reducing public support for ‘reproductive labour’(Bhattacharya 2017) and, on the other, to put the interests of powerful economic lobbies at the forefront of the recovery. Although the analytical clarity of this ‘disaster capitalism’ category has been questioned (see Wisner 2009), Klein’s book had the merit of drawing attention to the instrumental use of catastrophes for ‘advancing the political, ideological, and economic interests of transnational capitalist elite groups’ (Schuller and Maldonado 2016, p. 62; see also Lowenstein 2017; Imperiale and Vanclay 2020). According to this perspective, there are multiple opportunities to capitalize on disasters, not just during the recovery phase but also in relation to the activities of ‘imagining and planning’ for future disasters. Future disasters are opportunities to orientate societies’ development in ways that often lie ‘outside political accountability’ (Fortun et al. 2017, p. 1011). In addition, the role played by new insurance schemes connected with financial instruments is also increasingly relevant (Keucheyan 2017). According to Imperiale and Vanclay (2020, p. 2), it is important when researching disaster capitalism to pay attention to (i) the institutional mechanism by which states enable disaster capitalism to become implemented at the local level; (ii) the social risks that enable it to emerge at all levels of society; (iii) the worldview that accompanies it; and (iv) the consequences it has on local communities’ capacities to collectively learn, transform and build community resilience.

This means that disaster capitalism can have many faces and that cultural and institutional dimensions play a crucial role in explaining how it becomes possible to capitalize on disasters in ways that can vary considerably according to context. If we take on the power to automatically ensure the alignment of actors’ practices and ‘normative expectations’ (Dodier and Barbot 2016), there is the risk we may overlook any frictions or ignore their importance, both in the making and unmaking of hegemony (Tsing 2005, p. 6). In their case study of the post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in L’Aquila (Italy), for example, Imperiale and Vanclay showed how disaster capitalism exploited institutional and financial strategies, which were interwoven with the ‘mechanisms’ that states usually mobilize in disaster situations, such as ‘the command-and-control approach, emergency powers and top-down planning’ (Imperiale and Vanclay 2020, p. 3). In our view, research on disaster capitalism should be focused first and foremost on the long-term analysis of how upstream conditions of vulnerability can be related to the processes of exploitation that are the drivers of vulnerability. The emphasis on disasters and ‘shocks’ should not lead us to neglect other mechanisms that can, according to the local contexts of

238  Handbook of critical environmental politics occurrence, propel neoliberalism. For example, as discussed by Woods (2017) in the case of New Orleans, the Hurricane Katrina disaster revealed long-standing structures of domination related to the plantation economy (see also Villanueva and Cobián 2019). That is, even if the catastrophe capitalism ‘machine’ is increasingly globalized and intertwined with a humanitarian purpose (Fassin 2010), the context and its socio-economic history are important. As Villanueva and Cobián (2019, p. 1) wrote, disaster capitalism is in many instances only ‘the latest rendition of a long legacy of colonial capitalism’. Second, it is important that the disaster management phase, which can last for years, is examined in order to show how, while ordinary channels of profit creation are suspended, others emerge that are made socially acceptable by the way in which the disaster event and its consequences have been framed. Particularly important in this respect are the processes of sense-making concerning liability. Social blaming, corruption and the inadequacy of structures are all examples of liability frameworks that contribute to determining the course of the recovery phase. Finally, in the recovery phase, decisions are taken that heavily impact on future capacities to cope with disasters and that usually create lucrative opportunities, including for criminal groups. The ‘build back better’ (BBB) paradigm is now dominant in addressing reconstruction after disasters. This catchphrase was coined by the former US president Bill Clinton in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, and was developed into a list of 10 propositions conceived as operational guidelines for the humanitarian post-disaster intervention. As shown by Benadusi (2015, p. 93) for the case of Sri Lanka, however, the direct importation of this idea, with no public discussion of its assumptions and aim, can encourage the proliferation of conflicting interpretations of the slogan. The presumed neutral, technical nature of the BBB paradigm masks the normativity that is implicit in what ‘better’ means. As Fernandez and Iftekhar (2019, p. 2) discussed, ‘better’ can have multiple interpretations: ‘more modern, more environment-friendly, more aesthetically appealing, more oriented towards livelihoods, more resistant to natural hazards, faster, stronger, more equitable, etc.’. There is therefore no point in trying to set generalized indicators to measure change in relation to BBB. Many researchers in the field of disasters, as well as working on measuring resilience capacity, are nevertheless preoccupied with creating just such a measure. The definition of what ‘better’ means is (or should be) a political choice made with the involvement of those directly concerned with the reconstruction process. This example reveals how concepts of failure and success, which are used as interpretative categories with a strong performative character, still heavily influence current academic research on disasters.

OPEN QUESTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL As we write, the world is facing the consequences of a pandemic disease known as COVID-19, which is caused by a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), whose outbreak was first reported in the city of Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province in December 2019. Unprecedented measures, including approximately one-third of humanity confined to their homes, have been put in place to respond to the emergency. Our societies appear to have been ‘unprepared’ to face this global threat, which was nevertheless largely predictable and predicted (see Lakoff 2017). The global economy is heading towards a crisis of unprecedented

Disasters and catastrophes  239 gravity. There is no doubt that the response to this crisis will mark a main turning point for the future of our societies and, indeed, our planet. From the viewpoint of disaster research, the evidence is now overwhelming. Ecological degradation together with injustice and social exclusion are the issues that need to be urgently addressed for effective disaster risk reduction. Structural measures directed towards reducing social vulnerability must go hand in hand with a collective building of systemic resilience capacity, which is different from the moralizing use of the injunction to individual and community resilience. The current situation highlights issues that remain open for further investigation in disaster research. First and foremost among them is the relationship between disasters and law. We owe to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998, p. 20) the idea that ‘in our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule’. This chapter is not the place for an in-depth discussion of Agamben’s concept of the state of exception (see Huysmans 2008; Goupy 2017), however, as noted by Illner and Holm (2016, p. 57), the generalized use of the state of exception ‘jargon’, especially after 9/11, to describe a world increasingly confronted with disasters can be problematic, since its ‘elevation’ to ‘a general social condition can also make it seem unspecific and inept at analysing specific disaster situations’. Following Goupy (2017), we should focus on the question of ‘exceptionality’ as an argument mobilized by a variety of actors in governments, administrative structures, the administration of justice and social movements to define different things (norms and political practices) for a variety of purposes while also questioning the reasons behind the centrality gained by this discourse. Another important issue related to law and disasters is what Lauta (2016) termed the increasing, observable ‘juridification’ of disaster, that is, recourse to legal actions in order to claim reparation for disaster victims. The growing complexity of disaster torts that law is called on to redress requires innovative legal ideas (for example, ecocide). The same is true if we consider the increasing reliance on technology in disaster management and recovery. In both instances, there is the need for a critical investigation of the relationships among law, science and technology. The growing interconnectedness between disaster and technological innovation is particularly clear in the way disaster risk reduction and disaster recovery are becoming an opportunity to radically transform the urban space in ways that are influenced by the ‘smart city’ paradigm (for a definition, see Kondepudi and Kondepudi 2015; see also Chapter 12 in this volume). From the smart-city planning perspective, post-disaster reconstruction and disaster preparedness are conceived as opportunities to transform public spaces and services in order to create new market opportunities through technological solutions provided by private companies such as IBM, Cisco and Amazon. Case studies are needed in order to ascertain the degree to which the smart city, instead of providing a response to the risk of catastrophe, is the completion of a historical process of privatization and tertiarization of the urban space, which increases its vulnerability through sustaining the production and reproduction of inequalities. In particular, the smart-city model implies the assumption that the solution to social problems is mainly technical and that the regulation of ecosystems is based on the control of individual behaviours. Ecological concerns thus become the justification for control apparatuses that, in turn, become acceptable because of the need to implement efficient risk management tools. The impact of the ‘digital revolution’ on urban planning, as the technical fix for the ecological

240  Handbook of critical environmental politics crisis, is thus not just a research topic; it is also evidently a political problem when we consider the power already acquired by private companies in shaping urban life and space. Even if disasters management continues to be seen by many as a technocratic issue, disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery are highly political matters that call, among other things, for an increased reflexivity in the way we as researchers approach fieldwork. As Schuller and Maldonado (2016, p. 67) asked, ‘Are we “capitalizing on catastrophe”, like the entities that we analyse and sometimes critique?’ According to the anthropologist Mara Benadusi (2017, p. 40, translated from Italian), in order to contribute to the development of publicly relevant and politically aware disaster research, it is necessary to pay attention to the diversity of languages, positions, actors and publics in the hope that this polymorphism ... will help to develop knowledge and practices that are useful to promote not only … academic essays but also social interventions that are truly capable of ‘undoing’ the increasingly meaningless public decisions that are taken in the name of disasters.

In contrast to the ‘extractivist’ forms of research on disasters, there have been independent ‘public collective research’ initiatives to support social transformative processes and the self-organization of local communities.6 Moreover, the engagement of local researchers with direct experience of the disaster situation in question (see also Tomassi and Forino 2019) echoes Gaillard’s (2019, p. 9) invitation to ‘encourage local researchers who know best local contexts to study local disasters’. Critical disaster researchers should also develop a stronger connection with social movements, given the importance acquired by the systemic collapse scenario in contemporary environmental movements, such as Extinction Rebellion and the collapsology movement in France.7 These transdisciplinary collaborations are of great importance in the effort to reclaim the positive and democratic significance of uncertainty and avoid the (scientifically unwarranted but interest-motivated) reduction of possibility to probability, where uncertainty becomes a calculable risk that is open to capitalist investment (see Chollet and Felli 2015). In a ‘ruined world’, we need disaster researchers to engage in the collective quest for liveable ways to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016), while ‘repairing’ (see Centemeri et al. 2022) injustices and socio-technical and ecological interdependencies.

NOTES 1. On the French case, see Revet and Langumier (2015). 2. For a more detailed reconstruction, see Tierney (2007), Cabane and Revet (2015), Dahlberg et al. (2016) and Fortun et al. (2017). 3. On the relation between disaster research and the ‘crisis approach’, see Boin et al. (2018). See also Gilbert (2002). 4. For a review of the now extensive literature on resilience, see Alexander (2013). For a discussion of the ‘genealogies of resilience’, see Walker and Cooper (2011). 5. On the interlinking of psychological and social dimensions in the thinking on welfare, see Stenner and Taylor (2008). On the category of trauma and its increasing centrality in crisis situations, see Fassin and Rechtman (2009). 6. See the case of the research group ‘Emidio di Treviri’, which was set up in the wake of the August 2016 Central Italy earthquake (Olori and Menghi 2019). 7. On the case of ‘collapsology’, see Allard et al. (2019). See also Centemeri (2019).

Disasters and catastrophes  241

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Disasters and catastrophes  243 Keucheyan, R. (2017), The financialization of natural disasters: insurance, finance and climate change, Actuel Marx, 61 (1), 79–94. Kimura, A.H. (2017), Fukushima ETHOS: post-disaster risk communication, affect, and shifting risks, Science as Culture, 27 (1), 98–117. Klein, N. (2007), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books. Kondepudi, S. and Kondepudi, R. (2015), What constitutes a smart city? in A. Vesco and F. Ferrero (eds), Handbook of Research on Social, Economic, and Environmental Sustainability in the Development of Smart Cities, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 1–25. Lakoff, A. (2006), From disaster to catastrophe: the limits of preparedness, Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, accessed 15 March 2021 at https://​items​.ssrc​.org/​understanding​-katrina/​from​-disaster​ -to​-catastrophe​-the​-limits​-of​-preparedness/​. Lakoff, A. (2017), Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lauta, K.C. (2016), Legal scholarship and disasters, in R. Dahlberg, O. Rubin and M.T. Vendelø (eds), Disaster Research: Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 97–109. Lovell, A.M. (2013), Tending to the unseen in extraordinary circumstances. On Arendt’s natality and severe mental illness after Hurricane Katrina, Iride, 26 (70), 563–78. Lowenstein, A. (2017), Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, Brooklyn, NY: Verso. McGoey, L. (2012), Philanthrocapitalism and its critics, Poetics, 40 (2), 185–99. Methmann, C. and Oels, A. (2014), Vulnerability, in C. Death (ed.), Critical Environmental Politics, London: Routledge, pp. 277–86. Oliver-Smith, A. (1986), The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Peruvian Andes, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Oliver-Smith, A. and Hoffman, S. (eds) (2019), The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Olori, D., and Menghi, M. (2019), Ricerca, attivismo e trasformazione sociale nel post-sisma: l’esperienza di una ricerca collettiva, pubblica e dal basso tra criticità e prospettive, Cambio, 9 (17), 95–107. Perrow, C. (1999), Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perry, R.W. (2018), Defining disaster: an evolving concept, in H. Rodríguez, W. Donner and J.E. Trainor (eds), Handbook of Disaster Research, 2nd edn, New York: Springer, pp. 3–22. Petryna, A. (2013), How did they survive? in A. Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, 10th anniversary edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 1–19. Quarantelli, E.L. (2005), A social science research agenda for the disasters of the 21st century: theoretical, methodological and empirical issues and their professional implementation, in R.W. Perry and E.L. Quarantelli (eds), What is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions, Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, pp. 325–96. Quarantelli, E.L., Boin, A. and Lagadec, P. (2018), Studying future disasters and crises: a heuristic approach, in H. Rodríguez, W. Donner and J.E. Trainor (eds), Handbook of Disaster Research, 2nd edn, New York: Springer, pp. 61–83. Quenault, B. (2016), La rhétorique de la résilience, une lueur d’espoir à l’ère de l’anthropocène? Vers un changement de paradigme fondé sur l’acceptation de la catastrophe, in F. Rudolf (ed.), Les villes à la croisée des stratégies globales et locales des enjeux climatiques, Laval, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, pp. 49–98. Revet, S. (2020), Disasterland. An Ethnography of the International Disaster Community, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Revet, S. and Langumier, J. (2015), Governing Disasters. Beyond Risk Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ribault, T. (2019), Resilience in Fukushima: contribution to a political economy of consent, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 44 (2–4), 94–118. Schuller, M. and Maldonado, J.K. (2016), Disaster capitalism, Annals of Anthropological Practice, 40 (1), 61–72.

244  Handbook of critical environmental politics Stenner, P. and Taylor, D. (2008), Psychosocial welfare: reflections on an emerging field, Critical Social Policy, 28 (4), 415–37. Swyngedouw, E. (2010), Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change, Theory, Culture and Society, 27 (2–3), 213–32. Tierney, K.J. (2007), From the margins to the mainstream? Disaster research at the crossroads, Annual Review of Sociology, 33 (1), 503–25. Tomassi, I. and Forino, G. (2019), The ecovillage of Pescomaggiore (L’Aquila): birth and death of a self-determined post-disaster community (2009–2014), Disaster Prevention and Management, 28 (4), 513–26. Topçu, S. (2013), Chernobyl empowerment? Exporting participatory governance to contaminated territories, in S. Boudia and N. Jas (eds), Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, London: Routledge, pp. 135–58. Tsing, A.L. (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Villanueva, J. and Cobián, M. (2019), Intervention – beyond disaster capitalism: dismantling the infrastructure of extraction in Puerto Rico’s neo-plantation economy, Antipode Online, accessed 15 March 2021 at https://​antipodeonline​.org/​2019/​06/​25/​beyond​-disaster​-capitalism/​. Walker, J. and Cooper, M. (2011), Genealogies of resilience: from systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation, Security Dialogue, 2 (42), 143–60. Wisner, B. (2009), The grocer’s daughter and the men in suits: who exactly capitalizes on catastrophe? And why the question matters, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 20 (3), 104–12. Wisner, B., O’Keefe, P. and Westgate, K. (1977), Global systems and local disasters: the untapped power of peoples’ science, Disasters, 1 (1), 47–57. Woods, C. (2017), Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

17. Energy politics and energy transition Natalia Magnani, Dario Minervini and Ivano Scotti

INTRODUCTION There is a general agreement that the history of the development of human societies is a history of the complex transition from one energy production system to another. However, the political issue of energy transition emerged overwhelmingly after the 1970s energy–environmental crises, together with critical reflections on the sustainability of the development model. In the past two decades, the sustainable energy transition also became one of the main issues of international climate change policies. This issue is part of political agendas that propose strategies to decouple economic growth from the degradation of nature. Concepts such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green economy’, ‘circular economy’ and, recently, the ‘green new deal’, despite their ambivalent definition, have offered discursive schemes to define transition policies. Also, social scientists have increasingly analysed the contradictions and complexities of the turn to a sustainable energy society. By reporting some of the main theoretical reflections on energy transition, we aim to highlight the socio-political intricacy of this process. In the conclusion a brief description of energy policies is provided, highlighting assumptions and trends of the ongoing green transformation.

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ENERGY TRANSITION The Energetic Basis of Social Sciences between Evolutionism and Determinism Interest in the social dimension of the energy transition has boosted in recent times. However, the initial steps towards convergence between reflection on society and the energy issue are to be found as early as at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first attempts to consider energy in the social sciences, instead of considering energy systems as objects, saw energy as a tool to understand the functioning of society. The attempt was to develop a general theory of society starting from the application of the laws of thermodynamics to social problems. Herbert Spencer is among the key contributors to this perspective. In Principles of Sociology (Spencer 1896) he argues that the development of human societies can be measured starting from the degree to which the simple acquisition of energy is replaced by production, obtained primarily by manual force, then by animal force and, finally, by machines. Among the first attempts to take into consideration the energy issue we also find the work of Wilhelm Ostwald. In his Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft (Energetic Foundations of the Cultural Sciences) (Ostwald 1909), he considers at the basis of all social changes a transformation of energy from raw energy to usable energy. The larger the coefficient of usable energy obtained in the conversion, the greater the social progress. About 50 years later the interest in socio-energetics was taken up by Leslie White. In his book The Science of Culture White (1949) elaborates on a theoretical approach based on the 245

246  Handbook of critical environmental politics idea that culture is a thermodynamic system, which develops to the extent that increases the amount of energy absorbed per capita in a year. The further development of socio-energetics ran aground for various reasons. First, it failed to consider fully the limits to the growth and exploitation of available energy imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, many of the theories attributable to it saw social evolution as a univocal and unilinear process and mostly adhered to the equation between evolution and progress. These factors have appeared increasingly critical. The Issue of Energy in Environmental Sociology The re-emergence of social sciences’ attention to energy is closely linked to the birth of environmental sociology in the late 1960s (Gross and Mautz 2015). This branch of sociology was created in North America in the wake of a vast movement, which brought the environmental theme to the centre of public attention. The oil crisis of 1973–74, in particular, stimulated the debate on the theme of scarcity of resources and showed that environmental conditions can have direct social consequences. Environmental sociology addressed the issue of energy differently than socio-energetics. Some environmental sociologists began to argue that per-capita energy consumption should be considered not as an indicator of social evolution, but as a measure of the stress to which the carrying capacity of the earth is subjected. Moreover, energy began to be analysed not simply as a factor influencing the stages of social development, but also as a system in turn influenced by social and political variables. In those years, the study of energy issues was first addressed through the analysis of public opinion (Rosa et al. 1988). Attention specifically focused on nuclear energy, which, following the oil crisis, became the fundamental option for most western powers to guarantee energy security. Moreover, especially in North America, growing attention was devoted to studies on local communities and on the expected and unexpected impacts produced by energy policies (Rosa et al. 1988). The Analysis of Energy Transition A new research strand has recently emerged aimed at analysing the dynamics, strategies and factors that influence – favouring or hindering – energy transition. Around the issue of energy transition, a variety of theoretical and empirical studies has flourished and new research networks (for example, the network Energy and Society of the European Sociological Association) and journals (for instance, Energy Research and Social Sciences) have been created. As noted by Gross and Mautz (2015, p. 2), if the speed of this transition is uncertain, controversial and influenced by cultural frames (Osti 2012), there is however no doubt that the history of human development is a history of transitions from one energy production system to another. According to White (1949), humans initially used their muscles as a source of energy, integrating it with the breeding and use of animals. With the agricultural revolution and the end of nomadism the first human settlements were created based on the exploitation of the energy deriving from the cultivation of plants. In the next stage humanity learned to extract and use natural resources such as coal and oil. Given the exhaustion and rising costs of extracting fossil sources, it seems inevitable that the twenty-first century will bring with it a new energy system, which will be necessary if industrialized societies want to survive.

Energy politics and energy transition  247 The socio-historical analyses of exponents of political ecology such as Podobnik (2006) also point out that today a third global energy shift towards a system of new energy technologies based mainly on natural gas and renewable sources is starting. A great deal of the debate on energy transition focuses on trying to demonstrate that renewable energies can be a quick solution to the energy problem (Giddens 2009; Urry 2013; Gross and Mautz 2015). Furthermore, it is increasingly evident that although renewable energy sources are distinguished from fossil fuels for the low greenhouse gas emissions during their life cycle (World Energy Council 2017), no transition path can be assumed without paying attention also to the issue of energy saving and fuel efficiency. The diversification of the energy mix in favour of a wider use of renewables, accompanied by the search for a reduction in consumption, appears increasingly necessary. These two aspects of the energy transition are now recognized also by European and national energy and climate policies as equally overriding and complementary. The current sociological debate on energy, therefore, focuses on the development of empirical analyses and conceptual tools to study the socio-technical transformation process towards a low-carbon society, characterized, in large part, by a different type of energy production, from renewables as well as from the adoption of strategies and behaviours aimed at greater sustainability of consumption.

MAIN ANALYTICAL APPROACHES Normative and Analytical Frameworks A very general principle can be useful to explore and problematize how social critique has been introduced into the debate on energy transition. While there is a constant tension between normative and analytical postures, at the same time both try to display the current state of affairs, prefiguring how the process of socio-technical change would be or will be (Longhurst and Chilvers 2019). The multilevel perspective (MLP) explains how the transition works (and should work). Since the late 1990s, it has emerged as a dominant approach to analyse the transition towards sustainability in general and the energy transition in particular (Gross and Mautz 2015). Derived from evolutionary economics (Geels 2002), it is based on a model of interaction among actors playing a role at different levels (micro/niches, meso/regimes, macro/landscape). Within this multilevel frame, social groups are interconnected with norms, beliefs, values, technologies and materiality (Markard et al. 2012, p. 956). This approach was criticized because it tends to underestimate the agency informing everyday life (Shove and Walker 2014), as well as because it is too focused, at least in early works (Geels 2002), on niche-driven innovation (Smith et al. 2005). It was also criticized for its normativity since it aims at designing a model for energy transition. It was noted that the landscapes of transition represent something that has to be critically questioned more than considered as an analytical dimension of the process (Feola 2019). As a reaction to this approach, alternative approaches have emerged focusing, for example, on a multidimensional conceptualization of the roles of the public in the transition (Avelino and Wittmayer 2016; Chilvers and Longhurst 2016) and on the places in which it takes shape (Devine-Wright and Wiersma 2013).

248  Handbook of critical environmental politics A part of MLP studies is dedicated to discussing the technical and social innovations required to pursue the transition from local experiments up to the regime level (Hölsgens et al. 2018). The ideological side of the process has been neglected even if power, policies and politics are mentioned by scholars adhering to MLP (Geels 2011). The argument is about the poor critical potential that does not problematize the ideological translation of the ‘green society’ project emerging from the sustainable development discourse (Meadowcroft 2011). It has been stressed that researches on climate policies, including those fostering an energy transition, do not sufficiently consider the political framing in which policies arise. Also, when the crisis of the capitalist regime has been considered (Turnheim and Geels 2012; Geels 2013), critics have shown that this was taken into account as an external factor and that power relations and inequalities were not given due consideration (Newell and Mulvaney 2013). So, there is a request both for a more analytical approach, in respect of questioning what critics consider to be underestimated, and for a more critical sensitivity to unveil the social asymmetries featuring the paths of energy transition (Chapter 30 in this volume). Pragmatic and Critical Understandings A second distinction helps to classify the theoretical debate: the difference between the pragmatist the critical approaches. The pragmatist approach to energy transition (Shove and Walker 2014) focuses, first, on how the socio-material life of energy is as it is, and how it has changed over time. The multilevel argument is considered to miss the way actors ‘practice’ energy. The MLP leaves room for the contribution of social groups in the transition process even if the pivotal role is given to market and institutions. In broader terms, a more differentiated and flexible categorization of actors is required to recognize and understand the plurality of energy transitions, as well as of the opportunities to promote these processes in democratic terms (Meadowcroft 2011). The pragmatic perspective to energy transition appears quite different from a behavioural explanation or an application of methodological individualism. It consists in (and is named as) a social practice theory (SPT). Actors are not simply able (or unable) to adhere to a sustainable programme of action provided by eco-policies and eco-technological solutions. The crux of the matter is ‘what is energy for?’, an inquiry that cannot be adequately questioned, according to Shove and Walker (2014, p. 46), if society is intended as the consequence of something that is outside society itself: market, technology, institutions and policies. Shifting from the vertical interconnection of levels, the pragmatic perspective to energy transition looks to the horizontal dynamics in which users, those that practise energy in their ordinary activities, are intertwined (Shove 2012). Scholars adopting this perspective have underlined how difficult, even unrealistic, it can be to trace a linear cause–effect relationship between the implementation of sustainable energy policies and the impacts on people’s practical engagement in the use of energy (Butler et al. 2018; Strengers and Maller 2015). So, it seems worth investigating energy demand ‘beyond energy policy’ (Butler et al. 2018), focusing on social practices ‘that are enacted, reproduced and transformed in any one society, and understanding how material arrangements, including forms of energy, constitute dimensions of practice’ (Shove and Walker 2014, p. 48). The big picture appears complicated by the issue of where and when energy is provided and used. As SPT scholars underline, an abstract conceptualization of energy (and of its flows) seems ineffective in intercepting those situated practices it aims to change (Shove 2017).

Energy politics and energy transition  249 This understanding of energy transition has been considered not particularly suitable for providing policy suggestions because of its grounded focus. These criticisms overlap with the ‘modest’ claim (Shove et al. 2012) of SPT scholars about orientating transition policies or individual behaviours. The main support for policy-makers consists in suggestions about how to re-craft the ordinary practices performing energy, assuming that policies have to be framed as programmes orientated to interact with practices (Spurling et al. 2013). The argument about power is expressed in terms of which socio-material configuration performing energy transition works effectively. Powerful actors are those that are effectively interconnected with the set of practices fostering energy transition. Walker and colleagues (Day et al. 2016) complicate this point, merging SPT with the capabilities approach (Sen 1999). That is, they look to the issue of social justice within the practices involved in the transition, where dynamics of recruitment or exclusion/defection can be observed. Socio-material obstacles affecting the accessibility to energy, hampering a fair, affordable, democratic inclusion of people to this fundamental service, are questioned. This problematization of injustice leads us to shift the focus on the transition from the pragmatic ‘how it works’ to the political ‘why it is as it is’. This move reintroduces a normative yet critical posture. Here we can locate scholars and studies that express a politically engaged programme of research. This work argues that the energy transition is framed along the dominant neoliberal ideology, by actors pursuing different interests and holding different power positions. Indeed, energy transition, and its move towards renewable sources, cannot be detached from dynamics such as privatization and displacement that Castree (2003) enlists under the ‘commodification of nature’ conceptualization. Policies of transition to a low-carbon society have been designed often as an extension of the ordinary market-orientated approach, translating it from the fossil fuel sources to new green solutions. Similarly, large multinationals advocate their carbon-free strategies, investing in the supply of renewables and narrating the transition through the influential voice of their champions (Swaffield and Bell 2012). A critical dimension concerns those mainstream arguments that have the power to legitimize the politics of the post-carbon economies (Mitchell 2011). An example can be seen in the smartness ideology that informs the political discourse based on the techno-scientific fix of individual and collective market behaviours of energy consumption. Critical political ecology (Heynen et al. 2006) has contributed to this debate, aiming to unveil the apparent neutrality of the green economy fostered in the name of ‘the driving forces of capitalism (growth, efficiency, rationality, productivity)’ (Wilhite 2016, p. 78). As with SPT, neo-Marxist thinking also distances itself from a radical constructionist idea of the environment. Nature and its entities, energy included, are materialities that contribute to structuring reality. This ontological materialism (Swyngedouw 2006) is linked with the historical materialism that elaborates diachronically on the geographical development of societies and their ‘metabolic’ relations of production within the environment (Benton 1996; Harvey 1996; Chapter 4 in this volume). In this view, energy transition consists of new, different paths of transforming energy sources into commodities. At the global level, the social history of energy and the related socio-technologies of commodification or financialization highlight how green capitalism does not call into question its own accumulation logic, affecting the most vulnerable territories (Moore 2016, 2017). Some scholars write about a specific energetic metabolism (Giampietro and Mayumi 2000) coupled with land-grabbing strategies pursued by companies leading the transition. Studies adopting this perspective analyse the different interests at stake

250  Handbook of critical environmental politics in local conflicts originating from land occupation and exploitation in the name of transition (Podobnik 2006; Scheidel and Sorman 2012). This picture represents a concise summary of the different theoretical variations developed in recent decades about energy transition. In the literature several works try to hybridize these perspectives, enhancing their critical salience. Some issues are debated across all the approaches mentioned previously, such as, for example, participation and collective action (Hendriks 2009). Contributions have focused on the forms of collective organization of consumers and civil society through the concept of community energy. Citizen involvement is addressed by scholars analysing how local institutional arrangements support a more sustainable way of energy provision and a commons/democratic ideology (Acosta et al. 2018; Seyfang et al. 2013).

ENERGY TRANSITION POLICIES How is the complexity of energy transition, reported by the scientific debate, addressed by international policies? In this section, we elucidate the theoretical assumptions underlying green initiatives and the differences between various geopolitical areas. We find that policies set the market conditions for the green transition within a regulatory framework that refers to neoliberal ideology. Also, grassroots initiatives push for fairer energy production. The Market Mechanisms of International Policies From the 1990s, intergovernmental activities on energy have been closely associated with the sustainability issue (Rowkands 2005). In 1992, the UN adopted the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Kyoto Protocol was the first treaty that set, directly and indirectly, the international policy of energy transition. It defines mandatory GHG reduction targets for industrialized countries and non-binding measures for developing countries.1 ‘Flexible mechanisms’ were defined to accomplish reduction targets and to support less developed nations in mitigation actions. Those mechanisms (International Emissions Trading, the Clean Development Mechanism and the Joint Implementation) define a specific carbon market to exchange carbon credit. Carbon credits can be obtained by reducing direct emissions or supporting green projects in developing nations like hydroelectric power plants. The Kyoto Protocol had non-negligible effects for signatories with mandatory targets (Shishlov et al. 2016), but data show that the global GHG emissions increased. At the end of 2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expired, the global amount of GHG emissions recorded an increase of 46 per cent compared with 1990. In the period between the end of the Kyoto Protocol and the new international agreement (Doha Amendment, 2013–2020) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continued to rise by 1.2 per cent per year (Crippa et al. 2019). Despite the growth of renewables and energy efficiency initiatives, in non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries – particularly in China and India – energy demand has been primarily met by fossil fuels, contributing to this mass increase in emissions. It seems that climate governance fails because it is characterized by negotiations among national states’ interests instead of a new conception of interstate relations based on cosmopolitan values. For this reason, the Kyoto Protocol has entered into application slowly and

Energy politics and energy transition  251 some large countries, such as the US, have refused to join or have withdrawn from the treaty (Michaelowa et al. 2019). Global environmental governance has also been subordinated to an economic logic, failing to face the urgency of environmental challenges (Harris 2011; Dryzek 2016). In addition, market mechanisms have been environmentally ineffective, yet economically efficient (Lohmann 2011). Despite limited CO2 reduction, the World Bank registers that the overall value of the global aggregated carbon markets has increased tenfold in the period 2005–11.2 Financial success but concrete failure is inscribed in the belief that climate change can be solved only by marketization. Disembedding CO2 from its social production defines GHG both as a new commodity and a financial object (Chapter 27 in this volume). Carbon credits are traded on the market; their value conditions the development of the energy sector, and related industrial technologies, determining significant economic flows worldwide. In view of that, what counts for companies and governments is more the process of obtaining CO2 credits than their real effects on gas emissions (Spash 2011). As a consequence, the carbon market can promote forms of ‘green authoritarianism’ from national governments and ‘green colonialism’ from industrialized nations. On the one hand, governments try to favour renewable plants owing to their economic and job opportunities, even damaging local communities (for example, hydroelectric dams push indigenous peoples out of their territories). On the other hand, power plant developers come from countries with a good geopolitical influence. They wish to develop their facilities, often with their motherland governments’ support, for commercial and strategic interests, positioning themselves (and their nations) in the global energy market (Erlewein and Nüsser 2011). The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to face global warming, and includes the higher GHG-emitting nations.3 Yet, this treaty does not design new international binding mechanisms to face climate change. Renewables and Socio-Institutional Contexts If the neoliberal market logic defines energy transition policies, internationally and intra-nationally, what influences the performance of different countries? According to the literature, differences seem related to the socio-institutional context in which market mechanisms are implemented. High performances in renewables are recorded in coordinated market economies, such as Germany, and in controlled market economies, namely China, but not in ‘liberal market economies’, like the US. If, on the one hand, energy transition is a political choice, on the other, in an institutional context where government and the main stakeholders (industry, finance, science and society) collaborate, market mechanisms promote the transition process more efficiently (Ćetković and Buzogány 2016; Li 2017). However, despite having forms of coordination, the European Union (EU) and China present very different institutional and socio-political contexts. The EU sets mandatory targets for member states. The market mechanism of feed-in tariff prevails, providing higher cost-compensation in private investments in new energy technologies through long-term contracts. This approach seems successful: the EU over-achieved its Kyoto Protocol target.4 Moreover, the broad public consensus within the European civil society stimulates green initiatives.5 In Germany, for example, the prominence of the ecological issue is underlined by the relevance of the Green Party. In 2019, the Greens obtained 20.5 per cent votes in the European elections. Also, grassroots initiatives – such as the claim for the remunicipalization of energy grids and the promotion of energy cooperatives – push

252  Handbook of critical environmental politics for a greener, decentralized and participatory energy provision model, that is in contrast with private green business (Gailing and Moss 2016; Morris and Jungjohann 2016). This model seems partially endorsed by recent EU Directives (for example, 2018/2001/EU), that intend to promote renewables communities and the self-consumption of energy. Despite market logic is still prevailing in the EU (where the most extensive emission trading system, the EU ETS, is active), civil society pressures seem to drive Europe to a participative or democratic energy transition (Lopez et al. 2019). China’s effort towards green energy has been massive. In a short time, China became the foremost country in the world for renewables plants and jobs in the green energy sector.6 Its interest in climate governance and renewables can be explained according to strategic reasons, namely, energy security and the interest in becoming the leading country in green technologies (Clark and Li 2010; Li 2017; Chen et al. 2019). The energy transition is linked to economic supremacy, as clearly stated in the 13th Five-Year Energy Development Plan (2016–2020), which sets mandatory targets and state commitments in cutting coal’s share. If the central Chinese government adopts top-down governance, it does not exclude complex interactions between central and local government levels in implementing policies. For example, until 2012 there were few photovoltaic projects, but some local administrations decided to promote them, and the solar industry developed with no central steering. The literature has highlighted how, in China, energy transition has taken place in a particular institutional context, where the relationship between the central state and its territorial articulations played a predominant role, while civil society was less relevant (Wang et al. 2017). Beeson (2016) considers China an interesting case study for comparison: its responses to climate change are overseen by an authoritarian government that has a higher capacity to implement potentially tricky reforms in the energy sector. Its ‘environmental authoritarianism’ is in stark contrast with the approach adopted in most countries around the world, such as in the EU. It remains to be seen which approach is more effective in addressing the environmental issue.

CONCLUSION: ALTERNATIVE PATHS? Despite regional differences, (neoliberal) market mechanisms inform the international policies on energy transition, as stressed previously. However, some initiatives prefigure alternative strategies (Chapter 35 in this volume). In conclusion, we would like to underline the links between the policy proposals on the energy transition and the theoretical perspectives reported in the chapter. In this way, we briefly highlight the scope of action for the transition within a specific policy framework. First, we consider the radical ‘Green New Deal’ proposed in 2019 by the US social movements, intellectuals and Democrat representatives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They addressed climate change as the most significant market failure and denounced market mechanisms as ineffective and unfair. In their opinion, the state should address the uncertainty of unprofitable investments in the short term to transform the national energy system into a sustainable system. Policies should go beyond interventions that change relative prices (carbon tax and subsidies) and impose strict emission limits, as well as environmental standards, such as banning petrol and diesel vehicles. According to this perspective, the decarbonization of the economic system can be facilitated by a socialization of energy through cooperatives and

Energy politics and energy transition  253 local public agencies. Investments in renewables bring returns later than private companies expect, while cooperatives or municipal-owned companies can operate with lower profit requirements. In this way, the Green New Deal would not only allow coping with climate change, but it would also create new job opportunities and boost the economy. Eventually, the US Congress did not adopt this energy policy proposal, which remains an object of fierce debate owing to polarization in public opinion. In progressive policy proposals, such as the Green New Deal or the remunicipalization of energy grids, we can trace overlaps with critical scholars’ considerations on the sustainable energy transition. In summary, these researchers identify the socio-environmental injustice and environmental failure of energy policies in the commodification of nature and the market. In this instance, state intervention or community initiatives represent the most appropriate solutions to energy and socio-environmental problems, and they offer the prospect of an alternative future for a radical democratic energy system (Brad et al., Chapter 29 in this volume). A second policy example is the ‘European Green Deal’ to enforce the ongoing energy transition proposed in 2019 by the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The EU strategy contains several policy measures for the power sector (buildings, transport, and so on) and it plans investments for 1 trillion euros until 2030. However, unlike the US proposal, the European Green Deal counts on market mechanisms to reach its goals, and the role of energy communities seems to remain marginal, despite civil society pressures and the Directive 2019/9442, which encourages renewable energy communities. Recent valuable EU performances in the energy transition are evident, but the social costs of tackling the ecological crisis appear challenging to sustain in times of economic crisis. The protest of the gilets jaunes in France against environmental legislation is one example. Roughly, we can say that for reformist policies, such as the European or Chinese initiatives, MLP or SPT approaches seem to be the most direct reference. The MLP helps to identify the legislative and market mechanisms that enable transition and to indicate macro-policies promoting socio-technical change. However, it does not explicitly focus on the definition of an alternative social model of the energy system or the social injustice of the energy transition. Instead, SPT focuses on how energy works from a social viewpoint. For this reason, SPT can identify the asymmetries of power and resources that determine transition injustices. This approach shows how to mitigate market failures, but it does not focus on overcoming the market by favouring other, fairer, coordination mechanisms. To summarize, policies for energy transition seem to be characterized by two main trends: one in favour of a massive public intervention and one focused on improving mechanisms to facilitate the green market transaction. The latter is prominent, but it varies among countries, from a pure market model (such as that in the US) to strong state coordination (for example, China). The energy provision model changes according to policies, from large centralized green facilities to small sustainable energy communities. Which model will prevail or what type of mixed system will be adopted seems to be a relevant question for the future.

NOTES 1. The economic development of BRIC countries, such China or India, contributed to reconsidering this distinction during the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties, in 2015. 2. World Bank, State and Trends in the Carbon Market, Washington, DC, various year editions.

254  Handbook of critical environmental politics 3. On 4 November 2019, the US Trump administration notified the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. However the Biden administration has joined it again. 4. European Commission, Progress towards achieving the Kyoto and EU 2020 objectives, Brussels, 9 October 2013. 5. According to the Eurobarometer opinion poll, the concern score for the environment, climate and energy issues have risen from 5 per cent in 2014 to 18 per cent in 2019, while other topics decrease or are stable. Special Eurobarometer 486, ‘Europeans in 2019’, March 2019, p. 7. 6. International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Renewable Capacity Statistics 2019, Abu Dhabi; International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Renewable Energy and Jobs Annual Review 2019, Abu Dhabi.

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256  Handbook of critical environmental politics Rowkands, I.H. (2005), Renewable energy and international politics, in P. Dauvergne (ed.), Handbook of Global Environmental Politics, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 78–94. Scheidel, A. and Sorman, A.H. (2012), Energy transitions and the global land rush: ultimate drivers and persistent consequences, Global Environmental Change, 22 (3), 588–95. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seyfang, G., Jin, J. and Smith, A. (2013), A thousand flowers blooming? An examination of community energy in the UK, Energy Policy, 61 (October), 977–89. Shishlov, I., Morel, R. and Bellassen, V. (2016), Compliance of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol in the first commitment period, Climate Policy, 16 (6), 768–82. Shove, E. (2012), Energy transitions in practice: the case of global indoor climate change, in G. Verbong and D. Loorbach (eds), Governing the Energy Transition: Reality, Illusion or Necessity? London: Routledge, pp. 51–74. Shove, E. (2017), Energy and social practice: from abstractions to dynamic processes, in N. Labanca (ed.), Complex Systems and Social Practices in Energy Transitions: Framing the Issue of Energy Sustainability in the Time of Renewables, Cham: Springer, pp. 207–20. Shove, E. and Walker, G. (2014), What is energy for? Social practice and energy demand, Theory, Culture & Society, 31 (5), 41–58. Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012), The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes, London: Sage. Smith, A., Stirling, A. and Berkhout, F. (2005), The governance of sustainable socio-technical transitions, Research Policy, 34 (10), 1491–510. Spash, C.L. (2011), Carbon trading: a critique, in J.S. Dryzek, R.B. Norgaard and D. Schlosberg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 550–60. Spencer, H. (1896), The Principles of Sociology, London: Harrison and Sons. Spurling, N., McKeekin, A., Shove, E., Southerton, D. and Welch, D. (2013), Interventions in practice: re-framing policy approaches to consumer behaviour, Social Practices Research Group, accessed 1 February 2020 at https://​www​.research​.manchester​.ac​.uk/​portal/​files/​32468813/​FULL​_TEXT​.PDF. Strengers, Y. and Maller, C. (eds) (2015), Social Practices, Intervention and Sustainability: Beyond Behaviour Change, London: Routledge. Swaffield, J. and Bell, D. (2012), Can ‘climate champions’ save the planet? A critical reflection on neoliberal social change, Environmental Politics, 21 (2), 248–67. Swyngedouw, E. (2006), Circulations and metabolisms: (hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities, Science as Culture, 15 (2), 105–21. Turnheim, B. and Geels, F.W. (2015), Regime destabilisation as the flipside of energy transitions: lessons from the history of the British coal industry (1913–1997), Energy Policy, 50 (November), 35–49. Urry, J. (2013), Societies beyond Oil, London: Zed Books. Wang, P., Liu, L. and Wu, T. (2017), A review of China’s climate governance: state, market and civil society, Climate Policy, 18 (5), 664–79. White, L. (1949), The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wilhite, H. (2016), The Political Economy of Low Carbon Transformation Breaking the Habits of Capitalism, London: Routledge. World Energy Council (2017), World energy focus 2017. The energy transition: how innovation is driving change, accessed 1 February 2020 at https://​www​.worldenergy​.org/​assets/​downloads/​WEF​ -WEC​_Annual​_2017​_Web​_LowRes​.pdf.

18. Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment Rolf Lidskog and Monika Berg

INTRODUCTION AND GENEALOGY Scientific expertise pervades almost all environmental areas. Science measures and analyses the state of the environment and traces possible causes of environmental problems. Not only does it diagnose the environment, but often it also develops and proposes remedies. Owing to science’s penetration of the environmental discourse, all proposals for environmental action must claim to be based on firm science – otherwise they will not be seen as relevant and legitimate. Environmental problems are science dependent, and science has not only spoken truth to power but has successfully marched through the corridors of power, pressing all actors to orientate themselves in relation to scientific understandings of environmental issues. This applies not only to natural sciences but to social sciences as well. In the face of severe environmental threats the social sciences are now increasingly being invited to provide knowledge on how to steer and transform societies. In many respects this can be depicted as a scientific success story. It is possible to paint another picture, however, in which science is contested, questioned, downplayed and perhaps even ignored. Scientific experts quarrel about what is a correct diagnosis and a relevant remedy. Political leaders tout ‘alternative facts’ or ignore science altogether. Environmental organisations select environmental scientists who support their preconceived standpoints. Local communities find science to be irrelevant for their situation. Furthermore, scientists themselves experience that their views are simplified and misinterpreted, and that non-scientific actors are invited as experts in public debates. There are also cases, such as the climate change issue, where science has successfully influenced the environmental discourse but does not seem to have resulted in sufficient political action (Chapter 13 in this volume). Despite science continuously delivering strong messages about the severity of environmental threats – with some elites in research, business and politics even claiming that we need a planetary emergency plan (Gore 2006; Club of Rome 2019; Lenton et al. 2019) – the gap is growing between what needs to be done and what is being done. Thus, we live in a paradoxical situation where large segments of society are conscious of environmental threats, but concerted action is lacking. Within the environmental area, we are experiencing a situation where the findings of science are needed, often listened to, but only rarely followed up by action. This raises crucial questions about science and its role in environmental action. Most people and organisations agree that science and expertise are crucial for modern society, not least when it comes to solving environmental problems. However, there are different views on what role it should play in policy and politics. What is the particular and unique contribution of experts, and how should they relate to other actors, not least political actors? There are also diverging claims on what expertise is. Where and on what grounds should we draw the boundary between experts and 257

258  Handbook of critical environmental politics non-experts? How the authority of expertise is constructed and maintained is contested (Berg and Lidskog 2018a). What is the basis for the epistemic authority and reliability of sources of knowledge and advice? These questions, and their various answers, are based on deeply held, fundamental and often implicit understandings of what knowledge is, how society works and how it should be governed. Currently, voices within the academic debate claim that to avoid environmental disasters the democratic process must be superseded by the issuing of scientific and technocratic dictates, to prevent society from trespassing planetary boundaries (Chapter 8 in this volume). Other voices claim that the best way to better respond to environmental threats is to democratise science, opening it up for more input and influence from stakeholders and citizens (Chapter 24 in this volume). In addition to these positions, there is a chorus of multifaceted voices with different proposals for how expertise should be defined, what role it should play and how it should be performed. It is important to note that, regardless of the position taken, science is crucial; it is needed for the production of systematic knowledge about planetary conditions or about public considerations. Without this knowledge, decision-makers will not have sufficient situational awareness and will therefore have difficulty developing relevant responses. However, the role that science will play may differ (Berg and Lidskog 2018b). A common definition of an expert is ‘someone who masters skills with recognized (indeed certified) competence which is called upon in decision-making processes’ (Callon et al. 2009, p. 228). This definition stresses that expertise is about more than possessing a particular level of competence; the competence has to be acknowledged and considered relevant by others than the expert community itself (Lidskog and Sundqvist 2018a). Experts need to be competent, in the sense of mastering specialist knowledge or practices. Their expertise needs to be recognised, by being known outside their own expert communities, not least their target groups, and it needs to be legitimate, by being considered trustworthy. This makes performing expertise a complex task that involves having to navigate a social landscape with conflicting interests and divergent beliefs about what knowledge is and how the world is constituted. Those who develop theories of expertise are also part of this landscape, which influences how they understand the conditions, characteristics and role of expertise. In the current rhetoric about global crises requiring concerted action, in which expertise is often given a prominent role in defining and diagnosing environmental problems, as well as suggesting remedies, it is crucial to have a deeper understanding of what constitutes expertise and how to relate expertise to science and policy. This allows for a more critical understanding of environmental problems and politics. Environmental problems are not external to society, waiting to be discovered, but are actively constructed in a dynamic process involving ecosystem conditions, social impacts and knowledge production. What type of expertise is seen as legitimate and receives an opportunity to develop knowledge heavily influences how an environmental problem is understood and acted upon. Knowledge is inseparable from power; how an environmental problem is defined and how society is understood determine which solutions are proposed and seen as relevant and legitimate. This chapter discusses the meaning of expertise and, not least, current challenges to its epistemic authority. The next section indicates two diverging trends: one leading toward a broad distribution of expertise in society, and another where specialised expertise is becoming increasingly separated from the wider society. The third section presents proposals developed in response to the situation of a plurality of expert advice and contestation of it. All these proposals declare the need to open up the category of expertise to include knowledge inputs

Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment  259 other than scientific inputs, that is, to re-draw the boundaries between experts and non-experts. They differ, however, in who, what, why and how to include non-scientific knowledge. The fourth and concluding section raises questions about the role of expertise in the current quest for social transformation.

PROBLEM-FRAMING AND KEY CONCEPTS The development of modern society, not least its techno-scientific progress, have made most aspects of life dependent on expert systems. We have, as Jasanoff (2005) stresses, a scientific overflow in society, in which knowledge and products originally created by scientific communities reach society with increasing speed, extent and impact. As a consequence, almost all public issues have a scientific component. This has led to an increased demand among government agencies, corporations and interest organisations for expertise to assess risks and guide actions. As Beck (1992) and Giddens (1990) have stressed, such a scientisation of society implies that citizens have to trust science; without science, crucial knowledge about the state of the environment would not exist, nor would there be guidance on relevant ways for handling such environmental problems. However, science does not influence society unilaterally. Instead, science and society are dynamically related. Technoscientific progress has evidently led to a scientisation of society, but science has also changed in the process. Nowotny et al.’s (2001) book Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty is one of the most well-known contributions presenting a case for this view. It claims that, owing to mass education, scientific thinking is distributed socially and spatially, and now exists ‘everywhere’ in society. Science was previously characterised by hierarchical structures, internal control systems and disciplinary boundaries (what Nowotny et al. term ‘Mode-1 science’). The gradual increase in science– society interaction has brought about a situation where they now also strongly influence each other. Processes of dedifferentiation and hybridisation have made it hard to demarcate science as a discrete practice or distinct sphere; research is conducted in many institutional settings and in very different ways. A consequence of this is that general scientific competence and literacy have grown, and citizens are not only able to evaluate scientific work, but may also contribute to it. A parallel, and diverging, trend is the extreme and ongoing specialisation of science (Lidskog and Sundqvist 2018b). Science consists of very specialised practices that are hard to understand not only by non-scientific actors, but also by researchers with other disciplinary assets. A great deal of current research takes place in spaces with restricted access, sometimes open only for the scientists involved. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), new synthetic chemicals, and carbon capture and storage are all examples of scientific results that are debated in society, but whose development took place behind closed doors, such as in laboratories run by universities or corporations. Scientific activity is still separated from the wider society, and when it does go public – when its findings are presented and/or applied in society – it becomes debated and potentially contested. Both these trends exist in regulatory work. Calls to open decision-making processes to external scrutiny and wider public involvement are a recurrent feature of political and public discussions of regulation, not least within the fields of health and the environment (Gouldson et al. 2007). These calls are not only directed towards political bodies and companies, but also

260  Handbook of critical environmental politics towards scientific communities. According to the European Commission (EC 2001), the solution to the problem of public distrust is increased transparency of expert work, that is, to make visible how experts are selected and used in assessments and policy support. The frequently used approach of risk governance goes beyond traditional methods of regulating risk, and stresses that there are many legitimate ways that stakeholders and the public can contribute to defining and evaluating risks (Chapter 22 in this volume; Renn 2008; Lidskog et al. 2010; van Asselt and Renn 2011). This approach implies that involved experts should be open to questioning the situation, should not conceal issues of uncertainty, should welcome pluralism (the existence of different legitimate understandings, evaluations and recommendations), and should be receptive to the input and participation of other stakeholders (van Asselt and Renn 2011). By being inclusive, regulatory bodies hope to achieve effective, robust, accountable and legitimate regulation. However, a great deal of regulation takes place with few opportunities for wider input. Regulation often builds on one set of experts who establish the environmental risks in respect of the probability and magnitude of the hazards, and another set who evaluate the costs and benefits of various responses. The issue is then opened for wider input by stakeholders and the public. Scientific expertise is often regarded by the regulators as neutral, objective and apolitical, that is, separate from political values. Regarded as the supreme source of knowledge, scientific expertise should guide the understanding of what is at stake and play a unique and decisive role in the regulatory process. Thus, both in theory and in practices, different normative ideals and roles are ascribed to scientific expertise. Regardless of whether it is broad and distributed or discrete and specialised, expertise is always based on a claim to possess specialised knowledge, competence or skill. Expertise is achieved by carving out and controlling a particular knowledge area and then asserting authority as the provider of relevant knowledge for problem-solving within this area (Gieryn 1999). Through this boundary work, a specific type of knowledge – expert knowledge – is accorded the legitimacy to define, describe and explain bounded domains of reality. This boundary work determines who has expertise, and thus also who does not. Expertise and non-expertise are co-constructed in processes of boundary-making. However, as stressed previously, in addition to possessing expert knowledge, an expert is also required to have epistemic authority, that is, to be considered a provider of relevant and valid knowledge. Achieving epistemic authority is, however, a complex task that is further complicated by current arrangements where expert knowledge flourishes in many institutional settings, and where different, and even divergent, advice is being given. In this context, while epistemic authority does to a limited degree derive from ascription, it is mainly achieved through active negotiations. As Nowotny et al. (2001, p. 210) put it, science has moved from a culture of autonomy to a culture of accountability.

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND STANDPOINTS Several theoretical approaches have been developed to tackle the situation of contested scientific expertise and a plurality of expert advice, with different views on and implications for the boundaries between science and policy and between expertise and non-expertise. Most can be collected under the heading democratised science, and have varying epistemological and normative assumptions as well as implications (Lidskog 2008; Berg and Lidskog 2018b).

Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment  261 Some proposals hold that science should swim downstream and open itself up for public input when discussing the practical implications of its research. Others hold that the public should swim upstream and have a say in the definition of research problems and practices. Even if the proposals for how to democratise science differ, they all advocate strategies of inclusion, where citizens should be seen not as mere passive receivers of scientific knowledge, but as active partners in the production of knowledge, or in the evaluation and application of scientific contributions. Thus, a common concern has to do with how new relations between experts and citizens can be negotiated and designed. We begin by presenting the standpoint that these proposals have emerged as a reaction to. An early response to public neglect of expert scientific advice was to interpret it as caused by public ignorance or misunderstanding of science. The suggested remedy for this was to better inform citizens, and sometimes even educate them, to help them correct their original misunderstanding and recognise the superiority of the scientific understanding of an issue. This solution, labelled the deficit model of public understanding of science, has been heavily criticised (Irwin and Wynne 2004). The basis of this criticism is that citizens often ignore expert claims not because they cannot comprehend them, but because they deliberately reject them. The reasons for the rejection may vary, but one of them is that on some occasions scientific findings have proven to be incorrect and have contributed to regulatory failures (Löfstedt 2005). Another reason is that the public may find that scientific experts frame an issue in an overly restricted way, excluding important aspects (Wynne 2005). A third reason is the existence of multiple, and often divergent, scientific recommendations about the causes as well as remedies of an environmental problem. A fourth reason is that the growing prevalence and awareness of uncertainty have made both the giving and the trusting of expert advice a much more complicated matter. As an alternative to the deficit model, a dialogical model has been developed, where public understandings are not simply subordinated to scientific understandings. Within this model, various proposals flourish which differ in their inclusion of other perspectives and thus in how they draw the boundary between science and other fields. The dialogue that they advocate penetrates the scientific sphere to different degrees. One standpoint is that the complexity of environmental problems makes it necessary to complement scientific expertise with non-scientific expert knowledge. An example of this outlook is post-normal science, which asserts that science may have great validity and reliability in the laboratory, but real-world problems are far more complex, multifarious and highly uncertain (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). The notion of ‘post-normal’ is chosen to stress that ‘normal science’ in the Kuhnian sense – puzzle-solving within an implicit and unquestioned scientific paradigm – is no longer relevant for tackling many of today’s environmental problems. Therefore, scientific knowledge needs to be enriched by other knowledge forms, not least local knowledge. The reason for this is that contextually generated knowledge about local circumstances is often more relevant to action than traditional, universal, abstract and context-independent scientific statements. Hence a bridge is built between the world of the laboratory and the world of society, which is needed when searching for viable solutions to environmental problems. The environmental justice movement has been a promoter of the need to complement scientific expertise with other sources of knowledge. Bullard’s (1990) seminal work Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality showed how in the 1960s the geographical pattern of siting noxious facilities (for example, waste-disposal sites) near highly segregated areas in the American South sparked a wave of protests against environmental racism, which brought together civil rights and environmental activists. As a consequence of this movement,

262  Handbook of critical environmental politics thousands of local, community-based groups that struggle to get their voices heard claimed that social justice also includes the right to live and work in a healthy environment (Szasz 1994). This movement was not critical of science per se, but claimed that powerful interests had brought in paid experts to convince local residents that proposed facilities did not constitute any environmental threat. By developing complementary expertise, even counter-expertise, activists spread knowledge about the detrimental effects of proposed facilities, and that people were living in endangered environments (Chapter 35 in this volume). A far more radical view is that of epistemic diversity, which does not see other forms of knowledge as complements to science, but instead questions and relativises scientific knowledge itself. Not least within post-colonial thought, researchers have strongly emphasised the necessity to recognise not only the cultural and social diversity of the world, but also its epistemic diversity. This view territorialises disciplinary perspectives and epistemologies; what science presents as a universal gaze is in reality a provincial gaze, based on particular epistemic premises and historical experiences (Bhambra 2014; Bhambra and Santos 2017; see also Chapters 2 and 37 in this volume). Similar to Frankopan’s (2015) criticism of making Europe the centre of gravity for world history, and thereby painting a selective and biased picture of world history, post-colonial thinkers stress that the social sciences have created a European epistemic singularity, thereby obscuring the existence of many other ways to understand and research the world and history. Some even claim that ways of being (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology) and ways of advancing knowledge (methodology) are interconnected. This radical perspective means not only that different perspectives can be used to understand the world, but that there are different worlds that need to be understood and acknowledged. Santos (2014) highlights the need to allow oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and on their own terms (what Santos terms ‘epistemologies of the South’). By acknowledging and valuing knowledge produced by groups that have systematically suffered injustice and oppression, the false universalism of northern- or western-centric thinking is revealed. Currently, when theories from the Global South are acknowledged, they tend to be framed as provincial, in contrast to the pretended universal character of western social science theories. This is nothing other than an exercise of power, acknowledging some forms of knowledge while silencing others (Chapter 33 in this volume). The solution, as put forward by Bhambra and Santos (2017), is to recognise the epistemic and cultural diversity of the world and to provincialise the epistemic and cultural premises of what is seen as universal scientific knowledge. A similar, though less far-reaching, perspective is provided by research strands within the field of science and technology studies that claim that science (often referring to the natural sciences and engineering) provides an overly restricted understanding of environmental issues, and that other means of framing and understanding issues are important if we are to grasp their full complexity. According to this perspective, the reason for including other perspectives is not that people have contextual or specialised knowledge that complements (or questions) science, but that members of the public may contribute important knowledge about public concerns (Marres 2007; Wynne 2005), as well as social practices and norms of relevance to the problem. Thus, scientific expertise does not provide a false, but instead an overly restricted, view of a matter. Scientific framings tend to ignore (or omit) the underlying causes of environmental problems, as well as the broader social implications of proposed solutions (Jasanoff 2005; Wynne 2005). Involving a broader set of scientific disciplines (such as history, sociology, anthropology and ethics), and letting people other than scientific experts provide

Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment  263 knowledge and perspectives on an issue, creates broader and more relevant knowledge. That makes it possible for everyone, including scientists, to generate more inclusive and reflexive framing processes around an issue (Wynne 2005; Hulme 2010). Thus, according to this perspective, while science is still an important provider of environmental knowledge and an important foundation for handling environmental problems, it is not a sufficient foundation; science always needs interpretation and support by non-scientific actors, for the sake of its accuracy as well as legitimacy. Expertise is a social position for delivering valid, relevant and trusted knowledge. All the approaches presented above concern what should be counted as expertise. They differ in their views on where to draw the border between expertise and non-expertise, and whether and how to include other non-scientific actors in the position of experts. Knowledge: What Should Be Included? Expertise is a matter of knowledge, but not of all types of knowledge, only those that are specialised. Expertise is always elitist; it concerns a competence that is unique and requested (Collins and Evans 2007). However, as soon as scientific knowledge is to be transferred from its original context to another, it must be translated, taking into account the context in which it will be applied. This is one of the main reasons behind claims that expertise needs to include forms of knowledge other than scientific forms – that important specialist knowledge exists outside science. A central issue in allowing for a broader knowledge base for expertise is how non-scientific knowledge should be related to scientific knowledge. That knowledge can arise from non-scientific practices is largely uncontested, as is that contextual aspects should be considered when giving expert advice. What is contested, however, is the character and status of non-scientific knowledge. The proposals range from claiming that it only complements science to claiming that it challenges science; that science is not superior to other knowledge forms but is tied to a specific socio-cultural context. Some proposals also claim that science can include knowledge about contextual aspects (including public concerns) and that there is therefore no need to broaden the scope of expertise to include non-scientific knowledge. It is through science that knowledge is systematised and validated to enable it to give relevant and robust expert advice. Also, warnings are raised that scientific representation of other forms of knowledge always transforms this knowledge into something other than its original content (Callon et al. 2009, p. 111). This raises the question of who should represent non-scientific expert knowledge. Actors: Who Is a Knowledge Holder? The social position of being an expert is often attached to the professional role of being a scientist. Professions are traditionally defined as being based on licence (exclusive permission to perform and implement specific tasks) and mandate (to prescribe how others must act) (Hughes 1958 [1981]). The limits of professional authority, mandate and legitimate scope of action are established through jurisdiction (which states who has a monopoly and control over a set of tasks) (Abbott 1988). In addition, to become part of a profession, a candidate must prove that he or she has acquired specific knowledge relevant for the profession (in most instances through an educational programme at university level) (Pfadenhauer 2006). When

264  Handbook of critical environmental politics expertise is broadened to include other forms of knowledge than scientific forms, it becomes harder to demarcate it. Prefixes such as ‘lay’, ‘local’ or ‘popular’ are used to signal a form of expertise that is not based on certified competence or a formal mandate. This makes the ‘problem of extension’ – where to draw the border between expert and non-expert – more present and urgent (Collins and Evans 2007). Experience-based expertise raises questions about what types of experiences and social practices lead to expert knowledge and how to evaluate this knowledge. An apposite example is indigenous knowledge. Historically, indigenous people have been a neglected group in society. They have often been seen as a hindrance for economic growth or, even, as representing the opposite of modern development. When they have received attention, they have often been viewed as rights holders, that is, as constituting a political reality that must be taken into consideration (Chapter 6 in this volume). More recently, indigenous people have also been regarded as knowledge holders, most clearly in the international expert organisation the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) which was designed to bridge different knowledge systems, in particular the divide between scientific knowledge and indigenous and local knowledge (Díaz et al. 2015). However, studies have shown that bridging different knowledge systems is anything but unproblematic. Thus, the question of who to include leads to how to include; by which methods should non-scientific knowledge be included in expert knowledge and expert advice? Methods: How Should We Include Non-Scientific Knowledge as Expertise? Stating who are experts and what types of contribution they will provide is not sufficient. It is also necessary to find organisational forms for these knowledge contributions. Callon et al. (2009, p. 109) have even formulated the imperative that anyone who silences and dismisses those who should speak is obligated to organise ways for them to express their views. On a local level, numerous social experiments and methods – for example, consensus conferences, citizen panels, hybrid forums, public inquiries and focus groups – have been developed to support broader knowledge inclusion (Callon et al. 2009; Irwin and Michael 2003; Chilvers and Kearnes 2016). On an international level, the most well-known and ambitious effort to achieve broader knowledge inclusion was undertaken by the IPBES, whose conceptual framework gives indigenous and local knowledge the same status as scientific knowledge (Díaz et al. 2015). Studies have noted, however, that despite these ambitions and intentions, there is a significant risk of non-scientific knowledge being constantly subordinated to scientific knowledge. An example is when, to be understood and heard, other forms of knowledge articulate themselves in a scientifically understandable way, but the original meaning and contribution of the non-scientific knowledge changes in the process of translation. This is visible, for example, when those selected to represent indigenous knowledge are also trained scientists (Löfmarck and Lidskog 2017). There is also a risk that these methods for broader knowledge inclusion will further alienate other knowledge holders within the public. These methods increase professionalisation, create new forms of professional expertise (on communication and inclusion), and unintentionally generate an extra layer of scientisation and bureaucratisation. Hence, contrary to that which they aim for, these methods may put further obstacles in the way of those whose voices they strive to represent (Soneryd and Amelung 2016). Another way of furthering knowledge inclusion is to make non-scientific knowledge an object of scientific analysis. Using different scientific methods, indigenous, local and popular

Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment  265 knowledge can be gathered, systematised and communicated to scientific experts, and thereby be included as scientific facts. This way of including non-scientific knowledge is contested, since form and content are always interrelated. Therefore, some researchers propose more context-sensitive approaches (such as ethnography) rather than surveys or structured interviews, to do better justice to non-scientific knowledge (Irwin and Michael 2003). Warnings have been raised, however, that all types of knowledge translation – even using context-sensitive methods – always transform the original knowledge. Arguing for direct representation – that non-scientific-knowledge holders should personally be included – does not necessarily solve this problem. It is rare to find a symmetrical exchange between scientific and non-scientific knowledge; instead, non-scientific knowledge is included and made use of to the extent that it is in line with scientific thought. The implication of this is that non-scientific actors’ voices will be, if not silenced, at least distorted in processes of knowledge inclusion. Reasons: The Wider Function of Public Inclusion The quest for knowledge inclusion and a broadening of expertise is part of a more general trend in society (Power 2007). Calls to open up decision-making processes to external scrutiny, stakeholder dialogue and wider public involvement are a recurrent feature of political and public discussions of environmental risk (Irwin 2006). The quest for broader expertise is thus part of a more general trend towards new ways of governing subjects in which inclusion means that those included can not only provide knowledge and perspectives, but also affect the participating groups and individuals and possibly change their understanding. The inclusion or exclusion of non-scientific actors may have an implicit strategic function. It can be a tool for co-opting oppositional groups, resulting in an uneven process where, in the end, expert knowledge and expert advice mainly reflect the views of the most powerful or vocal actors. Inclusion strategies can spread accountability to broader groups, but without giving them real opportunities to influence decisions. Some even claim that knowledge inclusion is largely a form of stage management (Hilgartner 2000) where inclusive processes are placed front of stage, making a public display of openness to different voices and forms of knowledge, whereas backstage techno-scientific development continues unabated. Citizens and stakeholders are frequently invited to take part in different kinds of public consultations, such as environmental impact assessments and public panels on controversial issues (as in the example of GMOs and nuclear waste disposal). In these settings, citizens are given the opportunity to evaluate proposals and articulate standpoints. However, even when they speak back to science through these forums, it is doubtful that they are listened to and have any effect on research agendas, knowledge production and decision-making. Inclusive strategies also have deeper effects irrespective of an actor’s intention. Participatory methods do not merely serve to include knowledge holders other than scientific ones in knowledge production and decision-making. They can also affect the identities of the included groups and may even create new categories of actors. Abstract actor categories such as ‘the public’, ‘indigenous people’ and ‘local people’ need to be further defined in order to specify concrete groups of people to invite. The knowledge holder is not only included, but also defined, through the participatory method used. When a strategy for knowledge inclusion is developed, it always involves an implicit idea of who should be included, what knowledge they hold, and what role they should play in knowledge-gathering and decision-making (Soneryd and Amelung 2016). That is, the non-scientific expertise, the issue at stake and the

266  Handbook of critical environmental politics inclusive strategies are all co-produced (Chilvers and Kearnes 2020). It is therefore important to reflect on and anticipate the effects that inclusive strategies will have on both the issue at stake and the actors involved. Reflecting on the wider function of broader knowledge inclusion should not be reduced to serving an instrumental function of improving effectiveness in regulation and retaining credibility for expertise. Environmental problems are complex, and an important part of the regulatory process is to consider not only environmental aspects, but also what people value and how they are likely to respond to decisions.

OPEN QUESTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL It is increasingly recognised that addressing the ongoing problems of unsustainability and the exceeding of planetary boundaries requires not only scientific and technological advances, but also profound and enduring social and cultural changes. There is an emergent call – from political bodies and scientific communities – for social transformation, that is, for alteration of the fundamental social structures of modern societies (Deacon 2016; Boström et al. 2018). The work towards transformative change requests and needs expert guidance, and we therefore conclude by highlighting important aspects to consider regarding the role of scientific expertise in guiding social transformation. First, it is important to critically investigate what type of expertise is asked for and shaped. The call for social transformation puts society at the centre, which is why representatives of the social sciences are increasingly being invited to, and included in, expert bodies (ISSC 2013). There is, however, a tendency for them to receive a restricted role, either giving advice on procedural aspects (such as how to involve stakeholders in decisional processes, or how to handle different views and standpoints in a deliberative way) or handling downstream issues and end-of-pipe solutions (facilitating implementation of technically framed solutions) (Beck 2011; Jasanoff 2012). In order to facilitate and guide social transformations, however, it is important that social scientific expertise is given (and tackles) the more fundamental role of examining the social causes of environmental problems and exploring how ingrained, unsustainable social and institutional structures are reproduced, and how they can be transformed (see, for example, Chapter 9 in this volume; Blühdorn and Welsh 2013; Hausknost 2020). Secondly, it is important to critically investigate how social transformations challenge current institutional structures and power relations. Social transformations will affect the distribution of wealth and power, and create winners and losers. Individual actors and even whole sectors will therefore oppose transformative changes and develop social strategies to counteract, hinder or redirect social transformation. When social transformation becomes part of a scientific, political and popular discourse, there is always a risk of it becoming de-radicalised. It may even be converted into a type of technical fix, which can be used rhetorically to delay or hinder transformative changes, for example, by referring to how a process of change is under way but needs to be developed a further to become viable. It is therefore important to consider how social transformation affects power relations, both to avoid unwanted consequences and to prepare for the conflicts and power struggles that accompany the work for social transformation. Thirdly, it is important to critically investigate the wider implications of proposed social transformations. The current emphasis on global environmental threats may serve a depoliti-

Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment  267 cising function by highlighting the urgent need for action and change while poorly recognising the social complexity of this task (Hulme 2015). Environmental threats are often pictured as universal and global, as though all people faced the same problems regardless of social and geographical belongings. There is a need to act, and to act rapidly, but without losing sight of the very different ways in which people understand and are impacted by global environmental change. People have to handle different local and regional issues, and draw on a diversity of knowledge and experience when framing and acting upon environmental challenges (Lidskog and Lockie 2020). To develop viable and relevant proposals and policies, is important to grasp what the problem is and entails for people with different positions, values and life-courses. In this process the dialogical model, with its emphasis on inclusiveness, is essential but, as noted previously, it must always be borne in mind that marginalised voices are often silenced or, when included, are often transformed and distorted. Fourthly, it is important to critically investigate what futures that expertise constructs. Scientific expertise has developed an array of technical, conceptual and institutional tools for predicting the future: showing trends, estimating risks, identifying opportunities, mobilising resources, coordinating actions and shaping outcomes (Callon et al. 2009; Hulme 2010). The aim of these is to understand the future, but this future is also shaped by how it is measured and predicted. Taking this measuring and modelling for granted leads to seeing particular futures as natural or inevitable, independent of cultural, political or geographical context. Social science has an important role to play in exploring whose interests are reflected in particular constructions of the future (Lidskog and Lockie 2020). It also plays an important role in identifying implicit assumptions and normative commitments that lie behind these constructed futures, as well as in critically investigating to what extent they are based on valid views of how society works and how institutional, organisational and behavioural changes occur (Jasanoff 2015; Wynne 2005).

REFERENCES Abbott, A. (1988), The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bhambra, G. (2014), Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bhambra, G. and Santos, B.S. (2017), Introduction: global challenges for sociology, Sociology, 51 (1), 3–10. Beck, S. (2011), Moving beyond the linear model of expertise? Regional Environmental Change, 11 (2), 297–306. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Berg, M. and Lidskog, R. (2018a), Pathways to deliberative capacity: the role of the IPCC? Climatic Change, 148 (1–2), 11–24. Berg, M. and Lidskog, R. (2018b), Deliberative democracy meets democratised science: a deliberative systems approach to global environmental governance, Environmental Politics, 27 (1), 1–20. Blühdorn, I. and Welsh, I. (eds) (2013), The Politics of Unsustainability: Eco-Politics in the Post-Ecologist Era, London: Routledge. Boström, M., Andersson, E., Berg, M., Gustafsson, K., Gustavsson, E., Hysing, E., et al. (2018), Conditions for transformative learning for sustainable development: a theoretical review and approach, Sustainability, 10 (12), 4479, accessed 16 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.3390/​su10124479. Bullard, R. (1990), Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality, Boulder, CO: Westview. Callon, M., Barthe, Y. and Lascoumes, P. (2009), Acting in an Uncertain World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Expertise, lay/local knowledge and the environment  269 Lidskog, R. and Lockie, S. (2020), Globalizing environmental sociology, in K. Legun, J. Keller, M. Bell, and M. Carolan (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 30–46. Lidskog, R. and Sundqvist, G. (2018a), Environmental expertise as group belonging: environmental sociology meets Science and Technology Studies, Nature and Culture, 13 (3), 309–31. Lidskog, R. and Sundqvist, G. (2018b), Environmental expertise, in M. Boström and D. Davidson (eds), Environment and Society: Concepts and Challenges, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 167–86. Lidskog, R., Soneryd, L. and Uggla, Y. (2010), Transboundary Risk Governance, London: Earthscan. Löfmarck, E. and Lidskog, R. (2017), Bumping against the boundary: IPBES and the knowledge divide, Environmental Science and Policy, 69 (March), 22–8. Löfstedt, R. (2005), Risk Management in Post-trust Societies, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marres, N. (2007), The issues deserve more credit. Pragmatist contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy, Social Studies of Science, 37 (5), 759–80. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001), Re-thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity. Pfadenhauer, M. (2006), Crisis or decline? Problems of legitimation and loss of trust in modern professionalism, Current Sociology, 54 (4), 565–78. Power, M. (2007), Organized Uncertainty. Designing a World of Risk Management, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renn, O. (2008), Risk Governance. Coping with Uncertainty in a Complex World, London: Earthscan. Santos, B.S. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, New York: Routledge. Soneryd, L. and Amelung, N. (2016), Translating participation: scenario workshops and citizens’ juries across situations and contexts, in J.P. Voß and R. Freeman (eds), Knowing Governance: The Epistemic Construction of Political Order, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 155–74. Szasz, A. (1994), EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Van Asselt, M. and Renn, O. (2011), Risk governance, Journal of Risk Research, 14 (4), 431–49. Wynne, B. (2005), Risk as globalizing ‘democratic’ discourse? Framing subjects and citizens, in M. Leach, I. Scoones and B. Wynne (eds), Science and Citizens. Globalization and the Challenge of Engagement, London: ZED Books, pp. 66–82.

19. Extractivism and neo-extractivism Maristella Svampa

INTRODUCTION Neo-extractivism is an analytical category born in Latin America that has a great descriptive and explanatory power, as well as a denunciatory character and a strong mobilizing power. It would be impossible to synthesize the contributions and characterizations, linked a profusion of articles and books produced in the past decade, which also encompass those of the affected actors and social movements. In this first section, I provide an account of some readings that point to the multidimensionality and multiscaleness of the extractivist phenomenon. As regards the ‘accumulation model’, all the authors recognize the historical roots of extractivism: it is a form ‘of accumulation that started to be established on a massive scale 500 years ago’ (Acosta 2013, p. 62). In this regard, extractivism is not one more phase of capitalism nor a problem of underdeveloped economies, but constitutes ‘a structural feature of capitalism as a world-economy’, ‘a historical-geopolitical product of the differentiation – the original hierarchization between colonial territories and imperial metropolises; the ones thought as mere spaces of looting and plundering done for the provisioning of the others’ (Machado Aráoz 2013, p. 131). From my perspective, contemporary neo-extractivism refers to a way of appropriating nature and a development model based on the overexploitation of natural goods, largely non-renewable, characterized by its large scale and its orientation towards exports, as well as by the vertiginous expansion of the borders of exploitation towards new territories, which were previously considered unproductive or not valued by capital. Consequently, it designates and expands on the activities traditionally considered as extractive. This ranges from open-pit mega-mining, the expansion of the oil and energy frontier, the construction of large hydroelectric dams, and other infrastructure works – waterways, ports, oceanic passes, and so on – to the expansion of different forms of monocultures or mono-production, the generalization of the agribusiness model (soya and palm leaf, among others) and overexploitation of fisheries or forest monocultures (Svampa 2019a). Coinciding with the previous definitions, extractivism has a long history with a historical-structural dimension. Since the time of the conquest, Latin American territories have been subject to destruction and looting. Rich in natural resources, the region was reconfigured again and again in the heat of successive economic cycles, imposed by the dynamics of capital and the international division of labor, through the expansion of the borders of goods. At a local level this has entailed great contrasts between extraordinary profitability and extreme poverty, as well as a great loss of human lives and degradation of territories, converted into zones of sacrifice. Potosí, in Bolivia, marked the birth of a means of appropriation of nature on a large scale and of a mode of accumulation, characterized by the export of raw materials and by a scheme of subordinate insertion in the world economy. Internal specialization and external dependence consolidated what the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil (2002) rightly names ‘nature-exporting societies’. 270

Extractivism and neo-extractivism  271 However, the history of extractivism in the region is not linear, as it is traversed by successive economic cycles, dependent on the demands of the world market, as well as by the processes of affirmation of the nation state, especially in the middle of the twentieth century. During that century it was characterized by national control of extraordinary income, especially in sectors such as mining and oil. The possibility of income capture by the state would also feed a particular social narrative about Latin American nature and its benefits. In the heat of the successive booms of the commodities, an ‘eldoradista’ vision of Latin America as a place of fabulous riches is usually reproduced, which expresses the idea that, owing to the convergence between the abundance of resources and opportunities offered by the international markets, it would be possible to achieve development, similar to core countries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, extractivism was loaded with new dimensions. In this context, where it is possible to register continuities and ruptures, the concept of extractivism reappeared as neo-extractivism. Continuities are seen because, during successive economic cycles, the extractivist DNA which European capital marked the region’s long-term memory with was also contributing to a specific social conception about nature and its benefits. As a consequence, extractivism was associated not only with dispossession and the large-scale looting of natural resources, but also with the comparative advantages and economic opportunities that emerged at the same time as the different economic cycles and the new role of an interventionist state. Not by chance, neo-extractivism, following the coming to power of the new progressive governments in Latin America,1 reinvigorated the developmentalist illusion expressed in the idea that, thanks to the opportunities offered by the new commodities boom and even more by the active role of the state, it would be possible to achieve development. Ruptures are seen when the new phase of capital accumulation, characterized by the strong pressure put on natural goods and territories, and even more by the dizzying expansion of the commodities frontier, opened up new political, social and ecological disputes, and social resistance against the dominant developmentalist imaginary. New forms of collective action such as socio-environmental movements, community conflicts and the new impetus of indigenous organizations questioned the developmentalist illusion while denouncing the consolidation of a single-commodity model that destroys biodiversity and entails land-grabbing, the destruction of pre-existing forces of development and the degradation of both the environment and territories used for production and sustainable rural livelihoods. In order to understand what characterizes neo-extractivism, I analyze it at two levels: first, in the second section, I deal with the topic from a more general viewpoint, as a privileged window to grasp the different dimensions of the current crisis; then, in the third section, I identify different phases of neo-extractivism, making visible the struggles’ recurring dynamics.

NEO-EXTRACTIVISM AS A PRIVILEGED WINDOW Far from being a flat category, neo-extractivism, in the form it has assumed over the past 15 years in Latin America, constitutes a complicated concept that provides a privileged window for viewing the complexities and different levels of the multifaceted crisis that contemporary societies are experiencing. First, neo-extractivism is at the center of diverse contemporary accumulation dynamics. Hand in hand with the World Trade Organization (WTO), in the past 30 years the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism has resulted in a greater expansion of the commodity frontier.2

272  Handbook of critical environmental politics The consumption model associated with advanced capitalism requires a greater amount of raw materials and energy for its maintenance, which promotes the increase of the social metabolism and brings with it a greater pressure on the natural goods and territories (Martínez-Alier 2009). This dynamic of capital introduces the phenomena of recolonization of nature and of dispossession, visible in the process of land grabbing, the destruction of territories and the displacement of populations. Thus, for example, the pressure and demand of mining resources globally has made companies look for minerals wherever they can be found: mining does not respect protected areas, archaeological or sacred sites, human settlements, glaciers, springs of water, headwaters of basins or fragile ecosystems. Mining has even begun to be exploited under the sea and various samples that have been obtained off-shore are analyzed in the hope of finding exploitable materials beyond the land boundaries. (Padilla, 2012, p. 38)

After 2002, the mining sector experienced an unprecedented boom in the Latin American region, owing to the growing increase in the international price of metals and the liberalization of regulatory frameworks, carried out during the 1990s, which granted enormous exemptions to the sector and benefited the large mining companies. According to data from Comision Economica Para America Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), 13 Latin American countries are ranked among the top 15 places as global producers of minerals (CEPAL 2013). If the 1990–2010 period is analyzed, Latin America almost doubled its share of world gold production (from 10.3 percent to 19.2 percent), molybdenum (from 15.8 percent to 31.8 percent) and copper (from 24.9 percent to 45.4 percent). The regional mining production remained stable despite the drop in the price of minerals experienced during 2008–09. In 2010, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico were among the main destination countries, whereas 10 years previously there were only Chile and Peru. This phenomenon is complemented currently by the lithium fever, which covers northern Chile and Argentina, and part of Bolivia, countries that concentrate 60 percent of the reserves of this strategic mineral for the energy transition of the global economy. Similarly, the desire to maintain an energy matrix linked to fossil fuels led to an expansion of the technological frontier. The extraction of unconventional fuels, whose economic cost is greater and whose energetic performance is much lower than that of conventional fuels, has serious and burdensome environmental, social and health impacts. The United States actively promoted fracking, which not only reconfigured the global energy agenda but also generated a new conflict cartography, which made Latin America a focal point, more particularly Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina – the beach-head for fracking. A similar phenomenon occurred involving large infrastructure projects. In the South American region, the IIRSA/COSIPLAN infrastructure projects portfolio3 was signed in 2000, which covers transport (waterways, ports and oceanic corridors, among others), energy (large hydroelectric dams) and communications. Between 2004 and 2014, these grew exponentially, from 335 projects to a portfolio of 579 projects (Carpio 2017, p. 130). In this context, the fervor caused by mega-dams increased, placing the Latin American region, together with Southeast Asia, at the epicenter of investments. While Brazil is at the head of the ranking with 256 large dams built or in the planning phase, the trend is expanding to other Latin American countries: of the 412 dams under construction, built or proposed in 2015 in the Amazon basin, 77 are in Peru, 55 in Ecuador, 14 in Bolivia, six in Venezuela and two in Guyana (Vidal 2017).

Extractivism and neo-extractivism  273 Another exacerbated element involves the territorial dynamics, which have a tendency to undergo intensive occupation of the territory and the hoarding of lands, through methods linked to monoculture or single-source (mono) production. For example, in several countries of South America, the expansion of the soybean front led to a reconfiguration of the rural world: Between 2000 and 2014, soybean plantations in South America expanded by 29 million hectares, comparable to the size of Ecuador. Brazil and Argentina centralize nearly 90 percent of regional production, although the fastest expansion has occurred in Uruguay, and Paraguay is the country where soybean occupies the largest area in relation to other crops: 67 percent of the total agricultural area. (Oxfam 2016, p. 30)

All this redefined the land dispute: according to the Oxfam report (with data from the agricultural censuses of 15 countries), ‘As a whole (in the region), 1% of the larger farms concentrated more than half of the agricultural surface. In other words, 1% of farms hold more land than the remaining 99%’ (Oxfam 2016, p. 9). Colombia is the most unequal country in the distribution of land, where 0.4 percent of agricultural holdings dominate 68 percent of the country’s land. It is followed by Peru, where 77 percent of the farms are in the hands of 1 percent; then Chile (74 percent), Paraguay (71 percent), Bolivia (66 percent), Mexico (56 percent), Brazil (44 percent), and Argentina (36 percent). The large scale of the ventures warns us about the size of the investments, which requires capital-intensive mega-enterprises, such as large transnational corporations – although national mega-companies are not excluded, such as Petrobras, the Venezuelan PDVSA and, even, the Argentine YPF, among others. Simultaneously these mega-projects are not labor-intensive, given that they generate few direct jobs. For example, in the example of large-scale mining, for every 1 million dollars invested, only between 0.5 and 2 direct jobs are created (Colectivo Voces de Alerta et al. 2011). In Peru, a country par excellence of transnational mega-mining, it occupies barely 2 percent of the economically active population, compared with 23 percent in agriculture, 16 percent in commerce and almost 10 percent in manufacturing (Svampa 2019a, p. 10). Secondly, neo-extractivism illuminates the current socio-ecological crisis, and more generally the crisis of the project of modernity. Certainly, the imminence that we are witnessing of significant anthropogenic and sociogenic changes on a planetary scale that endanger life (the Anthropocene) has led to a questioning of the current dynamics of development linked to unlimited expansion of the commercialization frontier, as well as the dualist vision associated with modernity. These dangers have been amplified by the current dynamics of development, a product of the burning of fossil fuels, the advance of deforestation and the loss of biodiversity, among other problems. As a consequence, it is possible to establish a relationship between neo-extractivism (as a dynamic of dominant development) and the Anthropocene (as a diagnosis of the global scope of the socio-ecological crisis), when examining these consequences on a planetary scale. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic made visible the close link between socio-ecological crisis, models of maldevelopment and human health. Among the structural causes of the pandemic is the problem of deforestation, that is, the destruction of ecosystems that expel wild animals from their natural environments and release zoonotic viruses that were isolated for millennia, putting them in contact with other animals and humans in more urban environments, thus enabling interspecies jumping. Thus, the revealing element is that the advance of

274  Handbook of critical environmental politics capitalism on the territories has the capacity to release a large quantity of zoonotic viruses, which are highly contagious and mutate rapidly, and for which we have no cure or vaccine. The pandemic showed the extent to which discussing the Anthropocene or Capitalocene is not only a matter of climate change and global warming, but also of globalization and maldevelopment models. Thus, other aspects of the climate emergency stand out, not exclusively linked to the increase in the use of fossil fuels, but also to changes in land use, deforestation and the expansion of intensive livestock, all of these sources of potential pandemics. Consequently, the ecological crisis thus appears intrinsically linked to the crisis of modernity. Escobar (2005) in this regard urges us to think of alternatives to modernity, other paradigms that place the reproduction of life at the center of analysis and point to the need to view and re-create the link between humans and non-humans from a critical non-dualistic perspective. In recent decades, Latin American governments have set the social and the economic against the environmental and the ecological. For example, progressive governments justified neo-extractivism and environmental destruction in the name of development and the reduction of inequalities, which created a paradoxical situation, based on the installation of a selective rights agenda, which denied and/or dismissed socio-environmental demands, and a large part of indigenous claims for land and territory. Today we know that an important part of the economic growth that occurred in Latin America during the commodities boom was captured by the richest sectors of society. Data from Forbes magazine show that the wealth of Latin American billionaires (with fortunes of over US$1 billion) grew at an annual rate of 21 percent between 2002 and 2015, an increase six times higher than that of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) (3.5 percent annually). In 2013–14, according to Oxfam, 10 percent of the richest people in the region kept 37 percent of the income; but if wealth was considered, these data rose overwhelmingly, showing that the richest 10 percent accumulated 71 percent of the wealth; while the most privileged 1 percent kept 41 percent (Kessler and Benza 2020). Even now the social is still set against the environmental, as if there were a contradiction between the two, dismissing that those who suffer the most environmental damage are the most vulnerable sectors, as they live in areas exposed to highly polluting sources, and lack the necessary economic and human means to face the consequences and resist the onslaught of neo-extractivism, and cope with the impacts of climate change (floods, droughts and storms). The conclusion is that, notwithstanding that the facts call into question this developmental perspective, for most Latin American governments neo-extractivism continues to be seen as a lifeline in the middle of the crisis. Third, neo-extractivism also connects us with the global economic crisis insofar as the current model of accumulation is associated with the reforms carried out by neoliberal and financial capitalism from the 1990s onward as well as the propensity towards crisis reflected in the global financial crisis of 2008. On the one hand, financial capital plays a fundamental role in the extraction of raw materials, in the organization of the logistics of their circulation and in determining increases and decreases in the prices of commodities in international markets. On the other hand, the crisis has accentuated social inequalities, following the implementation of economic adjustment policy to combat the recession that extended to the central countries and made economic models that more intensely commodify nature attractive. In this way, the green economy model based on inclusion (inclusive growth and sustainable development) is being promoted by a mainstream development perspective. This model extends the financial format of the carbon market to other elements of nature, such as air, water, and processes

Extractivism and neo-extractivism  275 and functions of the environment (Svampa and Viale 2020) (see Chapters 27 and 41 in this volume). Fourth, neo-extractivism provides a privileged window that allows us to read the development of capital(ism) in geopolitical terms, from the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China as a global power. This situation of hegemonic transition is interpreted as entry into a period characterized by conflicting polycentrism and plurality in cultural-civilizational terms, the consequences of which are still to be defined. From the globalized peripheries, in Latin America, Africa and some regions of Asia, the hegemonic transition brought as a correlate the intensification of exports of raw materials, which is reflected in the consolidation of increasingly unequal economic and socio-ecological links to economies at the center and especially the Republic of China. That is, in the current geopolitical context, which indicates the great Asian country as a new global power, neo-extractivism allows us to read the process of global reconfiguration, which from the perspective of peripheral capitalism implicates the expansion of the extractive frontier and a dizzying refocusing peripheral economies on the production of primary products. Circa 2000, China did not hold a relevant position as a destination for exports or origin of imports for the countries of the Latin American region. However, in 2013 it had become the first source of imports for Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay; the second in the case of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela; and the third for Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The exchange is, however, asymmetric. While 84 percent of exports from Latin American countries to China are commodities; 63.4 percent of Chinese exports to the region are manufactures. To mention a few cases: Argentina exports soybeans, oleaginous fruits and vegetable oils; Chile, copper; Brazil, soybean and iron ore; Venezuela and Ecuador, oil; and Peru, iron ore and other minerals. Similarly, Chinese investments are mainly established in extractive activities (mining, oil, agribusiness and megastores), which reinforces the reprimarization effect that Latin American economies experience under the Commodity Consensus. In some instances, they are orientated towards the tertiary sector to support the primary sectors. This shift implies a threat to the clusters made up of small and medium-sized companies (SMEs), whether owing to environmental contamination or the possibility of exporting directly to China products that were processed previously by local SMEs. Thus, what is most notable from this scenario, is not the linkage of the Latin American region – inevitable and necessary – with China, but the way in which it has been operating, through the massive export of commodities and the accentuation of unequal exchange. All this was enhancing neo-extractivism and the reprimarization effect in Latin American economies. Last but not least, neo-extractivism provides a privileged window for reading the development process in respect of the crisis of democracy (see Chapter 24 in this volume), that is, the relationship between political regime, democracy and respect for human rights. The association between neo-extractivism and the weakening of democracy is indisputable: without social license, without consultation of the population, without environmental controls and without the scarce presence of the state, or even with it, the trend is towards the manipulation of forms of popular participation in order to control collective decision-making. However, the increase in state and parastatal violence raises a question about the always tense links between extractivism and human rights. The Global Witness report released in September 2021 shows that 227 lethal attacks were recorded throughout the world, exceeding historical figures for the second year in a row. Three-quarters of the murders of environmental activists

276  Handbook of critical environmental politics recorded in 2020 occurred in Latin America (165 persons). Colombia was once again the most affected country in the world, with 65 recorded killings, and Nicaragua, with 12 deaths, was the deadliest place for environmental champions on a per capita basis (Global Witness 2021). The criminalization of socio-environmental protests and the increasing murders of environmental activists throughout the world, particularly in Latin America, points to a dangerous slip towards political closure, showing the perverse equation ‘more Extractivism, less Democracy’ (Svampa 2019b, p. 8). Given its characteristics (social fragmentation, displacements of other forms of economy, verticality of decisions, strong impact on ecosystems), instead of its consequence, conflict can be seen as largely inherent to neo-extractivism, even though this is not an automatic relationship, as it is conditional on the emergence of explicit social resistance. Over the years, and in the heat of new forms of expansion of the capital frontier, with conflicts multiplied, such social resistance became more active and organized. Consequently, an increase in social conflict occurred. Throughout Latin America and the geography of South American countries, where the number of extractive projects and the territorial areas intervened have expanded, the socio-environmental conflicts have continued to grow. An example of this is large-scale mining. The causes of socio-environmental conflicts generated by mining projects is extensive and highly complex to address in exhaustive terms. Each mining project triggers, in and of itself, a conflictual process that begins with exploration activities and that does not cease even when it is momentarily paralyzed, or when the life cycle of the deposit has been exhausted. Currently, there are no Latin American countries with mining projects that do not involve socio-environmental conflicts confronting communities with mining companies and the government. These include Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. There are numerous collective spaces devoted to the problem of mega-mining, among them, the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA), created in 1991, with headquarters in Chile, the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America (OCMAL), which has been in operation since 1997 and articulates more than 40 organizations. Thus, in relation to mining, according to the OCMAL, in 2010 there were 120 conflicts that affected 150 communities; in 2012, this increased to 161 conflicts, which included 173 projects and 212 affected communities. In February 2014, the number of conflicts was 198, with 297 affected communities and 207 projects involved. In January 2020, there were 284 conflicts, 5 cross-border, involving 301 projects, 263 cases of criminalization and 39 inquires. The countries with the greatest number of conflicts are Peru (46); Mexico (58), Chile (49); Argentina (28), Brazil (26), Bolivia (10), Colombia (16) and Ecuador (9).4 On the other hand, from 2003 the socio-environmental struggle laid the foundations of a common language of valuation5 of territoriality, what I have termed the ecoterritorial turn (Svampa 2019a), which is manifest in the convergence of different matrices and languages and an innovative crossing between the peasant-Indigenous and autonomist narratives, bound by an environmental thread, which by the end of the progressive cycle had also added a feminist thread. As a consequence, a common narrative emerged that focused on the defense of land and territory and sought to account for the way in which current socio-environmental struggles are thought of and represented. The ecoterritorial turn refers to the construction of various frames of collective action that also function as structures of meaning and schemes of alternative interpretation. These collective frameworks tend to develop an important mobilizing capacity, and establish new themes, languages and slogans in societal debates while

Extractivism and neo-extractivism  277 orienting the interactive dynamic towards the production of a common subjectivity in spaces of resistance. Within the ecoterritorial turn, the growing role of women in the struggles stands out. This growing association between feminisms and environmentalisms is expressed by the emergence of popular and/or territorial feminisms that place care for life and territories at the center.

A PERIODIZATION OF NEO-EXTRACTIVISM It is possible to distinguish different phases of neo-extractivism, linked to conflict and political processes. We can distinguish a first phase of positivity, between 2003 and 2008. Certainly, at the beginning of the new era, in the heat of the commodity price boom, the extractivist turn was interpreted in respect of comparative advantages, as a ‘new developmentalism’, instead of by the differences between progressive or conservative governments. I highlight that it was an optimistic phase, since the increase in social spending and its impact on poverty reduction as well as the growing role of the state and the broadening of the participation of the population, generated great political expectations in society. Let us not forget that between 2002 and 2011, in the region, poverty fell from 44 percent to 31.4 percent, while extreme poverty fell from 19.4 percent to 12.3 percent (CEPAL 2012). Most countries expanded with an array of conditional transfer programs (bonds or social plans), which would reach 19 percent of the population (CEPAL 2013); which is about 120 million people under plans. Alternatively, in some countries this first phase was characterized by the expansion of the borders of the law, visible in the constitutionalizing of new rights (individual and collective). The state-run narrative coexisted, with its articulations and tensions, with the indigenous and ecologist narrative. This is exemplified in Bolivia and Ecuador, beyond the growing hegemony of the state–populist matrix and its articulation with the new national political leaderships. This period of economic boom, of reformulation of the role of the state, is also an opaque period. As non-recognition of the conflicts became associated with extractive dynamics, this continued until approximately 2008, a period of time during which different governments renewed their presidential terms. The second phase, between 2008 and 2013, corresponds to the proliferation of mega-projects, as well as an increase in social resistances. As regards the former, this is reflected in the National Development Plans submitted by the different governments, which demonstrated an explicit intention to increase the different extractive activities. Depending on the specialization of the country, the extraction would be of minerals, petroleum, construction of hydroelectric power plants and/or the expansion of transgenic crops. In Brazil, the extraction followed the Growth Acceleration Plan (PAC), launched in 2007, which proposed the construction of a large number of dams in the Amazon, in addition to the realization of energy mega-projects linked to the exploitation of oil and gas. In Bolivia, the promise of the Great Industrial Leap emerged, based on projects for the extraction of gas, lithium, iron and the expansion of agribusiness, among others. In Ecuador, they started open-pit mega-mining and expanded the oil frontier; while in Colombia, from 2010, a set of extractive projects were launched under the slogan ‘the energetic-mining locomotive’. In Venezuela, there was the Strategic Plan for oil production, which involved an advance of the exploitation frontier in the Orinoco belt; while in Argentina, the 2010–2020 Agrifood Strategic Plan promised an increase of 60 percent in

278  Handbook of critical environmental politics grain production, to which was added (in 2012) the commitment to the exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbons through fracking. The desire to increase mega-projects was also expressed through the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), later renamed COSIPLAN. This program was agreed upon in 2000, by several Latin American governments, whose main objective was to facilitate the extraction and export of these products to their ports of destination. From 2007, the IIRSA came under the purview of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and was renamed COSIPLAN (which has already been cited), and this led to an intensification of regional trade and investment by the National Bank for Economic Development (BND) in infrastructure works. However, in various regions, the IIRSA-Cosiplan projects were questioned and resisted, because despite the Latin Americanist discourse that stressed the need to weave new relationships between peoples and state communities (Carpio 2017) the infrastructure integration of the IIRSA had evident market objectives. In the fervor of the different territorial and environmental conflicts and their recursive dynamics, the Latin American governments ended up taking on a belligerently developmentalist discourse in defense of neo-extractivism. This coherence between discourse and practice which occurred even in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia that had aroused the highest political expectation of change including promises of Buen Vivir – emphasizing care for nature and recognition of the role of indigenous peoples – illustrate the evolution of progressive governments towards models of more traditional domination (in many instances, linked to the classic populist or national-state model). It also demonstrates the forced recognition of a new phase of shrinking of the democratic sphere, visible in the intolerance towards dissidence and the criminalization of resistance. Finally, in line with the second phase, from 2013 to date, including the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing an exacerbated phase of neo-extractivism. One of the relevant elements that explains this type of aggravated continuity, refers to the fall in the prices of raw materials, which prompted Latin American governments to exponentially increase the number of extractive projects, through the expansion of the boundaries of commodities (Moore 2011; Svampa and Teran Mantovani 2019). In view of this, not only were the majority of Latin American governments unprepared for the fall in commodity prices – dramatically so in Venezuela – but consequences would quickly arise with the tendency to increase the trade deficit (Martínez Allier 2015) and the recession. In addition to this, the progressive/populist hegemony declined and the progressive cycle ended, which will have a strong impact on the reconfiguration of the regional political map of the future. During 2020, some celebrated that, on a global level, the paralysis of different economic activities brought about a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases. However, even though the emergency brake was activated, neo-extractivism did not stop. Furthermore, in Latin America, the public policies of the different governments did not aim to strengthen environmental demands. The extractive activities (such as mining) were declared essential, clearing and deforestation advanced, and with these so did the fires. During the pandemic, the murders of environmental activists continued, reaffirming that Latin America – particularly countries such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico – is still the most dangerous area in the world for environmental defenders. Likewise, neo-extractivist politics continues to overflow any ideological divisions. In 2020, the ‘fire lobby’ again unleashed its fury. For example, the Brazilian Pantanal, the largest continental wetland on the planet that covers a large part of the states of Mato Grosso and Mato

Extractivism and neo-extractivism  279 Grosso do Sul, registered 16 000 fires, making 2020 the year most punished by fire according to data from the National Institute for Space Research.6 For several months, Argentina was ranked second globally for the number of fire sources, which affected wetlands and native forests, in different provinces (in 2020 more than 1 million hectares were burned), largely intentional fires behind which are the soybean and mining lobbies and that of large real estate agents (gated communities). In Mexico, in September 2020, Victor Toledo, one of the most important referents of political ecology in Latin America, had to resign from his position in the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat). Under his mandate, Toledo promoted the prohibition of glyphosate and criticized the project of the Mayan Train,7 one of the emblems of the ‘development’ of the Lopez Obrador government, which tramples the rights of ancestral communities. His resignation exposed, once again, the limits of selective Latin American progressivism. Finally, while the fight against the development of fracking continues in Colombia, in Ecuador and Argentina, mining has further advanced, despite the lack of a social license and citizens’ mobilization of available institutional actions (public consultations, in Cuenca, Ecuador, and citizen initiatives, in Chubut, Argentina), which are denied or held back by the authorities.

CONCLUSION Extractivism is part of the long history of the continent and its struggles, and it defines an appropriation of nature and a pattern of colonial accumulation associated with the birth of modern capitalism. However, in its updated form in the twenty-first century, it brings new dimensions at different levels: global (hegemonic transition, expansion of the commodity frontier, depletion of non-renewable natural resources and a socio-ecological crisis of planetary scope), regional and national (the relationship among the extractive-export model, the nation-state and the capture of extraordinary income), territorial (intensive occupation of land and ecoterritorial struggles with the participation of different collective actors) and, finally, policies (the emergence of a new, contentious political grammar and an increase in state and parastatal violence). Within the framework of the continent’s anti-extractive struggles, one of the great contributions of the eco-territorial and popular feminisms of the south, together with the indigenous peoples, is the recognition of other languages – of valuation, relational narratives, other possible links between society and nature, which place care and sustaining life at their center (Svampa 2021).

NOTES 1. At beginning of this millennium there has been a shift towards left-wing governments in Latin American democracies, which has been welcomed as a new progressive politics as it aimed to move away from the neoliberal economic model of the early twenty-first century. Among these governments were those led by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia (the country’s first indigenous president), Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula) leader of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay and Mauricio Funes of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) in El Salvador). 2. First proposed by Moore (2000), the idea of commodity frontier emerges from the debates on world-systems theory prompted by Wallerstein and his related notion of the commodity chain. Commodity frontiers account for global capitalist economy expansions into specific places and

280  Handbook of critical environmental politics sites for the provisions and extraction of raw material and the subsequent process of incorporation of territories into the expanding capitalist world. 3. Inaugurated in 2009 by the Union of South American Nations, the COSIPLAN project portfolio incorporates the former Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) and consists of several transportation, energy, and communications integration projects spread throughout the entire South American territory (see https://​iirsa​.org/​en/​Page/​Detail​ ?menuItemId​=​32, accessed 17 May 2022). 4. Source: OCMAL, accessed 8 May 2022 at https://​mapa​.conflictosmineros​.net/​ocmal​_db​-v2/​. 5. For a short definition of the concept of ‘language of valuation’, see http://​www​.ejolt​.org/​2012/​12/​ languages​-of​-valuation/​(accessed 8 February 2021). 6. https://​www​.bbc​.com/​mundo/​noticias​-54124696 (accessed 8 February 2021). 7. The Tren Maya is a 1525 kilometer-long railway project that will interconnect the major cities and tourist regions of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

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Extractivism and neo-extractivism  281 Oxfam (2016), Unearthed, land, power and inequality in Latin America, https://​www​.oxfam​.org/​sites/​ www​.oxfam​.org/​files/​file​_attachments/​bp​-land​-power​-inequality​-latin​-america​-301116​-en​.pdf. Padilla, C. (2012), Minería y conflictos en América Latina, in C. Toro, J. Fierro Morales, S. Coronado and T.R. Avendaño (eds), Minería, territorio y conflicto en Colombia, Bogota: Censat-Universidad Nacional de Colombia, pp. 37–58. Svampa, M. (2019a), Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socioenvironmental Conflicts, the territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Svampa, M. (2019b), La expansión de las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina, Guadalajara: CALAS. Svampa, M. (2021), Feminismos ecoterritoriales en América Latina: Entyre la violewncia patriarcal y extractivista y la interconexión con la naturaleza, in Documentos de Trabajo 59, Fundación Carolina. chrome​-extension://​efa​idnbmnnnib​pcajpcglcl​efindmkaj/​https://​www​.fundacioncarolina​.es/​ wp​-content/​uploads/​2021/​11/​DT​_FC​_59​.pdf. Svampa, M. and Teran Mantovani, E. (2019), En las fronteras del cambio de época: Escenarios de una nueva fase del extractivismo, in K. Gabbert and L. Miriam (eds), Como se sostiene la vida en América Latina. Feminismos y re-existencias en tiempos de oscuridad, Quito: Abya Yala-FRL. Svampa, M. and Viale, E. (2020), El colapso ecológico ya llegó. Cómo salir de los modelos de (mal) desarrollo, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Vidal, J. (2017), ‘Why is Latin America is so obsessed with mega-dams?’, Guardian, 27 May, accessed 8 February 2021 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​global​-development​-professionals​-network/​2017/​ may/​23/​why​-latin​-america​-obsessed​-mega​-dams.

20. Religion and ecology Jens Koehrsen

INTRODUCTION In November 2019, Greenpeace withdrew the letter ‘C’ from the big CDU-logo at the headquarters of the German governing party, the Christian Democratic Union. The ‘C’ stands for ‘Christian’ in the name of the party. By withdrawing this letter, Greenpeace protested against the party’s supposedly ‘unchristian’ environmental politics in the government’s recent climate deal. German mass media strongly covered this incident and, thereby, gave the protest visibility, with Greenpeace arguing that the CDU cannot continuously refer to the Christian idea of preserving creation without doing anything for it. Similarly, the return of the ‘C’ was also covered by the mass media. In this context, a Protestant pastor gave a speech at the CDU headquarters, voicing environmental concern, but also claiming that the label Christian ‘C’ belonged to no one alone and that Christian values should not be instrumentalized. The case signals the German public imaginary of ‘Christianity’ as environmentally friendly. It illustrates that different actors (that is, political parties, environmental non-governmental organizations, churches) employ this imaginary to pursue their political interests by creating links between their environmental activities and ‘Christianity’. Religions can have a critical potential in environmental politics: Those not agreeing with predominant environmental policies may refer to religion to question these and suggest alternative pathways of societal development. In addition, religious institutions themselves may use their voice to raise concerns about ongoing environmental politics. A prominent example for this is Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home (Pope Francis 2015). Though usually regarded as conservative, religious groups frequently participate in endeavours to change the social order. Historically, they have played a crucial role in different social transformations such as the Anti-Communist Uprising in Poland, the Iranian Revolution, or the Civil Rights Movement in the US (Herbert 2002; Gardner 2003; Lienemann-Perrin and Lienemann 2006). In order to encourage social change, religious groups can use their public visibility and credibility. In many societies, religious leaders and institutions enjoy a strong public visibility and often a higher credibility than other institutions (for example, governments, public administrations and political parties) (Casanova 1994; Habermas 2008). Apart from their public visibility and transformative potential, religions have a notorious grassroots reach (Blanc and Ostheimer 2019; Mangunjaya and McKay 2012; Palmer 2013; Sheikh 2006). They can directly connect to local faith communities, sometimes even in the most remote places. Most importantly, religions shape the ‘inner worlds’ (for example, worldviews and emotions) and lifestyles of billions of individuals currently, including their perceptions of environmental degradation and disasters (Blanc and Ostheimer 2019; Ives et al. 2020; Mangunjaya and McKay 2012; Palmer 2013; Sheikh 2006). An estimated 84 per cent of the world’s population adheres to a religious tradition (Pew Research Center 2017). Given these ‘abilities’ of religions, state institutions increasingly regard them as relevant collaboration partners when it comes to sustainable development (Koehrsen and Heuser 2020; see also 282

Religion and ecology  283 Chapter 9 in this volume). Against the backdrop of increasing approval for religions’ societal roles, some authors even suggest the dawning of a post-secular age (Habermas 2008): existing boundaries between the religious and the secular dissipate, offering religious institutions opportunities to participate in public life and political affairs. Consequently, religious leaders and groups are likely to also have a mounting voice in environmental politics. The aforementioned characteristics of religions highlight the relevance of faith communities for environmental politics and the societal transformations towards environmental sustainability. While academic debates about sustainability have long ignored religion (Ives and Kidwell 2019), scholars from religious studies tend to highlight the positive potentials of religions for sustainable development (Bergmann 2009; Gardner 2003, 2006; Gottlieb 2008; Holmes 2006; Tucker 2006). However, it is not clear to what extent these potentials really become effective within religious institutions. Are religious institutions becoming green and contribute to an environmentally more sustainable world? The aim of this contribution is to outline the potentials of religion, critically reflect its limitations and indicate the need for further research. The academic study of religion has intensely disputed the definition of religion. Debates in this context have not only produced manifold definitions but also criticism over the concept ‘religion’, and even efforts to abandon the term altogether (Asad 2009; Bloch 2008; Klass 1995; Matthes 1992, 1993; Woodhead 2011). Paralleling these struggles around the definition of religion, contributions to the debate on religion and ecology promote different understandings of the term. While broad parts of the debate have focused on traditional, institutionalized religions (for example, Christianity and Islam), others have questioned this focus and called for a stronger attention to be paid to non-institutionalized forms of religion. This chapter addresses both institutionalized traditional religions and non-institutionalized eco-spiritualities. Given that the literature considered here refers to different concepts of religion, this chapter abstains from promoting a specific definition that could potentially exclude some of the contributions. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows: the first section describes the key concepts in the academic debates about religion and ecology by distinguishing between two forms of religion, traditional religions and spirituality. The second section discusses contentious issues and standpoints around religion and ecology. The final section summarizes the main insights of this contribution and raises open questions for further research.

KEY CONCEPTS This section introduces key-concepts in the debate about religion and ecology. Although the debate is interdisciplinary, it has been strongly shaped by theologians and scholars from the academic study of religion. As mentioned previously, the academic study of religion has intensely disputed the definition of religion. While scholars originally focused on traditional, institutionalized forms of religion, more recent approaches highlight the importance of non-institutionalized spiritualities that have developed beyond traditional religious institutions. Therefore, research debates about religion and ecology mostly circulate around two different forms of religion: (1) traditional religions (for example, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism) that are usually taking shape in formal religious communities (for example, churches, mosques and Buddhist centres), and (2) eco-spirituality, constituting a more fluid, non-organized form of religion. Both forms of religion may also overlap (for example, the

284  Handbook of critical environmental politics spreading of eco-spiritual concepts among members of institutional religions). However, for reasons of simplicity, this chapter describes separately each of these two main strands in the academic debate on religion and ecology. The Global Greening of Traditional Religions The academic debate about ‘religion and ecology’ has made strong claims regarding the potentials of religion for environmental sustainability. Scholars have frequently described religion as a crucial factor of positive social change. They argued that it can facilitate the change of worldviews and values that is needed for substantial transformations towards more environmentally sustainable societies (Bergmann 2009; Gardner 2003, 2006; Gottlieb 2008; Holmes 2006; Tucker 2006). These views suggest that, unlike other social domains such as politics, economy or science, religions shape people’s inner worlds: they affect people’s beliefs, moralities and emotions, thereby having a massive impact on their attitudes and lifestyles (see Chapter 34 in this volume). Consequently, many scholars from the religion and ecology debate regard religions as essential for sustainability transitions. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether religions have these unique capacities in sustainability transitions, as institutions from other domains (for example, secular civil society organizations, green politicians and eco-businesses) may also help to disseminate pro-environmental values. Also, scholars from this debate have suggested a global ‘greening of religion’ and have participated in efforts to render existing religious traditions more environmentally friendly (Chaplin 2016). First, this greening of religion consists in creating eco-theologies in different faith traditions (Blanc 2017; Gerten and Bergmann 2012; Gottlieb 2006b; Tucker 2006, 2008; Veldman et al. 2014b). Eco-theologies highlight the ecological dimensions of their faith and seek to establish environmentally friendly readings of the given tradition. Currently, the main religions have evolved these green readings (Haynes 2007). Secondly, on the basis of these eco-theologies, faith communities are becoming greener. Green theologies are likely to facilitate environmentally friendly behaviour among affiliates. Religious organizations and their members will be more environmentally concerned and undertake activities to protect nature. Therefore, the suggested greening of religions involves the faith bases of religions as well as the activities of faith communities. However, thus far, there is no clear empirical underpinning for the supposed greening, as further discussed in the following ‘Contentious issues’ section. The green activities of religious organizations (for example, local faith communities and national umbrella organizations of religious traditions) may cover different areas (Koehrsen and Huber 2021): they can (1) disseminate pro-environmental worldviews and values, (2) materialize sustainability via transition projects (for example, energy efficiency and recycling), and (3) make pro-environmental positions in the public and seek to influence political decision-making processes. The dissemination of pro-environmental worldviews and values refers to the aforementioned key-function of religions in sustainability transitions. Based on the greening of their faith basis, local communities can seek to disseminate these eco-friendly concepts among their members (Djupe and Hunt 2009; Shibley and Wiggins 1997). For instance, imams or pastors can preach in sermons about the responsibilities of believers to protect God’s creation, and focus on these topics in the educational training of young community members. This refers to an internal transformation of the given faith community that may become manifest in lifestyle changes of its members and thereby indirectly contribute to broader societal transformation processes.

Religion and ecology  285 As regards materialization, communities can undertake environmental projects (Gottlieb 2006a; Harper 2011; Mohamad et al. 2012). For instance, these can consist in establishing recycling measures, planting trees, implementing environmental management systems, or refurbishing community buildings to improve their energy efficiency. If the materialization activities of religious communities are pioneering activities in the given municipality, they may assume an exemplary character and encourage similar activities among other actors, thereby helping to broaden sustainability transitions. Although the materialization activities of religious communities are often internal transformations (for example, improving the energy efficiency of churches), they may indirectly contribute to broader transformations by assuming an exemplary character (see Chapter 42 in this volume). However, in some instances, religious communities may even directly invest in materialization activities that go beyond the given religious community (for example, joint investments with other organizations in renewables). The third type of activity, public lobbying, is particularly relevant for critical environmental politics, as it reaches out to the wider society. It seeks to facilitate (or stop) broader transformation processes beyond the immediate religious community. Religious actors can critically accompany and comment on environmental politics, and seek to influence decision-making processes (Gardner 2006; Johnston 2010). To this end, they can disseminate public statements, participate in protest activities, or seek to persuade decision-makers through contacts and collaboration. A particularly prominent example for the dissemination of public statements is Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home (Pope Francis 2015). However, there have been many other activities. The German Protestant Church and German Bishops Conference have made public statements calling for more environmental protection since the 1980s (Blanc 2017). Many of these statements consider specific societal issues (for example, climate change, genetics, food supply, energy efficiency and production), thereby critically accompanying German legislation processes. Other examples include interreligious statements such as the Telegraph letter on 3 May by British faith leaders, approving UK’s planned 2050 zero emission target that was later legislated by then Prime Minister, Theresa May. An early example that is frequently quoted in the literature concerns the Evangelical opposition against attempts to undermine the Endangered Species Act in the US congress in 1996 (Gardner 2003; Kearns 1997). In order to have stake in legislation processes, faith leaders and communities may pursue to collaborate with political decision-makers. For instance, Glaab (2017, 2022) shows how faith-based actors from different faith backgrounds at the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change prefer to work within the institutions rather than staging climate protests outside of them. Despite sharing a critical stance with those protesting outside, they diplomatically collaborate in the institutions by participating in expert meetings and the writing of technical reports. Glaab (2017, p. 1121) states: In contrast, FBAs (faith-based actors) are more willing to work within the political institutions in which negotiations take place, thus helping to legitimize these institutions rather than question them. … By accepting the institutionalization of the political process, they appear to be closer to ‘mainstream’ civil society organizations that work at the UNFCCC.

Similar collaboration may also take place at the national level. In Indonesia, Majlis Ulama Indonesia, the umbrella organization of Islamic clerics and scholars, has published environment-related fatwas (Jamil 2022; Koehrsen 2021; Mangunjaya and McKay 2012). These concern fishery, recycled wastewater, sustainable mining and logging. Fatwas are

286  Handbook of critical environmental politics non-binding legal opinions on Islam that Majlis Ulama Indonesia frequently formulates in response to inquiries by the state or public. Finally, faith groups may also assume government-critical positions and participate in protests against environmental policies. For instance, German and Swiss church groups have participated in the climate protests in 2019. Another example concerns the Movement of Olancho in Honduras, organized by a Catholic priest (Haynes 2007). This movement strongly mobilized against unregulated logging in the Department of Olancho, coordinating protest marches to Honduras Capital and calling for stricter government policies. Eco-Spirituality as a Fluid Environmental Religion in Expansion Contrasting the aforementioned traditional religions, spirituality refers to individual and mostly non-organized forms of religiosity. It tends to be more diffuse and fluid than traditional religions, involving non-canonized beliefs. Nevertheless, these beliefs may still relate to some elements of dominant traditional faith traditions (for example, belief in soul and belief in karma) and recombine these with new elements (for example, belief in extra-terrestrials and unidentified flying objects). Spirituality often constitutes an individualized assemblage of religious concepts. Given that spirituality rarely assumes an organizational form, it has no central organization that could undertake specific activities such as the materialization of sustainability transitions or the lobbying for pro-environmental policies. In spite of this, spirituality may become relevant in other ways for the transitions towards environmentally more sustainable societies (see Chapter 30 this volume). Eco-spirituality involves spiritual beliefs and ethics that refer to the environment. Contrasting the aforementioned debate about the greening of traditional religions, scholarship about eco-spirituality studies the underlying spiritual dimensions of environmentalism. A prominent concept in this domain is Taylor’s ‘dark green religion’. He defines this spiritual type of religion in the following way: religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care. Dark green religion considers nonhuman species to have worth, regardless of their usefulness to human beings. Such religion expresses and promotes an ethics of kinship between human beings and other life forms. (Taylor 2008, p. 89)

Dark green religion regards nature as sacred and having an intrinsic value that is independent of its value for human beings. It promotes a care for the well-being of nature. Taylor suggests that dark green religion becomes visible in literature, magazines, movies and theatrical plays, as well as outdoor recreation practices, such as surfing. These activities and mass-media productions (for example, Avatar and Disney movies) help to spread this new type of fluid religion and create eco-spiritual attachments to nature among an ever-growing population of adherents. In consequence, Taylor (2004, 2010) argues that this form of spirituality is becoming the new world religion while traditional religions are declining. Currently, dark green religion becomes most visible in the ‘environmental milieu’, involving environmentally concerned citizens, officials, scientists, politicians, and activists (Taylor 2010, pp. 13–14). For instance, green politicians and activists from environmental movements such as Extinction Rebellion may perceive nature as sacred. Their eco-spiritual worldviews fuel their endeavours to protect nature. Apart from Taylor, other scholars have shown dimensions of eco-spirituality among environmentally concerned citizens, businesses, activists and politicians (Becci and Monnot 2016;

Religion and ecology  287 Grandjean 2022; Hedlund-de Witt 2013; Koehrsen 2018; Majerus 2022; Nelson 2012; Witt 2016). The contributions highlight the emergence of a new type of religion that embraces nature. Being more fluid than traditional religion, it is not limited to the religious sphere. Therefore, it can more easily penetrate other social spheres (for example, politics and the business sector), which are considered as secular in most Western societies, and inform the environmental activities of leading actors in these spheres. Therefore, in the context of secularized Western societies, eco-spirituality may be an even more effective source of environmental change than the greening of traditional religions.

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES The aforementioned research debates about religion and ecology involve different contentious issues. These refer, in particular, to (1) the missing empirical underpinnings for the global expansion of eco-spirituality and greening of religion, (2) tensions and negotiation processes about religious environmentalism, and (3) the ongoing and expanding environmental unsustainability of religions. Missing Empirical Underpinnings Although different faith traditions have evolved eco-theological branches, there is little evidence for broad greening among their congregations and members. While there are, sometimes, outstanding activities among the leadership or individual congregations of the faith traditions, most religious followers and congregations do not show an above-average environmental engagement (Huber 2022; Koehrsen and Huber 2021; Taylor et al. 2016). For instance, some authors suggest strong greening processes among mainline Christians (for example, Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists) (Douglass Warner 2008; Kearns 1996; Shibley and Wiggins 1997; Wardekker et al. 2009) while members of conservative Christian groups (for example, Evangelicals and Pentecostals) are less environmentally concerned (Ecklund et al. 2017; McCright and Dunlap 2011; Peifer et al. 2014). Though the leadership level of mainline communities does often show a strong commitment (for example, via green public statements), studies on the environmental attitudes among adherents do not support this assumption (Carlisle and Clark 2018; Clements et al. 2014; Dilmaghani 2018; Haluza-DeLay 2014; Konisky 2018; Taylor et al. 2016). Veldman et al. (2014a, p. 7) phrase this in the following way: ‘denominational statements and education programs have had difficulty penetrating to the grassroots’. There appears to be a gap between the engagement on the leadership level and the absence of a greening on the micro-level: the adherents. Empirical research has mostly focused on Christianity in Western Europe and the US. By contrast, other faith traditions and regions have received less academic attention. Still, the few existing studies on Islam indicate similar problems in expanding the greening: though Muslim umbrella organizations pursue environmental activities, local congregations and adherents engage to a much lower extent (Gilliat-Ray and Bryant 2011; Koehrsen 2021; Skirbekk and Pędziwiatr 2018). Similarly, research on eco-spirituality is still limited to the Global North. It remains an open question as to which extent green spiritualities are not only expanding among the comparatively rich and well-educated environmental milieu of the Global North, but also become

288  Handbook of critical environmental politics a world religion that expands also in the Global South (see Chapter 33 in this volume) and among other social segments. This is also a question of definition. When defined as including indigenous religions, then eco-spirituality can be conceived of as involving many actors from the Global South. In total, there is more need for broader research about eco-spirituality and the environmental activities among local faith communities in different world regions. Conducting broad research about the presence of eco-spirituality (Koehrsen et al. 2021) and designing indicators for measuring fluid forms of religion tends to be more challenging than undertaking surveys on institutionalized religions where respondents usually know with which religion (for example, Christianity or Islam) they affiliate. Tensions and Negotiation Processes The mitigated greening of religious communities is partly the outcome of tensions within the communities. The religion and ecology literature tends to suggest a straightforward impact of eco-theologies on the activities of faith-based organizations and actors. By contrast, religious environmentalism in organized religions frequently involves tensions and complex negotiation processes (Koehrsen et al. 2021, 2022). These include positions that seek to stop and reverse religious greening processes. An example is the evangelical Cornwall Alliance in the US. This alliance critically questions the focus on environmental protection, suggesting that it increasingly leads to the discounting of human needs (for example, job loss in extraction industries, and disengagement from poverty reduction programmes in the Global South). Therefore, the Cornwall Alliance has launched the petition ‘Forget “Climate Change”, Energy Empowers the Poor!’ and the initiative ‘Resisting the Green Dragon’ (Chaplin 2016). By contrast, other evangelical groups, such as the World Evangelical Alliance, promote environmental stewardship and lobby for stronger environmental policies. This example illustrates that different camps in the same faith traditions assume diverging standpoints towards environmental sustainability and compete in shaping the topic (Wardekker et al. 2009). However, even if religious groups broadly agree to engage in environmental sustainability, different approaches on how to implement sustainability and struggles over the authenticity of the engagement may arise (Blanc 2022; Dohe 2022; Gojowczyk 2022). For instance, Gojowczyk (2022) shows how members of Catholic orders interpret the key environmental goals in a hugely different way and, therefore, undertake diverging activities ranging among political activism, meditation, research and teaching, and care of excluded humans. Tensions may also emerge between religious and secular organizations (Herman 2022; Jamil 2022). For instance, in Israel, government and ultra-orthodox communities struggle over kosher electricity in the context of the energy transitions (Herman 2022; see also Chapter 17 in this volume). Jewish Sabbath observance prohibits human participation in the production and usage of electricity during the Sabbath. Therefore, ultra-orthodox communities develop their own technological solutions by mostly employing automated diesel generators to fulfil Sabbath observance (that is, avoiding human work on Sabbath). Nevertheless, these solutions clash with secular law and cause environmental harm. While ultra-orthodox communities seek to leverage their political power to legalize the existing practices, the Ministry of Energy and environmental non-governmental organizations promote solutions based on renewable energy. The collaboration between religious and secular organizations becomes even harder in more secularized Western states, as secularization usually involves the exclusion of religion

Religion and ecology  289 from other social spheres and public activities. Therefore, secular environmental groups may dissuade their participants from expressing their religion and, sometimes, even deny religious groups access to their activities. For instance, a case study about the London Islamic Network for the Environment shows its Muslim activists experience marginalization among environmental groups for being religious (Nita 2014, pp. 233–5). Another illustration for the exclusion of religion is sustainability research itself, which has, for long, mostly disregarded religion as an important ingredient of sustainability transitions and instead stressed technological, political and economic solutions. Based on these perceptions, religious actors may underrate their own potentials to undertake sustainable transformations and send the responsibility back to the sphere of politics. The framing of sustainability transitions as secular and mostly technological transformation processes can even create barriers for the more fluid eco-spirituality. For instance, spiritually motivated actors engaging in local energy transitions avoid sharing their eco-spiritual views, as they fear marginalization in their technological innovation circles (Koehrsen 2018). The Unsustainability of Religions Current religious worldviews and ethics continue to have negative environmental impacts. However, against the backdrop of a religion and ecology debate that highlights the positive potentials of religion to pursue environmental sustainability, the un-sustainability of religions has received much less attention. White (1967) addressed the negative impacts already in the 1960s. In his seminal contribution, White argued that the anthropocentrism of Western Christianity was the cause of the environmental crisis: it promoted the concept of human supremacy over the rest of God’s creation and, thereby, facilitated the exploitation of nature. Similarly, religious worldviews that perceive environmental degradation as the will of God are unlikely to encourage their followers to act against environmental degradation (Artur and Hilhorst 2012; Haluza-DeLay 2014; Roscoe 2016). For instance, evangelical Protestants who follow an ‘end of times’ theology are likely to interpret climate change as a step towards the final apocalypse and the second coming of Jesus and, therefore, will be unwilling to stop this process (Barker and Bearce 2013). Moreover, even new developments within existing religions may rather add to the existing environmental challenges than help to solve them. An example is the massive expansion of prosperity gospel in Protestant Christianity. Prosperity gospel (or, ‘wealth and health gospel’) promotes the belief that Christians have a right to enjoy a prosperous life: ‘By virtue of becoming born-again and confessing faith the true believer has the right to health and wealth and the possibility of consumption’ (Hasu 2006, p. 680). According to this belief, God blesses its obedient believers with material wealth and a healthy life. In order to parade God’s blessing, believers tend to show off their wealth through consumption. Scholarship suggests that prosperity gospel contributes to the expansion and accommodation of neo-liberal capitalism in the Global South (Comaroff 2009; Martin 2002; Maxwell 1998; Meyer 2007). New pro-capitalistic forms of spirituality may parallel these developments, creating cults of money and luxurious consumption, and thereby contradicting the environmental impetus of eco-spirituality (Baecker 2009). In the context of global neo-liberalism, these consumption-friendly spiritualities may spread even more effectively than the aforementioned eco-spiritualities that seem to represent a small niche of environmental activists. In total, it

290  Handbook of critical environmental politics remains an open question whether the suggested greening processes may be influential enough to counteract existing and even expanding environmentally harmful tendencies of religions.

OPEN QUESTIONS While scholarship about religion and ecology has made strong claims about the global greening of religions and the expansion of eco-spirituality, there is a lack of research to underpin these claims. Existing research indicates that the global greening faces difficulties in reaching local congregations and adherents, while eco-spirituality appears to remain mostly limited to the small environmental niches in the Global North. Moreover, religious environmentalism often provokes tensions and complex negotiation processes within religious communities as well as between the communities and their secular social environment (Koehrsen et al. 2021, 2022). The tensions and negotiation processes curb the greening processes and expansion of eco-spirituality. In addition, some religious worldviews and ethics continue to have negative environmental impacts while expanding religious innovations, such as prosperity gospel, encourage their believers to become industrious capitalists and feverous consumers, thereby countering religious greening processes. There is a need for more empirical research to study the challenges of religious greening processes and the expansion of eco-spirituality. In particular, empirical research may address greening at the local level of congregations. Congregations are likely to constitute the necessary broker for transmitting green theologies towards their religious constituencies. The general impact of the global greening will be negligible, if these transmission processes do not take place. Also, research should consider the ongoing negative environmental impacts of religions and the spread of non-green religious innovations (for example, prosperity gospel, and theologies of human dominion over nature) that strengthen these impacts. Most importantly, there is a need for stronger dialogue between sustainability transitions research and the research debate about religion and ecology. Existing research debates about sustainability transitions have scarcely considered religion, while the debates about religion and ecology have barely connected with existing sustainability transitions research. Academics in religious studies have gestured to the strong potential of religion, but they have not sufficiently underpinned their claims through empirical studies and existing theories in sustainability research. Bringing both research debates together would create a stronger awareness for the role of religion in sustainability transitions research and help the religion and ecology debate to critically study its claims and underpin them with existing sustainability models.

REFERENCES Artur, L. and D. Hilhorst (2012), ‘Everyday realities of climate change adaptation in Mozambique’, Global Environmental Change, 22 (2), 529–36. Asad, T. (2009), Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baecker, D. (ed.) (2009), Kapitalismus als Religion, Berlin: Kulturverl Kadmos. Barker, D.C. and D.H. Bearce (2013), ‘End-times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing global climate change’, Political Research Quarterly, 66 (2), 267–79. Becci, I. and C. Monnot (2016), ‘Spiritualité et religion: Nouveaux carburants vers la transition énergétique?’, Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses, 40 (4), 93–109.

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Religion and ecology  293 Koehrsen, J., J. Blanc and F. Huber (2022), Global Religious Environmental Activism: Emerging Conflicts and Tensions in Earth Stewardship, London: Routledge. Konisky, D. (2018), ‘The greening of Christianity? A study of environmental attitudes over time’, Environmental Politics, 27 (2), 267–91. Lienemann-Perrin, C. and W. Lienemann (2006), Kirche und Öffentlichkeit in Transformationsgesellschaften, Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer. Majerus, S. (2022), ‘Cosmological tensions: biodynamic agriculture’s anthropocentrism and its contestation’, in J. Koehrsen, J. Blanc and F. Huber (eds), Global Religious Environmental Activism: Emerging Conflicts and Tensions in Earth Stewardship, London: Routledge. Mangunjaya, F.M. and J.E. McKay (2012), ‘Reviving an Islamic approach for environmental conservation in Indonesia’, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 16 (3), 286–305. Martin, D. (2002), Pentecostalism: The World their Parish, Oxford: Blackwell. Matthes, J. (1992), ‘Auf der Suche nach dem “Religiösen”. Reflexionen zu Theorie und Empirie religionssoziologischer Forschung’, Sociologia Internationalis, 30 (2), 129–42. Matthes, J. (1993), ‘Was ist anders an anderen Religionen? Anmerkungen zur zentristischen Organisation des religionssoziologischen Denkens, in J. Bergmann, A. Hahn and T. Luckmann (eds), Religion und Kultur, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 33, special issue, 16–30. Maxwell, D. (1998), ‘“Delivered from the spirit of poverty?” Pentecostalism, prosperity and modernity in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 28 (3), 350–73. McCright, A.M. and R.E. Dunlap (2011), ‘Cool dudes: the denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States’, Global Environmental Change, 21 (4), 1163–72. Meyer, B. (2007), ‘Pentecostalism and neo-liberal capitalism: faith, prosperity and vision in African Pentecostal-charismatic churches’, Journal for the Study of Religion, 20 (2), 5–28. Mohamad, Z.F., N. Idris and Z. Mamat (2012), ‘Role of religious communities in enhancing transition experiments: a localised strategy for sustainable solid waste management in Malaysia’, Sustainability Science, 7 (2), 237–51. Nelson, R.H. (2012), ‘Economics and environmentalism: belief systems at odds’, Independent Review, 17 (1), 5–17. Nita, M. (2014), ‘Christian and Muslim climate activists fasting and praying for the planet: emotional translation of “dark green” activism and green-faith identities’, in R.G. Veldman, A. Szasz and R. Haluza-DeLay (eds), How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations, London: Routledge, pp. 229–43. Palmer, M. (2013), ‘The quiet revolutionaries: why the faith-based environmental movement has become the largest civil society movement in the conservation world’, Biodiversity, 14 (3), 180–82. Peifer, J.L., E.H. Ecklund and C. Fullerton (2014), ‘How evangelicals from two churches in the American Southwest frame their relationship with the environment’, Review of Religious Research, 56 (3), 373–97. Pew Research Center (2017), ‘The changing global religious landscape’, accessed 7 March 2019 at www​ .pewforum​.org/​2017/​04/​05/​the​-changing​-global​-religious​-landscape/​. Pope Francis (2015), Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home. Roscoe, P. (2016), ‘Method, measurement, and management in IPCC climate modeling’, Human Ecology, 44 (6), 655–64. Sheikh, K.M. (2006), ‘Involving religious leaders in conservation education in the Western Karakorum, Pakistan’, Mountain Research and Development, 26 (4), 319–22. Shibley, M.A. and J.L. Wiggins (1997), ‘The greening of mainline American religion: a sociological analysis of the environmental ethics of the national religious partnership for the environment’, Social Compass, 44 (3), 333–48. Skirbekk, V. and K. Pędziwiatr (2018), ‘Sustainability and climate change in major religions with a focus on Islam’, accessed 1 September 2019 at www​.researchgate​.net/​publication/​329656310. Taylor, B. (2004), ‘A green future for religion?’, Futures, 36 (9), 991–1008. Taylor, B. (2008), ‘From the ground up: dark green religion and the environmental future’, in D.K. Swearer (ed.), Ecology and the Environment: Perspectives from the Humanities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 89–107. Taylor, B. (2010), Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.

294  Handbook of critical environmental politics Taylor, B., G. van Wieren and B.D. Zaleha (2016), ‘Lynn White Jr. and the greening-of-religion hypothesis’, Conservation Biology, 30 (5), 1000–1009. Tucker, M.E. (2006), ‘Religion and ecology: survey of the field’, in R.S. Gottlieb (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 398–418. Tucker, M.E. (2008), ‘World religions, the Earth Charter, and sustainability’, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 12 (2), 115–28. Veldman, R.G., A. Szasz and R. Haluza-DeLay (2014a), ‘How are the world’s religions responding to climate change?’, in R.G. Veldman, A. Szasz and R. Haluza-DeLay (eds), How The World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations, London: Routledge, pp. 3–20. Veldman, R.G., A. Szasz and R. Haluza-DeLay (eds) (2014b), How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations, London: Routledge. Wardekker, A., A.C. Petersen and J.P. van der Sluijs (2009), ‘Ethics and public perception of climate change: exploring the Christian voices in the US public debate’, Global Environmental Change, 19 (4), 512–21. White, L. (1967), ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’, Science, 155 (3767), 1203–7. Witt, J.D. (2016), Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Woodhead, L. (2011), ‘Five concepts of religion’, International Review of Sociology – Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 21 (1), 121–43.

21. Social metabolism Dario Padovan, Osman Arrobbio and Alessandro Sciullo

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we introduce the concept of metabolism as a theoretical tool to understand the current relation between society and nature. The exchange of matter and energy between living systems and their ecological environment is an inescapable mechanism needed for the reproduction of the former. This applies to social systems, but at the same time this metabolic perspective allows us to perceive the concrete ways in which the contradictions of capital accumulation are generating ecological crises and catastrophes. Moreover, metabolism entails dynamics of local and global inequalities. As suggested by Bensaid (2002, p. 302), ‘the critique of political economy discovers a turbulent topology, divided up into basins, springs, wells, flows; an articulated space, imbricated and interlocking, whose fault-lines and fractures organize the metabolism of unequal exchange’. The dynamics of social metabolism that entail conflicts and protests at different scales ask for a more radical conceptual tool to deal with these dynamics. In this vein, we suggest using the Foucauldian notion of apparatus on which we might inscribe the local and global tensions regarding the metabolic regulation of energy and water, the two most important ‘political liquids’ of this era (Caffentzis 2005). The chapter is organized as follows: in the next section we introduce a general definition of social metabolism underlining how its dynamics and changes are crucial for understanding and assessing the sustainability of the social system and of the social practices it entails. The third section briefly illustrates some socio-metabolic approaches used to carry on investigations. The fourth section provides some insights regarding the sociological dilemmas that underline the social metabolism theory, focusing mainly on different disputes that inhabited the field. In the fifth section we suggest developing, together with some other authors, a sociology of flows coupled with the Foucauldian concept of apparatus. The final section shows that energy and hydro-social metabolism are marked by increasing political controversies and conflicts.

METABOLISM AND SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL REPRODUCTION For their reproduction and maintenance, societies draw matter and energy from nature, which they transform, distribute, consume and reject. This process is named societal metabolism. Despite all the work on societal metabolism and its environmental impacts, little has been revealed about the regulation of its two main dynamics: production and consumption. Analysis of regulation implies the identification of agents involved in practices of production and consumption (reproduction). This is evidently a functionalist approach, but it is useful as a preliminary exercise to identify main social sectors of societal reproduction and their rulers or drivers. The way in which different agents perform particular activities and the telos they pursue gives rise to different metabolic regimes. 295

296  Handbook of critical environmental politics Metabolic regimes have two functions: on the one hand, they fulfil social needs for transforming resources into usable and consumable forms; on the other, they provide grounds for the process of wealth accumulation. Therefore, societal metabolism is not a distinctly delimited, socially disembedded sphere of physical relations, which tends towards general stability. Instead, social metabolism is a complex process that tends to accumulate capital (natural, human, technical and monetary) while it provides socially useful objects, artefacts and services. These functions are apparently not in contrast but are complementary. However, metabolic processes that are too fast and too linear, that is, not circular, might overrun socio-ecological stability, generating a crisis, as, for instance, the rift between consumption and resource availability. In this chapter we link metabolism and social practices. The practices taken into consideration are those of basic social reproduction, such as eating, cooking, housing, heating, cleaning, moving and caring (Chapter 34 in this volume). Societal metabolism comprises bundles of everyday-life activities aimed at the stable and recursive reproduction of the social material life of human beings. These bundles are the basic units of metabolism, the triggering activities that start metabolism, while also being outcomes of metabolism itself. For instance, social practices by which people eat are either the activators of food collective metabolism or the consequence of socio-metabolic processes that make them possible. All human activity involves the harvesting, transformation, consumption and conservation of matter and energy (Rosa and Machlis 1983; Foster 1999, 2000). From a material viewpoint, practices always consume matter and energy as input and produce something material as output. Thus, we employ the concept of ‘practice’ in order to focus on the ongoing material social reproduction. The material base of social life is constituted by human practices. Also, practices entail relations – between human agents and with technical artefacts, natural resources and services. These relations vary in different historical circumstances and constitute the specific conditions of social reproduction: human agency must operate within those specific conditions. The mode of combining social metabolism and abstract and concrete practices – mainly labour – brings about the predominant ‘form of life’. Societal metabolism and its connected practices are not only a matter of biophysical accounting; they are also driven by cultural and symbolic horizons. This is why practices of consumption for decades have been studied from a symbolic, cultural, linguistic and identity-making perspective. However, metabolism is driven by the necessity of collective reproduction, which gives reproduction back its original, material meaning. The recent interest in ‘metabolism’ as a category is owing to its capability to capture this and to account for the resources that systems consume for their reproduction. Systems are consuming too many resources, which is leading to a turn in social ontology, now aiming to cope with the finite biophysical limits. In our view, the ‘practice turn’ (see, for example, Knorr Cetina et al. 2001; Schatzki 2010; Shove et al. 2012) is one of these ontological approaches, which tries to deal with the material basis of social reproduction. Thus, the ‘metabolic turn’ (Ayres 1994; Fischer-Kowalski 1998; Foster 1999) is a new ontology in the field of studying physical systems, such as cities, firms and buildings. This implies a reincorporation of the social into the biophysical realm (Padovan 2014). Metabolism is not only a metaphor, but also a theoretical category useful for understanding, explaining and accounting for the relations of systems to their environments. Societal metabolism is an input/output mechanism, with the aim of maintaining the turnover connected to the conversion of matter and energy into useful things. This is an intrinsic feature in the

Social metabolism  297 reproduction of any organism (Padovan 2003, 2014), yet it is also a category that is useful for investigating, pinpointing and assessing the regulatory processes that govern this complex interchange between organisms and their environment. At the heart of a metabolic regime are two relations: the first is that between technical progress and nature appropriation (Chapter 22 in this volume), where technical efficiency depends partly on the institutional arrangements and partly on the resistance of natural actants, such as soil, animals, plants, climate and geological stratification, to increase productivity (Moore 2012). The second is the relation between the accumulation dynamic and the mode of social reproduction (Burkett 1999; Foster 1999, 2000). People increasingly depend on the market for their reproduction. This insertion of the reproduction of the labour force in the accumulation scheme dramatically modifies its properties. Flexible combinations of economic and extra-economic practices help to secure, although only temporarily and in specific economic spaces, societal metabolism stability. Yet, if the role of market forces becomes increasingly crucial for societal reproduction, complementary but declining functions of other agents, such as social assemblages, non-humans actants and community activities, might undermine its stability. The specific processes by which society’s metabolism is synchronized with or desynchronized from its environment are determined by a variety of historically organized constellations of practices. The rise of the metabolic rift is a consequence of a historical mode of regulation imposed on metabolic throughput (Clark and York 2005; Clausen and Clark 2005; Clark and Foster 2010). The current societal metabolism is ontologically orientated to an unstable condition owing to its growth and accumulation. The systematic innovation of socio-technical regimes often implies the expansion of consumption, the creation of new needs and the discovery of new uses and exchange values. The consequence is that societies organize their resource throughput by changing parameters of natural processes to gain better access to nature’s resource supply (Schandl et al. 2002), and this can bring about very dramatic consequences at the socio-ecological level. Our attention might turn to the structural coupling and coevolution of infrastructural forms, social practices and discursive apparatuses in the overall reproduction-regulation of societal metabolism, whereas these assemblages are the ground on which societal reproduction processes arise, eventually bringing the system towards dissipation and inequality. Metabolism entails different interconnected activities carried on by different organized agents (Dickens 2004). It corresponds with the whole process of reproduction of the system itself and of its parts, irrespective of the system to which it refers (for example, city, household or firm). This process might be deconstructed into different fields of practice, entailing different agents and sociotechnical systems along all the goods provision chain: appropriation, production and transformation, distribution, consumption and, finally, disposal. All these interrelated activities are subjected to different organizational regimes, rules, knowledge and capabilities (Chapter 18 in this volume). Consequently, they need flexible analytical tools to be reassembled in a new understanding. Practice approaches might help in this effort. Practices can be of all types. There are practices implied in the reproduction of largest social systems, as well as practices aimed to reproduce everyday life; practices aimed at the production of means of production, and practices designed to produce stuffs and goods for households, as well as practices for disposing waste. Practices are the basic units of social affairs.

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MODELS OF SOCIETAL METABOLISM Among the metabolic approaches we find Industrial Metabolism, Urban Metabolism, the multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach, household metabolism and metabolic rift. All have their specific methods for analysis of the exchange between social and natural systems. Industrial metabolism studies the throughput of raw materials and energy sources in productive systems, arguing that societies must actively regulate this process and develop efficient machinery to diminish the rate of material consumption (Ayres 1994). The analysis of the metabolism of a socio-economic system is a truly interdisciplinary enterprise that uses concepts and methodologies from several social and natural sciences (Fischer-Kowalski 1998, 2003; Fischer-Kowalski and Hüttler 1999). The tool used by industrial or socio-economic researchers is material and energy flow accounting (MEFA). The MEFA framework analyses important aspects of society–nature interaction by tracing socio-economic materials and energy flows, and by assessing changes in relevant patterns and processes in ecosystems related to these flows – that is, the colonization of terrestrial ecosystems (Haberl et al. 2004). The MuSIASEM approach makes it possible to perform a check on the feasibility and desirability of patterns of metabolism of socio-economic systems by providing a characterization at different levels and scales of: (1) the performance of socio-economic activities (for households, enterprises, economic sectors, national economies and the world economy) and (2) ecological constraints (micro and macro). This is achieved by looking at the interference that the metabolism of matter and energy flows controlled by human activity induces on the expected pattern of metabolism associated with the self-organization of natural ecosystems (Giampietro et al. 2009). While MEFA uses a stock-flow approach as its basic analytical distinction to account for the system’s different elements, MuSIASEM uses the fund-flow framework, where the fund is transformative while stocks are not. Urban metabolism is a multi-disciplinary and integrated platform that examines material and energy flows in cities as complex systems shaped by various social, economic and environmental forces. The biophysical approach to studying and quantifying urban material and energy flows and stocks is the predominant task of urban metabolism today (Gandy 2004). It generally focuses on quantifying the flows of materials or energy in an urban system, in order to identify environmental problems and to design more efficient urban planning policies (Brunner 2008; Barles 2010; Rapoport 2011). However, cities are not only physical entities. They are also symbolic, social, cultural machines. A growing cohort of scholars is expanding the conceptions of urban metabolism as not only consisting of material and energy cycles, but also of highly politicized physical and social processes. These scholars move away from a society–nature dualism and choose to see the city as a process of metabolically transformed nature, a dynamic intersection between social and bio-physical dimensions to urban space, even a socio-natural hybrid or a cyborg of machine and organism (Heynen et al. 2006, Swyngedouw 2006). The household metabolism is an approach that enables an evaluation of the environmental impact of a community/country, based on the linkages between household consumption and the processes of producing and managing goods. It measures the households’ final consumption, including all energy that is consumed directly and indirectly in the processes of production of final goods (Moll et al. 2005). Household metabolism makes it possible to identify different types of aggregation and categorization of consumption (Benders et al. 2006). In addition, the

Social metabolism  299 metabolic model for family units allows us to identify the structure of the everyday practices of consumption, by which the physiology of the socio-economic system itself can be reconstructed (Padovan et al. 2015). All these approaches address the physical account of metabolic processes, but they rarely study the practices of agents that shape the metabolism dynamics. Finally, there is the metabolic rift suggested by Foster and Burkett derived from the works of Marx (Chapter 4 in this volume). Here the emphasis is on the rift that capitalism inserts in the metabolic process between society and nature. The rift recalled by Marx is the disproportionateness that the process of production and consumption under capitalism generates in the relation of exchange between social and natural reproduction. As stated by Foster (2000, p. 141): It was in Capital that Marx’s materialist conception of nature became fully integrated with his materialist conception of history. In his developed political economy, as presented in Capital, Marx employed the concept of ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechsel) to define the labor as ‘a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.’ Yet an ‘irreparable rift’ had emerged in this metabolism as a result of capitalist relations of production and the antagonistic separation of town and countryside. Hence, under the society of associated producers it would be necessary to ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way’, completely beyond the capabilities of bourgeois society.

METABOLISM AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEM The concept of social metabolism is becoming one of the most robust instruments by which to understand the current complex scenarios related to the society/nature complex. For instance, the social metabolism with Nature or the interchange between Man and Nature, as it is currently objectified, shows its fetishized form historically specific to capitalism, in the same way that the invisible hand is the fetishized form of freedom of interchange between men (Cunha 2018). However, it also has a wider meaning, implying some theoretical and ontological problems that emerge from the dualistic nature of the concept. In the field of social and human sciences, socio-ecological metabolism has been a matter of different disputes. As noted by Foster, the centrality of the concept of metabolism in Marx’s thought has been recognized for a long time, though its full significance has rarely been grasped until recently. For example, in the 1920s, Lukács emphasized the ‘metabolic interaction with nature’ through labour as key to Marx’s dialectic of nature and society. He did not, however, go any further. He asserted that ‘the metabolic interchange with nature’ was ‘socially mediated’ through labour and matter. Such a metabolic ‘exchange of matter’ between nature and society, Lukács wrote, ‘cannot possibly be achieved – even on the most primitive level – without possessing a certain degree of objectively correct knowledge about the processes of nature (which exist prior to people and function independently of them).’ It was precisely the development of this metabolic ‘exchange of matter’ by means of production that formed, in Lukács’s interpretation of Marx’s dialectic, ‘the material basis of modern science’ (Foster 2013, p. 3). Schmidt (1971) devoted a large part of his book on the concept of nature in Marx to provide a detailed interpretation of the use of the concept of metabolism and to reflect on the social, historical and ecological implications of the concept, which he synthesized in a key premise: ‘Marx conceived labor as a process of progressive humanization of nature, an act which is

300  Handbook of critical environmental politics coincident with the gradual naturalization of humans’ (Schmidt 1971, p. 76). Nature is thus thought by Marx to be the material substrate of work, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labour. All act of giving form to a natural substance must obey the peculiar laws of matter. Finally, for him ‘in Marx nature is not merely a social category. It cannot be totally dissolved into the historical processes of its appropriation in respect of form, content, extent and objectivity. If nature is a social category, the inverted statement that society is a category of nature is equally valid’ (Schmidt 1971, p. 70). In the wake of the discovery and systematization of Marx’s work, there is a rediscovery of the ecological potentiality of the metabolic perspective, so much so that Marx’s Capital can be viewed as a theory of metabolism. The metabolism with nature and the internal societal metabolism, which implies the circulation and consumption of commodities, are seen in this perspective as the motor of capitalist accumulation, and capital as the agent that was able to bend these metabolic exchanges to the logic of value (Saito 2017). Viewing metabolism as a tool to investigate social dynamics at different levels and scales somehow challenges all the post-humanist thought that it is strongly influencing the debate about the transformation of planetary biogeochemistry. Metabolism as a concept has been contended by Moore, who noted that there has been virtually no critical interrogation of social metabolism as the metabolic exchange between two entities: ‘nature’ and ‘society’. The ‘separation’ of nature and society has been taken for granted. For him this might be a problem because reality is much messier, and the relations of humans and the rest of nature more intimate than the dualistic model suggests. This dualism, which is Cartesian in nature, has the tendency to draw strong lines between what is human and what is ‘natural’. We might call this an epistemic rift that generates a series of violent abstractions implicated in the creation and reproduction of two separate epistemic domains: ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’. This epistemic rift, notes Moore again, attests the broad material divorce of the direct producers from the means of production (Moore 2014). Whereas Moore argues for a dissolution of the analytical boundary between the social and the natural, thus conceding legitimacy to the post-humanist trends championed by Haraway and Latour, for Hornborg this is not only completely at odds with a coherent and well grasped materialism, but also dismantles any chance of politically challenging the destructive forces ravaging our planet (Hornborg 2017). According to Hornborg, Moore’s claims would signify a post-humanist co-optation of the critique of capitalism, which in his consequences might serve no other interests than those of neoliberalism. Briefly, metabolism allows us to understand differences and interchanges of society and nature, and it notes that nature is never completely subsumed by capitalist society. That is, as noted by Schmidt (1971), nature is irreducible to a social category, it cannot be completely captured by the historical process of its appropriation, and thus the total unification of nature and capitalism seems not adequate to Marx’s perspective and premise. Under the capitalist conditions of existence, the irreducibility of the natural to the social implies an ontological and insuperable dualism. The reason for the persistence of this dualism can be explained by reflecting upon the concept of consumptive production, which for Marx is the basis of human metabolism. As noted by Marx, the production of the living form is immediately equal to the consumption of elements extracted from the environment. According to Marx (1993, pp. 90–1):

Social metabolism  301 Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. It is clear that in taking in food, for example, which is a form of consumption, the human being produces his own body. But this is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some particular aspect.

However, as noted by Haug (2018), the consumptive production is in the capitalist society functionally disjointed in the two realms of production and consumption mediated by the labour producing value. The separation between production and consumption is the condition for the exchange of commodities for the self-valorization of the capital itself. Here, the immediate unity in which production coincides with consumption leaves its immediate duality intact. It also means that when the biological metabolism, which presupposes the unity of production and consumption, is subsumed under the social sphere, it is separated and even opposed between the two realms of activity – production and consumption – thus reproducing the immanent dualism of capitalism. Production and consumption are ontologically, functionally and spatially differentiated: on one side there are the provisioning systems of material and immaterial goods (Fanning et al. 2020) that depend on the technical development of the production (Haug 2018); on the other, there are bundles of social practices that make individuals able to appropriate and consume these goods (Padovan 2015). In summary, the capitalist society is a world of unsolvable dualisms and contradictions, and the socio-ecological metabolism is part of these dualisms.

SOCIOLOGY OF FLOWS, DEVICES AND APPARATUSES Even if it recognizes the dualistic nature of capitalist society, the metabolism approach tries to overcome it by challenging the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between producers and consumers. Even though we think we know where consumption starts and ends, from the viewpoint of natural resources each activity included in social reproduction (production, distribution, exchange and consumption) consumes energy, matter, ecosystems services and labour. Everybody consumes, thus everybody is a consumer, even producers (Princen et al. 2002). That the routine enactment of many different activities entails the consumption of energy and matter including the body’s energy, is now being shared by several scholars (Warde 2005; Røpke 2009). Metabolism is at its simplest level a matter of inputs and outputs. That is, socio-ecological metabolism is a matter of flows. Investigating systems’ metabolism can offer multiple indications and indicators on what a system is doing and how it is changing. From the viewpoint of social science, an interesting approach to study metabolic dynamics of different systems is a sociology of flows as suggested by Mol and Spaargaren (2005), based on Castells’s and Urry’s seminal works (Castells 1996; Urry 2003). This vision can be merged with the notion of apparatus that might help the development of a sociology of flows strengthening the perspective on regulation and security. An apparatus1 focuses on strategic practices aimed to cope with problems of security: spaces and technologies of security, treatments of the uncertainty, and forms of normalization of human conduct (Foucault 2007). An apparatus is far more orientated towards distinct goals implying a flexible management of flows than Urry’s (2003) vision, for which flows have no goal or end and tend to generate, via iteration, complexity, instability and uncertainty.

302  Handbook of critical environmental politics According to Foucault (1980, p. 194), an apparatus is ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid’. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements, but it is also an assemblage or a hybrid of technical and social elements, which has the strategic function in a given moment to respond to an urgency. Foucault refers to the apparatus as a series of devices arranged in a way so that they influence the scope, an arrangement that exerts a normative effect on its environment since it introduces specific dispositions. He then applies his concept of apparatus to asylums, prisons, schools, factories and hospitals, as apparatuses of disciplining and transformation of practices. In our view, it appears reasonable to apply the concept of apparatus, as depicted in this chapter, to energy, water, mobility and informational grids (Padovan and Arrobbio 2017). For example, a more or less smart energy grid is not simply a complex of technical devices. It is something more: an apparatus. It is made of a series of devices connected in a complex way that engenders a strong detection and regulation of energy flows and of social behaviour associated with them. Norms are thus developed and inscribed in the example of energy grids into a play of power, aimed to overcome resistances, or to change inertial habits, or again to orientate future choices. Data standardization and collection is crucial to monitor the functioning of the energy grid, to drive it towards more efficient ways to provide and use energy, and to discipline agents of the grid for more appropriate behaviour, as for example the harmonization of demand and supply. The same applies to other provisioning systems, such as food, mobility and, finally, water. All these are a combination of devices hold together by an apparatus. Moreover, if we pay due attention to the essential distinction between flows (quantities of materials qualitatively transformed in the process) and funds (agents transforming a given set of inflows into a given set of stocks and outflows) in the material production process as suggested by Georgescu-Roegen (1971), metabolism is shaped by the ways in which flows are transformed (the structure of the funds or who is involved in the transformation, such as workers or households), and by the proportion between inflows, stocks and outflows. However, the relation between flows and funds is still a matter of regulation, that is, of the way in which apparatuses regulate the dynamics of flows and funds. To obtain a safe circulation of people, money, commodities, water, energy, and so on, and to secure stocks depending on flows but also generating them, an apparatus must regulate flows. In doing that, it generates a circulating and securing power that, in turn, often generates resistance, tensions, ruptures and protests. The analysis of conflicts, manipulation and efforts to access or appropriate flows, as well as resistance to escape the regulation of flows, is a matter of investigation for a sociology of flows. Apparatuses are concerned both with ordering and disordering, regulation and deregulation, normalization and deviation. Instead of ordering and capturing with omniscient foresight, apparatuses get muddled and mix things up, producing subjectivities which escape and need to be reinserted into a different ‘multiplicity’, forcing a constant reconsideration of the ‘new’ (Deleuze 1992, pp. 162–3). Each flow implies devices and an apparatus connecting them to control and regulate the flow itself. Moreover, that human agents always belong to apparatuses and act within them, means that apparatuses exercise a specific power on them but also that agents can change them and the flows managed by them, accepting, resisting or fighting against them (Agamben 2009). New apparatuses often generate a complex and contradictory behaviour in the agents involved in them. Agents hope that something will improve, but they immediately experience

Social metabolism  303 disorder, misunderstanding, regret or disappointment. In its functioning, each apparatus shows, as explored by Deleuze (1992), lines of breakage and fracture. Sometimes these are situated at the level of powers, other times at the level of knowledge, while at yet other times more at the level of practical action. Generally, the lines of subjectivation – that the modern subject is sculpted by the apparatuses in which it is involved – indicate fissures and fractures, and change depends on these fissures and fractures that appear in the apparatus. The creation of the apparatus is shaped by these breaks. This is why each apparatus deserves its own diagnostic, its own archaeology. Moreover, an apparatus creates a propensity for particular types of events, a trend that some things ‘happen’. The application of this concept to an energy or water grid opens the possibility of its change. Can an apparatus become flat, democratic, equal or differentiated in its functions and provisions? Might an apparatus, such as a thermal grid, be designed and managed in order to raise insensible but enduring changes in the agents’ performance, or to be flexible enough to change by virtue of agents’ performance?

ENERGY AND WATER METABOLISM, AND THE ASYMMETRY OF SOCIAL POWER Social metabolism seems a good point of departure for studying energy and water controversies around the world. Energy flows enter and escape from any system. Water is the flow necessary for any system reproduction. Both energy and water are stored in different carriers and forms (virtual water): they move in the form of direct and indirect (embedded) energy and water, as for example, matter, food and biomass. Social and environmental injustice connected with energy and water arises because grids are complex apparatuses of connection of different agents, equipped with different power of influence and intervention on flows (Chapter 17 in this volume). It is self-evident that energy and water providers and final users are very asymmetrical in the influence on their management. In their working, grids bring and convey energy, water and social power in the form of rules and norms, bringing up the problematic of how their processes change their own configurations. This asks for an analysis of how energy and water flows through complex systems, how they engender and support already existing positive and negative feedback loops among production, distribution and consumption, and how technical devices, knowledge and enunciations build up regimes and apparatuses. Social forms, as living systems, depend upon flows of water and energy maintaining their systemic viability but also these flows are exchanged as commodities that might generate tensions and conflicts among producers, distributors and final users (Padovan 2015, Padovan et al. 2015). Energy and water networks are analogous to social networks, since they are made of the same substance: a variable and disparate assemblage of natural, technical and social elements, a continuous process fostering differences and repetitions. As in social networks, in which power flows (re)produce asymmetries and differences (but also negate them), in these technical networks water flows reproduce asymmetries and dissimilarities. The analogy may go further, as long as we pinpoint dynamics of water and energy circulation, security and control: how is the grid governed? Who benefits in terms of provision and consumption? Is the grid an apparatus that assures a win–win mechanism? To answer these questions, we should not to look at water and energy grids as a vertical apparatus going from the centre to the periphery,

304  Handbook of critical environmental politics but understand it by looking at its extremities, at its outer limits where it becomes capillary (Foucault 2003). Specifically, three fields of research can be enriched by a metabolic outlook on water and energy. One is the study of potable water grids. They are the most advanced and desirable method of delivering water to households. Originally, in temperate climate Western countries this was the way to provide water for all. It was a measure of social justice (Bocquet 2004). The growing technical and financial needs of water grids and the ideological tendency to privilege private style management for utilities (Bakker 2003) have changed the meaning and function of the grid. Different levels of service and access to energy and water among different populations and individuals are the vehicle of social hierarchies and injustice (Hellberg 2017). The second field concerns the dramatic increase in interest in the energy communities, that is, the use of this primary good for increasing the autonomy of local groups vis-à-vis the control generated by national public bodies or multinational companies (Gregg et al. 2020; Sciullo et al. 2020). The transition towards sustainable energy not only entails a shift from centralized systems of energy provision towards mixed forms, but also a change in the organizational structure, which comes with new actors who partly replace incumbents in the market. Decentralized, community-based ownership of energy equipment, sources and distribution systems (that is, an energy community) is a prominent example of energy generation and distribution under the control of local owners and used by community members. The energy transition implies a radical shift in energy metabolism and the regime or apparatus that governs as we described previously. The third field of critical research is the large social organization and management of energy, its crucial contribution to the expanding capitalist society and its crucial contribution to climate change. We can note how neoclassical economic theory has failed to adequately take into account the relationship of human beings to the metabolism of energy and matter in the biosphere. We can note also that energy is going to be theorized into social theory, and that social sciences are developing the due interest for the operations and functions of energy as one of the pillars of social reproduction and capital accumulation.

CONCLUSIONS Our goal has been to suggest a metabolic approach to investigate the socio-material relations that manage water and energy flows in our society. Water and energy regulation is invested in real and effective practices, where it relates directly to its object, target and field of application. Instead of simply asking who rules or manages the water and energy grids, we should try to discover how multiple bodies, forces, objects, desires and thoughts are gradually and materially constituted as subjects in the making of them. This may correspond to a call for a renewed sociology of flows since, for instance, we have seen that conventional grids leave agents in a state of blindness regarding the functioning of the water and energy systems. However, the deployment of smart grids implies a process of subjectivation, whereby agents are invested in a twofold dynamic of freedom and individual responsibility. Together with water and energy, grids also convey data, prescriptions, rules and codes aimed at disciplining and regulating user practices, from connection to payment. Agents can bend the grid toward their own goals or refuse all the regulating power underpinning it. Forms of adaptation, rejection and manipulation mark the grid, becoming sources of controversies and conflicts between different final

Social metabolism  305 users, as different tenants experience different intensities and performances of the grid, or are located in areas where the grid malfunctions. Finally, the transition process towards more democratic and decentralized ways of management is often, if not always, seen as a simple addition of different technical operations. From our viewpoint, these operations are inappropriate as socially naïve, as they assume that the ‘right’ results descend in a linear way from the application of the ‘right’ techniques. We suggest that analysts and developers should think in terms of apparatus, assemblage, bundle of practices and arrangements qualified by circularity and co-evolution.

NOTE 1. The word ‘apparatus’ is the English translation of the French word dispositif, in Italian dispositivo. Device refers to a technical dispositif and it has nothing to do with the philosophical meaning of apparatus as we use here.

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Social metabolism  307 Padovan, D. (2015), Assembling societal metabolism and social practices: the dynamics of sustainable and unsustainable reproduction, in P. Strandbakken and J. Gronow (eds), The Consumer in Society. A Tribute to Eivind Sto, Oslo: Abstrakt Forlag AS, pp. 335–62. Padovan, D. and Arrobbio, O. (2017), Making energy grids smart. The transition of sociotechnical apparatuses towards a new ontology, in N. Labanca (ed.), Complex Systems and Social Practices in Energy Transitions. Framing Energy Sustainability in the Time of Renewables, London: Springer, pp. 259–82. Padovan, D., Martini, F. and Cerutti, A.K. (2015), Social practices of ordinary consumption: an introduction to household metabolism’, Journal of Socialomics, 4 (2), 1–11. Princen, T., Maniates, M. and Conca, K. (eds) (2002), Confronting Consumption, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rapoport, E. (2011), Interdisciplinary perspectives on urban metabolism. A review of the literature, working paper, Environmental Institute, University College London. Røpke, I. (2009), Theories of practice. New inspiration for ecological economic studies on consumption, Ecological Economics, 68 (10), 2490–7. Rosa, E.A. and Machlis, G.E. (1983), Energetic theories of society. An evaluative review. Sociological Inquiry, 53 (2–3), 152–78. Saito, K. (2017), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press. Schandl, H., Grünbühel, C.M., Haberl, H. and Weisz, H. (eds) (2002), Handbook of Physical Accounting Measuring Biophysical Dimensions of Socio-economic Activities, Vienna: Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Environment and Water Management. Schatzki, T.R. (2010), Materiality and social life, Nature and Culture, 5 (2), 123–49. Schmidt, A. (1971), The Concept of Nature in Marx, London: New Left Books. Sciullo, A., Wierling, A., Arrobbio, O., Delvaux, S., Gilcrease, G.W., Gregg, J.S., et al. (2020), Collective action initiatives in the energy transition, in A. Diemer, E. Nedelciu, M. Schellens, M. Morales and M. Oostdijk (eds), Paradigms, Models, Scenarios and Practices for Strong Sustainability, Clermont Ferrand: Oeconomia Editions. Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012), The Dynamics of Social Practice, London: Sage. Swyngedouw, E. (2006), Circulations and metabolisms: (hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities. Science as Culture, 15 (2), 105–21. Urry, J. (2003), Global Complexity, Cambridge: Polity. Warde, A. (2005), Consumption and theories of practice, Journal of Consumer Culture, 5, (2), 131–53.

22. Technological fixes: nonknowledge transfer and the risk of ignorance Matthias Gross

KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TECHNO-FIXES Technological fixes, sometimes referred to as techno-solutionism or simply solutionism, have been studied for many years (see Johnston 2018; Rosner 2004; Scott 2011). Although the explicit phrase emerged only during the 1960s, technological fixes (techno-fixes) more generally refer to attempts of using novel or optimized technologies to solve social, cultural, economic, ecological or political problems as solely technical issues. The debate gained momentum in the 1980s as often the problem to be solved was seen as based on the limits and failures of the previous state of the technology itself. By so doing, techno-fixes can foster more problems than they are able to solve. In sociology, it was perhaps Ulrich Beck and his thesis of the risk society that fostered this view. In Beck’s notion, who implicitly built on the tradition of unintended side-effects in sociology and related disciplines (see Mica 2018), the risks of modern societies are based on science and technology. Their solution, paradoxically, should be located in the improvement of these technologies (Beck 1992, p. 192). Currently there is hardly a debate among critical scholars where we can find more consensus than as regards the idea of a technological fix. The term itself is mainly used by scholars generally critical of technical solutions. After all, social and ecological problems cannot be solved just by technical means since new risks and negative consequences can emerge at any stage of a technology’s development (see Dickel 2021). In this context of critical debates on technological solutions, Beck later also introduced the notion of nonknowledge (Beck 1999; Beck and Wehling 2012). Beck’s observation was that contemporary societies are subject to the uninsurability of new types of risks that are incalculable, non-compensable and unknown. This observation has fostered studies on the unintended consequences and rebound effects in modern societies (see Ruzzenenti and Wagner 2018; Sonnberger and Gross 2018; York and McGee 2015), as well as on the centrality of unknowns and ignorance in decision making of all kinds (see Firestein 2012; Gross 2010; Smithson 1989). Albeit not named as this, studies on ignorance make up a relatively old field that implicitly extends back to the well-known saying attributed to Socrates: ‘I know that I know nothing.’ Indeed, the concepts of known and unknown unknowns have existed for a long time and a great deal of scientific research has been conceptualized as investigating known unknowns or, as Merton (1987) named it, ‘specified ignorance.’ In this spirit Smithson (1989) showed that deliberately imposed unknowns can be understood as manufactured in both ordinary action as well as strategic manipulations. Nevertheless, for the most part, the topic of ignorance has suffered from a lack of scholarly attention. It is only relatively recently that academics have begun to rediscover some of the classical concepts related to ignorance and have addressed it as a subject worthy of investi308

Technological fixes  309 gation in its own right (for recent pertinent overviews, see Arfini 2019; Gross and McGoey 2023; Klintman 2019; and the literature cited therein). However, just as there is no universally accepted meaning of terms such as ‘risk’ or ‘uncertainty’, so too does ignorance have its own conceptual frameworks that can be in opposition or completely unrelated to one another (see Smithson 2015). In the following, the focus is on social science notions of ignorance in general, and sociological approaches in particular. I explain why it is important for ignorance to be communicated plainly since increasingly risk assessments and actuarial predictions in relation to technological fixes, such as the transition to renewable energies, lack the historical data and experience necessary to develop useful models and monitoring systems. If historical data are not available, risk assessments are themselves at risk of becoming mere rituals designed to appease the concerned parties involved. Central to this strand of thinking is the possibility of shifting away from traditional strategies of risk assessment or reducing uncertainty, and moving instead toward an enhanced capacity to cope with ignorance by experimenting with what is not known (see Gross 2010). More recent empirical studies in sociology and related fields focusing on technological fixes cover a broad terrain of empirical research ranging through geo-engineering (Rayner 2015), renewable energies (Gross and Mautz 2015) or genetically modified organisms (Levidow and Carr 2012), exploring the ways strategic ignorance and unavoidable uncertainty is purposefully mobilized in order to mitigate blame during controversies. Generally, nearly all current environmental problems require strategies of coping with social issues, and with politics and international affairs. Some of the most burning unsolved puzzles are therefore in the realm of social sciences. However, these are precisely the fields that receive least funding for climate-related research in favor of technology and engineering developments (see Overland and Sovacool 2020; Pielke 2018).

KNOWLEDGE, IGNORANCE AND NONKNOWLEDGE Growth in knowledge will inevitably bring about a concomitant growth in ignorance. This was recognized long ago by Blaise Pascal (1655 [1973]) who stated that knowledge was like a sphere floating in a universe of ignorance: whenever knowledge grows, so too does ignorance. This goes contrary to the intuitive sense that ignorance decreases as knowledge increases. As the knowledge sphere becomes larger, the surface of knowledge expands with it, inexorably generating yet more points of contact with ignorance. In a pessimistic interpretation, knowledge is represented by the radius of the sphere: as the sphere becomes larger, the surface area increases faster than the radius, so that in processes of knowledge production ignorance grows faster than knowledge. An optimistic interpretation considers knowledge to reside in the volume of the sphere, so that knowledge grows faster than ignorance, that is, the points of contact of the surface with the unknown do not increase as fast as the volume (Mittelstraß 1992, pp. 83–8). Whichever interpretation we favor, there are varying shades of knowledge and ignorance that should be distinguished to make them analytically manageable. The approach adopted here departs from the view that ignorance must necessarily be rendered as something negative. It thus also argues against positioning ignorance on the far side of a continuum from risk to uncertainty. What this perspective obscures, is an understanding of how ignorance can serve as a productive resource. Unlike the term ‘ignorance’, ‘nonknowledge’ indicates a symmetry between accepted positive knowledge and ignorance

310  Handbook of critical environmental politics Table 22.1

Different reactions to surprising events (e.g. technological failures) in terms of coping with unknowns and their relations to ascribed intentionality and temporality Active nonknowledge

Passive nonknowledge

Intentionality of not

Conscious unknowns that are

Specified but not pursued any

Intentionality cannot be ascribed

knowing

rendered useful for acting (e.g.

further, not used as basis for new

– unknown ignorance can only be

for understanding new digital

knowledge (alternative technologies known in retrospect

technologies)

not rendered important for a certain

Temporality of not

Conscious unknowns taken as

task, e.g. hydrogen cars) Unknowns that are either not

Awareness of the unknowns

knowing

the basis for acting according to

explored further as they cannot be

can only develop over time

assessments of whether unknowns coped with within a certain time

Nescience

(e.g. as in the completely

are provisional or whether it may

frame or are rendered dangerous or

unknown consequences of

be impossible to eliminate them

unimportant

chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, in

within a definable time period

the 1930s)

Source: based on Gross (2019).

that is adequately well defined. With connotations ranging from actively ignoring something to not even knowing that something is unknown, the term ‘ignorance’ has many meanings. ‘Nonknowledge’ can be rendered a specified form of the unknown, and it is this greater precision that makes it suited to the task of analyzing decisions. I refer to ‘positive nonknowledge’ as a type of ignorance in which the limitations and the borders of knowing are intentionally taken into account for acting or planning. ‘Passive nonknowledge’ can be defined as a type of ignorance in which the perceived limits of knowing are intentionally not taken into account for planning or action. It can remain latent or be developed into active nonknowledge, where it will be taken into account. ‘Nescience’ constitutes a different epistemic category from nonknowledge or ignorance given that no one can refer to their own current nescience as it is not part of their conscious nonknowledge (see Table 22.1 with examples for an overview). The aim is to specify ignorance so that it can be used in a meaningful and constructive way. As a consequence, nonknowledge can be seen as the natural reverse side of knowledge. This is referencing that there can (and should) be knowledge about the unknown, that is, a conception encompassing some awareness of what is not known. In order to do something successfully, a person needs a known residue of ignorance. This term indicates the above mentioned symmetry between knowledge and its flipside. Nonknowledge refers more precisely to a specific form of the unknown. This specified form can be used constructively for further planning and activity (positive nonknowledge) or can be rendered unimportant (negative nonknowledge). The latter notion is gaining prominence, for instance, in debates on the legal right not to (have to) know our own genetic identity. In preventive genetic diagnostics, the aim is to identify genetic specificities which may indicate an increased probability of illness, usually at an advanced age (see Andorno 2004; Davies 2020; Wehling 2015). More generally, the right not to know or the right to nonknowledge can be held against medical professionals at a formal institutional level. What seems peculiar with this is not only that the predictions relate to long periods of time but that it is unclear when a disease will manifest, or whether it will do so at all. More important still is the danger that the boundary between illness and health becomes blurred for those affected, as a disadvantageous test result may have an impact on a healthy person’s sense of well-being in their everyday lives. Knowing that you do not know when (or

Technological fixes  311 whether) you may fall seriously ill once a probability has been established is almost certain to make you feel afraid. The right not to know becomes even more relevant when, in the process of genetic testing, relatives are also informed (without their consent) about their genetic risk. Since the options for treating and healing these ‘diseases’ are often very limited, preventive genetic testing throws the shadow of a possibility of future illness over the present without providing any meaningful prospects for dealing with it. The right to nonknowledge is therefore intended to ensure that no one can be forced to accept risk assessments and evaluations of their genetic characteristics. As this example demonstrates, nonknowledge – far from being a detrimental state – is a right that should be protected in order to cushion the impacts of the risks, indeterminacies and uncertainties of scientific expertise (see Chapter 18 in this volume). In addition to protecting people from ‘wrong’ sets of knowledge in genetic testing, ignorance can also be used and misused as a strategic element that can be distributed in order to amplify interest in a product, such as in marketing (Hannah et al. 2014). It can be used as an excuse, as what historian Robert Proctor (2006) once criticized as ‘no proof’ defenses of the tobacco industries that had always known that cigarettes were harmful, but nevertheless were able to hold up their claim of ‘no proof’ of hazards. However, the classical mechanism by which a country’s executive and administration decide what risks citizens have to prepare themselves for does not do justice to the rights of those affected to be active participants (see Egmose 2015; Garcia 2015; Sellke and Renn 2010). This in turn leads to a further feature of contemporary debates, namely, that whereas in the past there seemed to be more risk-related issues, now it appears to be the notion of not knowing that is becoming increasingly important in policy-related issues (Beck and Wehling 2012). Making decisions in a context of nonknowledge is likely to become one of the determining features of decision making in societies of the future. In the example of chemical risk assessments, for example, it is evident that an alternative policy order has emerged in the European Environmental Agency (EEA), where the acknowledgment of ignorance implies a reconsideration of the responsibilities of science, formal policy institutions and various stakeholders. As Waterton and Wynne (2004, p. 100) wrote: ‘If it is not possible to predict the risks of this or that chemical, then the question arises: do we need it and the social purposes it is serving; and do we want the uncontrollable uncertainties which its use brings?’ In relation to the topics addressed in this handbook, the message in this chapter is that it is not science alone but also diverse non-scientific stakeholders that are called upon to play a crucial role in articulating values, concerns and, perhaps, even such things as aesthetic preferences in the course of making a decision for or against a new technology or an ecological intervention. This is a common insight in social studies of risk, but it takes on a different meaning when viewed from the perspective of the stakeholders involved. As regards perception and acceptance, there is a difference between discussing risk issues and issues that involve communicating the existence of things that are yet unknown (see Smithson et al. 2000).

RISK AND IGNORANCE COMMUNICATION Instead of glossing over knowledge gaps with risk assessments or rhetorics of risk, what is often called for is a way to describe ignorance so that, for instance, policy makers have an alternative to risk-related facts and figures when communicating with the public (see Firestein 2012; Owens 2017; Wehling 2015). Some well-known risk analysts have attempted to inte-

312  Handbook of critical environmental politics grate the concept of ignorance into risk assessments and management contexts. However, although Aven and Steen (2010) claim that risk assessments can readily be conducted for the purpose of describing uncertainties by indicating ignorance, these findings are often useless to decision makers. This is why it is increasingly important to understand how decision makers value and construct the unknown, rather than extending the debate to encompass yet another notion of risk. Since knowledge and ignorance can also merge and intertwine in challenging ways, Firestein (2012, p. 173) has argued that scientists ‘have to learn to talk in public about what they don’t know without feeling this is an admission of stupidity’. Imagining a fictitious dialogue between a risk assessor and a decision maker responsible for choosing the best available strategy, Huber suggests that the distinction between ignorance about an issue and knowledge of a probability distribution for that same issue should be dealt with by presenting in full the limitations of the available data. This includes making explicit what knowledge gaps exist and whether it seems feasible to wait until additional information is available or to try things out, ‘invest[ing] a few times’ in order to learn about the process (Huber 2010, p. 373). The prerequisite for waiting for additional information is having the time and finances to do so, while the second strategy entails the possibility of failure. However, as often occurs, the worst decision would probably be to do nothing; with unambiguous knowledge of what is known and not known, decision makers at least know where they stand. Consequently, revealing the limits of knowing in risk assessments may be a suitable strategy to move forward in the face of lack of knowledge. This also raises questions, however, about the varied ways in which actors may seek to not know about certain things in that they may consciously prevent knowledge from emerging in the first place (Cleary 2012; Frickel 2014; Hess 2015). A crucial question here is, how much do actors need to know in order to make strategic use of deliberate knowledge avoidance? Consider an example. In the context of cleaning up contaminated land, nonknowledge can prove to be a useful resource. Being open about the limits of knowing can be beneficial in planning and policy making. The following statement from a state authority official in Germany evidently indicates that it was obvious to all the stakeholders involved in a remediation project on contaminated sites that something had to be done, as doing nothing or waiting for proper knowledge and risk assessments would not be the best of all possible decisions: In such a complex situation we cannot say exactly what type of measures we need in order to take action against these hazards. We just don’t know, although [name of an engineering company] has conducted research on the issue since 2003. The basic research done by [name of academic research institute], with its more technical aspects, has also been integrated to help evaluate different variants. But we still can’t say exactly what is going on with the groundwater. And yet we need to do something, don’t we? So exactly how much do we have to do? This [that is, not knowing] doesn’t mean that we can stop the process and tell everybody to wait until we have a risk assessment. (Cited in Bleicher and Gross 2011, p. 195)

This quote is offered to illustrate how uncertainties and knowledge gaps do not necessarily have to be communicated using notions of risk, but in respect of what is not known. Building on the terminology introduced previously, this means that, starting from a general awareness that there is something they do not know (ignorance), the actors developed ‘positive nonknowledge’ (or ‘specified ignorance’ to use Merton’s classic notion) and took it into account when making their decision. As regards analytical focus, it is important to see that, in many instances, actors themselves often consider things that are unknown to be the more concrete

Technological fixes  313 issues to be discussed; in that context, it may be misleading to frame these issues in terms of risk. This is important given that risk assessments are often not understood by the general public owing to a phenomenon known as the neglect of probability (Sunstein 2002), or the tendency to misunderstand or simply disregard risk evaluations when making a decision. This tendency is often amplified by the zero risk bias, whereby most people prefer the complete elimination of risks (however small) to a reduction in greater risks (see Baron et al. 1993). A concerned public normally understands the notion of risk in terms of probability, such as: how likely is it that my house will be affected by seismic activities through geothermal drillings? How likely is it that I am going to die at the age of 54 since my father also died at this age? Furthermore, it can appear to be irresponsible to acknowledge uncertainty in ways that reduce ignorance to measurable probabilities. Thus it makes sense to develop analyses of ignorance on a par with risk studies: when asked to reach a decision, in many instances people prefer to be told about and to reflect on what is not known instead of to be told about probabilities (see Maxim and Mansier 2014). Nonknowledge can be regarded as additional information that brings a new perspective to the debate.

NONKNOWLEDGE AS A COMPLEMENT TO RISK-BASED ANALYSIS Instead of incorporating ‘black swans’ and other types of unknowns almost ad infinitum into risk analysis and thereby defining ever more aspects of decision making as ‘risk’, the limitations of locating social processes and decision making within the field of risk should be used to strengthen extant concepts. Only by clarifying the differences between risk and types of not knowing can ignorance studies be a useful complement to risk studies. If precautionary action is to be taken in a timely manner, decision makers often cannot afford to wait for specific knowledge to become available; instead, they must grapple with the problem of what is not known and what cannot be predicted (see Renn 2008). The first important question is why something is not known and, second – possibly more important – what actions and decisions are appropriate given this lack of knowledge. This, as stated by Aven and Steen (2010, p. 1121) is a ‘value judgment’, and, perhaps even more so, a question of available resources, but also of taste, of responsibility, of aesthetic preferences, of intuition or of sheer adventurousness. This implicitly also correlates with recommendations made by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), which proposes a fourfold characterization of hazards. Here, only ‘simple’ risk problems, where probabilities and impacts can be compared, are flagged as risk (Renn 2005, pp. 51–2). I would add that in instances where there is scientific dissent about a technological fix, to help decision makers it should be expressed as what knowledge is disputed and what is agreed upon. Evident knowledge gaps thus need to be related to extant possibilities to deal with uncertainties, such as the IPCC’s assessments, and ways to deal with uncertainties based on the parameters’ agreement and evidence (van der Sluijs 2012). A substantial difference with this is that nonknowledge should be seen in a more neutral light and not, in a prejudiced light, as uncertainty. This supports the observation that the issues involved in debates on the general uncertainty of life might, in many instances, be communicated not only in terms of concepts of risk but additionally and sometimes alternatively in terms of strategic or accidental constructions of ignorance – as the coronavirus pandemic that began in late 2019 has shown.

314  Handbook of critical environmental politics

OUTLOOK: KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER NEEDS TO BE COMPLEMENTED BY NONKNOWLEDGE TRANSFER The critical potential of a comprehensive view of nonknowledge may have become most apparent during the 2020 pandemic. The governmentality concerning the environment, by making a case for preparedness and resilience, often fails to express what is known and what is unknown. It can be conceived of as a way of coordinating contingent activities of diverse actors (for example, political parties, virologists, economic players and industries) which are continued despite an acknowledged awareness of ignorance, so that processes do not have to be interrupted. Coping with the coronavirus should be understood as decision making based on not knowing (see Gross 2021). From a sociological viewpoint it should be evident that instead of glossing over knowledge gaps with risk assessments or sidestepping them by rhetorics of certainty (for example, listing decimal places in the effective reproduction number (R),1 albeit the original data is based on rough estimates), what is needed is a means by which to describe nonknowledge so that, for instance, policy makers have an alternative to risk assessments based on limited data and figures when communicating with the public. In general, given the unavoidable uncertainties of the situation with the worldwide pandemic, decision making may necessitate an open acknowledgment that nonknowledge cannot be avoided. Thus, it can help to make the unknown more transparently explicit in order to build trust and collaboration among concerned citizens, researchers, planners and policy makers. After all, trust can serve as a bridge between knowledge and nonknowledge (Simmel 1906; see Möllering 2006). As with the coronavirus pandemic, trust in dealing with unknowns has become a reality not by choice but by necessity. When virologists reveal their nonknowledge, they need to be transparent about why it is impossible to have more certainty right now. The aim thus is not to overcome ignorance but to develop possibilities for decision making in spite of not knowing. Openly admitting and acknowledging that nonknowledge can be rendered part of ‘good science’ might foster new trust in science and its organizations. This, in turn, should also help to make nonknowledge a subject of open, democratic debate. In addition to the often quoted knowledge transfer between science and society, in view of the coronavirus crisis we should think about strategies to develop further successful ways to communicate and transfer knowledge gaps and unavoidable nonknowledge to a concerned public and policy makers, and among different cultures, such as between virologists and economists, doctors, nurses, police, supermarkets, teachers and manufacturers of masks and other medical equipment. In the same way that knowledge transfer is meant to disseminate scientific knowledge and provide inputs to problem solving for policy makers, it needs to be completed with nonknowledge transfer to capture, clarify and unambiguously communicate what is unknown, and make it available and understandable to the public. Nonknowledge needs to be understood as part of problem solving. This also requires new norms, for instance, in modelling, that enable decisions to be made that under traditional circumstances may have been rendered impossible. After all, transparently communicating the reality of knowledge gaps could offer new ways to discuss accountability. Therefore modelers must not project more certainty to their models than their models deserve (see Saltelli et al. 2020). In addition, policy makers need to be clear about this so they cannot easily escape accountability for ‘knowledge’ of their own choosing. Thus understood, nonknowledge transfer is even more difficult than knowledge transfer because it is often rendered a detrimental state, even if it is obvious that no more (reliable) knowledge can

Technological fixes  315 be generated in a given time. Worse, a great deal of nonknowledge is difficult to communicate since it is tacit or simply uncommon to articulate in a world where knowledge is rendered a most important value. To make matters worse, stressing on nonknowledge may be misused by stakeholder and industry actors as an excuse (‘we could not know any better’) or by denialists of all sort (the problem does not exist at all). However, glossing over the unknown with risk assessments or assumptions about safety that is not there cannot be the right way forward either. Indeed, the possibilities of new technologies as social and ecological cures for current ills have for far too long shown that they lead down the wrong track. In the same way that social, economic and ecological problems of the twenty-first century cannot be reduced to mere technological solutions over the long term, so the basis for any solution cannot ignore that ignorance is a large part of decision making to cure any ills.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I thank the editors and one anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Parts of this chapter build on sections from Gross (2016) and Gross (2019).

NOTE 1. According to standard definitions, the basic reproduction number (R0) is the reproduction number of a virus in a population when there is no immunity from past exposures or vaccination, nor any deliberate intervention in disease transmission. The effective reproduction number (R) is considered when there is some immunity or some intervention measures are in place. If R > 1, the number of cases will increase, such as at the start of an epidemic. Where R = 1, the disease is endemic, and where R < 1 there will be a decline in the number of cases.

REFERENCES Andorno, R. (2004), The right not to know: an autonomy based approach, Journal of Medical Ethics, 30 (5), 435–9. Arfini, S. (2019), Ignorant Cognition: A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-Knowing, Heidelberg: Springer. Aven, T. and Steen, R. (2010), The concept of ignorance in a risk assessment and risk management context, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 95 (11), 1117–22. Baron, J., Gowda, R. and Kunreuther, H. (1993), Attitudes toward managing hazardous waste: what should be cleaned up and who should pay for it? Risk Analysis, 13 (2), 183–92. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Beck, U. (1999), World Risk Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Beck, U. and Wehling, P. (2012), The politics of non-knowing: an emerging area of social and political conflict in reflexive modernity, in F.D. Rubio and P. Baert (eds), The Politics of Knowledge, London: Routledge, pp. 33–57. Bleicher, A. and Gross, M. (2011), Response and recovery in the remediation of contaminated land in Eastern Germany, in R.A. Dowty and B.L. Allen (eds), Dynamics of Disaster: Lessons on Risk, Response and Recovery, London: Earthscan, pp. 187–202. Cleary, T. (2012), Undone science and blind spots in medical treatment research, Social Medicine, 6 (4), 234–39.

316  Handbook of critical environmental politics Davies, B. (2020), The right not to know and the obligation to know, Journal of Medical Ethics, 46 (5), 300–3. Dickel, S. (2021), Der ‘Technological Fix’: Zur Kritik einer kritischen Semantik, in SONA - Netzwerk Soziologie der Nachhaltigkeit (eds), Soziologie der Nachhaltigkeit, Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 271–84. Egmose, J. (2015), Action Research for Sustainability: Social Imagination between Citizens and Scientists, Farnham: Ashgate. Firestein, S. (2012), Ignorance: How it Drives Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frickel, S. (2014), Not here and everywhere: the non-production of scientific knowledge, in D.E. Kleinman and K. Moore (eds), Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology and Society, London: Routledge, pp. 277–91. Garcia, L.B. (2015), Participatory Democracy and Civil Society in the EU: Agenda-Setting and Institutionalisation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gross, M. (2010), Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gross, M. (2016), Risk and ignorance, in A. Burgess, A. Alemanno and J. Zinn (eds), Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 310–17. Gross, M. (2019), The paradox of the unexpected: normal surprises and living with nonknowledge, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 61 (3), 20–5. Gross, M. (2021), The largest possible experiment: the corona pandemic as nonknowledge transfer, European Sociologist, 46 (2), accessed 24 June 2021 at https://​www​.europeansociologist​.org/​issue​-46​ -pandemic​-impossibilities​-vol​-2/​beliefs​-and​-knowledges​-largest​-possible​-experiment​-corona. Gross, M. and Mautz, R. (2015), Renewable Energies, London: Routledge. Gross, M. and McGoey, L. (eds) (2023), Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Hannah, D., Parent, M., Pitt, L. and Berthon, P. (2014), It’s a secret: marketing value and the denial of availability, Business Horizons, 57 (1), 49–59. Hess, D.J. (2015), Beyond scientific controversies: scientific counterpublics, countervailing industries, and undone science, in P. Wehling, W. Viehöver, and S. Koenen (eds), The Public Shaping of Medical Research, London: Routledge, pp. 151–71. Huber, W.A. (2010), Ignorance is not probability, Risk Analysis, 30 (3), 371–6. Johnston, S.F. (2018), The technological fix as social cure-all, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 37 (1), 47–54. Klintman, M. (2019), Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight from Others, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Levidow, L. and Carr, S. (2012), GM Food on Trial: Testing European Democracy, London: Routledge. Maxim, L. and Mansier, P. (2014), How is scientific credibility affected by communicating uncertainty? The case of endocrine disrupter effects on male fertility, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 20 (1), 201–23. Merton, R.K. (1987), Three fragments from a sociologist’s notebooks: establishing the phenomenon, specified ignorance, and strategic research materials, Annual Review of Sociology, 13, 1–29. Mica, A. (2018), Sociology as Analysis of the Unintended: From the Problem of Ignorance to the Discovery of the Possible, London: Routledge. Mittelstraß, J. (1992), Leonardo-Welt: Über Wissenschaft, Forschung und Verantwortung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Möllering, G. (2006), Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity, Oxford: Elsevier. Overland, I. and Sovacool, B.K. (2020), The misallocation of climate research funding, Energy Research & Social Science, 62 (suppl. C), art. 101349, accessed 9 December 2021 at https://​www​.sciencedirect​ .com/​journal/​energy​-research​-and​-social​-science/​vol/​62/​suppl/​C. Owens, K. (2017), Too much of a good thing? American childbirth, intentional ignorance, and the boundaries of responsible knowledge, Science, Technology & Human Values, 42 (5), 848–71. Pascal, B. (1655), The Physical Treatises of Pascal, repr. 1973, New York: Octagon. Pielke, R. Jr (2018), Opening up the climate policy envelope, Issues in Science and Technology, 34 (4), accessed 28 June 2021 at https://​issues​.org/​opening​-up​-the​-climate​-policy​-envelope/​. Proctor, R.N. (2006), ‘Everyone knew but no one had proof’: tobacco industry use of medical history expertise in US Courts, 1990–2002, Tobacco Control, 15 (suppl. 4), 117–25.

Technological fixes  317 Rayner, S. (2015), To know or not to know? A note on ignorance as a rhetorical resource in geoengineering debates, in M. Gross and L. McGoey (eds), Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 308–17. Renn, O. (2005), White Paper on Risk Governance: Towards an Integrative Approach, Geneva: International Risk Governance Council (IRGC). Renn, O. (2008), Precaution and ecological risk, in S.E. Jørgensen and B.D. Fath (eds), Encyclopedia of Ecology, vol. 4, Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 2909–16. Rosner, L. (ed.) (2004), The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems, London: Routledge. Ruzzenenti, F. and Wagner, A. (2018), Efficiency and the rebound effect in the hegemonic discourse on energy, Nature + Culture, 13 (3), 356–77. Saltelli, A., Bammer, G., Bruno, I., Charters, E., Di Fiore, M., Didier, E., et al. (2020), Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto, Nature, 582, 482–4. Scott, D. (2011), The technological fix criticisms and the agricultural biotechnology debate, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 24 (3), 207–26. Sellke, P. and Renn, O. (2010), Risk, society and environmental policy: risk governance in a complex world, in M. Gross and H. Heinrichs (eds), Environmental Sociology: European Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Challenges, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 295–321. Simmel, G. (1906), The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies, American Journal of Sociology, 11 (4), 441–98. Smithson, M. (1989), Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms, Dordrecht: Springer. Smithson, M. (2015), Ignorance studies: interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary, in M. Gross and L. McGoey (eds), Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 385–99. Smithson, M., Bartos, T. and Takemura, K. (2000), Human judgment under sample space ignorance, Risk, Decision and Policy, 5 (2), 135–50. Sonnberger, M. and Gross, M. (2018), Rebound effects in practice: an invitation to consider rebound from a practice theory perspective, Ecological Economics, 154 (C), 14–21. Sunstein, C.R. (2002), Probability neglect: emotions, worst cases, and law, Yale Law Journal, 112 (1), 61–107. Van der Sluijs, J.P. (2012), Uncertainty and dissent in climate risk assessment: a post-normal perspective, Nature + Culture, 7 (2), 174–95. Waterton, C. and Wynne, B. (2004), Knowledge and political order in the European Environmental Agency, in S. Jasanoff (ed.), States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order, London: Routledge, pp. 87–108. Wehling, P. (2015), Fighting a losing battle? The right not to know and the dynamics of biomedical knowledge production, in M. Gross and L. McGoey (eds), Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 206–14. York, R. and McGee, J.A. (2015), Understanding the Jevons paradox, Environmental Sociology, 2 (1), 77–87.

23. The values of Nature Clive L. Spash and Tone Smith

INTRODUCTION The differential values of Nature become evident in the divisions between three positions: (1) respecting and leaving room for autonomous Nature (for example, wilderness, rewilding and flourishing); (2) using, but living in symbiotic relationships with, natural processes through traditional management (for example, aboriginal fire ecology, or forms of organic agriculture and permaculture); and (3) attempted domination over Nature in modernity via invasive technologies. The first and third positions can be seen as opposite extremes, where Nature is either dominant over or dominated by humans. The middle ground of the second position confronts rather than dismisses the tension between Nature and culture, human and non-human values. These three positions summarise society–Nature relations and the surrounding debates. They encapsulate something of the ongoing conflicts over the concept and values of Nature, and as such aid reflection on how we understand Nature. The first position may be seen as looking back to hunter-gatherer societies, a time before widespread human population expansion, and no or low impact land-use change. In this position, Nature as provider is associated with lifestyles of sufficiency (Chapter 34 in this volume). These ideas crossover into the second position, as reflected in regarding indigenous cultures as being closer to Nature and natural processes. Similarly, the Romantic rural idyll is an idealised picture of humans living in harmony with Nature. Strong positions on value in Nature may be involved and in more recent times have been associated with deep ecology, and, often very loosely defined, concepts of ‘intrinsic value’ in non-human entities. Ideas of living from and within Nature, meeting needs, sufficiency and harmonious living are evident in modern environmental movements, such as degrowth. One set of counter arguments, to the idea of a benevolent Nature as provider, emphasises that life can be hard and Nature cruel. This appears as justification for increasing human management of natural processes (the third position). The struggle of ‘man’ against Nature is then employed to justify taming or eradicating wild animals, controlling the wilderness and making ‘wastelands’ productive. Such arguments have been cited by feminist literature as the imposition of a patriarchal social order. Thus, the domination of Nature as female is connected to the exploitation and suppression of the feminine and women (Merchant 1980; Seager 1993). A somewhat different reaction against appeals to Nature, and naturalness, warns of the naturalisation of human social norms, practices and behaviours. More specifically, a range of social structures and mechanisms are seen as having been naturalised – elitist class relations, patriarchy, sexual oppression, heterosexuality, ethnic/racial discrimination and eating meat. Thus, imposed norms of a dominant social group may be legitimised as natural in a form of social Darwinism. Reaction against this may include criticising the imperialist imposition of concepts and value systems. An explicitly subjective and cultural basis for values then appears as an alternative, where claims to objectivity are dismissed, and may be replaced by conven318

The values of Nature  319 tionalism (that is, values are merely social conventions), cultural relativism of knowledge and plural perspectives as equally valid. This counter to naturalisation is often presumed to be politically progressive on the assumption that it is politically tolerant. However, the move to cultural determination has also led to social constructionist arguments for the dissolution of Nature (Pollini 2013). These fail to account for the presence of Nature as a concept across time and space in human society and dismiss out-of-hand non-human values. Opening the door to the legitimisation of all positions as equally valid undermines knowledge claims and undermines the ability to determine what (if anything) is wrong with modernity. As a consequence, the currently hegemonic modernist position of domination over Nature can actually gain support from this postmodernist critique of Nature. As noted, this goes to the opposite extreme from the first position. It proposes an anti-non-human approach, and is typically allied with technological optimism, supporting economic growth as human progress, relying on anthropocentric, consequentialist arguments and utilitarian values. All three positions concern how Nature should be conceptualised, humans regard themselves, moral actions should be conducted and value conflicts addressed. Modernist-centred human-value positions envision man, or rather, (patriarchal) men, as in control of everything, with the ability to choose what is to be valued and what not. Postmodernists similarly place humans at the centre by dissolving Nature into the human and making it a social construct. Nature, if it is accepted that it exists at all, is only a hybrid, an artefact, of human making. The zeitgeist phrase of the early twenty-first century became ‘we are living in the Anthropocene’, a new geological era (Chapter 5 in this volume). This conflates global human impact with control while engaging in a Promethean discourse (Baskin 2015). Humans are described as both limited, facing catastrophe, and unlimited in their potentiality; that is, possessing the ability to make the world anew using geoengineering, genetic modification and the latest computing and communications technologies. The contrasting perspective is that modern human society has lost some basic understanding of the values of Nature that go beyond functionally fulfilling humans’ desires. In this view, humanity is out of control and subject to ultimate domination by the very structures it claims to have made irrelevant. The aim here is to explore the underlying values behind these positions on Nature. We start by clarifying what is understood by the concept ‘Nature’ and introducing the main value theories in Western philosophy (that is, rights, utility and virtues). On this basis, we explore the moral debate over how humans should value non-human reality and the entities of which it is constituted. Ethics and morality are taken as synonymous, and as rational means of guiding action. This refers to right/wrong/permissible behaviour with regard to basic values and a common concern across ethical theories for the alleviation of suffering and promotion of well-being (Pojman 1989). When considering the values of Nature, core concerns arise as to moral standing and considerability of non-humans, subjective versus objective values, plural values and incommensurability. In the penultimate section, we turn to the hegemonic policy discourse on environmental values that places them within price-making market systems and a neoliberal ideology. This involves the ongoing struggle to counter, transform and move beyond the reduction of all values of Nature to a single metric, namely, money.

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CONCEPTUALISING NATURE AND VALUE What Is Nature? Most fundamentally we must ask what is understood by the concept ‘Nature’, not least because of a postmodernist trend in denial of even its existence (Pollini 2013). Nature is generally taken as ‘other’ than human. However, humans are simultaneously part of Nature, not least as physical, chemical and biological entities. Their interaction and impact on the natural world around them is self-evident. Confusion then arises as to what the concept means. Defining Nature also requires clarifying different uses of the term (see Soper 1995, esp. ch.5). As an applied philosophical concept Nature stands in contrast to human (for example, society, culture and artefact). It represents a means of understanding the ways in which humans and their activities are distinct. That something is distinct from other entities should not be confused with being separate from other things. For example, your hand is distinct from the rest of your body but connected to (not separate from) your body of which it is a part. Clearly, humans are part of a greater whole and part of Nature, but remain distinct entities. A great deal of confusion comes from equating the terms ‘separate’ and ‘distinct’ and treating them as synonymous. The values of Nature are, then, about recognition of similarity and difference involving debates in environmental ethics over human–Nature relations and the status of non-humans. A second use of the term ‘Nature’ is ontological and concerns the fundamental aspects of reality that humans live within, that is the natural structures to which all are subject, metaphorically referred to as the Laws of Nature. Science has enabled humanity to harness Nature’s causal powers while remaining subject to its law-like conditions and constraints. A confusion here is to equate advances in human understanding of the structure and functioning of Nature with ability to determine and dominate everything, with the ultimate aim of creating reality in man’s image. While humans impact on the bio-physical world, which is why there is an ecological crisis, they do not determine the structure, mechanisms and causal powers of Nature. Contra some commentators’ opinions (most notably Merchant 1980, 2006), early pioneers of modern scientific approaches, such as Francis Bacon (1620 [1889]), understood that Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed, meaning humans do not determine the rules of the game but have to learn them and play by the rules as set down by Nature. That there are real structures outside human control is exactly why ignoring biophysical limits results in ecosystems collapse, species going extinct, humans dying from pollutants, and so on. Values here take the form of absolutes with associated concepts of thresholds, constraints and tipping points. A third meaning of ‘Nature’ is that found in policy discussions, public debates and lay discourses. Here Nature is a quality of the otherness of the non-human. This can be seen as a dialectical concept with the human on one end and the natural on the other. In this context humans experience the outcome of their interactions and the changes this involves. What constitutes the ‘natural’ is judged by the quality of the environment, the extent of biodiversity and the proximity of what is produced to its non-human state, for example, regarding a wooden chair as more natural than a metal one. Nature is then commonly regarded as degraded through human actions, as empirically observed in events, for example, the spread of domesticated animals, contamination of soil, air and water, manipulation of forests and extent of urbanisation. Here human intervention and management has qualitative impacts with aesthetic consequences, and creates forms of Nature that are actualised in landscapes and the occur-

The values of Nature  321 rence, or lack, of species. This third meaning is the main preoccupation of policy discourses, conservation, environmental activism, Green politics and popular debate. Despite the policy relevance, there has been a lack of clarity as to how naturalness should be understood and its philosophical basis (for an informed clarification of the meaning, see Deckers 2021). Nature, the non-human other, must then be understood as combining these different elements: an object in relation to humanity as subject which is distinct but not separate; a deep structure beyond human control that sets a range of limits (which humans ignore at their peril); and the quality of actualised interactions humans have in changing – creating, destroying and manipulating – their surrounding environment and its constituent parts. How these aspects of Nature are comprehended is reflected in our formalisation and expression of values. Environmental Values The various categories identified entail different understandings of what is at stake in defining the values of Nature. Philosophers and ethicists are concerned with comprehending the meaning of otherness and its moral implications for humans in their relationships with non-humans. Natural sciences seek to understand the structure and mechanisms of Nature to achieve specific consequences (for example, to overcome gravity and fly using one set of mechanisms to counter another). Ecologists are also concerned with structure and functioning, not least because modernity has entailed dramatic ecosystem decline and collapse. Environmental politics and Green movements (Chapter 35 in this volume) tend to operate at the contextually changing surface layer in which pandemics come and go, nuclear power stations melt down, climate-change driven wild fires devastate large regions, and corporations pollute, extract resources and destroy habitat impacting humans and non-humans alike. Preoccupation with different aspects of Nature entails recognition of different values. That Nature is associated with different values for different people is unsurprising. As O’Neill et al. (2007) stated, humans live both from, in and with the environment. Living from Nature means most fundamentally that humans depend on functioning ecosystems and natural resources for their survival. Nature has value in being useful and is instrumental for human ends. However, humans are more than physical beings with physical needs. Humans live in Nature with others, both human and non-human, in specific places at specific times, and this entails values relating to a sense of place as known locations and set within a given historical and social context. We also live with Nature as one set of living organisms that can experience the wonder of life in a world that existed before hominids arose and is autonomous from humans (that is, the ability of non-humans to survive and flourish without us). Interpreting these different relationships has been contentious, involving challenges to traditional anthropocentric ethics with propositions of the need for a new approach, an environmental ethics. Ethics concerns how we decide what constitutes a good or bad action, valid principles for acting and their relationships. In Western philosophy there are three main ethical theories: utilitarianism, deontology and virtues. The first is a specific form of consequentialism and associated with Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of judging what is best on the basis of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of morally considerable individuals. This has been adapted by mainstream economists into preference utilitarianism, where what individuals express as being preferred is deemed a choice that is equated to an expression of value. Under systems of utilitarianism there is intrinsic value in utility (which may be equated to well-being or welfare). Typically, utility is restricted to those consequences that affect humans, which

322  Handbook of critical environmental politics may include their concerns over others, for example, feeling bad about animal suffering. In theory, the consequences which affect the interests of non-humans could also be directly taken into account, regardless of whether those consequences have any effect on human well-being, by extending the community of morally considerable beings to non-humans. The second ethical system is derived from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and regards an individual undertaking the right action as good in itself, so that conformity to principles of right action is intrinsically valuable. Deontology is typically associated with obligations to act in certain ways and rights-based approaches. In modernity this forms the moral basis for legal systems, although ethics are distinct from the law and operate without the need for legislation or judicial sanctions, that is, the motivation is intrinsic to the individual. Some deontologists postulate the existence of moral absolutes, such as Kant’s (2012) categorical imperative or Rawls’ (1972) contractualism. Right action means a moral agent is someone who, of their own volition (that is, internal conscience), undertakes duties, fulfils obligations, follows moral codes of conduct or holds to ethical principles. The third ethical system derives from Aristotle and resurfaced as part of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church in medieval Europe, but has declined since the Enlightenment as the other two ethical systems became dominant. Virtue ethicists focus on being over doing. It is who you are, which character traits you express through your actions, which is valued. The right actions express virtuous character traits. The theory is based in a specific understanding of the human being and of the purpose, or greater meaning, of life. Hence, for Aristotle, virtue was fundamentally linked to human eudaimonia, often interpreted as flourishing, leading a good, happy and meaningful life. Moral absolutes and objective values in claims about the purpose of human life, or what constitutes the good life for humans, tend to be controversial, but can link to an ethics emphasising the importance of care, and relations to others, as in feminist theories. A key tension in environmental debates, explored below, is that between utilitarian and rights-based approaches. However, the focus on these theories has also been criticised as Western ethnocentrism that neglects alternatives (for example, indigenous knowledge). That the three main value theories are limited in their ability to address the non-human world stimulated the development of environmental ethics. Thus, during the rise of the environmental movement, Routley ([1973] 2009) argued that a new – an environmental ethics – is necessary to address the failures of modernity with respect to human–Nature relations. Industrial modernity justified modes of thought that were anthropocentric, placing humans, primarily men, above all else, either by attributing to them superior rights or by prioritising consequences for humans. Traditional (pre-industrial) human societies regulated their coexistence with and behaviour toward the non-human world via conventions, rituals, norms, traditions, rules and taboos. Capitalism entailed the deliberate eradication of customs in the drive to create a commodified world of exchange values (Thompson 1993). A new, environmental, ethics would therefore imply new modes of economic conduct and challenging modernity. Social structure, unlike the structure of Nature, can be changed, even if this tends to happen slowly over generations. That means, values, customs, practices and habits can change. However, these changes do not necessarily mean improvement; for example, the rise of capitalism or fascism. There is then ongoing social transformation and conflict. The phrase ‘natural value’ or ‘value of Nature’ has become embedded in the current hegemonic economic thinking that regards value as only existing in the marketplace, where one thing is traded for another and everything has a price. Producing money numbers to represent

The values of Nature  323 ecosystems services, converting Nature into capital and generally placing ecological entities into a financial discourse is how capitalism has addressed environmental problems. It has now become the dominant way of arguing in public policy debates even for the environmental movement itself. However, simultaneously, empirical studies reveal that people hold conflicting plural values and values that are incommensurable, under-cutting the entire approach. This is evident in actions such as refusals to trade, regardless of the price paid in compensation, and people risking, or sacrificing, their lives to protect places, landscapes and non-humans. The basis for these acts runs against the belief in purely anthropocentric values and in favour of an extension of moral considerability to non-human Nature.

MORAL CONSIDERABILITY OF NON-HUMANS: UTILITY AND RIGHTS A key distinction made in Western value theory is between the valuing agent (for whom things are of value and who evaluates) and the object/entity of valuation (the valuable, that which has value). This leads to some controversy over which entities are valuable in themselves (that is, intrinsic value) as opposed to being solely valued for their usefulness in achieving the ends of a valuing agent (that is, instrumental and contributory value). A key element of dispute over the values of Nature concerns who has moral standing (that is, counts as a moral agent) and who is morally considerable (that is, has interests that moral agents must treat as important). The question then arises: do only humans matter morally (anthropocentric perspective), or are there grounds for including non-human entities as moral agents or morally considerable (ecocentric perspective)? What is the basis for answering this question and drawing equivalences? Western ethical theories then aim to identify what is valuable, those for whom value matters, grounds for attributing moral standing or considerability, and how moral agents should act as a consequence. Typically, humans are regarded as the moral agents, that is, those doing the valuing, or the subject for whom the valuable is desirable and influences their action. If value is given by the choices of the valuing agent then it is regarded as being subjective. An example where this proves problematic is mainstream economists’ assumption that individuals give value to things they prefer and the value of those things is indicated by the strength of individual preferences. If people like pandas and not spiders, then the former have value and latter do not (Spash 2008c). The valued and the valuable are equated. Under such an approach, that valuing agents may get things wrong is inexplicable because what is preferred/chosen is by definition what is valuable/good. Accepting that valuing agents do get things wrong requires distinguishing what is valuable from what might (mistakenly) be held to have value. More generally, value may be regarded as something to be sought, for example, seeking to live a good life or conducting the right acts. From this perspective, value appears objective (that is, constitutive of the good) and acts as a guide to moral action. The moral standing of humans might be regarded as value inherent in humans that is outside of how humans, as subjects, value. What is the value of a human qua human? Your value is not given to you by other humans or their values, nor by yourself. This may be expressed as humans having intrinsic value or being inherently of value because they can produce intrinsic value (that is, utility, righteous action or virtue). However, the question of ‘what is the value of Nature?’ asks us to reflect upon how values might extend beyond humans and whether

324  Handbook of critical environmental politics ‘others’ might have either moral standing (for example, inherent value) or qualify for moral considerability. For example, wildlife conservationists have increasingly centred their concerns on entire species, the consequences of species extinction and the reduction of global biodiversity for ecosystems and ultimately the planet. There is then a distinction required between whether the health of ecosystems, or the planet (for example, personified as Gaia), is to be taken as of value in itself, or because this would adversely affect human quality of life. Similarly, the view that extinction of species (or death of individual animals) is bad in itself, regardless of the consequences, contrasts with the view that the negativity of such an outcome derives from its consequences – judged in relation to violating an ethical (for example, deontological, utilitarian or virtue) principle. The range of possible consequences and principles to be invoked will depend upon the entities that are deemed to enter into direct moral consideration and the moral standing attributed to them. Consider some endangered species of elephant. The extinction of each individual elephant may be held to be of moral concern, or only the extinction of the entire species, or only the impact that the loss of elephants (individually or as a whole) has on the ecosystem and its functions. Our answer to the question tends to depend on a prior question: whether the elephants matter only insofar as their survival affects the interests of humans, or whether the elephants themselves are held to have morally considerable interests. That is, are humans the only morally considerable creatures or are non-humans (for example, elephants) also morally considerable? The ecosystem services literature makes the implicit assumption that what matters is provision of value for human ends and nothing else. The role of elephants, or anything else, can be replaced if the value is maintained. Norman Myers, in his book The Sinking Ark (Myers 1979) argues that whether a species should be saved (that is, scarce resources should be used to save them) depends on their relative usefulness. He rejects saving species come what may. The issue is about whose ends (among those with moral standing) are served by the conservation of species, and how does saving a species enhance the long-term welfare of humans (assumed to be the only entities with moral standing). This, in turn, implies prioritising species in order of potential for extinction. This type of approach is instrumental, consequential and anthropocentric. If only humans are morally considerable, then the argument arises that specific species should be preserved only to the extent that a desire for this is reflected in human preferences. This has led environmental economists to argue for optimal extinction as an economically valid approach (for example, Swanson 1994). Traditionally wildlife conservation has sought to preserve key iconic species, for example, lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceros and pandas, at the expense of others. This vertebrate-centred ethics limits the morally considerable community to a small number of higher mammals. Yet, the basis for such a restricted approach is challenged by recognising the moral considerability of all those creatures who, in some meaningful sense, have the capacity to suffer. Historically the most influential version of consequentialism has been utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is egalitarian in that it considers equally the interests of all morally considerable beings affected by an action, for example, the abilities of all beings to suffer. As Bentham ([1789] 1823, pp. 235–6, original emphasis) mentioned in a footnote: ‘The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. … the question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?’ However, Bentham did not pursue the matter. His

The values of Nature  325 own utilitarian approach aimed for the greatest good for the greatest number of humans, and so allowed the sacrifice of the individual (and their well-being) for the greater good. This approach became encapsulated in the idea that the best action is that which generates the greatest net welfare for humans. However, recognition of animal suffering later led others to campaign to prevent cruelty to animals and protect animal welfare. This welfarist approach can be equated to using drugs to prevent pain rather than stopping the causes of pain and suffering. It can be seen as operative in the provision of minimal animal husbandry conditions imposed on industrial farming practices based on the grounds that animal suffering is then avoided. This is also the logic of humane killing. It exemplifies how moral considerability is different from having moral standing (that is, in this case, animal welfare versus humans as the moral agents). Human experimentation on animals can also be justified on the basis that either they feel no pain (that is, drugs may be used) or that the greater good is served (that is, humans will benefit more than the animal suffers). Welfare is often equated with value as ‘utility’, but pinning down the meaning of these terms is far from straightforward. Hence utility can cover a variety of positives, including obtaining preference satisfaction, pleasure (hedonism) and happiness, or avoiding negatives, such as frustration, pain, suffering and loss. Animal welfare as a form of utilitarian argument for avoiding negatives contrasts with recognising the ability of, and allowing for, ‘others’ (that is, non-humans) to flourish and live meaningful lives in their own terms. Mainstream economists have adopted a specific form of utilitarian ethics where they define utility as preference satisfaction, or more precisely value is defined (objectively) as utility that requires assessing welfare of humans based on their preference satisfaction (McShane 2017). In his book Practical Ethics Peter Singer (1979) presents a utilitarian defence of the value of animals that evaluates consequences in terms of the extent to which they satisfy the preferences of the agents granted moral considerability. Following Bentham’s suggestion, this is defined to be all creatures with the capacity to suffer, raising the evaluative problem of assessing preference satisfaction of non-humans, and so not such a practical ethics after all. Economists have struggled to even make sense of assessing human preferences as indicators of value (Spash 2008c). The main alternative to valuing Nature in utilitarian terms has been the Kantian deontological approach. A common example of the extension of rights is the ‘abolishment’ of slavery, where non-white humans were upgraded, from treatment as non-human animals with no moral considerability, to inclusion among those with moral standing (that is, moral agents). Although, in practice, racial discrimination was never removed (as the Black Lives Matter movement made evident) and the slave trade has continued illegally (Chapter 2 in this volume). Crucially, under deontology, rights-bearers possess equal standing and rights apply equally. The classic problem is what to do where conflicts arise between rights. The extension of moral standing to ‘others’ by the environmental movement has mostly been conducted in terms of attributing animals rights, but in recent times has also appeared in more general terms. An example is the ‘rights of Nature’ that came to prominence due to national legislation giving legal and sometimes constitutional recognition to Nature as a subject with inalienable rights. Legal provisions now exist in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Mexico, New Zealand and the USA (Kauffman and Martin 2018). In particular, the struggle of indigenous communities for protection of territory (Chapter 33 in this volume) became associated with making Nature a subject and giving it standing in law (that is, supposed protection via legal sanction not ethical motivation). This is a recognition of interests that tends to relate to humans

326  Handbook of critical environmental politics rather than non-humans. Hence, ‘rights of Nature’ appear more of a political tool than a moral philosophical struggle to recognise Nature’s value as found in indigenous culture (Tanasescu 2015). Institutional differences arise in defining the Nature that bears rights, the rights recognised, who can speak for Nature, whether anyone is responsible for protecting Nature’s rights and, if so, how. In Ecuador, these rights have been mixed with nationalist feelings underpinning a critique of neoliberalism, and aspirations for legal protection among indigenous communities and the decolonisation of society (Espinosa 2019). However, Nature’s rights have paradoxically also been used to promote mega-mining projects in Ecuador – claiming Nature is protected, will be restored or can be compensated – revealing their limitations under neoliberal governance and institutions (Valladares and Boelens 2019). In Brazil such rights also seem to have been ineffective; destruction of the Amazon has accelerated, rather than declined, under the Bolsonaro government.

GOING BEYOND NATURE’S VALUE UNDER NEOLIBERAL PUBLIC POLICY The rise of neoliberalism has seen environmental policy become increasingly dominated by economic approaches and a discourse claiming that making the value of Nature to humans visible in monetary terms will mean it is ʻtaken into accountʼ, or more precisely and quite literally, the accounts of firms, banks and nations. The claim is that if Nature has value then it should be empirically measurable. Pavan Sukdev, head of a major United Nations (UN) backed project on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity (TEEB 2010) and, later, president of the World Wildlife Fund, has claimed that if something cannot be measured it cannot be managed. More recently, the same logic has been pushed forward by The Dasgupta Review, which converts everything, both human and non-human, into forms of financial capital (Dasgupta 2021). Apart from the very specific form value then takes, the destruction of the environment is reduced to an information problem. An implicit claim is that demonstrating the monetary benefits will incentivise – inherently self-interested materialistic – humans, including politicians and business men and women, to take better care of Nature. Ecologists and conservationists have joined with economists to classify and enumerate ecosystem services that can then be ‘valued’ (Chapter 41 in this volume). The value of Nature becomes a matter of subjective human preference, similar to choosing a flavour of ice cream: if you like it then it has value and if you don’t it has none. Protecting Nature then makes the leap of logic to giving Nature a price in the marketplace, leading to the rhetoric of ‘getting the prices right’. The consequences of these market values has long been evident in capitalist modernity, where the primary aim is to commensurate and trade. Prices and monetary values are purely means of facilitating market exchange and creating opportunities for financial returns, and have nothing to do with protecting Nature. For example, biodiversity offsets are justified on the basis of an economic logic where ecosystems and species can be treated as commensurable across time and space, and therefore traded (see Chapter 27 in this volume). The outcome is not protection of biodiversity but instead its destruction justified by the financial value of ‘development’ projects (Spash 2015; Spash and Hache 2021). Framing the value of Nature in this way employs a range of contested assumptions. First, the utilitarian ethic employed is restricted to what is useful for humans (that is, anthropocentric).

The values of Nature  327 Second, the object of value (that is, Nature) is assumed to be a discrete and definable entity (such as a physical commodity) and something that humans can express preferences about. Third, the market is erroneously assumed to automatically protect that which is given a price. Fourth, demonstrating that Nature has a money value is meant to create political action, but there is no theory of politics in the approach nor any specification as to why this should be so. Fifth, the approach assumes there is an information deficit that can be filled by monetary values. In contrast, actors in competitive markets are engaged in a structure that rewards deliberate cost-shifting in full awareness of the destruction and harm involved. Despite these failings, this approach to valuing Nature has become a core aspect of public policy discourses on the environment. Environmental economists have expanded their categories of value together with their methods of valuation. Moving from values reflected in actual markets, designated as ‘use values’, they started in the 1970s hypothesising option, bequest and existence values, as a form of ‘non-use value’, but still within a preference utilitarian philosophy. Some equated existence values with ‘intrinsic values’ in an attempt to claim that all forms of value had now been captured in their ‘total value’ approach. While intrinsic value has several interpretations, they are all contradicted by assuming intrinsic values is given by one agent to another entity. Intrinsic value is an inherent quality of an entity and has nothing to do with preferences. There is also no relationship between existence of an entity and the preference value claims of economists (McShane 2017). Among the tools developed, the contingent valuation method (CVM) became popular and a rare source of primary data in economics. However, CVM has been dogged by controversy (for example, valuation studies undertaken after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989), and its claim to produce monetary values, that are definitive of species and ecosystems worth, lack credibility, both in practice and theory. Concerns include: treatment of protest bids and bid exclusion, use of ‘willingness to pay’ rather than ‘willingness to accept’ compensation for damages, treating respondents holding rights-based beliefs as preference utilitarians and values simply reflecting a scale of psychological attitudes (Ryan and Spash 2011; Spash 2008a). There are wider issues in economic valuation as well, including discounting, assuming marginal analysis is relevant, assuming reversibility, failing to account for preference construction and the role of information (Gowdy and Olsen 1994; Spash 2002). Economists using these techniques produce numbers appearing precise and objective, when they are, in fact, precisely wrong in what they claim to measure. These issues have not dissuaded environmentalists from advocating use of the resulting numbers on the basis that money is the ‘language’ of policy (Smith 2017). The move has been supported by the focus on market-based instruments (so-called ‘solutions’) under neoliberalism, which advocates rational choice that is reduced to weighing-up costs and benefits. Conventional economic cost–benefit analysis can then be employed using extended methods to appraise individuals’ revealed and stated preferences. What goes unnoticed, or unremarked, is how Nature is being conceptualised as an exchangeable item that can be treated as if a commodity, that is, made commensurable and traded. Ecosystems’ functions become ‘ecosystem services’ and natural structure becomes ‘natural capital’. Very particular forms of values are then expressed and expressible via the associated institutional arrangements. Unwittingly, under the guise of being pragmatic, the advocates of equating Nature’s value to a monetary equivalent deny the existence of value pluralism and incommensurability, and downplay the role of scientific knowledge in defining key attributes of Nature (Spash 2009, 2013). Ecologists and conservation biologists have not been immune to changing their concepts and

328  Handbook of critical environmental politics language to conform to the mainstream environmental economic approach, and as a result have undermined their own traditional research (Spash and Aslaksen 2015). Ecologists have long tried to understand interactions and interdependencies within natural ecosystems, including how ecosystems function, and how different species are linked together and depend upon each other as living beings in community. Similar to others in the web of life, humans interact with and are dependent upon other species and the functioning of ecosystems. Societies and economies are embedded in biological, chemical and physical structures upon which they are dependent. This does not mean that all human actions are determined by these structures, but they are certainly constrained by them. Properly functioning natural systems are essential to human survival, and the quality of these systems is a determining factor in human well-being. Therefore, Nature has instrumental value and there are consequences from its destruction. However, this does not mean the concept of intrinsic value can be dismissed as irrelevant. As was noted when introducing the three meta-ethical systems of Western philosophy, forms of intrinsic value exist as a fundamental concept in any value system and cannot be captured by being redefined as use value, as attempted in mainstream economics. Humans can be regarded as having (or creating) intrinsic value in economic theory, since this theory assumes all value derives from humans, but humans themselves do not derive their own value from this system. In other words, humans have an unexplained moral standing for mainstream economists, which is why human preferences count and those of other animals do not. While the concept of intrinsic value has often been used loosely and interpreted differently by many authors (McShane 2017; O’Neill 1992), it addresses an important understanding of what constitutes environmental values (McShane 2007). Empirical research also shows that people do actually relate to Nature in terms of intrinsic value (Butler and Acott 2007). That there are plural values (intrinsic, instrumental and consequential) taking different forms (subjective or objective/absolute), and posing fundamental incommensurabilties, has remained a central problem for those seeking simple means of taking Nature into account, as well as those trying to include all values in some summary form. There are then questions over the relative merits of different value articulating institutions (Vatn 2005, ch. 12). Considering the values of Nature reveals the inability of the typically individualised preference approaches to address the values that are expressed in group participation and deliberation (Spash 2008b). As outlined previously, environmental cost–benefit analysis has become overextended and divorced from its theoretical basis. More than that, it could never address plural incommensurable values because it claims a monistic value and universal commensurability. Attempts to bring the plural values of Nature into decision-making processes then point towards inclusive, deliberative and participatory methods. While facing their own limitations and problems, these methods offer the potential for improving the democratic legitimacy of the environmental decision-making process (Chapter 24 in this volume). Concerns over the restrictive perspectives on the values of Nature imposed in public policy have also been related to the exclusion of indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC). These IPLCs challenge the hegemonic discourse of market value and economic growth, and represent non-Western forms of non-instrumental reasoning. Along these lines, the concept of ‘relational values’ has recently been adopted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) under an approach named ‘Nature’s contribution to people’ (Díaz et al. 2018). Relational values are supposed to fill a perceived

The values of Nature  329 gap between instrumental and intrinsic value. They have been described as building from interpersonal relations and involving reasons for loving and caring that create meaningfulness. Neuteleers (2020) identifies four characteristics as constitutive of relational values: mutual creation, identity dependence, motivation dependence and a shared final end that is ‘good in itself’. However, the idea of being good/valuable in itself would seem to be a form of intrinsic value, even though the idea was to go beyond this in some way. An important additional aspect appears to be the role of identifying with the object of value in what appears to be a self-constituting form of psychological relationship, that is, feeling connected, feeling something is a part of yourself. However, as Neuteleers notes, the self-motivation to act in a particular way towards an object is not a duty/obligation (that is, deontology). Overall, there seems to be a close proximity between relational values and the Aristotelian concepts of eudaemonism, virtues, flourishing and the good life. Also, the relational values literature can be criticised for using vague and broad definitions of eudaemonic values, being unclear about the relationship between Nature and the good life, and between eudaemonic values and other values, and, finally, for risking reducing eudaemonic value to instrumental value. Even though relational values seem to suffer from vagueness, complex definitions and potentially having confusing overlaps with instrumental and intrinsic values, they are an important expression of the discontent with current polices and of the ongoing struggle to (conceptually) capture the complex relationships humans have with Nature.

CONCLUSION Attempts to remove the concept of Nature, because it is blamed for having naturalised unethical, exploitative and discriminatory social behaviour, have been misdirected and failed to account for fundamental aspects of the concept, with respect to both biophysical structures beyond human control and what is ‘other’ than human in the universe. That attempts are made repeatedly, by economists and others (Dasgupta 2021, Pearce and Moran 1994, TEEB 2010, UNEP 2019), to make Nature into an economic commodity form, value it as capital and/or make it into a hybrid artefact, is an indication of the conflict existing today between (past, present and post) modernity, capital accumulating economies and the non-human world. The non-human is then to be squeezed out if it cannot be made to conform to the dominant existing anthropocentric value systems. Where, then, is the place for non-humans and their interrelationships? The attempt to value nothing but that which matters for humans appears to miss out a major aspect of reality (Vetlesen 2015). That Nature has multiple values, which are not easily defined, challenges those seeking simple solutions to complex social ecological crises. The ongoing mass extinction of species, human-induced climate change and the myriad of other ecological problems are hardly surprising outcomes when living in a system that treats Nature as either contributing a luxury consumer product, an optional extra in the marketplace, or a producer input cost, something that can be bought and paid for, a price worth paying for ‘development’ and profits. That the values of Nature have been central to human society, and remain so, is undeniable. That they are contested intensely today, more than ever, is a sign of their importance.

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REFERENCES Bacon, F. (1620), Novum Organum, 1899 2nd edn, T. Fowler (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baskin, J. (2015), Paradigm dressed as epoch: the ideology of the Anthropocene, Environmental Values, 24(1), 9–29. Bentham, J. (1789), An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, repr. 1823, London: W. Pickering. Butler, W.F. and Acott, T.G. (2007), An inquiry concerning the acceptance of intrinsic value theories of Nature, Environmental Values, 16(2), 149–68. Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, London: HM Treasury. Deckers, J. (2021), On (Un)naturalness. Environmental Values, 30(3), 297–318. Díaz, S., Pascual, U. and Stenseke, M. (2018), Assessing nature’s contributions to people. Recognizing culture, and diverse sources of knowledge, can improve assessments, Science, 359(6373), 270–2. Espinosa, C. (2019), Interpretive affinities: the constitutionalization of Rights of Nature, Pacha Mama, in Ecuador, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 21(5), 608–22. Gowdy, J.M. and Olsen, P.R. (1994), Further problems with neoclassical environmental economics, Environmental Ethics, 16(2), 161–71. Kant, I. (2012), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, revd edn, M. Gregor and J. Timmermann (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kauffman, C.M. and Martin, P.L. (2018), Constructing rights of nature norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand, Global Environmental Politics, 18(4), 43–62. McShane, K. (2007), Why environmental ethics shouldn’t give up on intrinsic value, Environmental Ethics, 29(1), 43–61. McShane, K. (2017), Intrinsic values and economic valuation, in C.L. Spash (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 237–45. Merchant, C. (1980), The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Merchant, C. (2006), The scientific revolution and the death of nature , Isis, 97(3), 513–33. Myers, N. (1979), The Sinking Ark, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Neuteleers, S. (2020), A fresh look at ‘relational’ values in nature: distinctions derived from the debate on meaningfulness in life, Environmental Values, 29(4), 461–79. O’Neill, J.F. (1992), The varieties of intrinsic value, The Monist, 75(2), 119–37. O’Neill, J.F., Holland, A. and Light, A. (2007), Environmental Values, London: Routledge. Pearce, D.W. and Moran, D. (1994), The Economic Value of Biodiversity, London: Earthscan. Pojman, L.P. (1989), Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Pollini, J. (2013), Bruno Latour and the ontological dissolution of nature in the social sciences: a critical review, Environmental Values, 22(1), 25–42. Rawls, J. (1972), A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Routley, R. ([1973] 2009), Is there a need for a new environmental ethic? in C.L. Spash (ed.), Ecological Economics: Critical Concepts in the Environment, 4 vols. London: Routledge, pp. 264–72. Ryan, A.M. and Spash, C.L. (2011), Is WTP an attitudinal measure? Empirical analysis of the psychological explanation for contingent values, Journal of Economic Psychology, 32(5), 674–87. Seager, J. (1993), Earth Follies: Feminism, Politics and the Environment, London: Earthscan. Singer, P. (1979), Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, T. (2017), The Role of Numbers in Environmental Policy: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), PhD dissertation, WU University of Economics and Business, Vienna. Soper, K. (1995), What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-human, Oxford: Blackwell. Spash, C.L. (2002), Informing and forming preferences in environmental valuation: coral reef biodiversity, Journal of Economic Psychology, 23(5), 665–87. Spash, C.L. (2008a), Contingent valuation design and data treatment: if you can’t shoot the messenger, change the message, Environment & Planning C: Government & Policy, 26(1), 34–53. Spash, C.L. (2008b), Deliberative monetary valuation and the evidence for a new value theory, Land Economics, 84(3), 469–88. Spash, C.L. (2008c), How much is that ecosystem in the window? The one with the bio-diverse trail, Environmental Values, 17(2), 259–84.

The values of Nature  331 Spash, C.L. (2009), The new environmental pragmatists, pluralism and sustainability, Environmental Values, 18(3), 253–6. Spash, C.L. (2013), The shallow or the deep ecological economics movement? Ecological Economics, 93(September), 351–62. Spash, C.L. (2015), Bulldozing biodiversity: the economics of offsets and trading-in nature, Biological Conservation, 192, (December), 541–51. Spash, C.L. and Aslaksen, I. (2015), Re-establishing an ecological discourse in the debate over the value of ecosystems and biodiversity, Journal of Environmental Management, 159, 245–53. Spash, C.L. and Hache, F. (2021), The Dasgupta Review deconstructed: an exposé of biodiversity economics. Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2021.1929007. Swanson, T.M. (1994), The International Regulation of Extinction, London: Macmillan. Tanasescu, M. (2015), Nature advocacy and the indigenous symbol, Environmental Values, 24(1), 105–22. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) (2010), The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature: A Synthesis of the Approach, Conclusions and Recommendations of TEEB, Bonn: United Nations Environment Programme. Thompson, E.P. (1993), Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, New York: New Press. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2019), A New Deal for Nature: Account for the True Value of Nature. United Nations. Valladares, C. and Boelens, R. (2019), Mining for Mother Earth: governmentalities, sacred waters and nature’s rights in Ecuador, Geoforum, 100(March), 68–79. Vatn, A. (2005), Institutions and the Environment, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Vetlesen, A.J. (2015), The Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Capitalism, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

PART IV GOVERNANCE

24. Democracy and democratisation Marit Hammond

INTRODUCTION AND GENEALOGY Democracy has played a central role in critical environmental politics ever since its inception in the form of social movements. While the political discourse often frames environmental issues as coordination problems in need of a pragmatic solution, there has also always been an explicitly critical strand to environmental politics. This critical perspective sees the root cause of environmental disequilibrium in the fundamental structures of the modern state and the economic and proprietary relationships it fosters, and therefore radical political and social change beyond these as necessary for sustainability (Doherty 2002; Dryzek 1987). The question of democracy in environmental politics, then, is whether democracy’s changing form becomes either itself a part of these structures that perpetuate the unsustainable status quo, or the very space in which critique emanating from outside this existing system can be voiced and brought to bear on political change. Thus, democracy and democratisation have always been at once problematised in critical environmental politics, and seen as a key component (Dryzek 2000; Doherty and de Geus 1996). This chapter traces the forms this has taken throughout different phases of environmental politics and activism, before addressing the latest stage of this debate: the question of whether, and in what form, recent innovations in democratic practice provide a channel for critical environmental politics, and a starting point for the fundamental transformation of the modern state. I contend that the latest cutting edge of democratisation – deliberative democracy – has promise in so far as its innovations create a vibrant, open and inclusive societal space for bottom-up contestation, but is, in contrast, at threat of turning into a narrow and top-down instrumental intervention with which those in positions of power advance their particular agendas. The Western environmental movement has seen grassroots democracy as one of its hallmark principles from the beginning of its politicisation. Whereas early environmental thought is embodied in the figure of the solitary nature wanderer (such as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau or Aldo Leopold), environmentalist reactions to the Industrial Revolution gave the movement a broader base, and with it participatory activism as a tool, and grassroots democracy as a principle for an alternative politics. By the 1960s, the environmental new social movements, and the green parties they subsequently spawned, saw grassroots democracy as one of their key principles (Doherty 2002; Lucardie and Rihoux 2008, p. 3). These movements problematised the modern way of life and its embodiment in the fundamental structures of the liberal state: its prioritisation of human (industrial) progress over harmony with nature, the exploitation of non-human nature, and humans’ resulting alienation from their own true nature. From the outset, the environmentalist critique encompassed the role of political structures, specifically democracy: Inasmuch as the drivers of environmental destruction are exploitation and alienation, emancipation against these – and the self-determination promised by grassroots participation, decentralisation and radical democratisation – is needed as the basis for a radical shift towards an alternative politics and society (Eckersley 1992, 2004). 333

334  Handbook of critical environmental politics Thus, critical environmentalism advocated for radical, participatory democracy both as its own form of organisation and as its normative model for society. The grassroots nature of the movement enriched democratic practice, and established bottom-up participation as an important channel for influence in electoral politics overall (Eckersley 2020; Milder 2015). On the one hand, green parties’ dual leadership, rotation of Members of Parliament (MPs), and grassroots democratic principles formed a key part of their unconventional and anti-conventional politics and a new experiment on Michels’s iron law of oligarchy (Doherty 2002; Lucardie and Rihoux 2008). On the other, outside the arena of formal politics, greens tended to herald bioregional, communitarian living with horizontal forms of organisation as what was needed for a more harmonious relationship with non-human nature (Fischer 2017; Kenny 1996). Both in their political critique and their normative model for a new type of society did the problematisation of political structure play a key role: democratisation was needed to break through established hierarchies of exploitation, and to provide a foundation for more harmonious and balanced forms of interaction – among humans and between human and non-human populations. The philosophical scholarship that developed on the back of these early green politics similarly saw democracy as a foil with which to problematise fundamental societal structures of exploitation. From a framing of the ecologist critique of anthropocentrism as human domination over non-human nature follows democratisation as an important principle for redressing this imbalance, and thus an extension of the reach of democracy to include non-human species and the wider biotic community (Dryzek 1995; Eckersley 1992, 2020). This sets the context of democratic governance as societies’ constant negotiation of inevitable environmental limits – emancipating its own normative function beyond liberal democracy’s otherwise pre-political starting point of being in the service of economic growth (see, for example, Dryzek 2000). Thus, democracy is not only problematised in critical environmental thought, but the multifarious forms democracy can take become a key norm that exposes problematic structures and biases of modern society, and advances change in political practice. At the same time, democracy has also always sat uneasily in relation to environmental thought. Environmentalism’s principled commitment to democracy has long been seen as a significant tension within green political thought, in so far as environmentalist ethics and blueprints for a new ecological society would necessarily override the openness democracy demands (Goodin 1992; Latta 2007; Saward 1996). The more environmental politics and activism are pursued strategically, the more democracy is at risk of being reduced to a mere instrument as opposed to a fundamental normative standard (Hammond et al. 2020; Torgerson 1999). Treating democracy as a mere instrument is problematic since it undermines the fundamental normative commitment democracy stands for, therefore making it contingent. The more pressing environmental problems become, the more might then the view take hold that democracy is a dispensable luxury that must be sacrificed for the sake of survival (Shearman and Smith 2007). This picture would be simplistic, however. In reality, environmental politics and environmental concern are so innately diverse and multifarious, they are internally in need of democratic processes of contestation over their agendas. The context now is different from that of the twentieth century: the threat of climate change and its various impacts is so urgent that environmental concern, even its critical strand, is no longer an issue at the margins of politics, or a radical movement only. It is now accepted that current societies need visions of how they are to become sustainable in the face of climate change. That is, the future is open; it is a set

Democracy and democratisation  335 of visions in need of being filled with concrete meaning. As these visions – of environmental sustainability or, from a human perspective, of sustainable prosperity despite ecological limits (Jackson 2016) – are innately normative in character, revolving around questions of meaning, values and prosperity, their shaping requires democratic inclusion (Hammond 2019, 2020). Indeed, shaping these visions requires democratisation beyond current liberal democracy, for the latter’s individualism treats political discourse far too narrowly as being about private lifestyle preferences as opposed to shared, substantive visions of a collective ‘good life’ (Asara 2020, pp. 81–2). The question thus becomes what form democracy must take to fulfil its norm within sustainability; not whether democracy or some form of authoritarianism is the better instrument to advance the separate goal of sustainability. An important reason why democracy is an intrinsic component of environmental sustainability is its need for social critique as a way of exposing and transcending unsustainable patterns – otherwise masked by those with vested interests in them – in any given status quo (Hammond 2020). In summary, the important legacy of early environmental activism and thought is the very establishment of critique and alternative politics as a core tenet of environmental concern, in which democracy plays a role as both foil and core norm. Thus far, this has not translated into far-reaching political change: green movements and parties became largely assimilated into conventional politics (Frankland et al. 2008; Jordan and Maloney 1997); alternative communities remained at the local level at the margins of society; and, as I show in the next section, critical environmental thought was side-lined by the rise of new environmental narratives from within, rather than against, the liberal status quo. The question for critical environmental politics currently is what role democracy has in turn played in dissipating these early radical framings of environmental problems and the structural change they demand, and whether this means that democratisation as a channel for environmental critique has closed down – or is only changing form.

PROBLEM-FRAMING As this discussion already shows, the meaning of democracy is open to interpretation, and its shifting meaning thus an important theoretical as well as practical-political foil on which critical environmental politics unfolds. Democracy as liberal democracy plays a part in maintaining the structures that critical environmental thought sees as the root cause of environmental degradation. Some versions of participatory democracy have become assimilated into this, extending democratic voice only in ways that support rather than problematise the liberal framing of environmental problems; yet radical forms of democracy are seen as nothing less than the crux to breaking through this ‘glass ceiling’ (Hausknost and Hammond 2020). I explore subsequently where deliberative democracy – which, despite at first supplanting the much broader concept of ‘participation’ with ‘deliberation’ as a more specific ideal-critical standard of legitimacy, has itself spanned both ends of the liberal-radical spectrum – fits into this picture. For now, this section explores how critical environmental thought highlights a complicity of the liberal democratic state in sustaining environmental destruction and unsustainability; yet how liberal democracy has also, in turn, shaped environmental politics, by framing it in a particular way; and how the role of governance innovations in participatory democracy is framed by both of these sides.

336  Handbook of critical environmental politics From a critical perspective, all environmental politics is situated between the two recurrent fronts of ‘reform versus revolution’: between seeing environmental degradation as a policy problem that can be addressed from within the structures of the liberal nation state or, conversely, seeing it as a symptom of societies’ fundamental disrespect for ecological limits, which can only be resolved through structural change in social organisation, such as a shift away from the capitalist growth economy. Critique is necessary for the latter perspective to be brought to bear against the powerful interests vested in consolidating the former narrative. In this context, liberal democracy, as the dominant embodiment of a near-universal norm of democracy, forms part of the structurally unsustainable but ideologically self-reinforcing status quo. It is a particular and non-neutral interpretation of democracy whose ideological dominance over the meaning of ‘democracy’ is one component part of the ideological system of liberalism, and thus complicit in perpetuating the reformist environmental narrative and dissipating more radical perspectives (Eckersley 2020). Specifically, through a critical environmentalist lens, liberal democracy must be seen as complicit in unsustainability in that it interprets democracy in a highly atomised, interest-driven and narrow manner, wedded from the outset to neoliberal capitalism through politics being tied to ‘the “political solvent” of economic growth’ (Dryzek 2000, p. 144) and democratic choice thus restricted by its economic imperatives (Asara 2020, p. 76). By concentrating agency in individual citizens’ private realm as opposed to the public sphere, it can be accused of doing more to dissolve rather than channel collective critique (Ci 2006). Unsurprisingly, the particular form of liberal democracy – even, as I argue, the participatory experiments that have taken place under its banner – can be shown to have played a part in consolidating a narrative of reformist ecological modernisation, technology-driven ‘green growth’, and sustainable development as the globally dominant perspective on sustainability, in which neither the environment itself nor the limits it sets to the economy are so much as mentioned anymore (Mert 2009). Thus, it is worth beginning the discussion with recognition of the essential contestability of democracy as a normative concept (Dryzek 2016). The normative goal of democracy is to limit the power of authoritative governments, and thus to respect political equality (Weale 2007) and curb domination (Pettit 1999). However, as this can take different concrete forms, it follows that each particular interpretation that manifests in practice is itself an authoritative imposition at the expense of possible alternatives. Different electoral systems, but also different degrees and manifestations of popular participation, each benefit and disadvantage different groups in society. In so far as the specific form democracy takes is not random, but at a particular time and place reflects and further reproduces the outlook, values, assumptions and social roles in that society, the normative discourse on democratic legitimacy is itself an arena in which power structures are either upheld or fought. In Western societies, such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Western Europe, and the rest of the world these have influenced (or actively tried to impose their values on), democracy has established itself in the form of liberal democracy. Inspired by the liberal tradition of respecting individual rights and freedoms, political liberalism claims to be neutral; and the liberal state thus oriented towards providing a mere framework for mediating between people’s different comprehensive doctrines (Rawls 1996). By means of a constitution and regular competitive elections of representatives, liberal democracy fulfils the purpose of creating political communities with sanctioned authority in which as much individual freedom

Democracy and democratisation  337 as possible (that is, as is compatible with the same freedom for others) is nonetheless retained (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987, p. 5) This role of democracy within liberalism means that, despite the claimed neutrality, the norm of democracy is subordinate to a prior, pre-democratic political philosophy (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987, p. 5). Citizens, society, governments and the desired common good are defined in particular ways: with ‘government … represented as an apparatus of public administration, and society as a market-structured network of interactions among private persons’ (Habermas 1994, p. 1). Thus, democracy is understood to revolve first and foremost around regular elections, in which private individuals are expected to vote based on their interests. As liberal concern for individual rights to self-determination and protection from harm shifted over time towards neoliberal concern for the protection of private property, liberal democracy remains subordinated to the liberal ideal in both the political and the neoliberal economic sense, reflected in the emphasis on private individuals, marketplace-like political competition, and an assumption of interest maximisation as actors’ political goal. Based though they originally were on concern for political norms of neutrality and freedom, these show current liberal democratic principles as acting in service of the neoliberal economic ideology of an unquestioned primacy of economic profit over other social goals (Holcombe 2018). The way in which democratic consultation of the population acts as a ‘corrective to economic and social trends that may be detrimental to the populace’s welfare’ thus becomes instrumental to capitalism, for instance by reversing any ‘policies that reduce the rate of economic growth’ (Milanovic 2019, p. 208). Any deeper forms of democracy, which require citizens to be concerned and to actively participate, ‘cannot coexist’ with capitalism, inculcating as it does an opposing concern with private, material wants (Milanovic 2019, p. 119). Liberal democratic processes themselves resemble and normalise market competition (Maxton-Lee 2020, p. 444); and it is markets, not public opinion, that ‘are the sounding boards for public policy’ (Dryzek 2000, p. 94). Owing to the liberal state’s reliance on, and thus its role in upholding, the capitalist growth economy, which subordinates concern not just for alternative human values but also for any (non-economic) valuing of nature and ecological balance, ‘deep green’ critical environmental politics implies emancipation against the liberal state, including liberal democracy (Dryzek 2000, pp. 94, 144; Eckersley 2004). Critical environmental politics seeks to uncover and counteract structures of domination that afflict both the human and the nonhuman world (Eckersley 2004, p. 9). The domination of nature is seen as interconnected with the domination and exploitation that capitalism conditions within human societies, including along lines of gender (Mellor 1997; Plumwood 1993), class (Löwy 2015) and race (Bullard 2001; Newell 2005). In so far as liberal democracy, despite appearances, is complicit in upholding these, this particular instantiation of democracy fails to sufficiently realise the normative democratic commitment to curbing illegitimate power and domination. Further democratisation is then needed not just for the sake of ecological balance, but for democracy’s own sake as well. By ‘detaching democracy from liberal anthropocentrism’, democracy can be reinterpreted and extended in such a way as to no longer silence the voices of either oppressed humans or non-human nature (Dryzek 2000, p. 147; see also Eckersley 2020, p. 215). However, the role of liberal democracy in (playing its part in) upholding unsustainable capitalism is insidious in that it hides behind democracy’s ostensible commitment to norms of freedom and equality. The profit-driven exploitation that capitalist systems rely on is not openly repressive, but instead maintained by narratives that appear unprejudiced while

338  Handbook of critical environmental politics framing normative concepts, such as democracy or sustainability, in a particular direction. Where these narratives delude citizens about their actual interests, identities and visions of the good life, they amount to political myths that uphold ideological belief systems (Bottici 2007; Strecker 2008, p. 86). It is possible to trace how the liberal democratic context has shaped the evolution of environmental politics by framing environmental problems and visions of sustainability along neoliberal lines. Within liberal democratic politics, organised around competition between different private interests, environmental concern is seen as lobbying by an interest group or the voting public for a particular ‘good’; green parties are seen as successful in accordance with their electoral success, and liberal democracy is expected to produce environmentally orientated outcomes in line with popular demand for these as a public good (Ward 2008). These assumptions implicitly downgrade environmental political concern from the level of questioning the fundamental assumptions and goals of human societies (such as their anthropocentrism or ecocentrism or their definition of prosperity) to one ‘interest’ next to other, prima facie equally legitimate interests; its importance is to be defined by its success in the overall competition for attention and influence. Also, environmental problems are framed as economic externalities that can be overcome with the ecological modernisation of the economy (Jänicke 2008), or even turned into a new economic opportunity through the commercialisation of environmental activism and the myths of technological innovation and corporate responsibility as the keys to achieving sustainability (Wright and Nyberg 2014). These narratives depoliticise environmental issues by framing social change as taking effect first and foremost in individuals’ private environments, such as their consumption behaviour, and thus curtailing collective democratic imagination and critique (Ci 2006; Thierbach-McLean 2019). As democracy is framed in line with this as competition between private interests (as opposed to a collective search for, and contestation of, norms), the liberal political process is not a level playing field, but skewed from the outset in the capitalist direction; the rules are written by political and economic elites that cooperate for mutual benefit (Holcombe 2018, p. 44). Thus, not only the substance, but also the structure of liberal politics prioritises growth over balance, material profit over holistic prosperity, and private interests over collective meaning. According to scholars diagnosing the depoliticisation of environmental issues, it is the mainstreaming of environmental concern within this liberal context that has blunted the former transformative promise of critical environmental politics (Blühdorn and Welsh 2007, p. 185). Contemporary environmental discourses, such as ecological modernisation and green growth, ‘present themselves as taking the environmental crisis very seriously while at the same time refraining from any fundamental questioning of existing social systems and structures’ (Kenis and Lievens 2014, p. 532; see also Blühdorn 2013). The movement’s formerly radical critique is replaced with market-driven and growth-orientated solutions. A poignant example is the environmental discourse of sustainable development, for decades the dominant paradigm of environmental sustainability, endorsed globally in the form of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations 2015). Although the initial momentum for an international response to the environmental crises of resource overuse, pollution, biodiversity loss and, later, global warming centred on concern for environmental preservation and an acknowledgement of environmental ‘limits to growth’, the 1987 publication of the Brundtland Report and the 1992 Earth Summit changed the global discourse and paradigm towards ‘sustainable development’ as a way of continuing the developmental path based on economic growth while reducing its environmental impact (Mert 2009). In the name of sustainable development, the

Democracy and democratisation  339 market-driven innovations in sustainable consumption and production are expressly welcome, de-legitimating calls for radical system change while still officially framing the debate as transformation (as in the title of United Nations 2015). Even further democratisation under this umbrella, such as participatory innovations in democracy, has further bolstered rather than challenged depoliticisation. The sustainable development agenda incorporates an explicit dimension of participatory democracy and stakeholder engagement as a key principle. The Local Agenda 21 emphasises community participation and consultation for implementing sustainable development, as well as coining the role of partnerships in environmental politics under this heading (Pattberg et al. 2012; United Nations 1992: 23.2). Partnerships include public–private partnerships, in which stakeholders from government, civil society and business craft policies through voluntary engagement in negotiating mutually agreeable solutions. The instantiation par excellence of environmental politics as competition and compromise between interest positions, these partnerships support a win–win conception of sustainability (Mert 2009). That which was formerly a role of participatory democracy in driving radical change and an ‘alternative politics’ has thus become a participatory model that explicitly legitimates private and business interests in environmental governance, and aligns from the outset with a depoliticised, reformist sustainability agenda. Hence, the paradigm of sustainable development has not only replaced the environmentalist critique of the growth economy with a widespread belief in the need for more economic growth for the sake of environmental improvement, but also framed and shaped the role of democracy within its governance in a way that purportedly strengthened, but actually undermined it. Instead of contesting the failed democratic promise of liberal democracy, and opening up new channels for democratic voice and political critique, participatory democracy in the environmental governance context has become another tool for managing and thereby sustaining unsustainability in the liberal status quo (Blühdorn 2013). The dominant ideological paradigm stands in a mutually reinforcing relationship with the forms of democracy it is shaped by and itself in turn conditions. Thus, not just the environmental politics, but even some of the forms of democratic renewal (such as partnerships) that emanate out of liberal democratic engagement with environmental issues further entrench capitalist elites.

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND STANDPOINTS Although this framing has become dominant, embodied in both international agreements and national policy around the globe, radical critique and alternative models of democracy continue to inform the environmental movement outside of formal politics. The participatory politics envisioned by earlier environmental movements – far removed from the instantiation of participation via the stakeholder and partnership models of sustainable development – continue to operate within movement groups; and framings of unsustainability as a structural crisis demanding systems change are experiencing a resurgence, not least through new waves of climate activism (Chatterton et al. 2013). The changing form of democracy once more plays a key role in these developments. Deliberative democracy is now heralded by governments and movements alike (Bäckstrand et al. 2010; Extinction Rebellion 2019), and new forms of participation, such as prefiguration, political consumerism and sustainable materialism, are emerging (de Moor et al. 2021; Eckersley 2020; Maxton-Lee 2020). Do these hold promise for the crucial democratisation of environmental politics beyond liberal (and liberal-participatory)

340  Handbook of critical environmental politics democracy, or are they bound to meet the same fate of depoliticisation and absorption into the liberal environmental agenda? The status of democracy in critical environmental politics remains contentious. In so far as unsustainability is partly conditioned by the democratic insufficiency of liberal democracy, further democratisation must be seen as a key structural precondition for more effective and more critical environmental governance. Yet, as the example of participatory democracy as partnerships shows, the record thus far is weak; if anything, previous demands for participation and decentralisation by the radical environmental movement have in practice further entrenched the liberal status quo. What, then, is the answer? There are three broad standpoints. The first sees the next, deliberative iteration of democratic innovation as key. The second calls for critical re-politicisation via informal movements and activism. The third argues that democracy has become a hollow ‘post-democracy’ to such a degree as to no longer contain hope for radical change. In this section, I discuss each perspective in turn, before making a case for a way forward that combines their different components: a critical re-politicisation (as according to standpoint 2) of the recent developments in deliberative democracy (standpoint 1), which then holds promise for responding to the spectre of ‘post-democracy’ (standpoint 3). The shift in democratic theory away from participatory democracy and towards deliberative innovations has reinvigorated environmental governance (Bäckstrand et al. 2010; Niemeyer 2014). Deliberation differs from participation in a more generic sense in that the concept is normatively based specifically on moving beyond negotiation between interested positions; instead, it is defined as political communication so reflective as to ‘induce reflection upon preferences in non-coercive fashion’, ruling out ‘domination via the exercise of power, manipulation, … expressions of mere self-interest, … and attempts to impose ideological conformity’ (Dryzek 2000, p. 2). Of all the manifold shifts and innovations in democracy, this normative ambition makes deliberative democracy the candidate par excellence to overcome the liberal stronghold over both the environmental discourse and the evolution of democracy. Deliberation has established itself as a recognised toolbox for environmental governance. Small-scale deliberative bodies under the umbrella term of ‘mini-publics’ – including citizens’ juries, citizen assemblies, consensus conferences and town meetings – bring together representative samples of the population to deliberate together on contentious issues. By focusing on informed and facilitated reflection, these create settings in which partial, self-interested narratives of sustainability are put under scrutiny and are harder to justify. They provide a space for different perspectives to be brought together, and thus to challenge established assumptions (Hammond and Smith 2022). A recent example is the Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change in the UK, Climate Assembly UK, which ran from January until May 2020 on the initiative of six parliamentary select committees.1 The citizens’ assembly brought together a randomly selected sample of 108 members of British society, meeting over six weekends to learn about and make recommendations on different possible policy pathways. It has received particular attention in that the climate movement Extinction Rebellion also at the time demanded a citizens’ assembly as the route towards a more ambitious politics of climate and ecological justice (Extinction Rebellion 2019). Tellingly, however, while Extinction Rebellion has demanded a deliberative assembly on the open concept of climate justice, the ‘official’ citizens’ assembly was framed around the constructive question of how the UK can achieve its pre-given government target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Far from inviting as diverse a set of perspectives as possible to

Democracy and democratisation  341 encourage critical reflection on underlying assumptions and ideological belief systems, the deliberative event has thus itself been subsumed under formal government policy and its particular environmental narrative. Instead of being a new channel for empowerment, deliberative mini-publics thus become just another tool with which citizens are ‘activated’ in a top-down manner to fulfil functions that play into the hands of authorities (Böker 2017). There is some evidence that other forms of new citizen participation are likewise assimilating into the depoliticising, privatising tendencies of the neoliberal context (Maxton-Lee 2020). Not least against this background, the second contemporary standpoint on the democracy-environment question sees democratisation as the crux to sustainability politics beyond the liberal democracy, but only if this emanates from outside, and outside the control of, formal governance. Agonistic democracy emphasises democratic participation not as a way of involving citizens in constructive policy-making, but as provoking democratic disagreement able to disrupt the liberal hegemony and proffer altogether new alternatives (Machin 2020). Ecological agonism challenges the liberal portrayal of environmental issues as ‘problems’ in need of expert-led management, arguing that ‘the unsustainable status quo can only be disrupted by distinct alternatives that are contradictory to prevailing policy discourses, rather than compatible with them’ (Machin 2020, p. 157). Thus, disagreement is not a hindrance, but the key to critical environmental politics in the current context. Hegemony in the form of ideology is only dismantled where there is a continual possibility of dissent, and where disagreement is voiced instead of silenced (Machin 2020, p. 163). Therefore, agonism naturally fosters (re-) politicisation against the depoliticising effects of liberalism. Examples are movements outside of formal politics that actively resist the post-political reduction of environmental activism to the role of citizens as consumers (Fougere and Bond 2018; Kenis 2016). For instance, the ‘alternative climate summits’ outside the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conferences of the Parties, bringing together a global array of environmental groups and activists, engage in ongoing (including internal) contestation of the notion of ‘climate justice’ as a perspective that seeks to expose and challenge the interrelatedness of climate change with unequal socio-economic relationships (Chatterton et al. 2013; see Chapter 35 in this volume). Yet agonist environmentalism also goes beyond protest and contentious politics. For instance, Joost de Moor, Brian Doherty and Phil Catney specifically analyse the critical agency of environmental ‘lifestyle’ politics in the form of ‘alternative action organizations’, which practise a ‘do-it-yourself’ activism in light of the state’s failure to effectively respond to environmental threats (de Moor et al. 2021; see Chapter 34 in this volume). While organisations such as these are sometimes poignant examples of depoliticisation, moving away from the movement’s former direct-action tactics and towards practical responses to the climate crisis, de Moor et al. find that others are explicitly ‘political’ in advancing anti-capitalist principles such as degrowth and commoning, and seek out strategies to maximise their critical impact despite the conditions of the ‘post-political’ they find themselves in (de Moor et al. 2021). The most recent surge of movement activism against neoliberal climate politics, such as Extinction Rebellion and the Fridays for Future climate strikes – even though the apocalyptic narrative of the former has also been criticised (Doherty et al. 2018) – can be seen as further examples of radical democratic discourse-creation that challenges system-driven narratives and draws attention to otherwise marginalised perspectives (for example, Extinction Rebellion’s focus on climate justice next to the official citizens’ assembly on the government’s carbon target only).

342  Handbook of critical environmental politics Whether or not these instances of challenge to the ideological status quo can be seen to hold promise remains a contentious question. For Blühdorn (2020), democracy itself has become another ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents, rather than can still hope to enact, radical transformation beyond liberalism. He argues processes of ‘second-order emancipation’, in which individuals liberate themselves from previous emancipatory ideals, have rendered democracy fundamentally unable to realise self-determination and self-realisation, and thus citizens’ inalienable rights (Blühdorn 2020, pp. 45–6). Instead, any further evolution in the form and ideal of democracy channels a politics of exclusion in the purported name of democracy, and thus dissolves also the role of (radical) democratisation in social change towards environmental sustainability (Blühdorn 2020, p. 51). In this ‘post-democratic constellation’, democracy becomes a farce that merely simulates empowerment and plays a part in sustaining unsustainability by spreading ‘narratives of reassurance’ that pacify democratic demands and environmental concern yet without any fundamental change to their conditioned (neoliberal) thinking and behaviour (Blühdorn 2013). It is clear, from the debate between these different standpoints, that societal transformation towards sustainability does require some impulse from outside of liberal politics; yet that liberal politics at the same time operates a strong pull towards assimilating any such impulses into its own processes and ideology. Even an agonistic ‘outside’ impulse can end up cementing liberalism by ‘hardening its front’ as opposed to altogether dissolving practices of ‘othering’ and the ideological fight over hegemony (see de Moor et al. 2021; Erman 2009, p. 1057). On the other hand, the less critical and radical it is, the easier it is to fall prey to the assimilating tendencies of liberalism. In the face of global crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss, which continue to escalate, societal prosperity is increasingly going to depend on an effective critical and democratic space carving itself a niche somewhere along the fine balance between these more and less radical forces.

OPEN QUESTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL What might provide such a space are self-forming, bottom-up democratic publics that are critical in the original deliberative sense: so genuinely concerned with overcoming domination in all of its forms that they themselves retain an openness that comes from not just critique, but critical self-reflexivity as well (Hammond 2020). Agonistic critics of deliberative democracy (and Blühdorn) are right to say that much deliberation today is orchestrated via carefully controlled mini-publics, which, as the example of the UK climate assembly shows, are thus easily depoliticised. This instrumentalisation of deliberation is itself far removed from the normative theory of deliberative democracy, however (Böker 2017; Hammond 2020; Hammond et al. 2020). By situating itself in response to all forms of domination – specifically its most covert, insidious forms, such as ideology – the original critical theory of deliberative democracy cannot but be internally self-reflexive against both depoliticisation and its own hegemonic tendencies (Hammond 2020, p. 187). In so far as this implies a continuous responsiveness to shifting political contexts and internal developments, this can only be conceived of as a process over time; it is not about one side winning over the other, but about a continually expanding critical space, in both environmental politics and democratic discourse itself. Thus, this is the open question that remains: whether deliberative democracy will be able to inspire the bottom-up evolution of such continued critical spaces in society – and whether

Democracy and democratisation  343 these will prove an effective counterbalance against as powerful a hegemony as liberalism – or whether the discursive shifts and the top-down instantiations that have already occurred mean it is already in the process of meeting the same fate as previous iterations of democratic change. What is going to be key is the transformative potential of democracy itself. In so far as the norm of democracy, and practices of democratisation, are themselves arenas in which the liberal hegemony asserts its power, it is not the reach or growth of any one particular form of democracy that holds the greatest potential to contribute to a sustainability transformation. Instead, it is the ceaseless force of ‘the democratic’ that matters; of there being a sufficiently stubborn, organic drive towards making voices heard in society that any undermining, hijacking, or mere farcical simulation of democratic politics will in turn be met with a new iteration of critique. This is the power of the idea of democracy, whose changeable form in practice can then become its greatest strength. In conclusion, democracy has always been critical to environmental politics, and to environmental sustainability. By giving voice to the otherwise excluded, democracy is fundamentally about openness to what is new and to what cannot be controlled. It is for this reason that it not only chimes with, but is a component part of, sustainability: In response to something as unpredictable as ecological change over time, sustainability cannot have a fixed meaning, but consists in responsiveness to changing conditions (Hammond 2020). The current challenge of environmental politics in the world is the ongoing clash between the human need to feel in control and the necessity of openness towards reflexivity and transformation. It is psychologically unsettling to envisage unpredictability and change, yet environmental politics that refrains from it fails to understand the reality of ecological change, not least in the Anthropocene (Dryzek and Pickering 2018), and thus cannot be effective. Democracy is so important a principle for an open and reflexive politics of sustainability because the democratic ideal formulates the utmost promise for new political openings for contestation; but it is also a key battleground for control for the same reason. Thus, sustainability and democracy both critically hinge on, both attract the same opponents against, but both also continually open up new societal space for transformation. The best that a critical environmental politics can do to make use of democratic spaces is not strategically instrumentalise, and thus control, particular democratic processes, but to remain open-minded towards continually detecting and confronting itself and society with the realities of all of these recurrent developments.

NOTE 1.

https://​www​.climateassembly​.uk/​index​.html (accessed 18 March 2021).

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344  Handbook of critical environmental politics Blühdorn, I. (2020), ‘The legitimation crisis of democracy: emancipatory politics, the environmental state and the glass ceiling to socio-ecological transformation’, Environmental Politics, 29 (1), 38–57. Blühdorn, I. and Welsh, I. (2007), ‘Eco-politics beyond the paradigm of sustainability: a conceptual framework and research agenda’, Environmental Politics, 16 (2), 185–205. Böker, M. (2017), ‘Justification, critique and deliberative legitimacy: the limits of mini-publics’, Contemporary Political Theory, 16 (1), 19–40. Bottici, C. (2007), A Philosophy of Political Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bullard, R.D. (2001), ‘Environmental justice in the 21st century: race still matters’, Phylon, 49 (3–4), 151–71. Chatterton, P., Featherstone, D. and Routledge, P. (2013), ‘Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: antagonism, the commons, and solidarity’, Antipode, 45 (3), 602–20. Ci, J. (2006), ‘Political agency in liberal democracy’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 14 (2), 144–62. De Moor, J., Catney, P. and Doherty, B. (2021), ‘What hampers “political” action in environmental alternative action organizations? Exploring the scope for strategic agency under post-political conditions’, Social Movement Studies, 20 (3), 312–28. Doherty, B. (2002), Ideas and Actions in the Green Movement, London: Routledge. Doherty, B. and de Geus, M. (eds) (1996), Democracy and Green Political Thought, London: Routledge. Doherty, B., de Moor, J. and Hayes, G. (2018), ‘The “new” climate politics of Extinction Rebellion?’, OpenDemocracy, 27 November, accessed 18 March 2021 at https://​www​.opendemocracy​.net/​en/​new​ -climate​-politics​-of​-extinction​-rebellion/​. Dryzek, J.S. (1987), Rational Ecology: Environment and Political Economy, New York: Basil Blackwell. Dryzek, J.S. (1995), ‘Political and ecological communication’, Environmental Politics, 4 (4), 13–30. Dryzek, J.S. (2000), Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J.S. (2016), ‘Can there be a human right to an essentially contested concept? The case of democracy’, Journal of Politics, 78 (2), 357–67. Dryzek, J.S. and Pickering, J. (2018), The Politics of the Anthropocene, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunleavy, P. and O’Leary, B. (1987), Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Eckersley, R. (1992), Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Eckersley, R. (2004), The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eckersley, R. (2020), ‘Ecological democracy and the rise and decline of liberal democracy: looking back, looking forward’, Environmental Politics, 29 (2), 214–34. Erman, E. (2009), ‘What is wrong with agonistic pluralism? Reflections on conflict in democratic theory’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 35 (9), 1039–62. Extinction Rebellion (2019), The Extinction Rebellion Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies, accessed 18 August 2019 at https://​rebellion​.earth/​wp/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​06/​The​-Extinction​-Rebellion​ -Guide​-to​-Citizens​-Assemblies​-Version​-1​.1​-25​-June​-2019​.pdf. Fischer, F. (2017), Climate Crisis and the Democratic Prospect: Participatory Governance in Sustainable Communities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fougere, L. and Bond, S. (2018), ‘Legitimising activism in democracy: a place for antagonism in environmental governance’, Planning Theory, 17 (2), 143–69. Frankland, E.G., Lucardie, P. and Rihoux, B. (2008), Green Parties in Transition: The End of Grass-roots Democracy? Farnham: Ashgate. Goodin, R.E. (1992), Green Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1994), ‘Three normative models of democracy’, Constellations, 1 (1), 1–10. Hammond, M. (2019), ‘A cultural account of ecological democracy’, Environmental Values, 8 (1), 55–74. Hammond, M. (2020), ‘Sustainability as a cultural transformation: the role of deliberative democracy’, Environmental Politics, 29 (1), 173–92. Hammond, M., Dryzek, J.S. and Pickering, J. (2020), ‘Democracy in the Anthropocene’, Contemporary Political Theory, 19 (1), 127–41.

Democracy and democratisation  345 Hammond, M. and Smith, G. (2022), ‘Deliberation and sustainability’, in B. Bornemann, H. Knappe and P. Nanz (eds), Routledge Handbook of Democracy and Sustainability, London: Routledge. Hausknost, D. and Hammond, M. (2020), ‘Beyond the environmental state? The political prospects of a sustainability transformation’, Environmental Politics, 29 (1), 1–16. Holcombe, R.G. (2018), Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power is Made and Maintained, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, T. (2016), Prosperity without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, London: Routledge. Jänicke, M. (2008), ‘Ecological modernisation: new perspectives’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 16 (5), 557–65. Jordan, G. and Maloney, W. (1997), The Protest Business: Mobilizing Campaign Groups, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kenis, A. (2016), ‘Ecological citizenship and democracy: communitarian versus agonistic perspectives’, Environmental Politics, 25 (6), 949–70. Kenis, A. and Lievens, M. (2014), ‘Searching for “the political” in environmental politics’, Environmental Politics, 23 (4), 531–48. Kenny, M. (1996), ‘Paradoxes of community’, in B. Doherty and M. de Geus (eds), Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship, London: Routledge, pp. 17–34. Latta, P.P. (2007), ‘Locating democratic politics in ecological citizenship’, Environmental Politics, 16 (3), 377–93. Löwy, M. (2015), Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Lucardie, P. and Rihoux, B. (2008), ‘From amateur-activist to professional-electoral parties? On the organizational transformation of green parties in western democracies’, in E.G. Frankland, P. Lucardie and B. Rihoux (eds), Green Parties in Transition: The End of Grass-roots Democracy? Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 3–16. Machin, A. (2020), ‘Democracy, disagreement, disruption: agonism and the environmental state’, Environmental Politics, 29 (1), 155–72. Maxton-Lee, B. (2020), ‘Activating responsible citizens: depoliticized environmentalism in hegemonic neoliberalism’, Democratization, 27 (3), 443–60. Mellor, M. (1997), Feminism and Ecology, New York: NYU Press. Mert, A. (2009), ‘Partnerships for sustainable development as discursive practice: shifts in discourse of environment and democracy’, Forest Policy and Economics, 11, 326–39. Milanovic, B. (2019), Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Milder, S. (2015), ‘Between grassroots protest and green politics: the democratic potential of 1970s antinuclear activism’, German Politics and Society, 33 (4), 25–39. Newell, P. (2005), ‘Race, class and the global politics of environmental inequality’, Global Environmental Politics, 5 (3), 70–94. Niemeyer, S. (2014), ‘A defence of (deliberative) democracy in the Anthropocene’, Ethical Perspectives, 21 (1), 15–45. Pattberg, P., Biermann, F., Chan, S. and Mert, A. (eds) (2012), Public-Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Emergence, Influence and Legitimacy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Pettit, P. (1999), ‘Republican freedom and contestatory democratization’, in I. Shapiro and C. Hacker-Cordón (eds), Democracy’s Value, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 163–90. Plumwood, V. (1993), Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Rawls, J. (1996), Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Saward, M. (1996), ‘Must democrats be environmentalists?’, in B. Doherty and M. de Geus (eds), Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship, London: Routledge, pp. 79–98. Shearman, D. and Smith, J.W. (2007), The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

346  Handbook of critical environmental politics Strecker, D. (2008), ‘The architecture of social critique: three models of ideology critique and the legacy of the Frankfurt School’, in H.F. Dahms (ed.), No Social Science Without Critical Theory, Bingley: JAI Press, pp. 85–107. Thierbach-McLean, O. (2019), ‘Close to home, one at a time, not in my backyard: individualism and the mantras of depoliticization in US reform discourses’, European Journal of American Studies, 14 (2), 1–17. Torgerson, D. (1999), The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. United Nations (1992), ‘Agenda 21’, accessed 18 August 2019 at https://​su​stainabled​evelopment​.un​.org/​ content/​documents/​Agenda21​.pdf. United Nations (2015), ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development’, accessed 11 April 2020 at https://​su​stainabled​evelopment​.un​.org/​content/​documents/​21252030​ %20Agenda​%20for​%20Sustainable​%20Development​%20web​.pdf. Ward, H. (2008), ‘Liberal democracy and sustainability’, Environmental Politics, 17 (3), 386–409. Weale, A. (2007), Democracy, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, C. and Nyberg, D. (2014), ‘Creative self-destruction: corporate responses to climate change as political myths’, Environmental Politics, 23 (2), 205–23.

25. Environmental violence Gloria Pessina

INTRODUCTION: DIFFERENT FORMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE In 2019, while most European cities and several main urban areas of the Global North saw the rise of non-violent environmental movements led by younger generations (Pellizzoni 2019a, 2019b), other parts of the world, such as Colombia and the Philippines, were plagued by worryingly high numbers of environmental activists’ killings (Global Witness 2020). Two-thirds of the overall 2019 environment-related assassinations took place in Latin America, where the majority of the targeted activists used to fight against mining, oil and gas, energy, agribusiness and logging industries. Direct violence against environmental defenders (EDs) is a longstanding phenomenon, widely documented in the field of environmental conflicts research (Bohle and Füngfeld 2007; Conde and Le Billon 2017; Escobar 2006; Homer-Dixon 1999; Navas et al. 2018), covered by political ecology, as well as peace and conflict studies (Le Billon and Duffy 2018). The international interest in direct violence against EDs was sparked by some traumatic events between the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, such as the assassination of the Brazilian trade unionist, environmental activist and politician Chico Mendes (in 1988). Even though this issue was of no interest to academics for many years, the occurrence of direct violence related to environmental protection has been recorded since the mid-1990s by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Global Witness, and more recently by activist-researchers’ platforms, such as the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) (Temper et al. 2015). Among the most common forms of direct violence, EJAtlas includes ‘selective assassinations of environmental defenders’, ‘unsubstantiated accusations of environmental defenders to demobilize them from their campaign’, ‘massive coercion in a social protest’ and ‘direct attack aiming to cause physical and psychological damage’, including ‘death threats’ (Navas et al. 2018, p. 653). In particular, the most recent analyses of the EJAtlas data warn about the ways in which numerous violent crimes against women EDs tend to be overlooked both by official investigations and by academic research (Tran et al. 2020). Violent acts targeting the ‘first line of defense against the causes and impact of climate breakdown’ (Global Witness 2020, p. 6) have been mentioned since the early studies on the ‘curse of resources’ (Sachs and Warner 2001) and on ‘addictive economies’ (Freudenburg 1992) in mining regions, but gained importance in more recent and detailed studies on the social and territorial impact of mining (Bebbington et al. 2018; Orihuela 2018), oil and gas (Bridge 2009; Watts 2015) and other extractive industries (Tsing 2011). Despite the brutality against EDs as the most visible form of environmental violence, several authors have been investigating other facets of the same concept, highlighting the existing overlap among them (Davies 2019; Navas et al. 2018; Nixon 2011; Scheidel et al. 2020). One of the most recent definitions of violence describes it as ‘a concept constantly oscillating between the physical and the structural, the visible and the invisible, the natural 347

348  Handbook of critical environmental politics and the social, the institutional and the criminal’ (Pavoni and Tulumello 2020, p. 49). Even though social sciences are still struggling with the multidimensionality of this concept (Kilby 2013; Springer and Le Billon 2016), the socio-political dimensions of violence have been put under the spotlight, as violence is ‘deeply rooted in local histories and social relations but also connected to transitional processes of material change, political power relations and historical conjuncture’ (Peluso and Watts 2001, pp. 29–30). This chapter focuses on forms of environmental violence other than direct violent acts, through the presentation of concepts elaborated by scholars and activists, such as ‘structural violence’, ‘slow violence’, ‘environmental racism’, ‘biocide’ and ‘infrastructural violence’. In the second section of the chapter such concepts are investigated in their relationship with social and territorial inequalities. The third section presents some experiences of resistance against environmental violence in a variety of marginal and fragile territories. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the evolution of the concept of environmental violence and on future research paths.

SLOW VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL INEQUALITIES IN MARGINAL TERRITORIES A large part of the existing scholarship on environmental violence has been influenced by the work of the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and initiator of the peace and conflict studies discipline. According to Galtung, direct violence is perpetrated by humans through brutal acts, while structural violence cannot be related to a single event, as it entails a socio-political process that results in unequal opportunities for discriminated social groups (Galtung 1969). In Galtung’s words, structural violence ‘is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential’ (Galtung 1969, p. 168). This form of violence is particularly severe for women and minorities, as more recent studies have demonstrated (Mukherjee et al. 2011). A further typology of violence, of the cultural sort, completes Galtung’s view on the topic, consisting in the use of ideologies and religious beliefs to promote and justify violence (Galtung 1990). Among the different forms of violence identified by Galtung, structural violence has been of particular interest to scholars of critical environmental justice (CEJ) studies (Pellow 2016; Velicu 2019; Scheidel et al. 2020). Environmental violence is hence structural when it is the outcome of discriminations and inequalities produced by specific social, economic and political structures (Scheidel et al. 2020). Critical environmental justice scholars underline that structural violence can take the form of hazards or development projects deeply impacting marginal populations and ecosystems, which are considered expendable by dominant power structures (Pellow 2016). Humans and more-than-humans are impacted differently by structural forms of injustice and environmental violence, according to race, class (Bullard 1990, 1994, 2004) and other categories of difference, such as gender, sexuality, ability, age and species (Pellow 2016). Structural violence can also take the form of ‘prospective environmental injustice’ (Velicu 2019), when local populations are hardly affected by the perception of future harmful developments. Elaborating on the concept of structural violence and its relation to environmental injustice as proposed by CEJ studies, several scholars from a variety of disciplines (for example, litera-

Environmental violence  349 ture, anthropology, development studies, human geography, political ecology, environmental history, ecological economics and law) have been working on the notion of slow violence (Barca 2014; Davies 2019; Navas et al. 2018; Scheidel et al. 2020). Slow violence represents one of the products of dominant social, economic and political structures, considering marginal communities and territories as disposable. Beyond the structural dimension of violence, this concept introduces time as a fundamental element in the display of power and in the production of environmental injustices, as can be seen in the seminal work by the American writer and scholar Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon 2011). Making direct reference to a milestone of the political ecology and ecological economics literature – The Environmentalism of the Poor by the Catalan economist Joan Martínez-Alier (2002) – Nixon focuses on the uneven impacts of less visible forms of environmental violence. In his words, slow violence can be understood as a process ‘that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011, p. 2). The topic of slow but steady processes of environmental degradation has gained momentum with the increasing debate about climate change, but the phenomenon of slow violence has been studied in the past, under different names, with respect to the use of chemical herbicides (Carson 1962; Zierler 2011), air pollution (Narain 2017), soil/water contamination by petro-chemicals (Allen 2003; Davies 2019; Lerner 2004), toxic waste (De Rosa 2018), mining (Holterman 2014) and other forms of ecological destruction (Peluso and Watts 2001). Even though we know that ‘there’s no such thing as a natural disaster’ (Smith 2006) and that structural dimensions of violence accompany earthquakes, floods, fires and further effects of climate change (Soron 2007) in the planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2012; Swyngedouw 2014) of the capitalocene (Moore 2015), it is worth emphasising that these sudden catastrophic events are covered by the media and often treated by police as ‘emergencies’ (Anderson et al. 2019). On the contrary, slow violence is ‘spectactle deficient’ (Nixon 2011, p. 47) and tends to go unnoticed until its effects start to be perceived through biodiversity loss, pollution (Watts 2001; Zierler 2011) and the occurrence of illness (Auyero and Swistun 2009; Iengo and Armiero 2017). The delayed destruction of the environment and the human health, as well as the geographical distance of transnational companies often causing the degradation, both contribute to ‘legal procrastination’ (Nixon 2011, p. 51) and postponed acknowledgment of the issue’s gravity by governing bodies. Space and time hence play a crucial role in the different perceptions of slow violence, ranging from the lack of recognition of the issue by those who are far from the polluted sites and/or not properly informed by media to those who are exposed to contamination in their daily life (Armiero and De Rosa 2016; Wiebe 2016). Personal experience triggered the research by the American biologist and zoologist Rachel Carson, who published her ground-breaking book Silent Spring in 1962, after several years spent observing the effects of agro-chemicals (DDT) on the fauna of rural areas. Carson demonstrated that the chemicals harming the fauna were having detrimental effects on entire ecosystems, including humans. Despite Carson’s pioneering study being based on solid data, petrochemical companies tried for long to de-legitimise her work with an allegation of feminine irrationality (Barca 2014). Nevertheless, her research survived these denigrating attempts and contributed to consolidate new concepts such as ‘biocide’ (instead of ‘pesticide’) and ‘bioaccumulation’ of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in soil, water and, ultimately, food

350  Handbook of critical environmental politics chains. Studies on the effects of DDT continued in other parts of the world (Hall 2010), but Carson’s legacy was not limited to them. Nixon (2011) drew extensively on Carson’s research for his work on slow violence, including not only petrochemicals, but also mining, nuclear waste, megaprojects, deforestation and climate change among the causes of slow and invisible environmental degradation (Barca 2014). Moreover, he specifically focused on the uneven effects of slow violence on the poorest strata of the population and on other marginal subjectivities. Drawing on Nixon’s work, Barca (2014) observed the common historical roots of social inequality and environmental degradation, through corporate and/or administrative policies based on the existence of ‘sacrifice zones’ (Lerner 2010) and disposable bodies (Karim 2014). As already recalled by environmental historians, violent acts against the environment, including the discharge of POPs, have been reiterating the oppression and control of marginal territories (Messerli et al. 2015) and of (part of) their population (Barca 2014). Therefore, slow violence represents a form of injustice (Bullard et al. 1997) and racism (Bullard 1990, 1994), as it affects people differently according to income, gender, race, education, age, ability, species and so on (Pellow 2016). As observed by Bullard in his studies on environmental injustice in the United States, a vast majority of highly polluting industrial plants and dumpsites have been concentrating in areas inhabited mostly by low-income communities of colour, progressively affecting their health. In line with Bullard’s studies, several instances of slow violence and environmental injustice have been researched in a variety of marginal territories around the world (for example, Ako and Olawui 2017; Auyero and Swistun 2009; Basu 2018; Lerner 2004; Pellow 2007). While in many of these examples local environmental legislations are permissive with polluting and exploitative companies, low-income and impoverished local populations face the alternative (Pignarre and Stengers 2005 [2011]) between work and environment (Barca 2019). It is in this context that the ‘working-class ecology’ approach (Barca and Leonardi 2018; Cristiano 2018; Leonardi 2017) investigates the system of relations between a working-class community and its environment, strongly characterised by the presence of the industry (Barca 2019). This approach explores the existing contradiction between industrial production and socio-environmental reproduction within capitalist economies, while highlighting possible ways to overcome it (Chapter 4 in this volume). Beyond the daily bioaccumulation of pollutants in marginal bodies and territories (Banzhaf et al. 2019; Bullard et al. 1997; Davies 2019; Iengo and Armiero 2017), slow environmental violence unfolds through and is strengthened by narratives, including those about the creation of new jobs for the working class, despite their environmental impact (Barca and Leonardi 2018). Narrative violence (Barca 2014) hence entails the establishment of hegemonic ideas of development by those in power (Bates 1975), and through the suppression of fundamental information around environmental damage. Narrative violence relates to the conceptualisation of cultural violence by Galtung (1990), since dominant ideologies about development are among the cultural elements used to legitimise structural violence and environmental injustices (Scheidel et al. 2020). Further elements of cultural violence include religion, political ideologies and techno-managerial beliefs. Cultural violence has been displayed in the environmental domain and through the production of several examples of ‘infrastructural violence’ (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012), such as large-scale infrastructural projects aimed at reducing scarcity or excess of resources (for example, water), while structurally marginalising and segregating particular populations and territories, as well as according to political and religious beliefs (Luxion 2017; Mahadevia 2007; Mehta 2005; Pessina 2018; Swyngedouw 2015; Vélez Torres 2012). Moreover, the

Environmental violence  351 ecofeminist critique (Mies and Shiva 1993; Salleh 1995, 2003, 2017) suggests that environmental and, more specifically, infrastructural violence is also a product of patriarchal cultural elements. Patriarchal power and the narration sustaining it – comprising several elements, including the need for control and subjugation of bodies and ecosystems – hence intersect with other forms of violence, such as colonialism, exploitation, destruction of the biosphere (Rivera Cusicanqui 1997) and imposition of male-centred cultural development models materializing in violent infrastructural projects (Luxion 2017). Contributing to the debate about narrative violence, Zimmerer (2014, p. 275) argues that ‘resource scarcity – real or perceived – could serve as a cause as well as part of an ideology, whereby ideology becomes the means by which allegedly superfluous human beings are identified’. In urban areas, ideology (and the related narrative violence) can take the form of sustainable eco-technological urban developments (Swyngedouw 2014), leading to the dispossession of local inhabitants from their resources (Heynen et al. 2006), including housing (Desai 2018; Pain 2019; Portelli 2017; Zuc and Chapple 2016). As critically highlighted by the Belgian political ecologist Erik Swyngedouw (2014, p. 1), ‘[t]his techno-managerial disposition has now been consensually established at the frontier of architectural, planning, and design theory and practice, presumably capable of saving both city and planet’. A new urban technocracy (Raco and Savini 2019) would hence be on the rise, especially in relation to urban environmental issues. Nevertheless, this ‘technocratic depoliticisation of governance’ (Swyngedouw 2011; Chapter 32 in this volume) is contested by a number of critical geographers and planners dealing with urban (and suburban) environmental justice (Basta 2016; Bulkeley et al. 2015; Coppola et al. 2021b; Gandy 2018; Hodson and Marvin 2009; Kaika 2017; Keil 2020; Satterthwaite and Dodman 2013; Soja 2010). Moreover, sociologists have been highlighting the controversial role of experts in the process of depoliticisation of territorial and environmental governance (Caselli 2020; Chesta 2021; Pellizzoni 2011; Chapter 18 in this volume). Given that expertise is strongly bound to knowledge production about the material reality (Pellizzoni 2015), communication and narration are crucial dimensions to it. As shown by several instances around the world, experts (for example, state officials, doctors, and technicians from polluting firms) can exert a form of narrative violence through unclear and contradictory communications, amplifying the uncertainty about the real situation in which the affected populations are living in. This form of narrative violence has been the object of deep ethnographic research in some cases and has been defined as a labour of confusion (Auyero and Swistun 2009) promoted by experts, leading the affected population to deep uncertainty and scepticism towards collective action (Swistun 2015). In the effort to counter narrative violence and technocratic depoliticisation of governance, a variety of experiences of resistance and reclamation ‘from below’ (De Rosa 2017) oppose different forms of non-direct environmental violence also through the production of knowledge, as we will see in the next section.

FORMS AND SITES OF RESISTANCE TO ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE Environmental violence takes different forms, crosses multiple geographical scales and affects territories and populations differently. Therefore, a wide range of experiences of resistance

352  Handbook of critical environmental politics have been elaborated by local inhabitants, activists, scholars and institutions in past decades (Chapters 33, 35 and 36 in this volume). The threat or killings of environmental defenders in many contexts, especially in Latin America, has been generating waves of local, national and transnational activism (White 2009–10). It has not only taken the form of demonstrations and campaigns but has also triggered the collection and mapping of data about direct environmental violence through activists-researchers outputs, such as the annual Global Witness reports or the Environmental Justice Atlas (Navas et al. 2018; Tran et al. 2020). International organisations for human rights have also been recognising the issue of direct environmental violence in recent years, as shown by the landmark resolution to protect environmental defenders, adopted on 21 March 2019 by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Against less visible forms of environmental violence, other methods of resistance have been developed by local inhabitants, activists and researchers. In this context, scholars are indicating the necessity to reclaim ‘slow emergencies’ (Anderson et al. 2019), occurring through systemic environmental and racial injustices (Bullard 2004). Moreover, slow observations (Davies 2019) through the employment of visual and ethnographic methods can make slow violence visible to policy-makers and the general public. Forms of slow observation have been introduced by local inhabitants and scholar-activists in some particularly polluted areas, such as the petrochemical area along the Mississippi in Louisiana, branded by many as ‘Cancer Alley’ (Allen 2003; Davies 2019), the territory between Naples and Caserta (Italy) also known as ‘Land of Fires’ owing to the presence of illegally dumped and burnt toxic waste (Armiero and De Rosa 2016; Iengo and Armiero 2017). Slow observations resulting in visual/sensorial representations of polluted territories can be considered part of emerging practices of ‘citizen science’ (Davies and Mah 2020). In the more advanced experiences, local inhabitants not only contribute to the collection of data on polluted territories, but also collaborate with the researchers in the interpretation of numbers and figures (Allen 2020). The inclusion of the most marginalised and less-educated members of the local communities is one of the main concerns of those who are experimenting with forms of inclusive citizen science to resist slow violence across the world (de Albuquerque and de Almeida 2020; Hoover 2020). These forms of ‘grassroots public politics’ (Paba 2009) aim at liberating marginalised communities and territories ‘from indifference and social invisibility through active inclusion practices’ (Paba 2010, pp. 104–5). As recent empirical and theoretical studies are demonstrating, forms of resistance to slow violence are taking place increasingly also within working-class communities whose livelihood depends on polluting industrial activities (Barca 2019). While during the 1960s–1970s several struggles for health and safety took place within the factories in large part of the industrialised countries (Davigo 2017), the following de-industrialisation processes increased environmental consciousness also outside the plants. Even though the struggles within and outside the factories might still be disconnected in many cases (Barca 2019), the workers and inhabitants of some mono-industrial towns affected by high levels of pollution and significant unemployment rates show how this link could be possible. For example, this occurred in the steel-town of Taranto, in southern Italy, which has been undergoing a deep economic and occupational crisis because of its changing role in the contemporary context of global value chains (Greco and Di Fabbio 2014). Through an in-depth study, Barca and Leonardi (2018) show how local environmental movements in Taranto have interacted with union politics since

Environmental violence  353 the early 2000s, thus leading to some common labour and environmental struggles centred on the crucial role of reproduction (Barca 2020). Although the international literature on slow violence and environmental justice shows an increasing number of cases in which collective action was started by local inhabitants (especially women), after they observed the existing connection between their living place, toxic hazards and illness, some in-depth ethnographic accounts reveal that this is not so for all the marginal territories. For example, Flammable, a Buenos Aires slum surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical areas in Argentina, suffers from extremely high levels of soil, air and water contamination (Auyero and Swistun 2009). In this example, the situation did not lead to protests, but on the contrary to doubts, disagreement and fear of collective action, fuelled by a ‘labour of confusion’ by those in power and their experts (Auyero and Swistun 2009). Therefore, researchers investigated the local perception of risks and engaged in a participatory action research with the local population to raise their awareness about the hazards. In other examples, looking for a clearly identifiable conflict could be misleading and could prevent scholars from recognising a range of controversies and a variety of less visible forms of opposition to environmental violence, as occurred, for example, with a large-scale water infrastructure in Western India (Pessina 2018) or in the aftermath of a chemical disaster in Northern Italy (Centemeri 2006). The call to repoliticise sustainability (Asara et al. 2015) in the face of techno-managerial depoliticisation (Raco and Savini 2019; Swyngedouw 2011) should hence take into account the different socio-territorial contexts affected by slow violence, infrastructural violence and other forms of environmental injustice, considering a variety of actions in urban, peri-urban and more marginal (rural, industrial, mining, forest, and so on) territories. Eventually, grassroots initiatives against slow and infrastructural violence can be supported and/or paralleled by urban and territorial planning tools, as well as by legislative innovations. Drawing on a consolidated tradition of participatory planning processes (Bryant 1995; Forester 1999), urban and territorial planners are exploring ways to promote more inclusive and sustainable development models through ‘urban transition labs’ (Nevens et al. 2013). More radically, some scholars are experimenting with forms of environmental and community mapping in urban, peri-urban and marginal territories by which to learn from practice and promote participatory action research in planning (Saija et al. 2017). In a similar vein, law scholars are empowering the partnership among different local actors to achieve environmental justice through community-based participatory action research (Bacon et al. 2013). Even though these collaborative approaches to environmental justice are constantly developing in new and promising ways, especially in the legal domain, as we will see in the following paragraph, scholars of CEJ remind us of the inner contradictions of this perspective, given the relationship between environmental and structural violence. As Pellow (2016, p. 224) wrote, looking ‘to the state and capital to accommodate demands via legislation, institutional reforms, and other policy concessions … leaves intact the very power structures that produced environmental injustice in the first place’. Therefore, CEJ calls for a broad anti-authoritarian perspective and hence for direct action and knowledge production. Even though not always explicitly, the CEJ perspective has been informing some critiques of legal innovations introduced after various waves of grassroots and planning initiatives for environmental justice. Beyond the already mentioned resolution to protect environmental defenders, several national laws have been designed to punish illegal polluting acts. Despite their strong symbolic value, these laws have been welcomed in contrasting ways in a variety of contexts owing to their limited scope and effectiveness (Lucchini and Membretti 2016).

354  Handbook of critical environmental politics Therefore, transnational environmental law scholars are advocating new legal instruments going beyond the human-centred approach of the ‘right to environment’ to a different attitude, based on the ‘right of nature’ (Borràs 2016). As evidence-based research is showing, the creation of right of nature tribunals in a variety of national contexts (for example, Ecuador, Bolivia, India and New Zealand) is a promising legal innovation which plays ‘an important role in confirming and materializing the new values of deep ecology that are slowly growing within society’ (Cano Pecharroman 2018). Despite the uncertainties still related to this new legal instrument, research is showing that it is leading to more effective local environmental laws (Borràs 2016). A further step against environmental violence is represented by the ongoing debate around the introduction of the ‘ecocide’ crime (Higgins 2010). Considering the inadequacy of the legal framework to contrast environmental violence in multiple territorial contexts and the presence of powerful laws protecting the interests of large polluting corporations, law scholars are proposing to consider the damage to the environment as a crime, punishable by international tribunals. The struggle for the recognition of ecocide is promoted both by scholar-activists (Crook et al. 2018; Dunlap 2020) and by transnational organisations such as the Stop Ecocide campaign, founded in 2017 by Polly Higgins and Jojo Mehta. According to the most recent definitions of the campaigners, ecocide could be considered as a ‘mass damage and destruction of ecosystems … committed repeatedly over decades’ and responsible for ‘the climate and ecological emergency that we now face’ (www​.stopecocide​.earth, accessed 20 July 2021). The legal sanctioning of ecocide would break the vicious relationship between powerful polluting industries, finance and governments, and would help put in perspective the individual contribution of ordinary citizens to climate change. Therefore, the Stop Ecocide campaigners are lobbying for an amendment of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adding ecocide to the four existing international crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression).

CONCLUDING REMARKS The issue of environmental violence has been explored by a variety of disciplines in the past decades, including literature, anthropology, peace and conflict studies, human geography, political ecology, philosophy of science, law, environmental history, chemistry, ecology and climate science. In order to navigate across the multiple perspectives on environmental violence, it is still useful to go back to the classification of violence proposed by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung (1969, 1990), that is, direct violence, structural violence and cultural violence. These categories help us recognise different forms of environmental violence (Navas et al. 2018), such as direct violent acts against environmental defenders (Global Witness 2020; Tran et al. 2020) and less visible forms of violence, which are the main focus of this chapter: slow violence owing to contamination in marginal territories and communities (Davies 2019; Lerner 2004; Nixon 2011), infrastructural violence through the creation of large-scale projects with high socio-environmental impacts (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012) and narrative violence (Barca 2014). The interplay between theories, definitions and real territories, bodies and stories in different parts of the world leads to more complex views on the topic, hopefully pushing scholars and activists to be ready to rethink their approach and

Environmental violence  355 research methods in the course of the analyses, while fine-tuning them to real socio-political and territorial specificities. While the analysis of environmental violence phenomena highlights common injustices, inequalities and forms of racism (Bullard 1990, 1994), especially against the poorest and most marginalised strata of the population (Nixon 2011), different forms of resistance have been experimented with in a variety of territorial contexts, ranging from the metamorphosis of local inhabitants (especially women) into activists (Iengo and Armiero 2017) to converging struggles for work and environmental protection in working-class communities (Barca and Leonardi 2018) and forms of inclusive citizen science in highly polluted territories (Davies and Mah 2020). Even if not directly addressed, the eradication of environmental violence has been also the object of some critical planning experimentations through participatory action research (Saija et al. 2017). The most radical experiences to counter environmental violence have been influenced by the CEJ approach, pushing for analyses and actions informed by a broad anti-authoritarian perspective (Pellow 2016). Despite an increasing number of cases of local mobilisation against slow and/or infrastructural violence, in some contexts it is hard to identify collective actions against injustices, owing to various factors, including the successful labour of confusion by governing bodies and the related experts (Auyero and Swistun 2009). While dealing with environmental violence, expertise hence emerges as a contentious field in relation with politics, activism and grassroots environmentalism (Chesta 2021; Pellizzoni 2011). As observed by the Italian sociologist Luigi Pellizzoni (2015), in his book Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature, the evolving production of knowledge on material reality is paralleled by new social scientific interpretations of human–nature relationships. While these accounts have been contributing to the establishment of the idea that our age would be characterised by ontological uncertainty, new economies have been taking advantage of it, through the use of technosciences allowing the expansion of the limits of nature’s exploitation, thus making the world even more disposable. Social science’s focus on ontological uncertainty, despite being apparently critical, would reveal a deep complicity with the current neoliberal economy based on technoscience. In this context, Pellizzoni suggests the need for new critical theories able to refuse violent narratives of domination, possession and exploitation of nature, while promoting a reconciliation between humans and nature (Chapter 41 in this volume), also through degrowth (Leonardi 2017). The most recent legal innovations aimed at contrasting environmental violence seem to move towards this reconciliation and of the reduction of uncertainty, through the establishment of right of nature tribunals (Borràs 2016; Chapter 6 in this volume) and the advocacy for the recognition of the ecocide crime (Higgins 2010). In the geography and territorial planning domain, further efforts are ongoing to contrast the technocratic depoliticisation of governance (Swyngedouw 2011) and the related environmental violence. These efforts are taking the form of in-depth territorial analyses able to grasp the specificities of the various (urban, peri-urban, intermediate, rural and marginal) contexts (Keil 2020) and to highlight forms of spatial injustice (Soja 2010). Moreover, some planners are elaborating interdisciplinary proposals aimed at achieving space-sensitive, politically viable and financially sustainable forms of contrast to inequalities and environmental degradation (Coppola et al. 2021b), as a means by which to critically produce knowledge and act in the context of increasing international programmes for ecological transition. The considerable amount of funds related to those programmes and the exceptionality of their implementation processes could materialize in unnecessary and

356  Handbook of critical environmental politics harmful development projects sustained by a rapidly expanding technocratic governance, as has occurred in the past (for example, the final decade of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno development programme in Southern Italy) (Coppola et al. 2021a). Therefore, planners are worrying about the spatial impact of the ecological transition and its possible contribution to the production of further environmental violence. Future research on environmental violence will benefit from unambiguous definitions of the multiple facets of the topic, strong theoretical frameworks and in-depth investigations of real territorial contexts, explored at multiple scales in their socio-political, spatial and environmental specificities. In this context, social scientists will be called to elaborate critical thoughts able to reconcile the relationship between humans and nature, as well as to facilitate the dialogue between lay people and experts and across disciplines, for the common objective of eradicating environmental violence.

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360  Handbook of critical environmental politics Pellow, D.N. (2007), Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pellow, D.N. (2016), ‘Toward a critical environmental justice studies: black lives matter as an environmental justice challenge’, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 13 (2), 221–36. Peluso, N.L. and Watts, M. (eds) (2001), Violent Environments, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Pessina, G. (2018), ‘The “missing conflict” of the Sabarmati riverfront. Authoritarian governance, neoliberalism, and water in Ahmedabad’, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 11 (3), 692–714. Pignarre, P. and Stengers, I. (2005), La sorcellerie capitaliste: Pratiques de désenvoûtement, Paris: Editions La Découverte, English trans. A. Goffey, 2011, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Portelli, S. (2017), La città orizzontale. Etnografia di un quartiere ribelle di Barcellona, Naples: Monitor edizioni. Raco, M. and Savini, F. (2019), Planning and Knowledge. How New Forms of Technocracy are Shaping Contemporary Cities, Bristol: Policy Press and Bristol University Press. Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (1997), ‘Mujeres y estructuras de poder en los Andes: De la etnohistoria a la política’, Escarmenar: Revista Boliviana de Estudios Culturales, 2, 16–25. Rodgers, D. and O’Neill, B. (2012), ‘Infrastructural violence: introduction to the special issue’, Ethnography, 13 (4), 401–12. Sachs, J.D. and Warner, A.M. (2001), ‘The curse of natural resources’, European Economic Review, 45 (4–6), 827–38. Saija, L., De Leo, D., Forester, J., Pappalardo, G., Rocha, I., Sletto, B., et al. (2017), ‘Learning from practice: environmental and community mapping as participatory action research in planning’, Planning Theory & Practice, 18 (1), 127–53. Salleh, A. (1995), ‘Nature, woman, labour, capital: living the deepest contradiction’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 61 (1), 21–39. Salleh, A. (2003), ‘Ecofeminism as sociology’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 14 (1), 61–74. Salleh, A. (2017), Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern, London: ZED Books. Satterthwaite, D. and Dodman, D. (2013), ‘Editorial: towards resilience and transformation for cities within a finite planet’, Environment & Urbanization, 25 (2), 291–8. Scheidel, A., Del Bene, D., Liu, J., Navas, G., Mingorrìa, S., Demaria, F., et al. (2020), ‘Environmental conflicts and defenders: a global overview’, Global Environmental Change, 63 (July), 102104. Smith, N. (2006), ‘There’s no such thing as a natural disaster’, items: Insights from the Social Sciences, 11 June, accessed 20 July 2021 at https://​items​.ssrc​.org/​understanding​-katrina/​theres​-no​-such​-thing​ -as​-a​-natural​-disaster/​. Soja, E. (2010), Seeking Spatial Justice, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Soron, D. (2007), ‘Cruel weather: natural disasters and structural violence’, Transformations, (14), accessed 20 July 2021 at http://​www​.tr​ansformati​onsjournal​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2017/​01/​Soron​ _Transformations14​.pdf. Springer, S. and Le Billon, P. (2016), ‘Violence and space: an introduction to the geographies of violence’, Political Geography, 52, 1–3. Swistun, D. (2015), ‘Desastres en cámara lenta. Incubación de confusión tóxica y emergencia de justicia ambiental y ciudadania biológica’, O Social em Questão, 33, 193–214. Swyngedouw, E. (2011), ‘Depoliticized environments: the end of nature, climate change and the post-political condition’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, October, 253–74. Swyngedouw, E. (2014), ‘The violence of sustainable urbanity’, Metropolitics, 24 November 2014, accessed 20 July 2021 at http://​www​.metropolitiques​.eu/​The​-Violence​-of​-Sustainable​.html. Swyngedouw, E. (2015), Liquid Power. Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Temper, L., Del Bene, D. and Martínez-Alier, J. (2015), ‘Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: the EJAtlas’, Journal of Political Ecology, 22 (1), 255–78. Tran, D., Martínez-Alier, J., Navas, G. and Mingorria, S. (2020), ‘Gendered geographies of violence: a multiple case-study analysis of murdered women environmental defenders’, Journal of Political Ecology, 27 (1), 1189–212.

Environmental violence  361 Tsing, A. (2011), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, New York: Princeton University Press. Vélez Torres, I. (2012), ‘Water grabbing in the Cauca Basin: the capitalist exploitation of water and dispossession of Afro-descendant communities’, Water Alternatives, 5 (2), 431–49. Velicu, I. (2019), ‘Prospective environmental injustice: insights from anti-mining struggles in Rumania and Bulgaria’, Environmental Politics, 29 (3), 414–34. Watts, M. (2015), ‘Securing oil: frontiers, risk, and spaces of accumulated insecurity’, in A. Hannah, A. Mason and M. Watts (eds), Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 211–36. White, R. (2009–10), ‘Environmental victims and resistance to state crime through transnational activism’, Social Justice, 36 (3), 46–60. Wiebe, S. (2016), Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley, Vancouver: UBC Press. Zierler, D. (2011), The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about the Environment, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Zimmerer, J. (2014), ‘Climate change, environmental violence and genocide’, International Journal of Human Rights, 18 (3), 265–80. Zuc, M. and Chapple, K. (2016), Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationship, Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies.

26. Environment-related human mobility Eleonora Guadagno

UNDERSTANDING THE MULTIPLE FACETS OF THE TOPIC The idea that global warming and its negative consequences will lead to migration fluxes from the Global South to Northern countries seems to be a common refrain recited by political leaders, international organizations, media and scientists. Nonetheless, if there is strong evidence concerning the environmental and social impacts of climate change, its consequences in respect of massive migration from ‘poor’ to ‘rich’ countries, remain very controversial: and even if could be sound tautologically, the difficulties in identifying this phenomenon cast doubts on the basis of the phenomenon itself (Baldwin and Bettini 2017, among others). The vagueness of the concepts used in defining the scope and nature of climate-related mobility, the lack of legally adopted definitions and the differences in the methodologies used to produce statistics and scenarios, create an enormous debate, not only within public opinion, but also in academia. Furthermore, this vagueness, compounded by statistical biases (the available data are insufficient or only cover specific geographical areas or environmental drivers), undermines the possibility of using reliable and comparable datasets to produce scientific analyses over different temporal and spatial scales (Zetter 2007). All this constitutes a key problem in the recognition/misrecognition of the phenomenon of mobility related to climate/environment,1 and brings about significant research, policy and operational challenges to distinctly define different categories of mobile people – which has, in turn, implications on potential legal protection and assistance regimes that could be applicable to the different groups in an increasingly security-obsessed world. Even the 2018 United Nations (UN) Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, adopted by 164 countries, identifies climate change as a driver of migration and promotes international cooperation in order to implement governance measures addressed to people who are moving because of natural hazards and climate change. While data are still lacking, gloomy projections about the global scale of climate-related mass migration tend to be misleading as they are often based on little evidence and only rarely take into account the role of adaptation in exposed communities. The more pressing questions, even if they could appear rhetorical, to clarify the issue seem to be: ● ● ● ●

How many people are involved in ‘climate/environment-related human mobility’? Which categories of people? When will they move? Where will they go?

It could also be interesting to understand how the issue of ‘climate/environment-related human mobility’ is constructed and who is responsible for its definition. These questions help shed light on the complexity of this phenomenon which, owing to its ties with environmental, 362

Environment-related human mobility  363 economic and legal structures of power and governance, is deeply political and needs to be investigated through an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approach.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT Since its first conceptualization, and despite the vagueness of terminology and the limited evidence base to describe the phenomenon, climate-related human mobility increasingly become a focus of public opinion between the late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium (Nicholson 2001). Its popularity, owing to a proliferation in reports, television debates and documentaries, has contributed to sensitizing the public over the human impacts of climate change, but has also rested on a misinterpretation of reality, based on ambiguous predictions about the size of populations of concern (called on a case-by-case basis, according to the different sources, refugees, migrants or displaced), the entity of the flows and the scale of their impacts. It seems that the phenomenon is often addressed in an alarmist way in consideration of current estimation and projection, based on inaccurate information (or just on different methodologies), reinforcing widespread prejudices and generalizations. By way of example, according to Myers’s first estimates, the total number of environmental refugees was 25 million in 1995 and their numbers seem likely to grow still more rapidly if predictions of global warming are borne out, whereupon sea-level rise and flooding of many coastal communities, plus agricultural dislocations through droughts and disruption of monsoon and other rainfall systems, could eventually cause as many as 200 million people to be put at risk of displacement. (Myers 1997, pp. 167–8)

The 2001 World Disaster Report (Red Cross and Red Crescent Society 2001) estimated a 25 million environmental refugees by the end of 2010. In 2000, the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that approximately 24 million people around the world were displaced owing to floods, famines and other environmental factors (UNHCR 2000). Christian Aid (2007, p. 5) estimated that 1 billion people would be forcibly displaced by 2050: ‘250 million could be permanently displaced by climate change-related phenomena such as droughts, floods and hurricanes, and 645 million by dams and other development projects, based on a current rate of 15 million people a year’. In 2009, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Refugee Council (2009, p. 15) indicated that ‘millions are already being displaced by climate-related natural disasters each year’. More recently, the Groundswell report (World Bank 2018), focused on the nexus between mobility and slow-onset climate change impacts in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, highlighted that these three regions alone could potentially see 140 million of additional internal migrants owing to climate change by 2050. In the same year, Watts et al. (2018) report that in 2100 1 billion (plus or minus 50 per cent) people will migrate as a consequence of climate change. Human mobility caused by environmental and climatic changes is not a new topic: in 1882, Ratzel, in his theory of migration, showed how movements of populations could be generated by changes in climate and temperature, or by environmental degradation. The environmental, climate or ecological drivers of human mobility have been a leitmotif in the migration theories for the first half of the 1900s (for an example, see Semple 1911). Vogt, in 1948, used the phrase ‘ecological refuge’ to describe places for people escaping from disasters.

364  Handbook of critical environmental politics From the second half of the twentieth century, the relationship between environment and migration started to be rejected (Petersen 1958). Deterministic theories began to be abandoned as they were considered scientifically outdated, as noted by Ambrosini (2005). In addition, ‘refugee studies’ emerged in the political context of the Cold War (among others, Chandler, 1959), which led to a shift in the consideration of forced mobility, increasingly regarded as the consequence of state actions than of disasters and environmental degradation. Lastly, the economic paradigm emerged in the field of migration research (Borjas 1989) and research on mobility and migration started progressively to deny the relevance of natural factors, considering them to be a primitive element characterizing only specific communities (Piguet et al. 2011; Piguet 2013). This idea fits within the modern conceptualization of ‘progress’, and with its complete alienation of human action from climate and nature in general (as noted by Latour 1999, 2011). According to this perspective, mostly developed in the Global North, vulnerability to environmental and climatic factors is the exclusive prerogative of less complex societies (Bankoff 2001; Mouhot 2012). It is only since the late 1970s that the nexus between environmental processes and events and mobility has been rediscovered, mainly owing to the emergence of issues linked to global changes in climate, resource availability, and integrity of ecosystems and delivery of their services, and owing to the increased risks related to technological hazards or severe pollution. In 1976, environmental analysts Brown et al., in a Worldwatch Institute paper, used the term ‘environmental refugees’ for the first time, to refer to migrants who were forced to flee their homes owing to a changing environment, as a consequence of pollution, climate change, overgrazing, overcrowding, urbanization and deforestation, political instability, conflict over energy, water and minerals and biodiversity reduction. However, the term ‘environmental refugee’ came into popular use following El-Hinnawi’s work on the topic for the United Nations Environment Programme, which defined them as ‘those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life’ (El-Hinnawi 1985, p. 4). Subsequently, Jacobson (1988, pp. 37–8) identified different types of ‘environmental refugees’: Those displaced temporarily due to local disruption such as an avalanche or earthquake; those who migrate because environmental degradation has undermined their livelihood or poses unacceptable risks to health; and those who resettle because land degradation has resulted in desertification or because of other permanent and untenable changes in their habitat.

These initial works are characterized by broad definitions, a marked concern for environmental degradation, the consideration of all the natural and human-made hazards as possible drivers of mobility, and a prevalent focus on the Global South. In the following decades, a number of articles appeared to confirm or criticize the contributions of the early scholars (such as El-Hinnawi and Jacobson). Mathews (1989, pp. 162–77) uses El-Hinnawi’s ‘environmental refugees’ definition to reconsider the concept of security, while Westing (1992), writing about categories of refugees, noted that the more environmental refugees flee from disasters, the more their movement will have global implications on national and international security, providing a first critical analysis over the subject which deals with international climate governance.

Environment-related human mobility  365 In 1993, the UNHCR’s State of the World’s Refugees identified four root causes of refugee flows, namely, political instability, economic tensions, ethnic conflict and environmental degradation. Myers (1994, pp. 6–7) defines environmental refugees as ‘People who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems’. A year later, the Climate Institute in Washington, DC, published ‘Environmental exodus: an emergent crisis in the global arena’, a report that legitimized the use of the concept of environmental and climate refugees (Kent and Myers 1995). Some criticism was provided by other academics who considered the term ‘environmental refugee’ to be simplistic, one-sided and misleading (among others, Kibreab 1997) because it does not include people not moving to other countries. For the first time, the problem of security is associated with specific geographical areas (especially the arid parts of Africa), and the phenomenon of displacement in the aftermath of catastrophic events starts to be considered as a political concern in the international security future scenarios – associated with other conflicts and warfare in Global South countries – which needs to be addressed through concrete response by the international community. Generally, in analysing the literature production, the 1990s seem to be characterized by a sentiment of insecurity which starts to consider the ‘environmental issues’ as a broader challenge and is reflected in political agendas, often orientated to securitization of borders and tightening of immigration policies (Ambrosini 2005). The environment is seen as a tangible triggering factor of broader conflicts between and within countries, especially in Global South contexts; indeed, the management measures put in place are becoming progressively more selective and repressive towards the most vulnerable populations/cohorts, such as irregular migrants, asylum seekers and temporary workers. Since the early 2000s, scholars started to talk instead of ‘environmental migrants’ or ‘environmentally displaced persons’. The necessity to use different definitions arose because the term ‘environmental refugee’ previously used in the literature did not fit into the international definition of ‘refugee’ provided by the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol, in particular as regards the concept of a well-founded fear of persecution (Renaud et al. 2007, p. 14). ‘The current parameters of the international legal definition of refugee make it inappropriate to use the term of environmental refugee in a general context. Uncritical use of the term may quickly result in confusion’ (Renaud et al. 2007, p. 14). Throughout the 2000s, these definitions have become increasingly prevalent among scholars and international organizations, reflecting the incapacity to recognize a specific category of ‘environmental refugees’ and the consequent impossibility of assigning them a specific status in order to guarantee their international protection, even if both in the Global South and the Global North phenomena of mobility and resettlement and the internal and international displacement in the aftermath of environmental degradation and catastrophes were very common. Following Myers (1994), the idea that specific effects of climate change, and not only of environmental degradation in general, cause massive displacements has been evoked by several other academics,2 but the label ‘climate refugee’ has been widely adopted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Ollitrault 2010) and in the international policy discourse. Bates (2002) suggests a categorization of environmental refugees based on criteria related to the kind of environmental disruption triggering the movement (disasters, expropriations and deteriorations), its duration (acute or gradual) and whether migration was a planned outcome or not. On occasions, the use of ‘climate refugees’ has also represented a way to improve visibility of reports in the media and in public opinion. Along these lines the Council of Europe reports

366  Handbook of critical environmental politics that ‘The impacts of climate change on the environment and human mobility are becoming increasingly worrying: the number of natural disasters has doubled over the past two decades’ (McAdam 2010, p. 207). In the absence of an internationally agreed definition, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) developed a working definition in 2008 that refuses the label of refugees preferring the term ‘environmental migrants’ as more inclusive: Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive change in the environment that adversely affects their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad. (Warner and Laczko 2008, p. 2)

In 2011, a group of scholars of the Government Office for Science in the UK, considering mobility and migration as a consequence of environmental change, cast doubts on the monocausality of the given definitions (not considering the cultural, social, individual, household and capital factors impinging on mobility): ‘Environmental change will affect migration now and in the future, specifically through its influence on a range of economic, social and political drivers which themselves affect migration’ (Foresight Project 2011, p. 9). Over the past decade or so, the debate has been expanded to discuss the role of mobility in the context of environmental and climate change, with some studies considering migration as a failure in adapting to climate change and others seeing it as an adaptation measure (Black et al. 2011; Stojanov 2014) in considering that in the context of climate change the ‘immobility’ (owing to personal or exogenous reasons) can also be considered as a failure in climate change adaptation (Kelman et al. 2015). The range and complexity of the interactions between these drivers means that it will rarely be possible to distinguish individuals for whom environmental factors are the sole driver (‘environmental migrants’). Moreover, these studies introduced the concept of ‘trapped population’ into the debate, highlighting how high levels of vulnerability to environmental change and low degrees of human, social and economic capital could negatively affect the capability to move and the possibility to be identified during the recovery (Foresight 2011, pp. 9, 14). However, in the policy and academic debate it is not uncommon to find the expression ‘mobility in the context of environmental change’. As highlighted in this diachronic analysis, decades of academic and policy debate have allowed identify key conceptual issues to circumscribe the topic: ● the possibility of considering mobility/migration (including all categories associated with human movement, for example, displacement and planned relocation) as outcomes of events/processes that are owing to, or affected by, environmental/climate change (both sudden-onset, such as floods, or slow-onset, such as desertification); ● the misrecognition of cultural and social elements which mediate (for both mitigation or accentuation) the nexus between environmental/climate change impacts and mobility; ● both ‘forced immobility’ and ‘forced mobility’ as outcomes of vulnerability owing to these social elements; ● the possibility/impossibility of encasing the phenomenon in consolidated legal frameworks both at domestic and international levels; ● the necessity/uselessness of specific or new legal or judicial practices, at different scales, to grant protection to this specific ‘new’ category of mobile people;

Environment-related human mobility  367 ● the reasons of the spectacularization/minimization of the issue and the differences in approaches of analysis, solutions and policies produced by different actors (for example, international organizations, academia and NGOs).

PUTTING THE DEBATE IN PERSPECTIVE The complexity of the link between climate and environmental change and migration and the political and strategic consequences of its different interpretations often hinder a distinct definition and quantification of the phenomenon (Guadagno 2016, 2017). On the one hand, it is possible to observe a growing attention to the nexus between environmental degradation and mobility by media, NGOs and governments in the public discourse as well as in the international political agenda. On the other, a lack of evidence in the analysis of the phenomenon and the concentration of case studies in the Global South have created, since the 1970s, an articulate debate around the definition, the quantification and the explanation of the phenomenon among scholars (Adamo 2008). Laczko and Aghazarm (2009) identified the 3 Ds problem: definition, data and drivers. The authors believe that the challenges in the recognition and protection of this particular category of people moving in the context of environmental change are strictly linked with the difficulty that academics and governments have to limit and circumscribe the phenomenon. Some scholars consider climate migrants as proper ‘refugees’, needing protection under international law (see, among others, Cournil and Mazzega 2007). Others claim that climate migrants cannot be considered to be ‘traditional’ refugees or stateless people, and need a ‘new’ form of protection (McAdam 2010). In this regard, for example, the legal scholars of the University of Limoges (France) have imagined a new convention (the Appel de Limoges sur les réfugiés écologiques (et environnementaux) 2006) conceived as a tool for the recognition of these categories currently unprotected. There are, however, some examples and practices of how protection has been granted to this group of people, at international level and at domestic scale.3 The 16 February 2018 L’Aquila (Italy) court decision, for instance, granted a Bengali citizen humanitarian protection in the second instance for ‘environmental reasons’ (Ciervo 2018). In the ordinance, the reference to poverty is explicit as a socio-economic consequence of climate change, environmental conflicts, deforestation and land grabbing, laying, in a certain way, the foundations for a reconceptualization of the very idea of ‘economic/ traditional migrant’. The problem, however, is that legal categories, which could multiply, are often inapplicable owing to their stringent definitions, and could even become counter-productive in consideration of the possibility to protect all the different mentioned categories. These differences in relation to definitions, drivers, numerical predictions and consequences in the short, medium and long terms call for a deeper reflection on the phenomenon that takes into account all the relevant political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of the issue of climate-related mobility in order to understand the reasons behind the different approaches and perspectives on the topic. Concepts often used as synonyms (such as ‘climate refugees’, ‘climate migrants’, ‘environmental refugees’, ‘environmental migrants’ and ‘environmental displaced persons’, or other mediatic definitions, such as ‘tsunami refugees’, ‘famine refugees’ or ‘nuclear refugees’) and referred to phenomena broadly linked with human mobility owing to environmental degrada-

368  Handbook of critical environmental politics tion or climate change, create a misleading representation of a phenomenon. As previously highlighted, environmental factors are very difficult to isolate as the sole drivers of movements (Gentle et al. 2018; Guadagno and Guadagno 2021). This much was clear already to Myers (1994, p. 7): ‘It is often difficult, however, to differentiate between refugees driven by environmental factors and those impelled by economic problems’. The analysis of the environmental link often follows a very simplified, deterministic path – where the environment becomes the most important push factor – denying a complex, multi-causal and multivariate process that is always mediated by social, cultural, political and economic factors. Moreover, these simplistic conceptualizations may fail to account for environmental change that may result in a well-planned migration decision or in the sudden abandonment of an area – or anything in between. On a closer look, though, these predictions seem artificially inflated and based more on speculation than on scientific evidence. The impossibility of accurate estimates and predictions has been noted by Döös (1997). He considers that a large number of factors contributing to the possibility of environmental migration have very low or no predictability. This is why the vast majority of previous studies concerning the magnitude of the phenomenon are based on post-disaster recovery enumerations (see, for example, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports, which annually estimates the number of people displaced by sudden-onset climate-related disasters). ‘Rather, the linkage appears simply as “common sense” – if water levels rise, or forests disappear, it seems obvious that people will have to move’ (Castles 2002, p. 4), overlooking the additional layers of complexity involved in mobility decision-making. Instead, the migration (or the flight) of an individual is a reflection of individual and household-level livelihood strategies, levels of income and assets, household size and composition (disasters and environmental impacts in general have distinct age, race/ethnicity and gendered effects; see Chapter 16 in this volume), ownership of land and goods, prior migration experience and migration networks (Hugo 1981), individual/familiar perceived relative deprivation (in material and immaterial goods) (Findley 1987; Hunter and David 2011; Le Billon 2001), expectations and confidence towards the institutions, media and scientific forecasts (when possible), local/regional/international power structure (Massey et al. 2007). In addition, subjective considerations involved in the decision to migrate abroad or internally (Suhrke and Visentin 1991) take place in the context of societies or communities with varying capacities to adapt to climate change.

REFRAMING THE PHENOMENON FROM A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In addition to the problems of definition, quantification, limitation of the discourse to specific areas of the globe, recognition of specific categories and recognition of their protection claims, the mainstream discourse on climate-induced mobility may also hide a neo-liberal agenda. As highlighted by Felli and Castree (2012, p. 4), the question is ‘whether our efforts should be directed toward adapting as individual migrants to increasingly unadapted socioecological conditions, or whether we support the possibility of changing these very conditions. Adapting to “global environmental change” or changing the very nature of the global environmental order? Now that is a political question’. Rethinking the conceptualization of environmentally induced mobility does not only involve reframing its theoretical approach. It involves a para-

Environment-related human mobility  369 digm shift to give the correct value to the words and to the category of people they define, on the whole, in media and in dissemination contexts. This link is instead shaped by a multitude of community and society-wide factors, but also by a level of personal choice/agency/capability and previous economic/social/human capital (Bates 2002; Black, 1998; Boano 2008; Gemenne 2011 Piguet et al. 2011). Moreover, it is necessary to reconsider the global implications of the phenomenon: the difficulties in providing an inclusive definition and in calculating the real dimension of this category are the main reasons behind the insufficient international and domestic protection regimes. This, in turn, creates an institutional and regulatory vacuum (Kolmannskog and Trebbi 2010; Nespor 2007) – in opposition to environmental justice principles (Felli 2008; Grasso 2010; Chapter 13 in this volume) – and generates little more than fear in Northern countries which define this issue in relations to migration, humanitarian, development, security and environmental ‘problems’: ‘The underdeveloped South poses a physical threat to the prosperous North by population explosions, resource scarcity, violent conflict and mass migration’ (Dalby 2002, p. 71). The reconceptualization of the phenomenon also implies abandonment of the idea that climate mobility only concerns the Global South as the area of origin and the Global North as the ‘natural’ area of destination. Moreover, this perspective does not consider that climate-related mobility will occur not just from, but within, the Global South. When considering the traditional patterns of migration, in both scientific and public policy discourse it is often forgotten that the biggest rate of migration occurs internally or within the same geographical region (IOM 2020).4 This approach is based on the idea of the invulnerability of the Global North and its complete detachment from the natural environment, contrary to the Global South which is more susceptible to generating a primitive form of mobility (Baldwin 2013). However, this approach does not take into account that, being a global phenomenon, climate change will affect all the globe. However, while disasters and long-term degradation phenomena will also hit the Global North, the level of vulnerability are not uniformly distributed among the communities in all geographical contexts. This tendency has been analysed in the attempt to understand how post-colonial and the neo-imperialist paradigm (Dalby 2004) still link scientific research with interpretations of the reality by the media and governmental policies. The analysis of the different frameworks and conceptualizations starts by Bankoff’s (2001) in his discussion of ‘vulnerability’ as a post-colonial, ‘Western’ discourse. The increasing attention paid to environmentally induced displacement in some specific areas in these alarmist ways is not strictly a ‘humanitarian’ preoccupation, but may derive from strategic and political concerns related to immigration in Northern countries.5 Western security agencies seem to prompt region-specific studies in order to predict future immigration flows and be able to justify restrictive immigration policies. The emphasis on data and scenarios is instrumental to a political system where the ‘securitisation’ of environmental degradation is bringing military considerations to the issue, promoting repressive tendencies; moreover, the accentuation of the relationship between forced mobility and climate change, becomes an alibi in order to avoid recognizing an objective common (but differentiated) responsibility in environmental degradation and unfair resource distribution at local and global level. In conclusion, beyond the specific issues in defining the phenomenon, the main paradigm shift must be, on the one hand, in recognizing the economic and power structures that generate conditions of vulnerability in local settings at a global level (both in Northern and Southern countries) and, on the other, in readdressing the tools and frameworks for the management of

370  Handbook of critical environmental politics migrant flows which are currently mainly characterized as security and restrictive migration regimes and border policies.

NOTES 1.

In order to study the debate surrounding the politicization of the climate change and mobility nexus, principally consider the works of Mol (1999), Bankoff (2001), Miller (2004), Gemenne (2009) and Zetter (1991, 2007). 2. Ferris (2011, p. 2) defines ‘climate refugees’ as those who are subject to ‘displacement which is likely to occur as a result of climate change: the relocation or resettlement of communities from areas which are no longer habitable because of environmental consequences of climate change’. 3. For example, ‘The Nansen Initiative is a state-led, bottom-up consultative process intended to build consensus on the development of a protection agenda addressing the needs of people displaced across international borders in the context of disasters and the effects of climate change’ (https://​ www​.nanseninitiative​.org/​, accessed 31 January 2020). 4. Moreover, in consideration of the African context and the data provided by UNDESA (2019), IOM (2020) and European Commission (2018), if the total number of African extra-continental migrants was 26.5 million in 2019 (2 per cent of the African population), over 21 million live in neighborhood African countries and 19 million live in different regions within the continent. 5. This is a manifestation of Bricmont’s (2006) ‘humanitarian imperialism’, which demonstrates how the human rights framework and the other Global North concepts created by political leaders and the intellectual community have been abused to further an imperialistic agenda. This prejudice reveals a presumed superiority of the Global North countries and underlines the dialectic of the recognition/ misrecognition in the alterity: the Global North defines a phenomenon for the Global South, and helps the Global South to face it.

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Environment-related human mobility  371 Brown, L., McGrath, P. and Stoke, B. (1976), Twenty-Two Dimensions of the Population Problem, Worldwatch Paper 5, Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute. Castles, S. (2002), Environmental change and forced migration: making sense of the debate, New Issues in Refugee Research, 70 (October), 1–14. Chandler, E. (1959), High Tower of Refuge: The Inspiring Story of Refugee Relief throughout the World, London: Odhams Press. Christian Aid (2007), Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis, London: Christian Aid. Ciervo, A. (2018), Rifugiati invisibili: la possibilità di riconoscere una nuova categoria giuridica di richiedenti asilo, in S. Altiero and M. Marano (eds), Crisi ambientale e migrazioni forzate, Rome: Associazione A Sud, pp. 146–67. Cournil, C. and Mazzega, P. (2007), Réflexions prospectives sur une protection juridique des réfugiés, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 23 (1), 7–34. Dalby, S. (2002), Environmental change and human security, Isuma – Canadian Journal of Policy Research, 3 (2), 71–9. Dalby, S. (2004), Ecological politics, violence, and the theme of empire, Environmental Politics, 4 (2), 1–11. Döös, B. (1997), Can large-scale environmental migrations be predicted? Global Environmental Change, 7 (1), 41–61. El-Hinnawi, E. (1985), Environmental Refugees, Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme. European Commission (2018), Many More to Come? Migration From and Within Africa, Luxembourg: European Commission. Felli, R. and Castree, N. (2012), Neoliberalising adaptation to environmental change: foresight or foreclosure? Environment and Planning A, 44 (1), 1–4. Felli, R. (2008), Justice globale pour les réfugié-e-s climatiques? Asylon(s), 6 (November), accessed 9 May 2022 at http://​reseau​-terra​.eu/​article850​.html. Ferris, E. (2011), Climate change and internal displacement: a contribution to the discussion, Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, accessed 9 May 2022 at https://​www​.brookings​ .edu/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​0228​_cc​_displacement​_ferris​.pdf. Findley, S. (1987), Rural Development and Migration: A Study of Family Choices in the Philippines, Boulder, Co and London: Westview. Foresight Project (2011), Migration and Global Environmental Change: Future Challenges and Opportunities, London: Government Office for Science. Gemenne, F. (2011), The State of Environmental Migration 2010, Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Gemenne, F. (2009), Géopolitique du changement climatique, Paris: Armand Colin. Gentle, P., Thwaites, R., Race, D., Kim, A. and Maraseni, T. (2018), Household and community responses to impacts of climate change in the rural hills of Nepal, Climatic Change, 147 (January), 267–82. Grasso, M. (2010), Justice in Funding Adaptation under the International Climate Change Regime. Dordrecht: Springer. Guadagno, E. (2016), Rethinking Environmentally Induced Displacement in the Global North, Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic. Guadagno, E. (2017), Movimenti di popolazione e questioni ambientali: una lettura del recente dibattito, Bollettino della Società Geografica italiana, 13 (10), 195–208. Guadagno, L. and Guadagno, E. (2021), Migration, housing & disaster: risk reduction and creation in Southern Italy’s Apennines, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 61 (July), 102305. Hugo, G. (1981), Village-community ties, the village norms, and ethnic and social networks: a review of evidence from the Third World, in G. Jong and R. Gardner (eds), Migration Decision Making: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Micro-Level Studies in Developed and Developing Countries, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 186–224. Hunter, L. and David, E. (2011), Displacement, Climate Change, and Gender, in E. Piguet, P. Antoine and P. De Guchteneire (eds), Migration and Climate Change, Cambridge, UNESCO and Cambridge University Press, pp. 306–30. International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2008), World Migration Report 2008: Managing Labour Mobility in the Evolving Global Economy, Geneva: IOM.

372  Handbook of critical environmental politics International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2020), Word Migration Report, Geneva: IOM. Jacobson, J. (1988), Environmental Refugees: A Yardstick of Habitability, Worldwatch Paper 86, Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute. Kelman, I., Gaillard, J. and Mercer, J. (2015), Climate change’s role in disaster risk reduction’s future: beyond vulnerability and resilience, International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 6 (1), 21–7. Kent, J. and Myers, N. (1955), Environmental exodus: an emergent crisis in the global arena, Climate Institute, Washington, DC. Kibreab, G. (1997), Environmental causes and impacts of refugee movements: a critique of the current debate, Disasters, 21 (1), 20–38. Kolmannskog, V. and Trebbi, L. (2010), Climate change, natural disasters and displacement: a multi-track approach to filling the protection gaps, International Review of the Red Cross, 92 (879), monograph issue. Laczko, F. and Aghazarm, C. (2009), Migration, Environment and Climate Change: Assessing the Evidence, Geneva: IOM. Latour, B. (1999), Politiques de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie? Paris: Édition La Découverte. Latour, B. (2011), Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics, lecture at the French Institute, London, November, for the launching of the Sciences Po programme in Arts and Politics. Le Billon, P. (2001), The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography, 20 (5), 561–84. Massey, D., Axinn, W. and Ghimire, D. (2007), Environmental Change and Outmigration: Evidence from Nepal, Ann Arbor, MI: Population Studies Centre, University of Michigan. Mathews, J. (1989), Redefining security, Foreign Affairs, 68 (2), 162–77. McAdam, J. (2010), Climate Change and Displacement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Oxford: Hart. Miller, C. (2004), Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order. States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, London: Routledge. Mol, A. (1999), Ontological politics: a word and some questions. Actor network theory, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network and After, Oxford and Keele: Blackwell and the Sociological Review, pp. 74–89. Mouhot, J.F. (2012), Du climat au changement climatique: chantiers, leçons et défis pour l’histoire, Cultures & Conflits, 4 (88), 19–42. Myers, N. (1994), Scarcity or Abundance. A debate on the Environment, New York: W.W. Norton Press. Myers, N. (1995), Report on Environmental Refugees, Washington, DC: Climate Institute. Myers, N. (1997), Environmental refugees, Population and Environment, 19 (2), 167–82. Nespor, S. (2007), I Rifugiati ambientali, Federalismi.it Rivista di diritto pubblico italiano, comunitario e comparato, 4 (February). Nicholson, S. (2001), Climatic and environmental change in Africa during the last two centuries, Climatic Research, 17 (August), 123–44. Ollitrault, S. (2010), De la sauvegarde de la planète à celle des réfugiés climatiques: l’activisme des ONG, Revue Tiers Monde, 4 (204), 19–34. Petersen, W.A. (1958), A general typology of migration, American Sociological Review, 23 (3), 256–66. Piguet, E. (2013), From ‘primitive migration’ to ‘climate refugees’: the curious fate of the natural environment in migration studies, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (1), 148–62. Piguet, E., Antoine, P. and De Guchteneire, P. (eds) (2011), Migration and Climate Change, Cambridge: UNESCO and Cambridge University Press. Ratzel, F. (1882), Anthropogeographie oder Grundzuge der Anwendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte, Stuttgart: Verlag von J. Engelhom. Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2001), World Disasters Report 2001, Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Renaud, F., Bogardi, J., Dun, O. and Warner, K. (2007), Control, adapt or flee: how to face environmental migration? InterSecTions, 5. Semple, E. (1911), Influences of Geographic Environment, New York: Henry Holt. Stojanov, R. (2014), Climate change and migration. Adaptation dilemma of population in Bangladesh. Vesmír, 91 (142), 570–3.

Environment-related human mobility  373 Suhrke, A. and Visentin, A. (1991), The environmental refugee: a new approach, Ecodecision, 2 (September), 73–84. United Nations (2018), Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, accessed 9 May 2022 at https://​www​.iom​.int/​global​-compact​-migration. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) (2019), International Migrant Stock 2019, Rome: UNDESA. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (1993), The State of The World’s Refugees 1993: The Challenge of Protection, Geneva: UNHCR. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2000), The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Refugee Council (2009), Monitoring Disaster Displacement in the Context of Climate Change, Geneva: IDMC. Vogt, W. (1948), Road to Survival, New York: William Sloane Associates. Warner, K. and Laczko, F. (2008), Migration, environment and development: new directions for research, in J. Chamie and L. Dall’Oglio (eds), International Migration and Development, Continuing the Dialogue: Legal and Policy Perspectives, New York and Geneva: International Organization for Migration and Center for Migration Studies. Watts, N., Amann, M., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Belesova, K., Bouley, T., Boykoff, M., et al. (2018), The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health, The Lancet, 391 (10120), 581–630. Westing, A. (1992), Environmental refugees: a growing category of displaced persons, Cambridge: Environmental Conservation, 19 (3), 201–7. World Bank (2018), Groundswell – Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank. Zetter, R. (1991), Labelling refugees: forming and transforming a bureaucratic identity, Journal of Refugee Studies, 4 (1), 39–62. Zetter, R. (2007), More labels, fewer refugees: remaking the refugee label in an era of globalization, Journal of Refugee Studies, 20 (2), 172–92.

27. Financialisation of nature Tone Smith

INTRODUCTION Broadly speaking, ‘financialisation’ refers to the increasing importance or dominance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions and financial elites in the operations of the economy and its governing institutions, both at national and international levels (Epstein 2005). This development also implies that the size of the financial sector is growing relative to other sectors of the economy. As an economic phenomenon, financialisation has received increased attention during the past decade, having been strongly associated with – and by some even seen as responsible for – the financial crisis of 2008. In particular, the deregulation (or regulatory capture) of the financial sector has been pinpointed as leading to financial, and hence economic, instability (Dow 2018). This deregulation allowed the creation of a variety of ‘innovative financial instruments’ (Bookstaber 2007, p. 12) as well as a ‘shadow banking system’ (Authers 2010, p. 27) encouraging ‘moral hazards’ (Authers 2010, p. 6; Bookstaber 2007, p. 119) in institutions ‘too big to fail’ (Authers 2010, p. 76; Bookstaber 2007, p. 113). Critical scholars, however, had already been studying the phenomenon of financialisation for many years, associating it with the more general neoliberal turn that started in the late 1970s. To understand the emergence of financialisation, it is useful to review the economic context of the time period when the process started. At that time, the crisis of the Fordist accumulation regime, with its specific mode of production and consumption, was becoming evident. It was clear that the crisis was not just a minor accumulation crisis, but a structural crisis (Boyer 1990). This led to an over-accumulation of capital in search of new investment opportunities. Over time, new ways of creating profits were developed, for example, investing in the dot.com industry or in new financial assets. A range of new innovative instruments were developed, and almost everything could now be traded, including risks, futures, credits or pollution rights. Seen from this perspective, financialisation of the economy was a deliberate strategy to overcome the structural crisis of Fordism by solving the lack of investment opportunities for accumulated capital. While Harvey (2011, p. 7) claims that ‘[c]ontinuous financial innovation has been crucial to the survival of capitalism’ and is therefore not unique to neoliberalism, others are writing about financialised capitalism and a long-term structural transformation of (global) capitalism with broad repercussions (see, for example, Simon and Tittor 2014). What characterises this transformation is not only expansion of the finance sector and innovative new instruments, but also an industrial sector more involved in finance, financing through capital markets (instead of through banks), the rise of institutional investors (that is, pension funds), and the involvement of individuals through pension savings, insurances and social security systems. Financialisation is also characterised by the language and practice of the financial world taking over increasingly more parts of our daily lives. Our homes are converted from a right or a need into an object of investment, an asset. Decisions and important choices are focused on returns and risks. Further, the ideology of the financial markets and 374

Financialisation of nature  375 the value of stocks push up the requirements for return on investment throughout business (Hjertaker and Tranøy 2017). What has all this got to do with nature? The ‘financialisation of nature’ is a particular version of both financialisation and the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’, the latter usually referring to the commodification and privatisation of tangible nature and natural resources. Some (for example, Brand and Wissen 2014) see financialisation of nature as a strategy to handle the multiple current crises (environmental, social and economic). However, these scholars understand financialisation of nature more broadly as including the financialisation of land, speculation in natural resources/products or profiting from biopiracy (that is, theft of biological material for commercial purposes). Narrowly defined, however, the financialisation of nature, is about creating markets for trading in abstractions of these natural entities. It refers to the promotion of new financial instruments and markets, for example, for natural capital, ecosystem services or pollution rights, and the mainstreaming of a new kind of finance, that is, sustainable finance. In particular, it refers to the conversion of nature into financial assets which can themselves be traded. This leads to a divorce between the underlying nature entity and its associated piece of paper (a financial asset), where the latter becomes an object of investment and speculation. Many instruments that we know from mainstream finance are being developed for nature as well, for example, insurances, derivatives and futures. The most innovative instruments have so far been developed in the field of carbon, where financial actors now buy and sell derivatives on the commodity price of carbon, commodity futures or subprime carbon (high-risk projects). The latest inventions include securitisation (activity of repackaging and selling to investors a pool of financial assets such as mortgage loans), collateralised debt obligations, index trading, swap funds, blockchain and green bonds, including ‘catastrophe bonds’ (Hache 2020). Due to space constraints, this chapter mainly concentrates on one specific mechanism – offsetting – because of its many perverse environmental and social effects. Offsetting is based on a logic of allowing destruction of nature in one place, and offsetting (or ‘compensating’) the damage in another. Offsetting schemes exist, for example, for pollution (in particular greenhouse gases, GHGs, often termed ‘carbon offsets’), biodiversity, specific species, habitats, wetlands and other ecosystems. The idea and the existence of financial instruments for offsetting pollution or destruction of nature has huge consequences for how environmental politics and international agreements are increasingly being formulated in relative terms, that is, as ‘neutrality’ or ‘net zero emissions’, instead of in absolute terms which would involve real emission cuts or halting the loss of biodiversity. Behind this financialisation of nature, lies an important shift in the modes of governing the environment, that is, a move from regulation by the state or international bodies to market-based instruments. This chapter outlines the development of the idea and the actual establishment of offsetting and other financial instruments to regulate destruction of nature during the neoliberal era, including an overview of the financialisation discourse and its grounding in neoclassical economics. The phenomenon of financialisation is then analysed and critiqued focusing on its environmental effectiveness, its socio-economic consequences and its impact on our relationship with nature. In conclusion, I provide an outlook for the future of offsetting as a solution to environmental problems and consider what the consequences of the ongoing financialisation of nature might be for nature, people and the economy.

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UNDERSTANDING THE ‘FINANCIALISATION OF NATURE’ As defined in the previous section, the financialisation of nature is associated with a shift in environmental governance, relying on the creation of innovative financial instruments and new financial markets for trading in abstractions of various nature-related entities. These abstractions can refer to broad, economically defined conceptions about nature, such as natural capital and ecosystem services (see Chapter 41 in this volume), or to already institutionalised financial assets, such as pollution rights or biodiversity credits. However, it is not obvious for the uninitiated what a financial asset is, what a tradable abstraction is, or how such markets work. Hence, we start by explaining the two basic types of markets – for tradable emission rights and for offsets – and the financial instruments involved. Emissions Trading – or ‘Cap and Trade’ A cap and trade system is generally used to regulate emissions. It is a system of rights to emit a specific amount of a specific pollutant (for example, sulphur dioxide, SO2) or groups of pollutants (for example, GHGs). The system is set up for a specific region and in such a way that there is an upper ceiling – a cap – on the total emissions allowed, a ceiling which is decided politically. The allowances of all the permits in the system then add up to the cap set for the amount of pollution accepted. Ideally, the permits should be sold or auctioned to the interested economic actors by the public body governing the emissions trading scheme (ETS), but in practice they are often given away for free (Spash 2010). Further, the rights to pollute can be traded, and the trading part is key to the system. Its purpose is to achieve a particular environmental target while still basing policies on the (supposed) efficiency of the market. According to mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory, making the pollution rights tradable can make the scheme cost-effective, so the aggregate costs of pollution reduction are minimised. Further, by using the price mechanism, the social cost of pollution (the ‘externality’) can be internalised. The US SO2 trading system for coal-fired power plants, tried out in the 1990s under the new Acid Rain Program, is usually considered the first large-scale financial cap and trade scheme. The scheme resulted in emission reductions even bigger than the programme’s emission reduction goal, and was hence considered a great success (Stavins 2012). On a larger scale, emissions trading took off with the agreement of emission reduction targets in 1997 under the Kyoto Protocol (a treaty under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC). The move to offsetting under the Kyoto Protocol arose as a supplementary means for meeting targets and as a separate mechanism from that which was meant to be achieved by domestic reduction (for example, via ETS or other scheme). Two mechanisms were developed before the first legally binding GHGs emission reduction targets came into force in 2005: the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation projects. These mechanisms authorised parties to the protocol to achieve their emission reduction targets in countries without binding targets (that is, developing countries). For countries who had organised their domestic emission reductions efforts via an ETS, the cap was effectively removed (Hache 2020).1

Financialisation of nature  377 Offsets and Offsetting Let us look at what exactly such an offset is and how it works. Typically, offsetting refers to an action aimed at compensating for environmental harm taking place at a different time and place. In an offsetting system, the right to emit or do other harm – the ‘credit’ – is issued based on the logic that the harm will be compensated for. This differs from a basic cap and trade system where the right to emit simply is issued by the authorities in charge. Hence, within an offsetting logic or scheme an actor can carry out an action harmful to the environment, for example, emit carbon dioxide (CO2) or destroy a wetland, only by compensating the damage. The fundamental idea behind carbon offsetting is that someone else is paid to avoid, sequester or reduce GHG emissions, which then compensates for the GHG emissions that originate from the purchaser’s actions. Still, offsetting has some similarities to emissions trading. Within an ETS, a kind of offsetting occurs if polluters reduce their emissions enough to allow them to have an excess of permits to sell to others (Spash and Theine 2018). Offsetting exists in many forms and can be either voluntary (for example, offsetting impacts from flying) or regulated (for example, the previously mentioned Kyoto Protocol). In practice, both types are mediated by economic actors who specialise in buying and selling compensational credits (for example, carbon credits). However, beyond this intermediary, someone needs to produce the credits in the first place. This is achieved through various types of offsetting projects. For example, projects that produce carbon credits, could in principle be any project that can demonstrate additionality, that is, that their activity is saving CO2 emissions. Common examples include building of hydropower plants that will prevent (or substitute) production of energy from fossil fuels, or the establishment of tree plantations where carbon is captured and stored in the trees. Through the agreement of conversion factors between different types of GHGs, and through equating fossil and living organic carbon, a metric has been created that helps facilitate the comparison of damage and compensation.2 These conventions, creating equivalence measures between various natural components, are exactly what is needed for developing financial instruments for trading in nature abstractions (Smith 2017). Biodiversity offsetting is a more complicated affair than carbon offsetting. This type of offsetting is linked to the planning and implementation of activities that require land use change, itself the most important contributor to biodiversity loss. These activities typically include large construction or development projects, such as motorways, airports, hydroelectric dams or new housing estates. In this context, offsetting is perceived to deal with conflicting interests between economic interests and nature protection interests, that is, to ‘reconcile the unavoidable tension between development and conservation goals’ (Peterson et al. 2008, p. 14). In principle, the mechanisms for both kinds of offsetting (carbon and biodiversity) are similar. In practice, however, it has proven much harder to construct and agree upon a measurement system for biodiversity that can facilitate equating damage and compensation. That is, how to equate types, quality and amount of biodiversity or ecosystems? Is it at all possible? Although establishing a system of CO2-equivalents, allowing the conversion and hence equation between different types of GHGs, also did not occur without controversy, establishing equivalents within the realm of biodiversity has been much harder owing to both the incredibly large number of species and the different qualities that characterise specific ecosystems or habitats (Spash 2015a). Unlike the offsetting of GHGs where emissions taking place in one country can be offset in another country, biodiversity offsetting generally requires the offsetting site to be within geo-

378  Handbook of critical environmental politics graphical proximity. In its most basic and early form, a development project could be required to carry out on-site mitigation. As offsetting practice developed, it became more common to allow and carry out off-site mitigation, since this was usually cheaper. Later came an opening for offsetting ‘in-kind’, referring to an offset that provides the same type of biodiversity as that which is destroyed by protecting land within the same ecosystem, and finally ‘out-of-kind’, referring to an offset that protects land within a different ecosystem, thereby providing a different type of biodiversity (US EPA 2004). In addition to generally costing less, off-site offsetting introduces the opportunity for a third party (an intermediary) to implement and maintain the offsets on behalf of the developer in exchange for financial compensation. These intermediaries usually go under the name of ‘offset banks’, such as habitat banks, species banks or wetland banks (see Sullivan 2013). Many countries have by now introduced mandatory offsetting into their environmental regulations. This legislation usually requires that in order for the construction project to be approved, the mitigation hierarchy must be followed (ten Kate et al. 2004). The mitigation hierarchy prescribes that a developer or company must first try to avoid destroying, for example, a habitat; it must then try to minimise the impact that cannot be avoided; and, finally, mitigate the degraded habitat following impacts that cannot be completely avoided or minimised. If there is still a residual impact after these three steps are taken, then this must be compensated through offsetting. It is therefore often highlighted that offsetting is the last step in the mitigation hierarchy and should only be used when damage is unavoidable. However, as we will see in the third section of the chapter, this is a contested issue, as the hierarchy instead works to legitimise destruction. The mitigation hierarchy has for some time been considered a general sustainable practice followed by many developers and companies on a voluntarily basis, hence is already operating in many places prior to any legislation. Also, it is increasingly being integrated in planning legislation or made obligatory in order to achieve financial support of various kinds. For example, the World Bank’s environmental and social framework from 2018, made it mandatory to offset biodiversity destruction in order to receive financial support. These rules contribute to increasing demand for offsetting and expansion of new types of financial markets. The European Commission (EC) has also been preparing regulations requiring these types of offsets for some time. In 2010, a proposal for a European Union (EU) habitat banking market was developed at the request of the EC, but the attempt at introducing it into European environmental legislation in 2014 failed owing to strong public opposition (Hache 2019b). However, with the EU Green Deal, and the associated new Biodiversity Strategy, the door has again been opened to mandatory biodiversity offsetting and thereby to habitat banking (European Commission 2020). Proposed initiatives include developing an EU No Net Loss label, making EU infrastructure funding conditional upon minimising biodiversity damage, and introducing mandatory EU requirements to offset losses to all biodiversity and ecosystem services. The Extent of Financialisation Financial markets and instruments related to nature and the environment have grown in size and type, especially over the past two decades. Currently, 31 carbon ETSs are in place or scheduled worldwide (World Bank 2020). For a long time, the European ETS has been the largest ETS scheme and also the biggest source of demand for international carbon credits

Financialisation of nature  379 (Hache 2019a), but by mid-2021 the Chinese National ETS is expected to launch and become the world’s largest scheme (Xu and Stanway 2021). The CDM has historically been the largest carbon credit issuer, responsible for over half of all offsetting credits ever issued. However, the number of actors in this field is increasing, and in 2019 more than two-thirds of credits issued came from independent crediting mechanisms (World Bank 2020). That same year, the accumulated number of registered crediting project to date had reached more than 14500 (World Bank 2020). In 2009, Deutsche Bank declared carbon markets to be among the most promising emerging markets (Korosec 2009). However, owing to the strongly fluctuating ‘prices of carbon’ (that is, rights to emit CO2), the interest in the carbon markets have been up and down over the years. In later years, it has been relatively low, but with the recent spike in carbon prices following the review of the EU ETS, the interest of banks and hedge funds was reawakened, with trading volumes spiking 45 per cent in 2018 and carbon being named ‘the City’s hottest trade this year’ (Hache 2019a, p. 41). It is, however, expected that the scale of the carbon markets will reach new highs in the years to come, given the various new and large additional schemes coming up, such as the carbon offset markets expected to emerge from the Paris Agreement (United Nations 2015), China’s new carbon market, and not least the new aviation carbon offset market whose pilot phase started in 2021 (CORSIA 2021). Also, the carbon capture and sequestration market is projected to grow from an estimated USD 4.25 billion in 2016 to USD 8.05 billion by 2021 (Markets and Markets 2021). When we turn our focus to biodiversity offsetting, the number of countries with government policies in this area has doubled in the past 15 years (the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, in Kill 2020). Interestingly, it is a field where we can observe extensive cooperation between large corporations, new environmental ‘entrepreneurs’ setting up habitat banks, large consultancy firms involved in the auditing of the offsetting schemes, and the involvement of some large conservation organisations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the IUCN, Nature Conservancy or Conservation International. A range of new business–environmental coalitions have also been created (for example, The Capitals Coalition). At the same time, there is increasing interest from traditional large financial corporations. In 2016, Credit Suisse published a report titled ‘Conservation finance – from niche to mainstream: the building of an institutional asset class’. The report assessed that sustainable farmland, healthy forests, clean water and abundant habitat stand to become more valuable as the global population rises. Estimating the total conservation finance investment potential to be USD 200–400 billion between 2016 and 2020, the recommendation is that ‘[n]ature must not be turned into a commodity, but rather into an asset’ (Credit Suisse, in Hache 2019b, p. 68). More recently, the same position was echoed by The Dasgupta Review on the economics of biodiversity, commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury (UK). The main approach and message of the review is that we need to start managing nature as an asset, with the finance sector playing a crucial role (Dasgupta 2021).3 The Core of ‘Financialisation of Nature’ The conversion of nature into tradable financial assets, especially as a way to allow destruction of nature in one place, and offsetting the damage in another, has become key to financialising nature. As noted previously, it has not been easy to create and agree on equivalence measures

380  Handbook of critical environmental politics between various types of nature areas or biodiversity. However, this is exactly what has been done within biodiversity banks and what has been accepted where there are offsetting regulations in place. To make these equivalences work, all aspects of nature must be rendered commensurate4 and the place-specific uniqueness of each nature type disappears (Smith 2017). We have seen how financial instruments imposed through environmental regulation were championed by the USA, which is also the place with the most developed and varied schemes and markets for offsetting. As other countries are increasingly adopting similar legislation (for example, France, the UK, Germany and Colombia), there will follow a similar impetus for more financial activity related to environmental problems and nature protection, especially since there is still a great deal of accumulated capital in search of investment opportunities. Also, we observe that as the sector develops and sees new opportunities, many instruments that we know from mainstream finance are being developed for nature as well, for example, catastrophe bonds, insurance of states (instead of protection), derivatives and futures. Berta et al. (2016) claim that the EU ETS has in practice become a financial market mainly used for hedging and speculation. They found that since 2010, derivatives accounted for 99 per cent of trades in the EU ETS. Despite these developments, innovative financial mechanisms are encouraged, for example, by the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD). It is important to note the key role played by the public sector or state apparatus in facilitating the process of financialising nature. For while neoliberalism is generally characterised by a move away from the use of laws and regulation to a reliance upon economic incentives and market solutions, this does not mean the withdrawal of the state, but instead an active role for the state, for example, in the facilitation of new types of markets and new economic activity (Harvey 2005; Mirowski 2013). In the environmental field this is particularly obvious. Setting up new markets for hitherto unknown (environmental) goods, services or assets, such as emission rights or biodiversity credits, could not have taken place without a large public sector apparatus facilitating it and supporting its establishment.

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND PROBLEMATIC EFFECTS Carbon trading markets have been shown to suffer from a range of problems, including excess allowances, price fluctuations and fraud (Hache 2019a; Lohmann 2012; Spash 2010). While this has alerted many actors to the potential downside of the emissions trading system, not everyone sees it this way. A World Bank report has claimed it is a sign of success: ‘ironically … these controversies provide evidence that the emissions market is maturing and becoming mainstreamed within the European economy’ (Kossoy and Ambrosi 2010, p. 6). Offset markets both for biodiversity and carbon have also been shown to suffer from a range of problems. Some of these were already hinted at previously and relate to conceptual and measurement issues. Others link to problems with the economic theory behind them (for example, valuation and price signals, see Spash 2010). Many evaluative studies of offsetting schemes show a poor environmental and social track record. These include evidence of poor or disastrous outcomes for wildlife of these schemes which often push species to the brink instead of protecting them. Other studies have found that up to two-thirds of ecosystem restoration offset projects were unsuccessful. Another study, analysing 558 offset projects between 1990 and 2011, found that, despite attempts at

Financialisation of nature  381 compensating damage, the net loss of habitats was 99 per cent (see summary of studies in FoE Europe 2014). Other studies show that the majority of projects miscalculate their savings. For example, a study commissioned by the European Commission investigated the effectiveness of existing offsetting projects and concluded that only 2 per cent of the projects had a high probability of bringing about additional emissions reduction (Cames et al. 2016). If, for example, a hydropower plant is to be built anyway, the project should not be eligible for selling carbon credits, which in turn allows others to pollute more. The study further found that 85 per cent of the offset projects used by the EU under the CDM failed to reduce emissions. Instead, CDM credits towards climate targets have increased global GHGs emissions. In the EU alone, emissions increased by over 650 million tonnes of CO2 as a consequence of the use of CDM credits within the EU ETS (Hache 2019a). Hache attributes this to an overwhelming majority of CDM projects essentially issuing junk credits that do not lead to real emission reductions. The results are perhaps not surprising. After all, offsetting is linked to a ‘licence to trash nature’ (de Zylva 2018) in the first place. Although the mitigation hierarchy is meant to assure that offsetting is possible only as a last resort, it is increasingly questioned whether the procedure is implemented in this way. Increasing evidence points towards a tendency to relax environmental regulations – both in the Global North and in the Global South – exactly because of the possibility of offsetting (de Zylva 2018; WRM 2018). Thus, an increasing reliance upon the mitigation hierarchy might have huge implication through increasing allowance for destructive projects. A common definition used for biodiversity offsets state that they are ‘conservation actions intended to compensate for the residual, unavoidable harm to biodiversity caused by development projects’ (ten Kate et al. 2004, p. 13, emphasis added). However, what is interpreted as ‘unavoidable’ harm is highly debatable. Offsetting solutions generally assume that there is land available that otherwise would not have been used for anything, by anyone. An example from Colombia shows how difficult this can become. Colombia has introduced one of the most comprehensive environmental offsetting frameworks, and as a consequence the potential demand for land needed for biodiversity offset amounted to more than 180000 hectares between 2013 and 2015. As an observer in Colombia commented: With over 8 million hectares under mining titles, over 130 oil and gas companies with operations in the country over at least 1.5 million hectares, including Shell, Oxy, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Petrobras, and thousands of kilometres of highways in the pipeline that will affect critical biodiversity hotspots, one of the key questions is where are the hundreds of thousands of hectares needed in offsets going to come from. (Cited in Kill 2020)

Achieving Net Zero Goals and ‘Neutrality’ Through Nature Restoration We have seen how the logic of biodiversity offsetting has developed so that compensating damage in one place does not necessarily mean there is a need to create or increase biodiversity in another place. For in-kind offsetting, it is enough that the damage done is compensated by protecting (temporarily) an equivalent amount of biodiversity somewhere else, where it otherwise would not have been protected. Therefore, it is not possible to regard ‘biodiversity neutrality’ in the same way as GHGs where offsetting is in principle meant to neutralise the emissions.

382  Handbook of critical environmental politics Against this background, ‘Land degradation neutrality’ emerged as a mechanism centred on neutralising the loss of land through restoration, instead of through traditional offsetting as compensation (Safriel 2017). First developed under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and later part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,5 achieving neutrality through restoration and recovery has become a reference point also for the CBD. In the current draft for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, expected to be adopted in 2022, the overall aim is to achieve ‘net improvements [in biodiversity] by 2050’ (CBD 2020, p. 2). After two decades of ambitions to halt the loss of biodiversity, this change from ‘no loss’ to ‘no net loss’ represents a substantive reduction of ambition within the CBD. The move away from halting the loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems is, however, not the only problem with this change of focus. It happens that ecosystem restoration is also very compatible with offsetting: if there are no spaces left that can be protected as an offset for destruction somewhere else, then nature can instead be restored in places where it has been degraded, and in this way create credits that can neutralise destruction elsewhere. Conveniently, there now exist large areas of degraded nature that can be restored. The move to restoration means entering a new phase of thinking about nature conservation, or a new era in which ʻcreating’ nature is seen to be as valid as protecting natural ecosystems and habitats. This new thinking easily borrows arguments from the Anthropocene paradigm (see Chapter 5 in this volume), which not only notes that humans are now the most impactful geological force on earth (Crutzen 2002), but in parallel presents human ingenuity as the solution to the same problem (Baskin 2015; Spash 2015b). In that narrative, humans are both destroyers and God-like creators of nature. These arguments also go hand in hand with a social constructionist perspective claiming that there is no such thing as natural nature anyway – in our times all distinctions between nature and society have been eroded (see, for example, Latour 2004). This viewpoint is not only problematic from many value perspectives (Malm 2019), but is conveniently compatible with financialisation of nature. Restoration of nature now presents itself as a new growth sector, which has led Huff and Brock (2017) to coin the term ‘accumulation by restoration’. Carbon Neutrality and the Trap of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) In the Paris Agreement the concept of GHG neutrality6 is based on a logic similar to the mitigation hierarchy: first, we should aim to reduce the emissions as much as possible, then any remaining GHGs could be neutralised either with (1) an equivalent amount of removals (for example, carbon sequestration) or (2) future negative emission technologies (NETs). In practice however, countries tend to rely on the neutralising option instead of cutting emissions. Critics have further noted the lack of realism in relying on NETs based on possible future development of technologies or unproven scaling up of newly developed technologies (see, for example, Anderson 2019). However, neutralising via removal is the most interesting with respect to financialisation. Especially, NBSs have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. Originally developed during the UNFCCC negotiations in 2009 and introduced in the 2013–2016 IUCN Global Programme, we now see it appearing, for example, in the EU Green Deal’s taxonomy for sustainable finance (that is, a classification system for green investments) and in the Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Manifesto developed for the UN climate action summit 2019. At its core, the NBS concept encompasses protection, (sustainable) management and restoration of

Financialisation of nature  383 ecosystems. It expands traditional offsetting through carbon sequestration in trees/plantations, to also include sequestration in soil, wetlands and grasslands. The idea is particularly promoted as a link – a win–win solution – between the climate change (see Chapter 32 in this volume) and the biodiversity agendas since restoring nature goes hand in hand with carbon sequestration. The main problem with this approach, however, is the myth that the carbon-sequestering possibilities of nature can compensate for the continued burning of fossil fuels. What is needed to reach the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5 degrees is both to stop using fossil fuels completely and to sequester the already emitted carbon within our planet’s ecosystems. Improving ecosystems’ carbon sequestration is in itself not a problem, the problem is when NBSs are used as offsets (Stabinsky 2020). As countries, cities, companies and other actors are committing to carbon neutrality/net zero targets, NBS has become an attractive way to offset. For example, the World Bank (2020, p. 8) highlights that 42 per cent of the carbon credits issued over the past five years stems from the forestry sector, relates this to ‘a broader interest in nature-based solutions’, and further notes that this may be ‘partly driven by the significant potential for these projects to reduce emissions cost-effectively and their ability to generate additional co-benefits’. Again, the idea of NBS and net-zero carbon goes hand in hand with offsetting and market-based mechanisms that play to the finance sector. However, as critics have pointed out, there simply is not enough available land on the planet to accommodate all of the combined corporate and government plans for offsets (Lewis 2021). Social Consequences Beyond the environmental impacts, the restructuring of the economy under financialisation of nature has led to many social effects, for example, in relation to power or restructuring of agency distribution. In particular in the Global South, the socio-economic consequences for the currently worst off are considerable. Poor and already marginalised groups are repeatedly the losers of these schemes, which have been shown to lead to land grabbing, local conflicts, negative livelihood impacts and human rights violations (WRM 2014; see also Chapter 33 in this volume). Often, smallholders and indigenous peoples are restricted from using the forest in their ancestral ways in order to store the predicted amounts of carbon in the trees. Ultimately, offsetting is unjust and has therefore been labelled a new form colonialism, that is, ‘carbon colonialism’ (Bachram 2004; see also Chapters 2 and 37 in this volume). In addition, this abstract way of thinking in terms of commensurability also eliminates any place-based or context specificity of the ecosystem itself and any human relationship to that specific wetland, forest or river. If a community has a special and meaningful relationship with a particular forest, replacing that forest with another one somewhere else cannot represent compensation for that lost relationship.

CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK The financialisation of nature is contested for a range of reasons. First, financial instruments are believed to provide a licence to pollute and destroy, providing a new source of income for financiers, but not solving the environmental problems they claim to deal with, while at the same time increasingly leading to displacements, land grabbing and other conflicts, especially in the Global South. Offsetting schemes are also easily subject to miscalculation and fraud.

384  Handbook of critical environmental politics Further, the financialisation of nature can be criticised for changing our relationship with nature. Offsetting, in particular, diverts attention from the need for deep transformation of our economic systems by allowing business as usual. Despite the bad track record of cap and trade schemes and offsetting schemes, there are few signs of limiting them. Instead, the mitigation hierarchy is spreading, making offsetting increasingly mandatory. In addition, there is constant encouragement to develop even more innovative financial mechanisms. Despite the negative connotation that financial innovations had after the financial crisis of 2008, the environmental and nature conservation community still has high hopes for what it can achieve, both for nature and for the economy. The CBD, for example, is still looking to raise resources and funds with the help of finance, while trusting that market mechanisms are cost saving. As this chapter has shown, financialisation and financialisation of nature have several similarities. Both are characterised by the importance of financial markets, financial actors and financial motives, and by the language and practice of the financial world taking over the way we talk about and govern nature. Hence nature is increasingly referred to as an undifferentiated object of investment, an abstracted asset to be managed and thought about in relation to risk and return. Further, both depend on the development of innovative instruments. There are also some notable differences. Unlike the rest of the economy, financialisation of nature is not a phenomenon related to deregulation (of the financial sector), but instead is facilitated by the state, involving increased regulation – although in a different and unique way. Examples are mandatory offsetting for development projects or imposed cap and trade systems for GHG emissions in specific economic sectors. Critics of the general trend of financialisation, argue that the financial sector does not produce anything of real value, that is, does not contribute to the real economy. It is at best considered an ancillary or facilitating sector, and at worst simply as a parasite on society as a whole. The strategy of the state, to continue to facilitate these financial frameworks for accumulation, is therefore questionable, not only from an environmental viewpoint, but also from a macroeconomic (Keynesian) viewpoint. The financialisation of nature has brought together arguments and interests from a diverse group of actors, including bankers, financiers and businesses looking for new investment opportunities, disillusioned environmentalists, ecologists and conservationists struggling to make an impact in policy, and economists determined to find ways to fit nature into their conceptual apparatus so that mainstream economics can be applied to it. In addition to the actors described previously, politicians and environmental bureaucrats have also played an important part in promoting the financialisation of nature, for example, through the UN system. Both the CBD and the UNFCCC promote market-based instruments, including innovative financial instruments, as part of their policy mix under their respective conventions, while their ‘mother’ organisation – the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – has been a key actor in projects such as the green economy, or in ‘hardwiring biodiversity into finance’ (UNEP Finance Initiative 2010). The latest innovation from UNEP is to ‘unlock greater funding’ for offsetting projects in restoration and NBS through so-called ‘nature-backed securities’ (UNEP 2021). As the demand for offsetting (that is, credits) is increasing fast, introducing securitisation into nature conservation can be a strategy for making it more attractive for big, private investors. UNEP (2021) mentions the bad reputation securitisation – and especially mortgage-backed securities – acquired after the 2008 financial crisis, but claims that ‘the basic concept remains brilliant’.

Financialisation of nature  385 However, financialisation always carries the risk of financial bubbles. While the potential for emissions trading and offsetting to curb environmental damage is limited, it seems that the potential of the growing sector of financial instruments related to nature might carry a risk of financial collapse as these markets grow. The risks have not yet materialised (for example, owing to the limited size and lack of real functioning of these markets), but the recent spike in carbon prices has reawakened the interest of banks and hedge funds. Biodiversity as an asset class could also create significant moral hazard and financial stability issues by fostering the build-up of unmonitored risks (Hache 2020). Hence, while capital is looking for new and securer profits, the financialisation of nature might transform into a societal nightmare. The latest change in the international biodiversity policy and preparations for the upcoming CBD meeting in 2021, is moving nature conservation even further into the hands of financialisation, owing to the shift from conservation and protection (stopping harm), via compensation for harm, to restoration of degraded nature. According to Friends of the Earth: ‘Rather than try and curb biodiversity destruction, it is deemed economically preferable to destroy and restore biodiversity, as it generates more economic growth and minimizes the cost of compliance with environmental regulation for the private sector’ (FoE International 2019, p. 1).

NOTES 1. For the history of the development of these mechanisms, see Spash (2010). 2. However, demonstrating that the projects really lead to emission reductions has proved more difficult, as we will return to in the third section. 3. For a critical review, see Spash and Hache (2021). 4. That is, nature or ecosystems can be viewed as homogenous and replaceable. 5. The UN has even chosen the period of 2021–30 to be the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. 6. In public speech, the concept of GHG neutrality is often referred to as carbon neutrality or simply net zero emissions.

REFERENCES Anderson, K. (2019), Brief response to the UK Government’s ‘net-zero’ proposal, kevinanderson.info:​ comment on climate, accessed 30 September 2021 athttps://​kevinanderson​.info/​blog/​brief​-response​-to​ -the​-uk​-governments​-net​-zero​-proposal/​. Authers, J. (2010), The Fearful Rise of Markets: Global Bubbles, Synchronized Meltdowns, and How to Prevent Them in the Future, Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press. Bachram, H. (2004), Climate fraud and carbon colonialism: the new trade in greenhouse gases, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 15(4), 5–20. Baskin, J. (2015), Paradigm dressed as epoch: the ideology of the Anthropocene, Environmental Values, 24(1), 9–28. Berta, N., Gautherat, E. and Gun, O. (2016), Transactions in the European carbon market: a bubble of compliance in a whirlpool of speculation, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 41(2), 575–93. Bookstaber, R. (2007), A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation, New York: Wiley. Boyer, R. (1990), The Regulation School, New York: Columbia University Press. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2014), The financialisation of nature as crisis strategy? Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 30(2), 16–45. Cames, M., Harthan, R.O., Füssler, J., Lazarus, M., Lee, C.M., Erickson, P. et al. (2016), How additional is the clean development mechanism? Study prepared for DG Climate by Öko-Institut, Berlin, March.

386  Handbook of critical environmental politics Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) (2021), CORSIA’s official website, accessed 17 September 2021 at https://​ www​ .icao​ .int/​ environmental​ -protection/​ CORSIA/​Pages/​default​.aspx. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (2020), Update of the zero draft of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, CBD/POST2020/PREP/2/1, 17 August, UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Crutzen, P. (2002), Geology of mankind, Nature, 415(6867), 23. Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, abridged version, London: HM Treasury. De Zylva, P. (2018), Biodiversity offsetting and net gain: licence to trash nature, accessed 18 December 2020 at https://​friendsoftheearth​.uk/​nature/​biodiversity​-offsetting​-and​-net​-gain​-licence​-trash​-nature. Dow, S.C. (2018), Why regulate the financial system? Paper presented at the Conference on Rethinking Finance, Oslo, 12–13 April. Epstein, G. (2005), Financialization of the World Economy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. European Commission (2020), EU biodiversity strategy for 2030: bringing nature back into our lives, communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, Brussels, May. Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe (2014), Saving nature by putting a price on it, note prepared by Friends of the Earth Europe, Brussels. Friends of the Earth (FoE) International (2019), Can market-based approaches address critical loss of biodiversity? Friends of the Earth International, Amsterdam. Hache, F. (2019a), 50 Shades of Green: The Rise of Natural Capital Markets and Sustainable Finance – Part I. Carbon, Brussels: Green Finance Observatory. Hache, F. (2019b), 50 Shades of Green: The Rise of Natural Capital Markets and Sustainable Finance – Part II, Brussels: Green Finance Observatory. Hache, F. (2020), 50 Shades of Green. Sustainable Finance 2.0. The Securitization of Climate and Biodiversity Policies, Brussels: Green Finance Observatory. Harvey, D. (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2011), Roepke lecture in economic geography – crises, geographic disruptions and the uneven development of political responses, Economic Geography, 82(1), 1–22. Hjertaker, I. and Tranøy, B.S. (2017), Ustabilitetens politiske økonomi (The Political Economy of Instability), Oslo: Aschehoug. Huff, A. and Brock, A. (2017), Intervention – ‘accumulation by restoration: degradation neutrality and the Faustian bargain of conservation Finance’, Antipode, accessed 30 March 2021 at https://​ antipodeonline​.org/​2017/​11/​06/​accumulation​-by​-restoration/​. Kill, J. (2020), Regulated destruction of biodiversity, accessed 15 March 2021 at https://​www​.boell​.de/​ en/​2018/​11/​29/​regulated​-destruction​-biodiversity. Korosec, K. (2009), Deutsche Bank’s carbon counter and the business of greenhouse gases, CBS News, accessed 10 February 2021 at https://​www​.cbsnews​.com/​news/​deutsche​-banks​-carbon​-counter​-and​ -the​-business​-of​-greenhouse​-gases/​. Kossoy, A. and Ambrosi, P. (2010), State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2010, Washington, DC: World Bank. Latour, B. (2004), Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewis, S. (2021), The climate crisis can’t be solved by carbon accounting tricks, Guardian, 3 March, accessed 26 May 2021 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​commentisfree/​2021/​mar/​03/​climate​-crisis​ -carbon​-accounting​-tricks​-big​-finance. Lohmann, L. (2012), Financialization, commodification and carbon: the contradictions of neoliberal climate policy, Socialist Register, 48, 85–107. Malm, A. (2019), The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, London: Verso. Markets and Markets (2021), Carbon capture and sequestration market worth 8.05 billion USD by 2021, Markets and Markets press release, accessed 4 February 2021 at https://​www​.marketsandmarkets​ .com/​PressReleases/​carbon​-capture​-sequestration​.asp.

Financialisation of nature  387 Mirowski, P. (2013), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso. Peterson, A.L., Hill, C. and Gallagher, L.A. (2008), ‘Balancing biodiversity’: a global instrument for meeting the 2010 biodiversity target, MA thesis, Duke University, Durham, NC. Safriel, U. (2017), Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) in drylands and beyond – where has it come from and where does it go, Silva Fennica, 51(1B), 19. Simon, J. and Tittor, A. (2014), The financialisation of food, land and nature, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 30(2), 4–15. Smith, T. (2017), The role of numbers in environmental policy: the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity (TEEB), PhD dissertation, WU University of Economics and Business, Vienna. Spash, C.L. (2010), The brave new world of carbon trading, New Political Economy, 15(2), 169–95. Spash, C.L. (2015a), Bulldozing biodiversity: the economics of offsets and trading-in nature, Biological Conservation, 192(December), 541–51. Spash, C.L. (2015b), The dying planet index: life, death and man’s domination of nature, Environmental Values, 24(1), 1–7. Spash, C.L. and Hache, F. (2021), The Dasgupta Review deconstructed: an exposé of biodiversity economics, Globalizations, 19 (5), 653–76, accessed 5 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14747731​ .2021​.1929007. Spash, C.L. and Theine, H. (2018), Voluntary individual carbon trading: friend or foe? in A. Lewis (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic Behaviour, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 595–624. Stabinsky, D. (2020), Nature-based solutions or nature-based seductions? Unpacking the dangerous myth that nature-based solutions can sufficiently mitigate climate change, Third World Network and African Centre for Biodiversity, Penang and Johannesburg, September. Stavins, R.N. (2012), The U.S. sulphur dioxide cap and trade programme and lessons for climate policy, Vox, 12 August. Sullivan, S. (2013), Banking nature? The spectacular financialisation of environmental conservation, Antipode, 45(1), 198–217. Ten Kate, K., Bishop, J. and Bayon, R. (2004), Biodiversity Offsets: Views, Experience, and the Business Case, Gland: IUCN. United Nations (2015), Paris Agreement, Paris: UNFCCC. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2021), Accelerating capital market access for restoration using securitization: promoting the rise of nature-backed securities, accessed 20 April 2021 at https://​www​.unep​.org/​resources/​newsletter/​accelerating​-capital​-market​-access​-restoration​-using​ -securitization​-1. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Finance Initiative (2010), Demystifying Materiality: Hardwiring Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services into Finance, Geneva: UNEP Finance Initiative. United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) (2004), Federal Guidance on the Use of Off-Site and Out-of-Kind Compensatory Mitigation under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. World Bank (2020), State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2020, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Rainforest Movement (WRM) (2014), REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies, Montevideo: World Rainforest Movement. World Rainforest Movement (WRM) (2018),‘Mainstreaming biodiversity’ in extractive industries: concealing devastation and land grabbing, a compilation of articles from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin on the occasion of the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity held 17–29 November at Sharm El-Sheikh, World Rainforest Movement, Montevideo. Xu, M. and Stanway, D. (2021), China’s national emissions trading may launch in mid-2021 Securities Times, Reuters, accessed 11 February 2021 at https://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​us​-china​ -climatechange​-ets​-idINKBN29G083.

28. Fossil fuels and state–industry relations: a case study in environmental non-compliance Edwin A. Edou, Debra J. Davidson and Sydney Karbonik

INTRODUCTION The fingerprint of capitalism and western modernity on our ecosystems could not be more vivid than in fossil fuel extraction zones. As has been unfurled so eloquently by Mitchell (2011) in Carbon Democracy, fossil fuels are deeply entangled not only in the history of western economic development, but also in western political regimes. As is equally clear, the extraction, processing and combustion of those material resources have had enormous environmental and ecological impacts, from the contamination of land, air and water close to extraction sites, to the disruption of the global climate (Chapter 32 in this volume). However, state–industry relations in the fossil fuels sector tend to support the continued production of fossil fuels at the expense of environmental and climate well-being, posing formidable resistance to low-carbon transition (Chapters 17 and 30 in this volume). This resistance is manifest owing to two key mechanisms. First, in most instances extraction zones are located far from urban centres, in regions with limited economic opportunities, creating conditions for economic dependency. Second, because fossil fuel extraction involves highly capital- and technology-intensive processes, these activities are dominated by a small set of large corporations, creating conditions for the concentration of political power. Both state (Chapter 29 in this volume) and industry actors in this sector must nonetheless navigate an increasingly environmentally conscious international political sphere, and thus continued support for fossil fuel economies can also entail concerted efforts to maintain legitimacy – industry must maintain legitimacy among consumers, and the states governing extraction activities must maintain legitimacy among its voters. Since maintaining economic growth while protecting the environment in fossil fuel extraction is virtually impossible (Chapter 7 in this volume), maintaining legitimacy may require a bit of ‘magicianship’ (Freudenburg and Alario 2007): giving the impression of a reality that could not be farther from the truth. The ‘magician’s curtain’ here, as in so many other sectors of the current global economy, takes the form of neoliberalism, which prescribes limits on the capacities of regulatory ministries while relying on industry self-regulation, as a means of unleashing markets to maximize productivity. With the rise of environmental concern, proponents of neoliberalism have pivoted swiftly to proclaim that neoliberalism is not only the most effective pathway to economic growth, but also the most effective pathway to environmental well-being, through the pursuit of efficiency, market valuation of environmental services and corporate responsibilization. Are such claims valid? To reveal the magicians’ secrets, we must peek behind the curtain, to delve into the details of environmental management, in those places where legitimacy would appear to be under the greatest threat. Alberta, a prairie province situated in western Canada, is just such a place. With a rich and diverse historical and current economy, including coal, oil and gas development, but also Indigenous livelihoods, agricultural industries, tourism, strong 388

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations  389 health and education sectors, it is a place where conservation and environmentalism have been and continue to be supported. However, this is not the story told about Alberta; the story that is told about Alberta is about fossil fuels, a story that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways. Alberta has been home to the extraction and sale of fossil fuels since its inception, beginning with coal in the 1870s, and oil and natural gas after World War II, and therefore can be described as a ‘petro-state’. This term refers to a federal or provincial government that generates a large proportion of its revenues from the sale of petroleum products, but the significance of this term lays in the distortions that this state of affairs has a propensity to generate. The provincial government has been heavily involved at every stage of this industry’s development, including everything from transportation subsidies to bankrolling research and development of oil sands extraction technologies, to cultivating export markets and corporate tax breaks. At several stages of this history, Alberta’s fossil fuel advocates representing state and industry, and many Albertans too, could offer the high levels of employment and living standards as evidence of the prudence of investing in fossil fuel development. These positive storylines have also served as effective distractions from the cumulating environmental costs associated with fossil fuel exploitation. Until, that is, news of those costs began to spread across international social media in graphic detail, and this backwoods region few would have been able to locate on a map just a few years prior became known as Mordor, in reference to that hellish place in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Facing growing political pressure to protect the environment, while also protecting the interests of the fossil fuel industry, the provincial government found itself in a quandary. In this chapter, we illustrate how this state sought to navigate these two pressures. We also highlight a central requirement of all forms of critical analysis: to look behind the curtain of evidence available. In the current empirical study, what we see in front of the curtain is an apparent decline over time in ‘non-compliance events’, occurrences of non-compliance with environmental regulations committed by oil and gas companies. This trend would appear to contradict growing public attention to the environmental impacts of oil and gas development, particularly in the form of abandoned wells, but also including several instances of leakage, and expressions of concern by rural residents. Given this apparent contradiction, we seek to assess the relevance of this trend in non-compliance events in respect of real improvements in environmental well-being in Alberta. That is, we look behind the curtain, to regulatory changes that have allowed a shift in what is deemed a non-compliance event, and how these events are reported and sanctioned. We also highlight the significant power of state authorities to effectively set boundaries around what is considered legitimate environmental impacts.

GOVERNING OIL AND GAS DEVELOPMENT IN ALBERTA The history of oil and gas governance in Alberta can be traced back to 1936, when Alberta passed ‘An Act to provide for the Licensing of Dealers in Fuel Oil’ (Fuel Oil Licensing Act 1942). Cited as the Fuel Oil Licensing Act, the legislation required that the province’s 1000 fuel dealers obtain a license from the Public Utilities Board (Government of Alberta 2020c). Two years later on Canada Day, Alberta created its first energy regulatory body, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board (PNCGB), the earliest predecessor of the current body governing oil and gas development, the Alberta Energy Regulator (Jaremko 2013). In a memoir discussing oil exploration in Canada from 1937 to 1947, George Fournier remarked

390  Handbook of critical environmental politics that ‘the petroleum and natural gas regulations varied from one province to another, but the most attractive area, Alberta, had a workable petroleum law’ (quoted in Jaremko 2013, p. 6). As energy production began to grow considerably in the late twentieth century, so too did efforts to streamline the regulatory process, although lawmakers appear to have struggled with developing the right formula, and over the next 20 years the agency underwent several stages of metamorphosis. In 1995, at a time when neoliberalism had been fully embraced as the preferred means of governing economic development, the PNCGB merged with the Public Utilities Board to become the Alberta Energy Utilities Board (EUB) (Government of Alberta 2020c), with a new structure and mandate to operate as a quasi-judicial, independent agency regulating energy resources and public utilities (Environmental Law Centre 2006). The next stage of metamorphosis came in 2008 with Bill 46, the Alberta Utilities Commission Act, which reorganized the EUB into two separate regulatory bodies: the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) and the Energy Resources and Conservation Board (ERCB) (Alberta Energy and Utilities Board 2007; Alberta Energy and Utilities Commission Act 2007). The separation into two regulatory agencies meant that the new ERCB would focus on strengthening and enhancing the regulatory framework for energy resources and their development, including specifically the expansion of the oil sands sector (Alberta Energy and Utilities Board 2007). Finally, the royal assent of the Responsible Energy Development Act (REDA) in 2012 was responsible for the most recent stage of metamorphosis, into the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) (Davidson et al. 2018; Government of Alberta 2020a). The creation of the AER can be described in some ways as a means to maintain an investment-friendly atmosphere, preserving the ‘Alberta Advantage’, a state-sponsored campaign to attract foreign investment with the promise of low taxes (Salomons and Béland 2020, p. 419). The backdrop to the passage of REDA was the Regulatory Enhancement Project; a technical report whose objective was to examine ways to ensure that the province’s regulatory system is competitive, modern, efficient and performance-based, while maintaining a strong commitment to environmental management and public interest (Ministry of Energy 2010, pp. 2–3). After being proclaimed on 17 June 2013, the AER entered into effect with a mandate ‘to provide for the efficient, safe, orderly and environmentally responsible development of energy resources’ (Responsible Energy Development Act 2012). Here, the new AER combined the roles of its previous iteration, the ERCB, with environmental regulatory responsibilities that had previously been the domain of a separate regulatory body, the Ministry of Environment. Before this time, the AER would be responsible for implementation of the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, the Water Act, the Public Lands Act and Part 8 of the Mines and Minerals Act (Chiasson 2012; Responsible Energy Development Act 2012; Olynyk 2013), which pertains to exploration for mines and minerals. Accordingly, the AER became a one-stop shop or, to quote the regulatory agency itself, ‘the single regulator of energy development in Alberta – from application and exploration, to construction and operation, to decommissioning, closure, and reclamation’ (AER 2020c). Together with this expansion of regulatory jurisdiction, the scope of the agency’s jurisdiction has also exploded: whereas the agency and its 12 employees in 1938 oversaw regulatory compliance for 294 operating wells, in 2018 there were over 167 000 operating oil and gas wells and approximately an equivalent number of abandoned wells (AER 2020b), and over 900 square kilometres of open pit oil sands mines in operation (this chapter only focuses on the former). Although the number of employees has also grown substantially, with 1186 in 2018 (MacInnes 2018), agency growth has clearly not kept pace with the expansion of the industry.

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations  391 Considering the enormous mandate provided to the AER, the quasi-independent agency evidently also plays an outsized role in the energy development policy cycle. The policy cycle is a heuristic framework that serves to simplify our understanding of the policy process, including the complex conditions, emerging issues and strategies proposed to address them (Jann and Wegrich 2017). These are captured in a series of stages, namely: agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation (Jann and Wegrich 2017; European Geosciences Union 2020). Far from linear, however, these stages can overlap and loop back in a dynamic process in which decision-makers are often depicted as entrenched in a game of ‘whack-a-mole’, attempting to create and/or adopt best practices in a context in which new issues emerge at least as fast as pre-existing issues are addressed. One of the most important stages, and of particular focus in this chapter, is evaluation, because evaluation is the stage at which, presumably, information required to inform the efficacy of given policies is generated. Ideally, evaluation of the effectiveness of a given policy would include multiple affected groups and actors. The AER, however, arguably controls the entirety of both the implementation and evaluation stages, and thus has tremendous power to establish the conditions under which this evaluative information is generated. To this end, the AER provides several directives that set out requirements that companies must abide by in exchange for the right to operate.

POLICY ON PAPER: THE EVOLUTION OF POLICIES GOVERNING CONVENTIONAL OIL AND GAS DEVELOPMENT IN ALBERTA Until recently, compliance was governed by Directive 019: Compliance Assurance. This Directive came into effect on 1 November 2010, while the regulatory agency was still known as the ERCB, and it was designed to ‘improve process clarity, focus, and efficiency’ of the Compliance Assurance process (ERCB 2010, p. 2). Directive 019 was issued under the Compliance Assurance programme, whose activities to facilitate and ensure compliance relied on education, prevention, and enforcement (ERCB 2010, pp. 1–2), based on a number of key principles such as: ‘compliance reporting is open and transparent’; ‘enforcement actions are timely, effective, and consistent with ERCB requirements’; and ‘the ERCB has competent and engaged staff to deliver compliance assurance activities (ERCB 2010, p. 2). Through a voluntary self-disclosure policy, the directive was part of a series of policies and regulations to ensure high compliance rates across the board. Accordingly, the non-compliance events were ranked sequentially according to severity, and the ERCB’s response to high-risk non-compliance events depended on the circumstances of a particular event and the company’s compliance history. On 12 February 2016, the compliance and enforcement programme was revised yet again under the by now renamed AER, with the introduction of the Integrated Compliance Assurance Framework (ICAF) and Manual 013: Compliance and Enforcement Program (AER 2016a, p. 1; AER 2016b, pp. 1–2). Here, the decision to supersede and replace Directive 019 was based on reasoning that the Directive did not set any rules or requirements, but merely provided guidance based on the ERCB compliance assurance process (AER 2016a, p. 2; Tamura-O’Connor 2016). Still, the compliance assurance programmes maintain some of the same elements as previously, namely, the education, prevention and enforcement model; voluntary self-disclosure; and an energy operator’s ability to appeal enforcement action (AER

392  Handbook of critical environmental politics 2016a, p. 6; AER 2016b, p. 2). According to the AER, the ICAF combines the most effective parts of the ERCB’s and Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development’s (now Alberta Environment and Parks) (ERSD’s) compliance and assurance programmes into a singular framework (AER 2016b, p. 1). Here, the framework relies on a flexible risk-informed approach, which guides the design and delivery of compliance assurance activities and programs (AER 2016b, pp. 3–4), while Manual 013 explains in detail the AER’s strategy of education, prevention and enforcement (AER 2016b, p. 1). To ensure compliance, the AER uses several tools and strategies throughout the life of an energy operator’s projects. First, the AER monitors a project’s construction to ensure requirements are being met. When a project is built and in operation, the AER conducts inspections and audits to ensure that companies are engaged in proper monitoring, compliance and reporting (AER 2020a). Companies are encouraged to voluntarily self-disclose non-compliances, a form of industry self-regulation that relieves state agencies of extra work, which has become increasingly the norm in neoliberal political systems in which states are expected to play a minimal role in economic development, and their budgets are often trimmed accordingly. To do so, companies submit a voluntary self-disclosure form, in which operators identify, report, and indicate corrective actions to AER field offices, regional offices, and the Authorizations branch (AER 2020g). Upon receiving company reporting of a non-compliance event, under Manual 013, the AER staff issues a notice of non-compliance to an energy operator, and then uses its new non-compliance triage assessment process to evaluate the significance of non-compliance (Tamura-O’Connor 2016; AER 2019, p. 8, 2020g). When energy operators are non-compliant, the AER uses several compliance and non-enforcement tools, namely, notice of non-compliance, warning, order, administrative sanction, fee, administrative penalty, prosecution and the declaration of a named individual (AER 2020d). Finally, as a means to promote transparency but also perhaps to shame poor performers, the AER utilizes its Compliance Dashboard to share information about which companies are non-compliant and the AER’s disciplinary responses. Here, we were able to illustrate the changes to the number of non-compliance actions as outlined next.

THE STUDY Considering this was a quantitative study examining the contemporary history of oil and gas non-compliance and enforcement in the province, all numeric data was gathered from the AER and its predecessor organization, the ERCB. The ST108: AER monthly enforcement action summary provided a month-to-month summary of the ERCB’s compliance activity between January 2008 and June 2014 (AER 2014). From July 2014, non-compliance and enforcement data have been posted consistently onto the Compliance Dashboard within two business days of the AER issuing a response (AER 2020e). The data from July 2014 to April 2019 were also downloaded on a month-to-month basis. Prior to analysis, the gathered data from July 2014 to April 2019 was reconfigured to resemble January 2008 to June 2014 monthly enforcement action summaries to ease analysis. Further, all data from January 2008 to April 2019 was inspected for missing data. Subsequently, a new table was created which clustered the total number of enforcement actions per month, and total enforcement actions were annualized between 2008 and 2018. To determine the total number of companies reporting non-compliance events each year in our dataset, ST108 and the Compliance Dashboard were

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations  393 used because they list the name of each licensee/energy operator. Here, an advanced filter allowed us to sift the list of licensee names to prevent double counting. Then, the list of unique records was sorted alphabetically to again reduce double counting owing to semantic errors, for example, ‘Barnwell of Canada Ltd.’ as compared with ‘Barnwell of Canada, Limited’. All numeric data was gathered from the AER, and its predecessor organization, the ERCB. This also applies to ST59: Alberta drilling activity monthly statistics, yearly summaries which provide data submitted by operators to the AER (AER 2020f). A new table was created which summarized the total number of metres extracted from development wells per year. All data were gathered, cleaned and analysed using statistical software Microsoft Excel.

POLICY IN PRACTICE: WHAT ARE WE SEEING? WHAT ARE WE NOT SEEING? Over the past decade, there has been a notable decline in the total number of enforcement actions issued on a yearly basis (see Figure 28.1). The next step in critical analysis is to identify the possible explanations for our observations. An obvious possible reason for a decline in non-compliance events could be a decline in production. Indeed, the total number of wells drilled over this time period, while fluctuating considerably, has declined, as depicted by the black line in Figure 28.2. On the other hand, a given well now may have a significantly higher level of metres drilled than a well that was drilled 10 or 20 years ago. This apparent oddity reflects technological shifts that have occurred over this same period that have allowed for much deeper wells, horizontal drilling and the capacity to have multiple extensions from the same well, the latter named multistage horizontal fracturing (Government of Alberta 2020b). We find that while the number of wells has declined, the total number of metres drilled has not, as is also captured by the grey line in Figure 28.2. Figure 28.2 also highlights the discrepancy in what is a low variability in non-compliance events compared with tremendous variability in drilling activity, offering little confidence that the rate of reported non-compliance is closely related to the rate of production.

Figure 28.1

Total number of annual enforcement actions issued on a yearly basis between 2008 to 2018

While there may be a smaller number of operating wells on the land base for AER to monitor, if the amount of production activity alone could explain the number of enforcement actions issued in a given year, we might not expect the number of enforcement actions to decline, since

394  Handbook of critical environmental politics

Figure 28.2

Time series depicting the number of monthly enforcement actions (MEAs) against monthly drilling activity

the potential for things to go wrong at an individual well might be expected to increase with the increase in total metres drilled per well, leading to an enforcement action rate that remains largely the same over this time period. On the contrary, we observe a dramatic decrease in the number of non-compliance incidents. These findings – that the rate of non-compliance events has been decreasing while the level of productivity has not – could be seen as very good news. However, this study gives us an opportunity to think critically about these empirical findings. Critical analysis involves asking the questions, what are these findings telling us, and what are they not telling us? In the current example, since we cannot attribute the change in non-compliance events to rates of production activity, what else might explain this decline over time? Do these findings tell us a story of environmental improvement? Has the industry uniformly adopted a stronger safety culture? If the industry were dominated by a very small number of companies, that could be a possibility, but in this instance, it includes numerous companies, with an average total number of operating companies in our dataset of 249 per year, but as many as 321 in 2019. Some of these companies are old players, some are new, and some are large, but the majority are relatively small companies. That is, the continuous improvement explanation does not hold: there are too many actors with different levels of experience, capacity and incentives – more accurately disincentives for many – to accept this explanation. As a potential second explanation, many might argue that technological improvements (Chapter 22 in this volume) are the reason non-compliance events have declined: perhaps newer production technologies are safer, and that is why fewer accidents are being reported. This explanation can be readily thrown out too. There is plenty of evidence that the hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling technologies that now predominate in Alberta and elsewhere are immensely riskier and more prone to accidents than are earlier drilling techniques. The scientific record has in recent years catalogued an increase in evidence and concern regarding the hazardous impacts of hydraulic fracturing, including impacts on water use and contamination (for example, Korfmacher et al. 2013; Warner et al. 2013; Coram et al. 2014), air quality including greenhouse gas emissions (Litovitz et al. 2013; Jackson et al. 2014; Roy et al. 2014), ecological impacts (Sawyer et al. 2013; Trexler et al. 2014), increasing seismic events (Kerr 2012; Ellsworth 2013; Schultz et al. 2018) and health impacts (Warner et al. 2013). In Alberta, many residents have lodged complaints of severe impacts to land, livestock and personal health owing to nearby drilling activities (Davidson 2018), and several earthquakes that have occurred in recent years have been directly attributed to drilling (Schultz et al. 2018).

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations  395 A third possible explanation might be regulatory reform: perhaps policy-makers’ efforts to simplify and streamline the regulatory process for the benefit of industry were exceedingly effective, with the outcome that fewer non-compliance incidents occur. Alberta’s evolution in compliance and enforcement does reflect the belief that ‘compliance is better when the rules are simple and clear’ (Giles 2013, p. 24), and the decline in non-compliance events over time may well reflect that. However, a coincident policy shift serves to obfuscate this potential linkage. Seemingly in contradiction to the desire to prescribe rules that are ‘simple and clear’, those same rules have rewritten the nature of non-compliance enforcement from what were once unambiguous, compulsory directives, in favour of a more discretionary approach. Under the former Directive 019, there were well-defined risk assessments criteria, and predetermined possible responses to non-compliance events based on those criteria. Accordingly, when a non-compliance event occurred, AER staff had no discretion in applying a different risk rating (Tamura-O’Connor 2016). The specific details of non-compliance events are likely to differ on a case-by-case basis, and so a common approach would have been highly likely to have been a source of disgruntlement on the part of industry. With the newly flexible approach enabled by the ICAF and Manual 013, the AER has a tremendous amount of discretion to factor those specific case-by-case details into their evaluation and determination, demarcated by a subtle but significant shift in directive, as a ‘notice of noncompliance replaces high- and low-risk enforcement action and notices of high- and low-risk noncompliance’ (AER 2016b, p. 3). To justify this discretionary approach, Manual 013 states ‘responding to non-compliance is often a complex and iterative process that requires technical, environmental, and compliance expertise’ (AER 2019, p. 1). A warning letter is generally the lowest form of enforcement response, while a prosecution is generally the highest. However, responses in between depend on the exact nature of the non-compliance event, encompassing a range of possible responses, from small administrative penalties to large-impact enforcement orders. To select an appropriate response from a variety of potential responses without the advantage of clear, predetermined guidelines, compliance officers usually initially issue a notice of non-compliance, and then rely on the triage assessment to determine an appropriate response (AER 2019, p. 7; Tamura-O’Connor 2016). The initial notice of non-compliance lets the operator know that the AER has identified non-compliance and requires the company to inform the AER of steps they have made to come back into compliance (AER 2016b, p. 3). Further, the notice of non-compliance can be used to request more information from the operator, so that AER staff can determine the appropriate response, which may include enforcement (AER 2016b, p. 3). Concurrently, a non-compliance triage assessment is used to determine the extent or significance of non-compliance (AER 2019, p. 8). The triage process consists of five questions AER staff use to determine the appropriate response, consisting of (1) significant impact to the environment, (2) the conduct of unauthorized activity (3) evidence that suggests knowingly unauthorized activity with demonstrated disregard, (4) history of non-compliance, and (5) false and misleading information by the energy operator (AER 2016b, pp. 4–5). If AER staff determine the non-compliance event warrants further assessment, the case is then forwarded to the investigations team, who are available to all of the AER throughout for consultation to determine whether an investigation is necessary (AER 2019, p. 8). Combining the initial notice of non-compliance with the triage assessment permits discretion, allowing AER staff to take immediate steps to remediate a non-compliance event (AER 2019, p. 8). Discretion is also evident following the findings of an investigation, whereby nothing in Manual 013 is intended to restrict the discretion or auton-

396  Handbook of critical environmental politics omy of AER statutory decision-makers to determine whether to use compliance and enforcement tools at all (AER 2019, p. 11). The AER then uses its discretionary authority to determine whether an investigation of the (company self-reported) event is needed (AER 2020g). That is, there would appear to be a great deal of case-by-case discretion in the evaluation of problematic events and in the determination of disciplinary actions, and this discretion may well transpire in the minimization of the number, severity and nature of disciplinary actions, the latter of which may now include a variety of forms of creative sentencing. Bearing in mind further, however, that the increase in staffing in the agency has not kept pace with their increase in jurisdictional responsibilities, combined with a general endorsement of an industry self-regulation approach, this discretion for all intents and purposes is likely to be the prerogative of the non-compliant company to exercise. In the United States, a similar study using enforcement data from 2010 to 2014 found similar trends to those we have observed. That is, when state regulators were asked to implement programmes and policies that had the dual purpose of ensuring compliance from industries while also preserving the flow of state revenues generated from natural resource development, regulators were more likely to seek a cooperative approach to regulation to ensure ‘the pragmatic application of enforcements and penalizations’ (Hopper 2017, p. 106). As a consequence, the use of voluntary compliance on top of command and control regulation has led to enforcements becoming less frequent, less severe, and subject to lower fines (Hopper 2017, p. 118). The potential fourth explanation, and which we consider to be the most likely, is a form of symbolic politics, in that the number of non-compliance events has not gone down, but the reporting of those events has. That is, publicly available information, such as non-compliance reporting, may give the impression of environmental improvement, thereby enhancing the legitimacy of both the oil and gas industry and its regulators at a time of scrutiny by environmentally aware publics, when the reality may look different. While we cannot prove this hypothesis – hypotheses cannot be proven, only disproven – it does fit well with several other factors characterizing the province of Alberta, and its oil industry. First, investments in oil and gas development in a region in which the reserves are depleted are highly risky – wells drilled often come up empty, and even those that do become operational do not produce the same volume of oil and gas as their predecessors did. The technologies used are also very expensive, so each well drilled costs more. This fiscal situation makes the costs of regulatory compliance, including the reporting of non-compliance events, all the more troublesome to company actors. To take one particularly vivid example, a central pillar of environmental regulation in the oil and gas sector involves a requirement to reclaim wells after their production life cycle comes to a close. Officially, the AER is required to ensure that companies hold sufficient assets to pay for well reclamation. However, according to one critic: ‘the Alberta Energy Regulator is now propping up the province’s oil and gas companies through accounting systems that exaggerate assets and underestimate liabilities by using outdated information – meaning companies are able to drill new wells despite questions around their ability to pay for their eventual cleanup’ (Riley 2018). As a consequence, in Alberta currently, according to the official figures reported by the AER, we have 170 000 non-producing wells that remain unclaimed, giving them the notable title of ‘abandoned wells’, leaving taxpayers with a liability well in excess of $100 billion. Second, oil and gas development has limited oversight by the public, the only entity with an interest in ensuring environmental compliance. Most Albertans live in cities, far from sites of production, and most people close to those sites of production are economically dependent

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations  397 on that production and thus face staunch economic and cultural sanctions against expressing concern. Those willing to confront these informal sanctions are also faced with formal sanctions, in the form of increasingly constrained opportunities to express concerns, defined by, once again, those same streamlined policies designed to make it easier for companies to get on with business (Davidson et al. 2018). Third, Alberta also happens to be a jurisdiction that has enthusiastically embraced neoliberalism (Chapters 27 and 29 in this volume). The free-market principles embodied in neoliberalism and consequently applied to resource industries have, according to Malin et al. (2017, p. 525), ‘transformed the ethos of governance from bureaucracy to business’. Neoliberalism is premised upon the belief that markets are self-regulating, similarly to a biological organism, and will generate the most rewards for everyone if left to its own devices. This belief, in turn, rests upon an even deeper logic that celebrates individualism and entrepreneurialism (Mudge 2008), and relies upon corporations to self-regulate, often justified by the presumption that they know their own businesses best. While we acknowledge there may be many companies that seek to comply with regulations, even when they do not have state agents checking their operations, there are few incentives to diligently report non-compliance events under these circumstances. This is particularly so when the nature of the non-compliance is not obvious to anyone outside the company; as Beamish (2000) has shown, these situations can breed a ‘culture of silence’ within industrial organizations. There are many regions around the globe that can be described as neoliberal, but Alberta has another, relatively more unusual, feature that strongly shapes its governance. Alberta is an oil and gas extraction zone, and this sector plays such a prominent role in the regional economy that it can be described as a petro-state. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria, where 50–95 per cent of state revenues come from oil and gas development, are extreme cases of petro-statism. These are places which, despite widely varying histories and cultures, have several traits in common: high levels of poverty, inequality, conflict, and weak bureaucratic and democratic institutions. Many of these features flow from the source of state revenues, which is resource rent, rather than the business and income taxes that serve as the main revenue streams for most states. Authorities in petro-states extract rents for access to natural resources, usually from foreign investors, and then they have the power to redistribute those rents in a manner that serves their interests. This situation offers state authorities, as entities that are largely in control of petroleum resources, a tremendous amount of domestic power, and little incentive to support economic development in sectors other than that which is generating the rent-based revenues, or attend to the concerns of citizens. Terry Karl (1997) refers to this state of affairs as a ‘paradox of plenty’. Alberta is not Nigeria. But the vestiges of petro-statism can still be observed in jurisdictions with lower proportional levels of revenues from petroleum rents, as long as those proportions are high enough to persuade state authorities to do the bidding of petroleum corporations. In these instances, petro-statism may not emerge in the form of blatant corruption and violence, but instead in the form of regulatory capture (Etzioni 2009). In order for states to carry out their job effectively, they must wield sufficient autonomy to pursue their mandates without being subject to pressure from narrow special interests. Regulatory capture refers to situations in which this autonomy is lacking; in which legislatures and bureaucracies are subject to the undue influence of a small and concentrated group of economic elites, who impose pressure on policy-makers and bureaucrats to shape policies and regulations, and/or their enforcement, in order to serve the interests of those special interests instead of the public interest. Often,

398  Handbook of critical environmental politics this situation evolves over time, particularly in sectors that are relatively shielded from public oversight, and that entail a high degree of specialized knowledge which tends to be held by the special interests being regulated. In these contexts, it is not surprising to observe bureaucratic slippage, described by Freudenburg and Gramling (1994) as the incremental reinterpretation of policy mandates in ways that muddy the original policy objectives. Slippage can also be evidenced in the actions of legislators, as Davidson et al. (2018) illustrate, by making incremental incursions into the rights of citizens to protest harms associated with oil and gas extraction.

CONCLUSIONS In this study, we have shown how the deep political entanglements that describe places such as Alberta serve to support the persistence of fossil fuel extraction and, by extension, their combustion, despite growing calls for a low-carbon transition in light of the climate crisis. Multiple other forms of regional ecological disruption also result. To maintain legitimacy for these practices, however, state and industry must be able to give observers the impression that those ecosystems and the climate are being protected through neoliberal market mechanisms, while doing so becomes increasingly elusive. Alberta’s industry advocates often use the province’s environmental regulations in order to make this case. What we have shown, however, is that the environmental protection conveyed by those regulations may be more appearance than reality. As Freudenburg and Alario (2007) observed, provided these appearances are successful at distracting attention away from the environmental destruction that continues to take place, legitimacy is maintained, and the concerns of environment and climate advocates deflected. This example may offer general insights for environmental state actors elsewhere: although growing international social movement attention to regional environmental wrongdoing has compelled a state response, without strong support from regional civil societies, and that response is likely to take the form of ‘magicianship’. Why should anyone care what occurs in Alberta? Considering the urgent need to transition to a low-carbon economy, and the implications of our potential failure to do so, the governance of fossil fuel development in places such as Alberta are important to us all. Alberta is sitting on the third largest reserve of oil in the world and, unlike the rest of Canada, which is on its way to achieving targets set out in the Paris Agreement, in Alberta and neighbouring Saskatchewan, emissions are skyrocketing. Efforts to deregulate, coupled with the introduction of the job creation tax cut, are being celebrated by the incumbent government without ample discussion of whether Alberta can ever envisage a carbon-neutral economy (CTV News Edmonton Staff 2020). Instead, the government appears to be doubling down on fossil fuels extraction, rather than the economic diversification that climate action, and long-term economic stability, require. It is important to realize the damage that a slump in commodity prices can bring, and now the International Energy Agency has issued a fresh warning: diversify or face worsening finances. Revenue from oil and gas may fall as much as USD$7 trillion by 2040 since aggregate fossil-fuel demand is set to decline in the long run (Robertson 2018). Yet, doubling down on this sector can be exemplified by Premier Kenney’s decision to eliminate business tax credits intended to attract technology firms, and spend $30 million a year promoting the province’s oil sands through the Canadian Energy Centre, colloquially dubbed the Energy War Room (French 2020; Leavitt 2020). As the province reels from increasing deficits and cuts to public spending, the Ministry of Energy decided to lift curtailments on new conventional

Fossil fuels and state–industry relations  399 wells, which will bring about increasing pressure to restrain compliance and enforcement efforts (Giovannetti 2020; Nickel 2019). Meanwhile, the oil and gas companies already in operation have not only abandoned leaky wells, leaving an enormous environmental liability throughout the province, they have also abandoned their obligations to pay well leases to landowners and taxes to local rural municipalities, a move prompting sympathy from the Premier – for the companies, not the struggling rural communities (Weber 2020). These priorities are not in alignment with the consensus on climate action, let alone the steps required for long-term fiscal management. Therefore, students and scholars need to continue to make several critical inquiries: in what ways might neoliberalism exacerbate while at the same time conceal ecological and climate disruption? How can market and state legitimacy in the fossil fuels sector be challenged? How can justice and accountability be ensured?

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29. Global environmental governance and the state Alina Brad, Ulrich Brand and Etienne Schneider

INTRODUCTION AND GENEALOGY The emergence of the notion of ‘governance’ claims a shift in policy-making from hierarchically organized political decision-making based on formally codified competences (‘government’) towards less formalized and more decentralized, horizontal and participatory mode of political decision-making. The reason for this is largely seen in more complex problems to be solved. Moreover, the increasing willingness of civil society organizations and the population is seen as a driving force towards modes of governance. It is no longer the state with its public policies that intends to deal with societal problems but the state in interaction with other actors (van Kersbergen and van Waarden 2004; Offe 2009; Bevir 2012). On the global level, and in light of increasing concern over manifold problems associated with neoliberal ‘globalization’, the notion and discourse of global governance has gained prominence in academic debates (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992, Brand 2005, Overbeek et al. 2010), fuelled especially by the 1995 report by the UN Commission on Global Governance (CGG 1996). While the notion of global governance intends to provide a conceptual and analytical lens to understand the transformation of international relations, particularly since the end of the Cold War confrontation, it is often also associated with a normative expectation that the new governance-based modes of cooperation and re-regulation constitute a panacea for the problems of neoliberal globalization. Similarly, global environmental governance as a specific branch or field of global governance describes the emergences of new actors, new mechanisms of regulation and new, multilevel and transversal forms of interaction in global environmental politics, and often has been promoted as a quick fix to remedy global environmental problems. As environmental governance research constitutes a highly complex and broad research area, this chapter primarily focuses on the debate over global environmental governance (GEG). Through this thematic focus, we illustrate some of the core features of the general shift towards environmental governance as well as crucial weaknesses of environmental governance research. The next section introduces the key concepts and problems of GEG research. In the third section, we elaborate in more detail why the underlying optimism of dominant GEG research and discourse is flawed. Global environmental governance research tends to overrate the democratic potential of GEG, while largely ignoring the root causes of socio-environmental problems by eliding questions of power and interest in a more sophisticated understanding of the capitalist political economy and the state.

KEY DEVELOPMENT TRAJECTORIES AND CONCEPTS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE Global environmentalism, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the proliferation of international environmental agreements constitute the crucial antecedent to the subsequent 402

Global environmental governance and the state  403 emergence of GEG. Global environmentalism was particularly dynamized by the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The 1992 Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development then was sustained by a renewed optimism in global cooperation after the end of Cold War confrontation (Conca and Dabelko 2014). As a consequence, there has been a remarkable proliferation of cross-border multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). In November 2020, the International Environmental Agreements Database Project (IEADP 2020) listed 1300 multilateral and 2200 bilateral agreements, comprising an extensive international environmental law creation. This includes, for instance, the Antarctic Treaty System which grants scientific activities and bans military activities on the continent (late 1950s; in recent years under attack) or the Montreal Protocol (late 1980s) to phase out chemicals which destroy the ozone layer (Young and Levy 1999). Regime Theory as Predecessor of Global Environmental Governance In international relations scholarship, the proliferation of environmental interstate negotiations and consensus building was traditionally interpreted through the lens of neo-institutionalist regime theory (Keohane 1984).1 Regime theory departs from the ‘realist’ assumption that the international systems is fundamentally anarchic (Morgenthau 1948 [1978]), as there is no formal monopoly of power comparable with that which the nation state exercises over its territory. However, unlike realism, regime theory assumes that mutually beneficial interstate cooperation is possible even in the absence of a hegemon that organizes and enforce cooperation. This is owing to international interdependencies which provide incentives to cooperation as well as to the emergence of international regimes which provide sets of ‘principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor’s expectations converge’ (Krasner 1983, p. 2, see also Paterson 2009). Based on this theoretical perspective, a large body of research on international environmental institutions and regimes2 has emerged since the 1990s (Young 1989; Haas et al. 1993; Young and Levy 1999; Breitmeier et al. 2006), investigating in particular under which conditions and in which ways international environmental institutions and regimes have emerged and have proven effective in alleviating the problem that gave rise to their institutionalization. The Emergence of Global Environmental Governance Research However, as more recent contributions to GEG research argue, global environmental politics has developed significantly beyond the confines of interstate cooperation and MEAs. The emergence of GEG can be interpreted as a second phase of global environmental politics, the former having started in the 1990s but evolving particularly dynamically from the 2000s onwards. Coinciding with stagnation in the proliferation of international and intergovernmental environmental agreements since the 2000s (Conca and Dabelka 2014), this phase is characterized by the increasing importance of new forms of environmental policy-making (Okereke et al. 2009), particularly encouraged by the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development and its promotion of multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development. For Kate O’Neill (2017, p. 5) GEG ‘consists of efforts by the international community to manage and solve shared environmental problems’. Following Pattberg and Widerberg (2015) and Biermann (2014a), GEG is characterized by four distinct features as compared with traditional international environmental politics. None of these four features is

404  Handbook of critical environmental politics entirely new, but GEG scholars argue that their role in international relations had previously been only of minor significance. First, GEG is characterized by the emergence and participation of new actors as well as new forms of agency and authority in global environmental politics. While nation states had been the key (and often sole) actors in previous forms of international environmental politics, GEG is marked – as environmental governance at the national scale – by the emergence of multi-stakeholder forms of cooperation, and the state is one actor among many. These actors include, in addition to the governments of national states, especially civil society actors, such as non-governmental organization (NGOs) and representatives of social movements, expert networks (such the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), multinational corporations and industry associations, but also international organizations and international courts as well as local and regional governments (see the third section in this chapter for a different understanding of ‘civil society’, in the tradition of Gramsci). Along these lines, there is an increasing agency beyond the state (Dellas et al. 2011, Newell et al. 2012), evident for instance in the 2000 United Nations (UN) Global Compact, a non-binding pact supposed to encourage especially transnational corporations to adopt social and sustainable principles, or the increasing number of NGOs and other non-state actors participating in the UN Climate Change conferences (Müller and Walk 2014). Second, a key contention of GEG research is that not only do the presence and numbers of these actors on the global political scene increase, but so does their ability to influence particular aspects of world politics. This has been described with notions such as the emergence of a new global public domain (Ruggie 2004), a shift from international to world society (Buzan 2004), deliberative global governance (Dryzek et al. 2019), information-based governance (O’Neill 2017, p. 9) or – from a critical perspective – as privatization of environmental governance (Cashore 2002; Falkner 2003). This is closely related to the emergence of new, governance-based forms of regulation. Non-state actors, such as NGOs and corporations, increasingly participate in, and assume the role of, norm-setting and norm-implementing institutions, indicating a shift towards public-private and private-private global policy-making. The latter includes, for instance, industry self-regulation initiatives, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project or the Global Reporting Initiative, but also, and even more importantly, voluntary standards and certification schemes, such as the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO), the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) (Vogel 2008; Guldbrandsen 2009; Brad et al. 2018). These voluntary standards and certification schemes are mostly multi-stakeholder initiatives, that is, they have mostly been established jointly by NGOs and corporations, and they operate as private regulatory bodies without state enforcement. Third, and closely intertwined with the first and the second trend, GEG approaches put more emphasis than the general understanding of environmental governance on new forms of interaction between actors across multiple levels. For instance, there are myriad global forms of cooperation to mitigate climate change, ranging from the UN Climate Change conferences to global city networks which share information and experiences on low-emission planning. Crucially, these forms of cooperation span the conventional hierarchy of political levels from international over national to regional and local, making it appropriate to refer to global rather than international environmental governance (Biermann 2014a, Bäckstrand and Kuyper 2017). Fourth, and finally, the political and most parts of the academic discourse on environmental governance, particularly in GEG research, have been underpinned by the normative assump-

Global environmental governance and the state  405 tion that different modes of governance and, in this instance GEG, provide the potential to solve the main (global) environmental problems cooperatively (Brand 2005). The emergence of environmental governance has been sustained by a new optimistic vision of promoting change that deals effectively with environmental problems. The global perspective particularly assumes that economic globalization intensifies many problems (for example, environmental problems) and should be accompanied or regulated politically. It is assumed by approaches to GEG that, with adequate political steering and more cooperation, the problems can be dealt with. Moreover, it is argued that more participatory and cooperative forms of (global environmental) governance would enjoy a higher degree of legitimacy and accountability than the previous forms of (international environmental) politics, thus rectifying the democratic deficits at the national scale and even more of the international state system. More recently, however, this optimistic vision, and related concepts such as sustainability or sustainable development, are increasingly challenged by the less hopeful notion of the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2018; see Chapter 5 in this volume), acknowledging that we have entered a new epoch of planetary history in which human beings have become the determining force for the earth system. The notion of ‘earth system governance’ (ESG) understands the planet as an ‘interdependent integrated social-ecological system’ (Biermann 2014b, p. 16) and offers governance scholarship a dialogue with natural science research domains in order to take into account the interlinkages of social and natural systems across all scales (Biermann et al. 2012, Pattberg and Widerberg 2015).

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND STANDPOINTS Besides questions of current and future development trajectories of GEG, there is a variety of contentious issues in debates on the plausibility of GEG approaches (similar critique applies to the ESG approach). A key controversy is how exactly to interpret and conceptually grasp currently existing overall structures of (global) environmental governance. The proliferation of governance levels and functional arenas has brought about a highly fragmented structure of GEG which is characterized by a multiplicity of interacting and overlapping international and transnational institutions (organizations, regimes, implicit conventions and norms), ranging from bilateral to global forms of cooperation and from highly specific policy fields to universal issues (Pattberg and Widerberg 2015). How do we understand this fragmentation and largely ineffective forms of GEG? Fragmented Regime Complexes One way of portraying this structure, building on regime theory, is the notion of ‘regimes complexes’ as overlapping and interacting non-hierarchical institutions that govern particular global environmental policy fields (Raustiala and Victor 2004; Abbott 2012). While incoherence and fragmentation is regarded as the main reason for ineffectiveness in this perspective (Brand and Görg 2013), it seems difficult to integrate these regime complexes into an overarching, all-encompassing GEG regime (Pattberg and Widerberg 2015). Regime theoretical scholars argue that the key challenge is to more coherently manage and coordinate these regime complexes across regimes (Chambers 2008; Oberthür and Schram Stokke 2011;

406  Handbook of critical environmental politics van Asselt 2014), particularly through ‘orchestration’ (Abbott 2017; Bäckstrand and Kuyper 2017). Other scholars are more sceptical concerning such an orchestrated management to overcome fragmentation. Global environmental governance is conceptualized as a result of actions of powerful actors, that is, powerful states that exploit segmentation and fragmentation (Biermann 2014a; Pattberg and Widerberg 2015). The latter particularly provide opportunities for forum-shifting and forum-shopping, that is, strategies to horizontally and vertically shift the arenas of policy-making and decision-making. Inconsistencies are thus not simply deficits by accident, but also purposefully designed and exploited (Van de Graaf 2013, see also Brand et al. 2010). For instance, the agenda of international organizations, such as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), or the emission targets agreed upon at UN Climate Change conferences are continuously undermined by other international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, which promote conventional strategies of economic growth (Biermann 2014a).3 Democracy and (Global) Environmental Governance Together with debates over how to conceptualize political structures to deal effectively with environmental problems or crises, there are also several concerns with the underlying normative connotations of cooperative, participatory global, problem-solving (Sinclair 2003). As critical perspectives on governance have emphasized (Demirović and Walk 2011), the emergence and inclusion of new civil society actors and new forms of global cooperation does not necessarily augment democratic quality and legitimacy. Instead of replacing power asymmetries through assumingly horizontal forms of cooperation, power asymmetries continue to exist in governance-based modes of regulation, determining which actors are granted access to governance networks and decision-making processes. For instance, as studies on participation in international climate negotiations have shown (Müller and Walk 2014), NGOs are only granted access in so far as they provide detailed knowledge and expertise useful for governments, and upon condition that their political standpoints do not fundamentally collide with those of leading governments. Correlatedly, NGOs have only very few opportunities to influence the agenda-setting process in those negotiations through participation. Moreover, and on a more general level, the inclusion of new non-state actors can hardly be regarded as democratic per se since it tends to increase the weight of representatives of actors, such as industry associations or think tanks, which are mostly not elected in any democratic sense (Görg and Hirsch 1998; Demirović and Walk 2011; more generally on the contested role of knowledge in GEG, Vadrot 2020). This is particularly crucial as participation in global governance networks requires significant financial and organizational resources, which especially non-governmental actors from the Global South are lacking. Therefore, the liberal notion of civil society that underpins GEG debates where civil society is understood as a space in which critical and progressive actors meet and deliberate is evidently inadequate (Görg and Hirsch 1998). Instead of emphasizing the horizontal and democratic character of civil-society based forms of cooperation, critical political economy perspectives, particularly inspired by neo-Gramscianism (Cox 1981; Gill 1998), have interpreted the emergence of a global civil society ‘as an entrenchment and legitimation of hegemonic global environmental governance through the sphere of global civil society’ (Ford

Global environmental governance and the state  407 2003, p. 123, original emphasis) and as part of a global transformation towards a post-Fordist, neoliberal historical bloc and hegemony (Brand 2005; Levy and Newell 2005a). The democratic deficit of existing (global environmental) governance has always been reflected in a critical institutionalist strand of governance research, emphasizing that multi-stakeholder governance does not necessarily increase legitimacy and accountability (Dingwerth 2007). Along these lines, Dryzek et al. (2019) have renewed their call to create new GEG institutions by reconceptualizing environmental governance through deliberative democracy, understood as non-coercive, ‘effective, inclusive and transformative communication encompassing citizens and policy-makers’ (Dryzek et al. 2019, p. 1, similarly, Baber and Bartlett 2013). It is argued that in order to meet the challenge of the Anthropocene, the new forms of environmental governance would need to incorporate the principle of ‘ecological reflexivity’, that is, develop institutions and politics capable of responding to the signals of the earth system and of constantly reviewing and revising their own structure and organizational principles, as opposed to a ‘blind’ path dependence and adaptation without profound institutional change (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, see also Mert 2020). However, by relying mostly on institutionalist notions, such as path dependence to explain inertia, Dryzek and Pickering (2019, p. 105) tend to overestimate the transformative capacity of what they term ‘discourse entrepreneurs’, such as scientists or environmental activists, while underestimating more profound structural barriers to change, rooted in the political economy of global capitalism and the state. More provocatively, Blühdorn and Deflorian (2020) argue that different forms of (global) environmental governance have proven in many respects highly functional to global neoliberal capitalism and dominant accumulation strategies, and this might be the reason why governance-based forms of environmental politics have flourished despite criticisms with regard to its democratic legitimacy and effectiveness. They see environmental governance processes largely as ineffective ‘performance’. Critical Political Economy, Political Ecology and (Global) Environmental Governance Most parts of the governance debate, in general, and about environmental governance, in particular, have only a limited understanding of the underlying structural causes and drivers of the ecological crisis which have – as historical-materialist scholars argue (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016) – given rise to the Anthropocene in the first place (which is why these authors prefer the notion of ‘Capitalocene’ instead; cf. Moore 2016). To scrutinize these barriers to change, contradictions of dominant patterns of unsustainability and entry points for social-ecological transformations is the strength of historical-materialist approaches to governance. They focus on the political economy and political ecology of globalizing capitalism and the state, that is, both the object and the subject of political steering and problem-solving (Brand and Görg 2013, see also Brand 2016; Levy and Newell 2005a; Newell 2008). As regards the object of steering, even though critical institutionalist approaches problematize unsustainable ‘institutions’, such as markets, they hardly pay any attention to the political economy of capitalist social relations.4 Moreover, in contrast to institutionalist approaches to governance, historical-materialist approaches intend to put changing environmental governance mechanisms into their historical context. At a general level and in addition to all differences within policy fields and across regions and countries, a historical shift is assumed that occurred with the demise of Fordist

408  Handbook of critical environmental politics social compromise which encompassed extensive forms of planning and corporatist management, and therefore put the state at the centre of the political. This changed with the emergence of post-Fordist modes of regulation and, therefore, governance (Brand 2005). This general historical context is a type of structuring (not determining) force of the manifold modes of environmental governance. More concretely, historical-materialist approaches emphasize how the core structural principle of global capitalism permeates and shapes governance structures and processes. On the most fundamental level, these core structural principles of capitalism as an economic and social system are characterized (among others) by private ownership over the means of production, implying competing and antagonistic social interests, as well as an inherent drive of capital towards accumulation through profit-maximization owing to competitive pressure. This corresponds with an inherent growth imperative, which is, in principle, indifferent to its ecological consequences. Under neoliberal economic globalization, transnational corporations compete on a global scale, and maintaining and increasing international competitiveness has become one of the primary policy goals of nation states – often at the expense of stricter environmental regulation (Robinson 2004, Paterson 2009, Brand et al. 2010). Against this background, historical-materialist approaches stress that (global) environmental governance structures and processes do not simply contribute to the solution of given (global) environmental problems. In contrast to this managerial vision of most governance approaches (see Sinclair 2003), environmental governance is assumed to be permeated by competing and partly antagonistic interest as well as by relations of power and domination which in many cases even shape the definition of environmental problems – evident, for instance, in the controversy for whom the Paris Agreement target to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels is acceptable and for whom not. Environmental governance always entails ‘asymmetrical distributional outcomes, not just for states, but also for various industrial sectors and other social groups’ (Levy and Newell 2005b, p. 6), dominant accumulation strategies are often at odds with ambitious approaches to climate and environmental regulation that aim at establishing limits to growth. Developing adequate political responses to the looming climate catastrophe, rapid and massive biodiversity loss or other forms of environmental degradation is therefore not simply a question of overcoming abstract logics of path dependence as well as finding cooperative, techno-scientific solutions, but of confronting vested and highly organized interest in order to transform deeply rooted social relations of production and consumption (see also Alexander and Rutherford 2020). Moreover, dominant forms of environmental governance not only fail to implement stricter regulation by effectively undermining environmentally destructive accumulation strategies, but also promote the exploration and generation of new fields of accumulations. As Paterson (2009) and Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo (2015) argue, the shift to (global) environmental governance in the 1990s was accompanied by a re-orientation from attempting to put ‘limits to growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972) to the policy orientation of ‘sustainable development’ which accommodates the basic growth imperative of capitalism. This orientation also helped to open up new fields and terrains for capitalist accumulation and growth, particularly by the introduction of market-simulating and creating mechanisms (for instance, emission trading or the Clean Development Mechanism in global climate governance), by fostering the appropriation of genetic resources through global biodiversity governance, supported by the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement on intellectual property rights, and by cre-

Global environmental governance and the state  409 ating and exploiting new markets for environmentally conscious consumers through voluntary sustainability certification (Paterson 2009, Brand et al. 2010, Brad et al. 2018). The State and (Global) Environmental Governance In addition to the limited understanding of institutionalist approaches to (global) environmental governance regarding the structuring forces of political economy within globalizing capitalism, most of these also exhibit an underdeveloped understanding of the state. It is considered as a generally neutral regulating agency and as one actor among others, engaging in cooperative global problem-solving. Materialist state theory offers the point of departure for a more critical and elaborated understanding of the state in environmental governance structures and processes. Materialist state theory conceptualizes the state as a ‘condensation of a relationship of forces between classes and class fractions’ which expresses itself within the state in a specific form (Poulantzas 1978 [2000], p. 132, see also Jessop 1990; Bretthauer et al. 2011; Demirović 2011). From this perspective, the state is not just a neutral problem-solver or actor among others in environmental governance, but the focal terrain of societal power relations in which dominant social forces organize themselves by carrying out their conflicts in a rule-guided manner. As a consequence, power relations among social forces and specific political actors are historically inscribed into the political structure of the state (that is, a ‘material condensation’, cf. Poulantzas 1978 [2000], pp. 128–9). In contrast to the notion that given environmental problems are solved within inclusive and participatory environmental governance networks, a perspective based on materialist state theory emphasizes not only the deeply conflictual nature of environmental politics, but also that conflicts over environmental politics are fought out on a pre-structured, asymmetrical institutional terrain. This means that specific strategies and interests enjoy historically developed and entrenched privileged access to key decision-making areas (structural and strategic selectivities), as evident, for instance, in the privileged access of the environmental counter-movement to parts of the US-American state (Brulle and Aronczyk 2020). As regards global (environmental) governance, critical state-theoretical perspectives stress that globalization has not unequivocally led to a decline or ‘retreat of the state’ (Strange 1996), but instead to an ‘internationalization of the state’ (Egan and Levy 2001; Barrow 2005; Brand et al. 2010, 2011; Sauer and Wöhl 2011). Globalization and the internationalization of the state is not something that simply occurs to nation states, it is a process which particularly dominant nation states actively shape, establishing international state apparatuses, such as international organizations, regimes or governance networks (Görg and Hirsch 1998). Based on the notion of the state as a condensation of a societal relationship of forces, these international state apparatuses can be interpreted as a ‘second-order condensation’ (Brand et al. 2011), that is, they are a condensation of forces between nation states (which are themselves condensation of forces) as well as between nation states and other actors operating on a global scale. A crucial benefit of this approach is that it allows to take into account power asymmetries and competition between nation states in global (environmental) governance, including the postcolonial legacy of North–South asymmetries (Okereke 2020). Moreover, the concept of second-order condensation also facilitates a nuanced perspective on the politics of scale which focuses on why specific actors decide strategically where and how they engage in struggles and which level or fora of decision-making they strengthen or undermine (Egan and Levy 2001; Bulkeley 2005; Wissen 2009).

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DOES THE STATE COME BACK? OPEN QUESTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL From a critical perspective we contend that the world might have already entered into a ‘post-governance’ era (Brunnengräber 2017). Regarding global environmental politics, there is some evidence that another phase of transformation, in which the state and hierarchal forms of government and authority regain importance, is emerging. On the one hand, while the 2000s saw a stagnation of MEAs (Conca and Dabelka 2014) as well as many obvious deadlocks, which indicated a shift towards GEG, we can currently observe a stagnation in the previously dynamic proliferation of voluntary standards and certification schemes, arguably indicating a shift beyond GEG. On the other hand, as regards environmental politics more generally, current debates and policy strategies around a ‘European Green Deal’ or a ‘Green New Deal’ (GND) suggest – despite very significant differences – that the state might (re-)assume a far more prominent role by massively investing in infrastructure and renewable energy or by introducing emission-related border taxation (cf. European Commission 2019; Klein 2019). In contrast to most GEG perspectives, the aims of a radical acceleration of decarbonization and the promotion of economic, social, and environmental justice are much more explicit here. On an explicitly international level, some authors suggest that the development trajectory of climate change is likely to result in dystopian scenarios, such as the emergence of a ‘Climate Leviathan’ (Wainwright and Mann 2018) or a new ‘geopower’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). In this new global setting, the imperative of adaptation to the menacing and disastrous effects of the climate crisis might lead and justify sovereignty shifts to the planetary level. This sovereignty might be exercised, as Wainwright and Mann (2018) argue, by one or a couple of dominant nation states such as the USA and China. In particular, the use of geoengineering technologies (such as solar radiation management or carbon capture and storage), which would have wide-ranging effects on the entire earth system, might require centralized planetary forms of authority. This does not mean that the core development trajectories of GEG outlined previously are necessarily becoming obsolete, but their increasing relevance for future global environmental politics should not be assumed as given. In addition to the dystopic hypotheses of a global Climate Leviathan, recent debates on social-ecological transformations and degrowth (Asara et al. 2015; Chertkovskaya et al. 2019) insist that the root causes of the ecological crisis, which most institutionalist approaches tend to downplay, have to be tackled: the growth imperative and the capitalist and imperial mode of production and living as well as interests, norms and power relations intrinsically linked to them (Brand and Wissen 2021). Scientific debates about (global) environmental governance do still contribute to a better understanding of how political structures and processes changed over past decades. However, they need to acknowledge those root causes and the implications for the manifold forms of political steering in order to better understand the obstacles of, and potentials for, adequately coping with the deepening social-ecological crisis.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank the editors and Matthias Groß for their valuable comments.

NOTES 1. Classical institutionalism focused on the analysis of state institutions, such as governments or parliaments. Neo-institutionalism emerged in the 1980s as a response to the dominant behaviorism and methodological individualism. It puts emphasis on the institutional context of political events and outcomes (see Schmidt 2006, also on differences within neo-institutionalism). 2. The notion of institutions is usually understood as an umbrella term that encompasses regimes and international organizations, as well as conventions, that is, informal practices (Haas et al. 1993). 3. For yet another perspective which characterizes the structure of current GEG as ‘polycentric’, positively emphasizing in particular the capacity of systems to self-organize without a centre or authority which orchestrates or organises GEG, cf. Ostrom (2009). 4. Historical-materialist approaches need to look more at everyday practices that reproduce unsustainable social relations and societal nature relations. Here, practice theory makes important contributions (see Jonas and Littig 2015; Wilhite 2016; and an attempt to bring the two fields of knowledge together in Brand and Wissen 2021).

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414  Handbook of critical environmental politics O’Neill, K. (2017), The Environment and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oberthür, S. and Schram Stokke, O. (eds) (2011), Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Offe, C. (2009), Governance: an ‘empty signifier’? Constellations, 16 (4), 550–62. Okereke, C. (2020), North-South inequity and global environmental governance, in A. Kalfagianni, D. Fuchs and A. Hayden (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 167–79. Okereke, C., Bulkeley, H. and Schroeder, H. (2009), Conceptualizing climate governance beyond the international regime, Global Environmental Politics, 9 (1), 58–78. Ostrom, E. (2009), A polycentric approach for coping with climate change, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5095, World Bank, Washington, DC. Overbeek, H., Dingwerth, K., Pattberg, P. and Compagnon, D. (2010), Forum. Global governance: decline or maturation of an academic concept? International Studies Review, 12 (4), 696–719. Paterson, M. (2009), Global governance for sustainable capitalism? The political economy of global environmental governance, in W.N. Adger and A. Jordan (eds), Governing Sustainability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 99–122. Pattberg, P. and Widerberg, O. (2015), Theorising global environmental governance: key findings and future questions, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43 (2), 684–705. Poulantzas, N. (1978), State, Power, Socialism, repr. 2000, London: Verso. Raustiala, K. and Victor, D.G. (2004), The regime complex for plant genetic resources, International Organization, 58 (2), 277–309. Reinike, W.H. (1998), Global Public Policy. Governing without Government? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Robinson, W.I. (2004), A Theory of Global Capitalism. Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rosenau, J.N. and Czempiel, E.O. (1992), Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruggie, J.G. (2004), Reconstituting the global public domain – issues, actors, and practices, European Journal of International Relations, 10 (4), 499–531. Sauer, B. and Wöhl, S. (2011), Feminist perspectives on the internationalization of the state, Antipode, 43 (1), 108–28. Schmidt, V. (2006), Institutionalism, in C. Hay, M. Lister and D. Marsh (eds), The State: Theories and Issues, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 98–117. Sinclair, T.J. (2003), General introduction, in T.J. Sinclair (ed.), Global Governance: Critical Concepts in Political Science, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–7. Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T.M., Folke, C., Liverman, D., et al. (2018), Trajectories of the earth system in the Anthropocene, PNAS, 115 (33), 8252–9. Strange, S. (1996), The Retreat of the State. The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vadrot, A.B.M. (2020), Multilateralism as a ‘site’ of struggle over environmental knowledge: the North-South divide, Critical Policy Studies, 14 (2), 233–45. Van Asselt, H. (2014), The Fragmentation of Global Climate Governance: Consequences and Management of Regime Interactions, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Van de Graaf, T. (2013), Fragmentation in global energy governance: explaining the creation of IRENA, Global Environmental Politics, 13 (3), 14–33. Van Kersbergen, K. and van Waarden, F. (2004), ‘Governance’ as a bridge between disciplines, European Journal of Political Research, 43 (2), 143–71. Vogel, D. (2008), Private global business regulation, Annual Review of Political Science, 11 (1), 261–82. Wainwright, J. and Mann, G. (2018), Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, London: Verso. Wilhite, H. (2016), The Political Economy of Low Carbon Transformation: Breaking the Habits of Capitalism, London and New York: Routledge. Wissen, M. (2009), Contested terrains: politics of scale, the national state and struggles for the control over nature, Review of International Political Economy, 16 (5), 883–906.

Global environmental governance and the state  415 Young, O.R. (1989), International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Young, O.R. and Levy, M.A. (1999), The effectiveness of international environmental regimes, in O.R. Young (ed.), The Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes: Causal Connections and Behavioral Mechanisms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–32.

30. Just transition: a conflict transformation approach Damian McIlroy, Seán Brennan and John Barry

INTRODUCTION The planned retreat from a carbon-based economy is an essential component of addressing the root causes of climate breakdown. Nevertheless, how just, inclusive and equitable this transition might be is not guaranteed. With its origins in the trade union movement, the just transition stands as an energy transition pathway that can challenge head on dominant and comfortingly narratives on ‘win–win’ and ‘greening business as usual’. The reality is that moving to a low-carbon or post-carbon economy and society means the end of the fossil fuel energy system. This throws up a host of complex issues ranging from the role of the state (national and local) in managing or coordinating the transition, issues of democratic voice and procedure, reframing fossil fuels as ‘carbon resources’, to divestment and reinvestment energy strategies. Central to all these, and under-acknowledged in the literature, is to recognise that conflict and conflict transformation will frame and characterise the low-carbon energy transition. Therefore, lessons arising from the application of conflict transformation within the Liberal Peace paradigm will have to be recognised and radically reimagined if an emancipatory just energy transition is to be realised. This paradigm, arising after the Cold War, promoted the concept that liberal states were peacefully inclined yet advanced a neoliberal marketisation methodology that sustained levels of structural violence to exacerbate conflict and maximise profitability (Newman et al. 2009, p.12). While the potential for a just transition can lead to a net benefit for society as a whole, any transition will inevitably produce winners and losers in the process. Hence, the shift from one energy system to another is not as simple as switching from one fuel or source to another. The losers, particularly affected workers and communities, will have to be accommodated if the transition is to be considered just. For example, the dominant carbon-based energy system must be considered as forming a deep-seated ‘petroculture’ (Wilson et al. 2017). Awareness of culture formation is to be cognisant that any energy-climate transition is a political and political economy transition, and that as well as producing winners and losers, given the fundamental importance of the energy system to any social order, there will always be a ‘dirty politics’ of any ‘clean energy transition’ (Healy and Barry 2017, p. 453). As understood here, a just transition is the transition to a low-carbon economy and society explicitly orientated to ensure sustainability and climate action goals as well as the achievement of public health, worthwhile work, social inclusion and poverty eradication objectives. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the just transition concept within the trade union movement in the 1970s to the most recent international instantiation in the Silesia Declaration and the inclusion of just transition in the preamble of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (UNFCCC 2015). In the following section, we continue this trade union (and broader labour movement) focus on policy implementation, the 416

Just transition  417 state and (constrained) trade union agency. The fourth section offers a constestatory account of the just transition which problematises the domesticating and consensus generating and compromising logic of social dialogue and the green growth frame which is at the heart of most official just transition strategies. Following this, we develop this constestatory analysis further by directly critiquing social dialogue within official (state, business and trade union) understandings of just transition and suggest that what is needed is a more agonistic conflict transformation framework. We seek to move just transition processes beyond the consociational model of elite, top-down decision-making and agreement, and suggest that conflict transformative perspectives require social mobilisations and contestation outside any formal and state-centred just transition process. The final section examines some strategies for these extra-official forms of agonistic and localised opposition ranging from protests to boycotts and tax/rate strikes. The chapter suggests that the development of current structures to manage and implement a just energy transition are, while welcome, also woefully inadequate both to the planetary emergency we face and to the positive societal transformative opportunities presented by responding to that planetary crisis. What is urgently required is a far more confrontational narrative and the construction of self-emancipated spaces for dissent to challenge the uneven distribution of power within the negotiating arenas for just transition.

ORIGINS AND GENEALOGY OF JUST TRANSITION: TOWARDS THE SILESIA DECLARATION AND BEYOND The origins of just transition are in trade union campaigns to protect workers and communities during the environmental and social damage of the Industrial Revolution, securing health and safety at work, freedom from disease (such as miner’s black lung) and better living and environmental conditions for workers and their families. The phrase ‘just transition’ itself was coined in the US trade union movement by Tony Mazzocchi, leader of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers union (OCAW), who worked to bring trade unionists into the ‘ban-the-bomb’ peace movement, together with a campaign to protect atomic workers in the transition to nuclear disarmament (Roessler 2016, p. 6). Mazzocchi developed the idea to reconcile ecological and social concerns about jobs that were either unsafe or unsustainable and therefore needed to be retired or eliminated, but in a just and democratic manner (Stevis et al. 2020, p. 10). In the ensuing decades, the transformative possibilities of just transition were picked up and augmented by other unions, most notably the Spanish Comisiones Obreras that formed SustianLabour. During the course of SustianLabour’s existence it ‘played a critical role in the diffusion of labour environmentalism at the global level and around the world’ (Stevis and Felli 2020, p. 2). Nevertheless, it was the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 and the first Conference of the Parties (COP) in 1995 which created the institutional, policy and political space that facilitated the development of an international just transition policy. Having defined and developed the concept of just transition as a comprehensive opportunity to address interrelated social, economic and environmental issues (Galgóczi 2020), the international trade union movement set about strategically engaging with the ‘social partners’ in global business and through supranational government structures since the 1990s to establish a ‘common narrative’ (Rosemberg 2020, p. 36). From this,

418  Handbook of critical environmental politics a set of principles that both governments and business would adhere to emerged, regarding industrial development and transition planning. Over the past decade the role of global unions and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) then sought to secure conditions for a transition that was fair to workers and sufficiently ambitious to realise the decent and well paid job creation potential of a low-carbon future (Sweeney and Treat 2018). This original intention was reflected by the ITUC at its second congress in 2010 in its resolution to combat climate change, which stated: Congress is committed to promoting an integrated approach to sustainable development through a just transition where social progress, environmental protection and economic needs are brought into a framework of democratic governance, where labour and other human needs are respected and gender equality achieved. (ITUC 2010, p. 1)

The wider societal aspiration and ambition of this statement is evident, utilising a just transition as a catalyst to tackle other long-standing injustices within a framework of democratic control, beyond financialised neoliberal markets and top-down policy reforms. The trade unions’ journey with this just transition project is decades old: the slogan of ITUC ‘No Jobs on a Dead Planet’ has become synonymous with the global movement for climate justice, and underpins union’s attempts to reconcile the need to protect the interests of vulnerable workers, a stable climate and a habitable planet. Set against the backdrop of complex international negotiations, an ideological rapprochement between jobs and the environment was hard fought for by the ITUC. As regards the common acceptance of a just transition, Anabella Rosemberg, former Environment Policy Officer for the ITUC, rightfully questions ‘Would it have been possible to imagine such a trade union slogan, anchored on social justice, but also on environmental protection, only a few decades ago?’ (Rosemberg 2013, p. 19). Probably not, and despite its limitations at the negotiating table, without the efforts of the international trade union movement using the science, the notion of a globally recognised framework for a just energy transition might never have got started. The inclusion of ‘just transition’ in the Paris Agreement, the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s adoption of a just transition agenda in 2013 and publication of its guidelines (ILO 2015) have all contributed to enshrining the concept in international and national policy domains. As the preamble of the Paris Climate Agreement states, the imperative is ‘of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities’ (UNFCCC 2015, p. 2). However, the most significant development to date in the Just Transition international policy is the ‘Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration’ (2018) agreed at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. This declaration adopted by 37 countries and the European Union (EU) builds upon the explicit acknowledgement of a just transition in the Paris Agreement. The Silesia Declaration not only outlined provisos to protect vulnerable workers but also announced: the intrinsic relationship that climate change actions, responses and impacts have with equitable access to sustainable development and eradication of poverty; Recognizing [sic] the specific needs and special circumstances of developing countries, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. (Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, COP 24 2018, p. 1)

Just transition  419 Here we see a clear diversification of the just transition concept and the influence of the ITUC in its efforts to remediate, ‘the ethical obscenity of the most vulnerable in world suffering most from actually existing unsustainability’ (Barry 2013, p. 228). This recognition of the interaction among climate change, inequity, poverty and the needs of developing countries outlined in the declaration is undeniably significant, and an unambiguous recognition that a just transition is not simply about climate or energy. The Silesia Declaration also highlights the challenges faced by ‘sectors, cities and regions in transition’, emphasising the ‘importance of a participatory and representative process of social dialogue… when developing nationally determined contributions’ Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, COP 24 2018, p. 2). The inclusion of sectoral and place-based references and an implementation imperative premised upon participatory social dialogue speaks directly to the need for a different and more emancipatory type of industrial planning for just energy transitions.

PROBLEM-FRAMING AND KEY CONCEPTS: POLICY IMPLEMENTATION, THE NATION STATE AND TRADE UNION AGENCY The potential of current just transition planning was unpacked further in a report entitled ‘Implementing just transition after COP 24’. The report outlined a ‘multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder’ approach that required ‘collaboration between the state, local communities and trade unions’ with the ‘centre of these discussions … positioned at the national level’ (Jenkins 2019, p. 9). In addition, the international fora are designated as arenas for the ‘dissemination of information, exchange of experience, drawing of comparisons’ (Jenkins 2019, p. 9). This is an important distinction since it provides clarity on the types of information and initiative expected from each layer of social dialogue. Furthermore, in the report, we glimpse the intention of the international labour movement to create a supplementary conceptual space which also gently challenges the economic status quo and current modes of production, stating: Stakeholders should define the scope and nature of change during the process of coalition-building and policy design and pressingly, policy coordination and integration, considering whether it is transitional or transformative. Transitional change continues with the current economic model, whereas transformative change is more radical, moving towards a broader conception of communities and more collaborative energy production and ownership. (Jenkins 2019, p. 11)

While the report is meant as a vigilant policy briefing, immediately after the Silesia Declaration at COP24, it does highlight the evolving scope of ambition and the practical limitations of international trade union movement negotiating positions. There remains a ‘distinct gap between international decisions and domestic positions’ (ITUC 2017, p. 8). Individual nation states are not moving fast enough. In all of this it important to note that the units for innovation and participation to promote a just transition are the signatory nation states (see Chapter 29 in this volume). The recognition of this reality has critical implications for the types of social solidarity and coalition-building required to deliver sufficient levels of industrial planning, premised upon the understanding that the current and future trajectory of a just transition is nothing without the ‘emancipation of workers’ (Stevis et al. 2020, p. 21). Therefore, the emancipation of workers requires

420  Handbook of critical environmental politics a deeper appreciation of the inequities of climate breakdown and how these are intertwined with pre-exiting and long-standing economic, democratic, gender and class injustices within workplace relations (Shantz 2002). So, this conception of a just transition is resolutely not the decarbonisation of capitalism with trade union input. Instead, it is a much more politically radical and opposition strategy for a transformation beyond capitalism, based on the transition beyond carbon energy. Thus, the just transition debate potentially puts domestic corporate green capital on the spot, pinning the hypermobility of finance and forcing business to ‘clarify its story’ (Moussu 2020, p. 71). In this regard, there is also no reason why national and regionally delineated trade-union led campaigns cannot become more challenging and ‘primarily concerned with tackling and reducing unsustainability, inequality and harm, full stop, rather than feeling forced (as much of the green movement has) to also develop a costed, evidence based, policy ready alternative sustainability model’ (Barry 2013, p. 229). This logic provides a self-determining prerogative for the trade union movement and allows it to consider radical proposals with depth and ambition regarding, ‘a fresh narrative, one that is deeply ecological and capable of connecting workers’ needs to a vision for a truly sustainable society’ (Sweeney 2012, p. 13). It also repositions the contribution of trade unions as part of a wider socio-political and ecological dialogue together with other groups and allies. The call for additional alliance-building between trade unionism and other progressive social movements as a prerequisite to create the necessary socio-economic conditions for a deeper just transition is a common theme among many scholars and activists of labour environmentalism and left-green or eco-socialist political economy. This popular position also implies that it is not wise to assume that an ecologically sustainable world can simply be engineered through the normal policy reform process. Extra-parliamentary popular movements and mobilisations (such as Extinction Rebellion, general strikes and Youth Strike for Climate) will be needed beyond the confines of any formal social dialogue, adding deliberate conflict exacerbation as a necessary element of any conflict transformative energy and climate transition process (see Chapter 13 in this volume).

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES AND STANDPOINTS: WINNERS, LOSERS AND LIMITS OF SOCIAL DIALOGUE IN THE ECO-MODERNIST FRAME A key feature that defines a genuine approach to a just transition is the honest recognition that responding to climate breakdown and creating a low-carbon green economy means there will be winners and losers. The ‘win–win’ logic dominant in mainstream discourses around energy and climate (especially within techno-optimist variants) appear neither valid nor honest. The shift from a carbon-based economy does mean that some industries, such as the fossil fuel sector, will lose out and will have to be retired, quickly. Hence, it is important to ensure, as far as possible, that no one is left behind in the energy transition or that the costs and burdens of the transition fall disproportionately on one section of the community or the economy (Barry 2019). We can envisage the difficult, but we would suggest necessary, strategy of balancing the deliberate delegitimisation of fossil fuel extraction and use, while simultaneously valorising and not demonising fossil fuel workers and communities (Healy and Barry 2017); hating the sin but loving the sinner as it were. On the one hand, there is a need to undermine the social

Just transition  421 legitimacy (or social licence to operate) of the carbon energy system, including the economic and cultural practices and values associated with it. On the other, as part of the necessity for developing working-class environmental consciousness, the alienated fossil fuel workers and communities cannot be portrayed as climate criminals or positioned as disempowered recipients of exploitative green capitalist enterprise. The views of former Irish President and former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Mary Robinson, are important (and eloquently align with a worker-focused view of the just transition) when she stresses that: as we make the transition to clean energy, we must remember the millions of fossil fuel workers around the world who spend their lives extracting the fuel that has fed our economies. They too are victims of climate change and deserve to be treated with dignity. Their story is part of the struggle to climate justice. Others working in energy intensive industries – steel, iron, aluminium, power generation, and road transportation – will also be affected by carbon reduction and elimination. (Robinson, M. 2018, pp. 113–14)

The most important conclusion the trade union movement can draw from the stark reality we face is this: the transition to a low-carbon, sustainable future cannot be left to the investor class, chief executive officers (CEOs) of multinational companies, or governments that refuse to break with the current capitalist, carbon and endless growth economic paradigm. Therefore, can social dialogue as a diplomatic mechanism really deliver or is something additional required to move the ground? The answer to this question depends upon your interpretation of the just transition. Hampton (2015) notes that there is plasticity in the concept of just transition that allows for a more radical interpretation. On this issue, ecosocialist/feminist Jacklyn Cock also outlines this alternative position which ‘views the climate crisis as a catalysing force for massive transformative change with totally different forms of producing and consuming, perhaps even moving towards socialism, but a new kind of socialism which is democratic, ethical and ecological’ (Cock 2018, p. 222). In this regard, largely, the international trade union movement paradoxically embraces the discourse of eco-modernism and a green growth paradigm which continues to put economic activity on a collision course with planetary limits (Barry 2013; Cock 2018; Sweeney and Treat 2018). Critical voices, such as Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), take issue with the ITUC and the ILO for not challenging the economic status quo more robustly. Sweeney and Treat of the TUED are unambiguous in their analysis: Those in charge of the transition to a resilient low-carbon future have failed. What we have witnessed is more than two decades of talk with nothing like the sort of action necessary to back it up. This is not a problem of ‘political will’; it is a problem of the capitalist political economy and the imperatives of perpetual expansion on which it is based. (Sweeney and Treat 2018, p. 18, emphasis added)

It is perhaps unfair to dismiss the protracted and serious efforts of the ITUC as a failure but a just transition that genuinely protects workers, communities and the planet necessitates a deeper reflection on what needs to be done. Just transition policy-making at an international level has been fully appropriated by dominant discourses, eco-modernisation and neo-classical economics, as evidenced in the provisos of the Silesia Declaration which calls for a ‘paradigm shift’ in energy use and consumption but also, in the same sentence, seeks ‘high growth’ (Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, COP 24 2018, p. 1). At the heart of this green growth perspective lies a fundamental contradiction, first, if the accumulation imperative of capitalism is the root cause of climate breakdown, then it seems strange to rely on the

422  Handbook of critical environmental politics capitalist mode of production for solutions and an illusionary response to the ecological crisis (Fremaux 2019, p. 168). Sweeney and Treat (2018) suggest that a just transition is not inevitable, indeed it is not even likely without a radical shift in policy, away from a green capitalist paradigm towards public and social ownership models with more democratic control of key economic sectors such as energy (see Chapter 17 in this volume). Therefore, the clamour to enforce one definition of a just transition over another could create a ‘false binary decision, a distinction which fails to distinguish between the long-term and short-term interests of labour’ (Cock 2018, p. 222). Therefore, perhaps, the long-term interests of labour can be met with a more radical approach that pursues a deep restructuring of the global economy but where the short-term needs of vulnerable workers in extractive industries can be addressed as a matter of urgency. However, the short-term and long-term interests of labour, society and nature will not be best expressed or even heard within a formal process of social dialogue which is underpinned and dominated by an economic paradigm that is also the root cause of climate breakdown (Sweeney and Treat 2018). While the mechanism of social dialogue is designated to sort out short-term and long-term issues for a just energy transformation, it is simply not equipped to do so because it ‘rejects any serious challenge to current arrangements of power, ownership and profit, opting instead to draw comfort from an uncritical endorsement of “win–win” solutions and “green growth” for all’ (Sweeney and Treat 2018, p. 3). Arguably then, the internationally agreed frameworks for a ‘just transition’ are nothing more than, ‘spectacular reassurance strategies’ (Gunderson 2020, p. 260) that are not designed to challenge the status quo; but tactical ploys that mitigate environmental concern with the public while simultaneously maintaining or accelerating the social-structural causes of environmental harm, weaponising financial capital with new green markets to exploit (see Blühdorn, this volume). Similarly, with a mixture of seriousness and humour Stevenson determines this type of illusionary discourse as, ‘the concept of bullshit’ which ‘captures the mistruths and inconsistences we observe in global climate governance’ but also ‘draws our attention to the insidious effects of deceit and helps us grasp the type of reform needed’ (Stevenson 2021, p. 87). The problem with the carefully constructed spaces for social dialogue is the distribution of power and the premise of consensus among unequals (Ruser and Machin 2017). There are currently no official vents for dissent, conflict and confrontation to counter the ‘bullshit’ and we are running out of time.

OPEN QUESTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL: BEYOND SOCIAL DIALOGUE TOWARDS AN AGONISTIC CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION FRAMEWORK A conflict transformation framework develops a ‘prescriptive direction’ to reorient people from destructive and unstable relationships towards cooperative ones. It does this by first analysing the ‘root causes’ of conflict then engaging ‘top leadership’, ‘middle-range leadership’ and ‘grassroots leadership’ to help them move collectively from ‘issues to systems’ through grassroots training, problem-solving workshops and high-level negotiations that produce sustainable solutions beneficial to all (Lederach 1998, p. 39). The opportunity for social dialogue as expressed in an international just transition policy, such as the Silesia Declaration, upholds the fallacy of win–win–win (accumulative growth, workers’ rights and ecological sustainability). Just transition needs to be appropriated and

Just transition  423 reconfigured into an explicitly agonistic framework that allows conflict to be brought out into the open, debated, possibly democratically resolved, and provisional agreement and action created. It is a strong position among scholars and activists that a deeper just transition will only be possible if it is driven by a broad, democratic and progressive counter-movement outside official decision-making systems. This could create conditions on the ground for a more ambitious programme of radical reform that sits in opposition to the growth imperative of greening capitalist business-as-usual (Barry 2012b, 2013, 2019; Shantz 2002, 2012; Sweeney 2012; Cock and Lambert 2013; Felli 2014; Hampton 2015; Cock 2018; Stevis et al. 2018; Sweeney and Treat 2018; Barca 2019; Bell 2020; Goods 2020). There are now several counter-theories that challenge the green growth imperative. The matter of conjoining steady state/degrowth/post-growth theories and just transition, in whatever configuration, is complicated by the current position of institutional trade unionism that is tied to a growth paradigm within the eco-modernist turn. In this regard, Barca (2019) outlines an inescapable truth that just transition will lead to massive layoffs of workers within the extractive fossil economy and industrial agriculture, therefore any ecologically sustainable transition policy must include concrete recommendations for socially and economically sustaining livelihoods and communities in the transition process. Furthermore, sustainability transition politics, such as degrowth, ‘will remain politically weak unless it manages to enter into dialogue with a broadly defined global working class – including both wage labour and the myriad forms of work that support it – and its organizations’ (Barca 2019, p. 214). Both degrowth and just transition must be seen as converging aspects of the same struggle (see Chapter 7 in this volume). Barry (2012b, p. 141) concludes that ‘post-growth critique must necessarily lead to a post-capitalist alternative and related political and ideological struggle’. Thus, the critical intersection of just transition and degrowth/post-growth economic planning directs us towards a deepening culture of decommodification, work not growth and the development of functional abundance within planetary limits. In this manner, a radical just transition cast within a degrowth/post-growth model is explicitly oppositional to neoliberal, financialised capitalism, exacerbates tension and initiates conflict, even as it is also concerned with democratically resolving those conflicts. This provocative, agential opposition of an unjust transition links to what Martínez-Alier (2002) terms the ‘environmentalism of the poor’; those movements, mostly in the Global South, that resist extractivist, exploitative fossil capitalism (see Chapter 33 in this volume). In so doing, this opposition, whether against extractivism or corporate or state ‘unjust transitions’, can contribute to a larger political purpose. This explicit opposition and the deliberate creation of political and ideological tensions, can open up the space for debate on how communities and societies can develop coping mechanisms, if not solutions, to localised instances of ‘actually existing unsustainability’ (Barry 2012a). Part of this oppositional agonistic politics of a just transition (which will, and should, involve non-violent direct action, in our view) is about the inclusion of non-energy and non-sustainability issues and problems, such as poverty reduction, tackling socio-economic inequality and wealth disparities, as suggested above. As a veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process, former First Minister Peter Robinson has noted of his experience of peace negotiations, ‘when a problem cannot be solved, it needs to be enlarged. [We] need to broaden the agenda and open up more scope for trade-offs and hopefully the inclusion of other issues upon which common ground might be found’ (Robinson, P. 2018). Therefore, to expand the common ground for the common good neces-

424  Handbook of critical environmental politics sitates the inclusion of social and environmental inequalities, constituted by the relations of domination and exploitation that maintain capitalism. Theoretically, the conflation of social and environmental inequities to the debate for a just energy transition can be viewed as green republican approaches, in which contestation is seen as important (if not more important) as consensus (Barry 2019; Barry and Ellis 2010), based on an account of democracy as non-violent disagreement (Barry and Keller 2014). As well as foregrounding the common good, a green republican perspective on the just transition would highlight the importance of contestation over consensus for example, thus disrupting the compromise for consensus logic of social dialogue in orthodox and official processes of just transition. Also, in valuing active citizenship (both instrumentally and intrinsically), a green republican approach to just transition necessarily requires a focus on grassroots mobilisation. This is in opposition (or an agonistic complement) to the elite, technocratic, top-down and often consociational model observed in consensus-based and state-centric just transition strategies. Sociologically and strategically, this could manifest itself as a coalition of social movement mobilisations outside any formal just transition mechanism. Social movements of this scale and range would also imply significant contestation with the eco-modernist turn, challenging the existing arrangements of ownership and power within just transition policy and planning spaces, regionally, nationally and internationally. The climate/ conflict narrative for just transition, in respect of problem and solution, is informed by an understanding that the exploitation of workers’ relations and nature are inextricably linked to the capitalist mode of production. As Silverman (2004, p. 133) explains, ‘exploitation is the unifying term, which makes the common enemy common; both kinds of exploitation result from one process. … This interconnection allows a unified approach to workers’ problems and the environment’s needs. It encourages a common solution and offers a profound basis for alliance with environmentalists around the world’. Untangling the influence of capitalism as the dominant economic means of production in the push for a just transition will probably be a very complex, protracted and conflict-generating process (see Chapter 4 in this volume). A meaningful just transition will require more than social dialogue, with a deep conflict transformation process that could create sustainable structural and cultural changes, allowing new institutions and practices to emerge that address the outstanding issues of moving from a carbon to post carbon society. However, this will inevitably create tension, disagreement, suspicion and resistance, especially from those who will be, or see themselves, as losers from this energy transition. Therefore, the dynamism of a radical conflict transformation process, sustainability itself, can become more about developing political coping mechanisms that enable demonstrable change to emerge that is beneficial to affected workers and communities. This stands in stark contrast to the unrealistic and utopian technological ‘solutions’ currently based on ‘managing the planet’, which can be observed in proposals for ‘earth systems management’, such as geoengineering and large-scale carbon capture and sequestration (Fremaux 2019, p. 70).

CONFLICT, CREATIVITY AND DEMOCRATISED AND LOCALISED AGONISTIC CONTESTATION AND CO-CREATION A challenge in transforming conflict within any just transition is how, inter alia, activists, business, environmentalists and policy-makers can be moved from a rigid rationalist approach

Just transition  425 towards a more ‘combined linear and process-driven’ methodology that addresses unforeseen changes or conflicts as the transition evolves that is truly democratic, emancipatory and open to amendment rather than ignored. This would mean that it can be modified as the process develops insights on how to sustain both attitudinal and structural transformations (Rupesinghe 1995, p. 76). This processual approach suggests that for a just transition conflict transformation process to succeed, it needs to move beyond macro state or corporate needs, to find mutually compatible goals at the local level, particularly where local actors can have a voice in the design and management of multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder collaborations. Hence, the centrality of localised, bespoke, inclusive, participatory and institutionalised practices aimed at radical and transformative just transition processes. In addition, at the same time there need to be agonistic, oppositional and contestatory social mobilisation processes outside those institutionalised democratised dialogue and decision-making processes (see Chapter 24 in this volume). Lessons from liberal approaches to peace-making demonstrate that for conflict transformation to be successful all participants need to have the ‘moral imagination’ to ‘sustain the change processes engendered by an accord’ (Lederach 1998, p. 47). This is why, ideally, a shared and agreed transition vision is important in energy and climate politics. A shared vision can only emerge from open dialogue, contestation and deliberation, not technocratically from the top-down or from the centre of political power to the conflicted periphery. The latter, especially in relation to fossil fuel extraction (notably coal, oil and fracked gas) is often ecologically and public health-wise deemed a ‘sacrifice zone’, even as it is also a place of jobs and orthodox, unevenly distributed, economic development (Scott and Smith 2017). Therefore, any just transition needs to be agonistically transformed with the active participation of those deemed losers from the transition away from fossil fuel extraction. This is so, not least, to enable affected communities to be both compensated and their creative energies enabled to co-create sustainable, workable and localised solutions within participatory processes, that go well beyond elite level social dialogue, as applies to official just transition positions. What transformative just transition processes require are ‘post-liberal’ green political approaches that move beyond the capitalist, growth-oriented ‘neoliberal development model’ (Richmond 2011, p. 35), which is ecologically and socially unsustainable, that is, ecocidal and unjust. These radical, post-liberal approaches ‘confront direct, structural, or governmental power at the international and state levels or local elite power’ (Richmond 2016, p. 33) and create opportunities for new employment opportunities for those deemed collateral damage in a sacrifice zone. Therefore, if a radical, eco-socialist political economy is to advance a just transition worthy of the name, it needs to learn lessons from neoliberal attempts to promote conflict transformation as a technology to transition polities from war to a structurally violent peace. Moreover, just as non- or extra-democratic technological-technocratic approaches to ‘solving’ the planetary crisis are deeply flawed (Barry 2012a), so are neoliberal technologies of conflict transformation (Brennan 2017). Within this context, while the theoretical framework for conflict transformation is valid, any future transitional activities, and policies arising, within a green political economy need to shift the language away from condoning the neoliberalism and structural violence of sacrifice zones towards an emancipatory low-carbon cooperative future which is rooted in the communities it seeks to transform. These actions need to transform individuals and social systems so they can develop strategies and practices that transition polities beyond carbon, and beyond capitalism. In following established conflict transformation theory, this will require a vision,

426  Handbook of critical environmental politics with short- and long-term objectives that are based on achieving basic human needs and rights, and ensuring human well-being for all, for ever (Gough 2017). These objectives will require a new green economy, including a new conceptualisation of ‘economics’ (Barry 2012a, 2012b) that tackles the root causes of our growing planetary emergency through an integrated framework, inclusive of connected and networked local, national and international actors and actions to tackle the root causes of climate violence. One that is co-produced by engaged grassroots leaderships in processing and progressing just transitions at the local level. These transformative processes need to address both the relational dimensions and structural dimensions to help envision and identify those leaders skilled and knowledgeable in transitioning people, place and planet into a low-carbon economy. They also need to build the capacity, and develop the potential, of grassroots leaders to design and advocate for an emancipatory just transition within the administrative and governmental processes that manage polities at the everyday level. Being rooted in the grassroots of an emancipatory green political economy, these localised transitions may then produce the sustainable transformation required to address both the episode and epicentre of the planetary crisis. This may be realised by radically reforming the personal, relational, structural and cultural norms that inform and shape the governance of a polity and its political economy, especially its energy system. This inclusive, participatory decision-making is required to produce and enact the imagination and local creativity required to move populations through a just transition towards the construction of relations that prevent a relapse into climate extinction. These transformative objectives will require, as indicated previously, large-scale social mobilisations by different groups ranging from students, environmentalists, trade unions, workers and faith communities. To realise these outcomes, grassroots leaders and environmental activists need to utilise and promote a form of Mêtis, forms of practical cunning and strategy, tactics and ways of operating that can enable grassroots communities to produce ‘victories of the “weak” over the “strong”’ (de Certeau 1988, p. xix). It can also include acknowledge that sometimes ‘you have to pick a fight to win it’ as Martínez-Alier (2002) suggests in his analysis of the ‘environmentalism of the poor’). For de Certeau, Mêtis is a type of intelligence and thought … It implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation, or rigorous logic. (de Certeau, 1988, p. 3)

In many respects, Mêtis could be viewed as ‘virtues’ of social mobilisation and agonistic contestation. That is, dispositions, character traits and learned and inherited and invented strategies of grassroots opposition, rooted in place and time as opposed to some grand or universal theory of change. Practices of Mêtis can be protests, parades or planning objections to climate extinction practices or unjust energy transitions. In utilising their microphysics of power, through this form of ‘antidiscipline’, where these communities oppose policies and macro planning objectives or utilise their purchasing power to withdraw support from businesses damaging their communities, such leaders and activists may then self-generate a transformative outcome from their own actions. This focus on the consumer and household is important for a number of reasons pertinent to transformative accounts of just transitions. First, it calls attention to the importance of the consumer/consumption dimensions of just energy transitions to balance the

Just transition  427 predominant focus on primary energy resource extraction and energy production and industrial use in most accounts of just transition analysis (this is logical given the trade unions origins of the concept of course). Focusing on the consumer means widening and deepening the just transition focus to ensure that, for example, higher renewable energy prices should not be the outcome, since this would unfairly and disproportionately hurt low-income and vulnerable populations. Linking back both to the oppositional and green republican insights, a just transition, as we understand it, should mean ‘no carbon taxation without participation and agitation’ (Barry 2019). Secondly, this focus on the consumer highlights the strategic and disruptive opportunities of tactics such as consumer boycotts and withholding payment for energy services, including withholding taxes or rates owed to the local or national government, as part of localised, context-specific grassroots activism. This organised and sustained activism could result in the institutions of the state (including the local state), as well as multinational carbon energy and related industrial organisations, changing policies and practices in a more transformative and less ‘business as usual’ direction.

CONCLUSION The transformation of the energy system in addressing climate breakdown could and should fundamentally change society, the economy, culture and politics for the better. However, for these multiple benefits to be achieved, the urgent and rapid transition to low-carbon energy has to be achieved in a manner that is open, democratic, inclusive and, most importantly, just and fair. Moreover, this just transition requires the honest recognition that we should avoid the lure of a ‘win–win’ policy-reform or techno-optimistic logics and/or top-down solutions. Instead, a just transition acknowledges that while there will be multiple benefits, there will also be downsides, losers and adjustment burdens, and therefore conflict and disagreement. Hence the need for conflict transformation processes and insights to be integrated within thinking and planning for a just energy transition. Also, this conception of a just transition requires we move decisively beyond perceiving the energy transition as the greening of business as usual or the decarbonising of capitalism. These approaches may achieve the latter, and this is the reason why such mainstream political and policy approaches to addressing the climate/energy crisis are dominated by such status quo-reinforcing reformism. However, the acceptance and encouragement of non-violent conflict, contestation and agonistic disagreement around any energy transition (the green republican position) creates the space and, we would argue, necessity for moving beyond neoliberal capitalism objectives and business as usual outcomes. The vision of a just transition, outlined previously, can be captured in paraphrasing the Scottish novelist, Alasdair Gray: ‘Let us transition as if we are in the early days of building a better society’, or as the spark that lit the youth strike for climate movement, Greta Thunberg, has put it, Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling. Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses. (Thunberg 2019, p. 67)

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REFERENCES Barca, S. (2019), The labor(s) of degrowth, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30 (2), 207–16. Barry, J. (2012a), The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability – Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barry, J. (2012b), Climate change, ‘the cancer stage of capitalism’ and the return of limits to growth: towards a political economy of sustainability, in M. Pelling, D. Manuel-Navarrete and M. Redclift (eds), Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism – a Chance to Reclaim Self, Society and Nature, London: Routledge, pp. 129–43. Barry, J. (2013), Trade unions and the transition away from ‘actually existing unsustainability’, in N. Räthzel and D. Uzzell (eds), Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment, London: Routledge, pp. 227–41. Barry, J. (2019), Green republicanism and a ‘just transition’ from the tyranny of economic growth, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 25 (5), 725–42. Barry, J. and Ellis, G. (2010), Beyond consensus? Agonism, republicanism and a low carbon future, in P. Devine-Wright (ed.), Renewable Energy and the Public. From NIMBY to Participation, London: Earthscan, pp. 29–42. Barry, J. and Keller, S. (2014), The green promise of democracy, in B. Lechat (ed.), The Green Democratic Reboot, Brussels: Green European Foundation, pp. 8–14. Bell, K. (2020), Working Class Environmentalism: An Agenda for a Just and Fair Transition to Sustainability, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brennan, S. (2017), Ulster’s uncertain menders? The challenge of reintegration and reconciliation for Ulster loyalists in a post-ceasefire society, PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast. Cock, J. (2018), The climate crisis and a ‘just transition’ in South Africa: an eco-feminist-socialist perspective, in V. Satgar (ed.), The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 210–30. Cock, J. and Lambert, R. (2013), The neo-liberal global economy and nature: redefining the trade union role, in N. Räthzel and D. Uzzell (eds), Trade Unions in the Green Economy – Working for the Environment, London: Routledge, pp. 89–100. De Certeau, M. (1988), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Felli, R. (2014), An alternative socio-ecological strategy? International trade unions engagement with climate change, Review of International Political Economy, 21 (2), 372–97. Fremaux, A. (2019), After the Anthropocene – Green Republicanism in a Post Capitalist World, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Galgóczi, B. (2020), Just transition on the ground: challenges and opportunities for social dialogue, European Journal of Industrial Relations, 26 (4), 367–82. Goods, C. (2020), Australian business: embracing, reconceptualising, or ignoring a just transition in Australia, in E. Morena, D. Krause and D. Stevis (eds), Just Transitions – Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low Carbon World, London: Pluto, pp. 76–94. Gough, I. (2017), Heat, Greed and Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Gunderson, R. (2020), Spectacular reassurance strategies: how to reduce environmental concern while accelerating environmental harm, Environmental Politics, 29 (2), 257–77. Hampton, P. (2015), Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World, London: Routledge. Healy, N. and Barry, J. (2017), Politicizing energy justice and energy system transitions: fossil fuel divestment and a ‘just transition’, Energy Policy, 108 (June), 451–9. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2015), Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All, Geneva: ILO, accessed 29 June 2020 at https://​www​.ilo​ .org/​wcmsp5/​groups/​public/​-​-​-ed​_emp/​-​-​-emp​_ent/​documents/​publication/​wcms​_432859​.pdf. International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) (2010), Resolution on combating climate change through sustainable development and just transition, accessed 26 July 2020 at www​.ituc​-csi/​resolution​ -on​-combating​-climate​.html.

Just transition  429 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), (2017), Just transition – where are we now and what’s next – a guide to national policies and international governance, accessed 29 June 2020 at https://​www​ .ituc​-csi​.org/​IMG/​pdf/​ituc​_climate​_justice​_frontline​_briefing​_2017​.pdf. Jenkins, K. (2019), Implementing just transition after COP 24 - policy brief, Climate Strategies, accessed 29 June 2020 at https://​climatestrategies​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​01/​Implementing​ -Just​-Transition​-after​-COP24​_FINAL​.pdf. Lederach, J.P. (1998), Building Peace – Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Martínez-Alier, J. (2002), The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Moussu, N. (2020), Business in just transition: the never-ending story of corporate sustainability, in E. Morena, D. Krause and D. Stevis (eds), Just Transitions – Social Justice in the Shift towards a Low Carbon World, London: Pluto, pp. 56–75. Newman, E., Paris, R. and Richmond, O. (2009), New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding, Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Richmond, O. (2011), A Post-Liberal Peace, London: Routledge. Richmond, O. (2016), Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, M. (2018), Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future, London: Bloomsbury. Robinson, P. (2018), Peter Robinson’s Queen’s University Speech, Belfast Telegraph, accessed 31 July 2020 at https://​www​.belfasttelegraph​.co​.uk/​news/​northern​-ireland/​peter​-robinsons​-queens​-university​ -speech​-full​-text​-36992405​.html. Roessler, C. (2016), Just transition: just what is it? An analysis of language, strategies, and projects, Labor4Sustainability, accessed 10 July 2020 at https://​www​.​labor4sust​ainability​.org/​uncategorized/​ just​-transition​-just​-what​-is​-it/​. Rosemberg, A. (2013), Developing global environmental union policies through the International Trade Union Confederation, in N. Räthzel and D. Uzzell (eds), Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment, London: Routledge, ch. 2. Rosemberg, A. (2020), No jobs on a dead planet: the international trade union movement and just transition, in E. Morena, D. Krause and D. Stevis (eds), Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low Carbon World, London: Pluto, pp. 32–55. Ruser, A. and Machin, A. (2017), Against Political Compromise: Sustaining Democratic Debate, London: Routledge. Rupesinghe, K. (1995), Conflict transformation, in K. Rupesinghe (ed.), Conflict Transformation, London: St Martin’s Press, pp. 65–92. Scott, D. and Smith, A. (2017), ‘Sacrifice zones’ in the green energy economy: toward an environmental justice framework, McGill Law Journal, 62 (3), 863–97. Shantz, J. (2002), Green syndicalism: an alternative red-green vision, Environmental Politics, 11 (4), 21–41. Shantz, J. (2012), Green Syndicalism: An Alternative Red/Green Vision, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Silverman, V. (2004), Sustainable alliances: the origins of international labor environmentalism, International Labor and Working-Class History, 66 (1), 118–35. Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, COP24 (2018), accessed 29 June 2020 at https://​cop24​ .gov​.pl/​fileadmin/​user​_upload/​Solidarity​_and​_Just​_Transition​_Silesia​_Declaration​_2​_​.pdf. Stevenson, H. (2021), Reforming global climate governance in an age of bullshit, Globalizations, 18 (1), 86–102. Stevis, D. and Felli, R. (2020), Planetary just transition? How inclusive and how just? Earth System Governance, 6, 100065, accessed 6 November 2020 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.esg​.2020​.100065. Stevis, D., Morena, E. and Krause, D. (2020), The genealogy and contemporary politics of just transitions, in E. Morena, D. Krause and D. Stevis (eds), Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World, London: Pluto, pp. 1–32. Stevis, D., Uzzell, D. and R̈ athzel, N. (2018), The labour–nature relationship: varieties of labour environmentalism, Globalizations, 15 (4), 439–53.

430  Handbook of critical environmental politics Sweeney, S. (2012), Earth to labor – economic growth is no salvation, New Labor Forum, 21 (1), 1–13. Sweeney, S. and Treat, J. (2018), Trade Unions and Just Transition: The Search for a Transformative Politics, Working Paper No 11, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York. Thunberg, G. (2019), No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, London: Penguin. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (2015), The Paris Agreement, accessed 20 June 2020 at https://​unfccc​.int/​process​-and​-meetings/​the​-paris​-agreement/​the​-paris​ -agreement. Wilson, S., Carlson, A. and Szeman, I. (eds) (2017), Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, Montreal: McGill University Press.

31. Sustainable welfare: urban areas and transformational action Kajsa Emilsson and Max Koch

INTRODUCTION Very few countries have managed to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms, and even where this has been achieved, the rates of emission decline are far too slow to match the Paris climate targets (Haberl et al. 2020; Hickel and Kallis 2020). The corollary is that ‘decoupling needs to be complemented by sufficiency-oriented strategies and strict enforcement of absolute reduction targets’ (Haberl et al. 2020, p. 1). This is echoed by recent warnings of a ‘climate emergency’ (Ripple et al. 2020, representing over 11 000 scientists; see also Chapter 32 in this volume). In unprecedentedly clear-cut terms, the ‘Alliance of World Scientists’1 demands that ‘economic growth must be quickly curtailed’ to ‘maintain long-term sustainability of the biosphere’, and that the goals of economic and other policy-making ‘need to shift from GDP growth … toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality’ (Ripple et al. 2020, p. 11). There is agreement that welfare systems will have to play an important role in corresponding social-ecological transformations in post-growth contexts. One of the main challenges for meeting the Paris climate targets is to design welfare systems that are independent of or at least more resilient to economic growth (Corlet-Walker et al. 2021). In this chapter, we further develop the concept of sustainable welfare by considering the urban area as a site for potential transformational action through the theoretical lens of Tönnies’s (1887 [1957]) Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. After an initial outline of sustainable welfare, the chapter delineates the urban level as an arena of action and struggles relevant to social-ecological transformations, that is, where conflicts and compromises concerning sustainable welfare are enacted and achieved by various actors, such as local governments, civil society groups and citizens with specific economic, welfare and environmental interests. The conclusion sums up the argument and delineates some future research avenues.

SUSTAINABLE WELFARE Given the continuing lack of evidence for absolute decoupling of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, material resource use and carbon emissions, various growth-critical perspectives have been tabled to re-embed Western economies and societies in planetary boundaries and meet the Paris climate targets. ‘Degrowth’ (Weiss and Cattaneo 2017; Chapter 7 in this volume), for example, aims to achieve this through a significant decrease in material and energy throughputs, while also reducing structural inequalities and maintaining critical levels of well-being. However, if (perceived and/or actual) well-being losses2 are to be kept within 431

432  Handbook of critical environmental politics specific limits during the corresponding transformation, a range of social institutions, which historically evolved with and are currently coupled to the provision of economic growth, would need to change at roughly the same speed and various scales (local, national and global) (Büchs and Koch 2019). This opens up a range of questions and problems regarding the complexity of such change. The emerging concept of sustainable welfare (Koch and Mont 2016) contributes towards reducing this complexity by addressing the intersection of the environment and welfare. An improved understanding of this intersection is necessary, because climate policies to meet ambitious targets, such as those of the Paris Agreement, have distributional repercussions (Fitzpatrick 2011). For example, low-income households spend a relatively high proportion of their income on energy-intensive needs, such as heating and/or cooling, and would thus be hardest hit by a general rise in energy prices (Gough 2017). Hence, different societal groups have different responsibilities for fighting climate change, and experience different impacts (see Chapter13 in this volume. Responsibilities and impacts tend to constitute a double injustice (Walker 2012), as the groups mostly affected by climate change are those least responsible for causing it. An increasing number of scholars (Büchs and Koch 2017; Hirvilammi 2020) therefore argues that welfare policies qualitatively different from those that emerged in the post-World War II context would be necessary to counteract the distributional consequences of climate policies and to redistribute not only carbon emissions by individual quota, but also working hours, income and wealth. Policies that targeted the environmental crisis and patterns of social inequality at the same time are referred to as ‘eco-social’ policies. Sustainable welfare brings together environmental sustainability and social welfare concerns, and raises normative questions such as whose welfare should be represented in welfare societies. Brandstedt and Emmelin (2016) argue for an extension of the distributive principles underlying existing welfare systems to include those affected in other countries and in the future. If contemporary welfare provision considered that the satisfaction of current welfare demands should not undermine the ability of future generations to meet their welfare needs, critical thresholds and limitations would immediately need to be recognized. Needs, aspirations and wants would be reviewed, and most likely restrained. Hence, the understanding of climate change as a devastating threat, in particular, and the idea of environmental sustainability, in general, have significant implications for the scope and direction of welfare policies in the Global North, which would need to give greater weight to distribution and justice across nations and generations. Beyond provisioning and distribution principles of material riches within Western societies, sustainable welfare is concerned with the satisfaction of basic needs for all humans (universality) now and in the future (intertemporality). In relation to issues of intergenerational concerns and universality in the context of climate change, Gough (2017, pp. 19–37) suggests ‘policy auditing’, a principle under which critical thresholds for a ‘minimally decent life’ (Gough 2017, pp. 146–70) are constantly (re-)defined in light of the advancement of academic and practical knowledge. While it may be possible to satisfy basic human needs on a global scale and into the future, the degree to which more than basic needs can be provided on a planet with finite resources remains subject to empirical inquiry. Sustainable welfare and needs theories in particular can provide the analytical tools for distinguishing necessities from luxuries, that is, between goods and services that are necessary for basic levels of well-being, and those that are surplus to this requirement. By prioritizing the former, the human need perspective provides a bridge between social, global and intergenerational justice debates. It also allows for the definition of ‘consumption corridors’ (Di Giulio

Sustainable welfare  433 and Fuchs 2014) between minimum standards, allowing every individual to live a good life, and maximum standards (Buch-Hansen and Koch, 2019) ensuring a limit on every individual’s use of natural and social resources in order to guarantee a good life for others (Chapter 42 in this volume). In the remainder of this chapter, we delineate the urban level as an arena of actions and struggles relevant to social-ecological transformations through the theoretical lens of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. We also consider the local level and particularly the urban level in their significance for critical reflections and adjustments of patterns of needs satisfaction within community economies (Gibson-Graham 2006). This potentially contributes to the understanding of local provisioning systems of sustainable welfare in the short term, and an eventual re-embedding of production and consumption patterns in planetary boundaries.

URBAN AREAS AS SITES FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL ACTION Apart from providing a site or location for transformational action, three rationales can be distinguished when focusing on the urban level.3 The first rationale concerns cities, which are contributing more than 70 percent of global energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions, even though they cover less than 2 percent of the earth’s surface (Seto et al. 2014; UN Habitat 2018; see also Chapter 12 in this volume). This in combination with increasing urbanization trends (UN DESA 2019) make the urban dimension central. For instance, it has been argued that urbanization is ‘the most powerful macro-mechanism of change in coupled human-environment systems observed so far’, and thus having enormous effects on the environment (Wolfram 2016, p. 121). Another rationale for directing the attention to cities is that urban residents are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as air pollution and potential rising sea levels, owing to the concentrations of infrastructure, economic activities and communities (Bulkeley 2013). Finally, cities have been highlighted as having transformative potentials for a sustainability transformation in both academic literature and in society at large (Bulkeley 2013; Fenton and Gustafsson 2017; IPCC 2018; UN Habitat 2017; Vojnovic 2014; Wolfram 2016). For instance, it has been argued that ‘[c]ities and urban areas can help bridge the gap between the aggregate national intended contributions agreed in Paris, and the actual requirements of emissions reductions needed to keep temperature changes under 1.5 degrees’ (Castán Broto 2017, p. 1). Hence, beyond local levels, urban areas are seen by many as accelerators of change towards sustainability (for example, Wolfram et al. 2019). The following discussion concerning the urban level as a site for transformational action takes its point of departure from the notions of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft (Tönnies 1887 [1957]). Gesellschaft represents society as regards law, institutions and explicit regulation. Notions such as state, government and statutory are central, where impersonal and indirect social ties, formal values and beliefs, but also rationality and efficiency, are placed at the forefront (Tönnies 1887 [1957]). Urban areas, just as modern societies in general, are typical of Gesellschaft with its focus on commerce and capital wealth (Gottdiener et al. 2019, p. 43). Gesellschaft can thus be seen as a representation of the economic mainstream, status quo and current unsustainable urban practices and structures. Gesellschaft in urban areas is also present through the dominance of local political institutions in urban governance structures (Pierre 2011). In contrast, Gemeinschaft represents community, social interactions, interpersonal communication and, more organic and non-statutory organization (Tönnies 1887 [1957]). Gemeinschaft can thus be understood in relation to local and hands-on community-based

434  Handbook of critical environmental politics activities that are built on civic engagement and citizen participation (see, for instance, van Deth 2014, and the reasoning about civic engagement as a specific mode of political action). The appreciation for social ties in Gemeinschaft puts an emphasis on a sense of togetherness and mutual dependence. Being, living and working together may be conceived of as key factors of Gemeinschaft, where a striving for common and shared ideals are central (Gottdiener et al. 2019, p. 43; Tönnies 1887 [1957]). Next we consider how Gesellschaft can be related to current unsustainable urban practices and structures. Then we will discuss Gemeinschaft in relation to the notion of ‘community economy’ and provide examples of alternative views and initiatives led by civil society organizations, community groups and cooperatives in their potential for spurring change towards sustainable welfare. This should not be interpreted as though we are arguing for a simple replacement of Gesellschaft by Gemeinschaft. Instead, this discussion should be seen as an attempt to understand in what way challenges of the status quo and unsustainable urban practices and structures may emerge and proceed. We stress that the concepts of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft are ideal types and thus not real-type representations of society. Urban Areas through the Lens of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft Just as cities and urban areas generally can be regarded as Gesellschaft (Gottdiener et al. 2019, p. 43), local governing structures towards sustainability can likewise be regarded in this light as these structures tend to be dominated by public actors and private companies that are deeply entangled in the economic mainstream, typically advocating green growth and market solutions (Bulkeley and Betsill 2013). These market ideals not only form the basis for certain logics, rhetoric and discourses that dominate local governing structures, but also contribute to a particular public understanding of ‘the city’, which in turn might cement and even reinforce the status quo. Formulated as a critique towards the neoliberal order and structure of contemporary societies, Davidson (2017) argues, for instance, that the logics of entrepreneurialism – where governing serves as a way to make a city more competitive – dominates how cities have been governed since the late 1970s. Along these lines, perceptions and ideas of how a city may be organized are correspondingly narrow. Sharing Davidson’s observation that cities are simultaneously contributors of and victims to unsustainable practices, Cook and Swyngedouw note that cities around the world have adopted uncritical sustainability rhetorics and discourses, usually within the growth narrative (Chapter 9 in this volume). As a corollary, the two authors state that: ‘in order to safeguard the social and ecological order of things, we need to change the ways in which we, as humans, interact with nature, and the relations between cities and nature’ (Cook and Swyngedouw 2014, p. 168f.). Unfortunately, current trends in urban sustainability indicate another direction. Urban planning since the early 1990s has been influenced by sustainable development ideals with its trifold focus on environmental and social goals of sustainability as well as economic growth (for example, Campbell 2016). In an attempt to achieve urban sustainability, emphasis has been placed on smart eco-city strategies built on advanced technologies (Chapter 12 in this volume). In this vein, various types of urban redevelopment projects have emerged with a focus on energy efficiency technologies, waste management systems, sustainable transportation, and so on (Bibri and Krogstie 2020). According to Cook and Swyngedouw (2014), urban redevelopment projects such as Bo01 in Malmö and Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm4 should be assessed as not challenging the status quo. These scholars argue that the rise of, and the

Sustainable welfare  435 focus on, urban sustainability has created a sustainability industry, with practices of ‘greenwashing’ being prevalent.5 It seems, therefore, that logics of productivism and consumerism are deeply rooted in the organization and governance structures of cities. Some argue that cities themselves have intensified ‘the evils of industrialization and capitalism’ (Gottdiener et al. 2019, p. 44). These perspectives, understood as representations of Gesellschaft, draw a gloomy picture in relation to the feasibility of sustainable welfare. By turning our attention to Gemeinschaft we are looking for ways to explore how currently unsustainable urban practices and structures are, or may be, challenged in practice. We do this with the help of previous growth-critical literature (for example, Latouche 2009) and, specifically, about community economies, where the role of place and space are emphasized (Gibson-Graham 2006). Even though the bulk of the debate on community economies refers more generally to the local level, which includes non-urban as well as urban areas, we believe that it is equally applicable to more specific discussions of urban practices and struggles relevant for transformations towards sustainable welfare. While some refer to community economy in relation to a relocalization of the economy (Latouche 2009), others see it as a resocialization of the economy (Gibson-Graham 2006). The latter is a way of providing alternatives to current unsustainable economic structures and thus creating ‘a politics of economic possibility’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxiv) and a new political discourse where sociality, conviviality and the wisdom of movements are central (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 79), notions that are equally central in Gemeinschaft. Arguing for a recentring of social relations, grounded on ethical considerations, in the economy, Gibson-Graham (2006, p. 88) states: Resocialization (and repoliticizing) the economy involves making explicit the sociality that is always present, and thus constituting the various forms and practices of interdependence as matters for reflection, discussion, negotiation, and action.

During the resocialization of the economy the role of subjects and individual actors, which together comprise Gemeinschaft, becomes important, since subjects have the capacity to ethically reflect, discuss, negotiate and act. In principle, subjects or individual actors are assumed to have the potential of spurring change and transformation. Note, however, that subjects may also oppose, or even refuse, change and transformation. The focus on subjects often goes hand in hand with a place-based conception of space, within which the urban level can be seen as a geographical location or site for transformational action with local as well as global implications. To make a clear distinction between the local and the global is therefore difficult, since communities and/or movements are often not confined to the local level and may also comprise the national and global levels (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 80). The deeply intertwined connections between the local and the global could in fact be seen as a form of ‘place-based globalism’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxi), which in turn can be seen as constituting a politics of place. A politics with the potential of being, for instance, reactive towards current capitalist and neoliberal structures, and which aims at changing status quo and constructing something different, such as community economies. In the face of daunting challenges of global capitalism, but also of climate change, the local level offers a retreat to the small and manageable in constructing this something new, where locally focused activities and organizations with global reach are central. Thus, the role of place in this place-based globalism offers ‘the ground of a global politics of local transformation’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxvii).6 When

436  Handbook of critical environmental politics comparing a potential economic transformation with second-wave feminism, Gibson-Graham (2006, p. xxiv) stated that the: remapping of political space and possibility suggests the ever-present opportunity for local transformation that does not require (though is does not preclude and indeed promotes) transformation at larger scales.

This quotation indicates that locally focused activities and organizations are understood as having the potential of reaching global dimensions without presupposing larger scale transformations at other levels. Hence, the potential of making progress at the global level can be seen as a consequence of the close intertwining between the global and the local. Whereas the current economy can be seen as a-spatial or global, the community economy is more place-attached at the local level but with global reach (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 86f.). Against this backdrop, urban areas can be seen as providing a location or site for substantiating the concept of community economy through alternative views and initiatives led by civil society organizations, community groups and cooperatives. Before turning to what community economy might look like in practice, and thus to alternative views and initiatives led by civil society organizations, community groups and cooperatives, it is worth mentioning the critique brought forward by Kallis and March (2015, p. 365) of what they term a ‘fetishized localization’. By problematizing ‘relocalization’ and bringing in discussions on alternative structures, the two researchers distance themselves from ‘a reactive retrenchment and closure to an idealized “locality” or a new form of neoliberal communitarianism’ (Kallis and March 2015, p. 366). Instead of just demarcating a specific societal level as in the instance of the local level, they instead address various scales as arenas for change at the same time. If relocalization is not problematized, Kallis and March argue, there is a risk of reproducing current capitalist and neoliberal structures at the local level (see also Argüelles et al. 2017, for a similar reasoning). It is thus advisable to practise carefulness vis-à-vis approaches of closed local communities or beliefs that ‘if we just go local’, that is, without questioning current structures in their entirety, ‘everything will turn out fine’. It means that even though a form of community economy could challenge current neoliberal and unsustainable structures, represented through Gesellschaft, we also need to be cautious of and critical towards the alternative and new practices, represented by Gemeinschaft in this example. It is, for instance, a sociological fact that people act within powerful structures not of their choosing, but these often remain misunderstood in their social genesis and specificity, and appear instead as natural features. The growth imperative is a good example of this (Koch 2018), hampering the possibility of a sustainable welfare and social-ecological change. Practice of Community Economy and Alternative Views When it comes to what a place-attached community economy might look like in practice at the urban level, there are initiatives such as urban agriculture networks (Chapter 10 in this volume), transition towns, eco-communities, barter groups cooperatives and urban community gardens (Anguelovski 2014; Argülles et al. 2017; Cattaneo 2014; Johanisova et al. 2014). These initiatives constitute alternative views and practices led by civil society organizations, community groups and cooperatives, which can be contrasted with sustainability initiatives led or co-led by local government agencies, such as waste reduction or energy management

Sustainable welfare  437 projects. Eco-communities, for example, can be described as settlements within which humans live and work in accordance with ecological principles such as sharing. Within cities, eco-communities can be found in isolated buildings, for example, in the form of co-housing (Cattaneo 2014). These initiatives are in various ways central to the degrowth agenda as they focus on ideas such as self-organizing processes, horizontal and deliberative decision-making, commons, redistribution, closer relationships between people and between people and nature, conviviality and sharing (D’Alisa et al. 2014). With a focus on these alternative views and initiatives, components of ‘empowerment and inclusion’ are moved to the foreground, as stated in this citation: inclusion and empowerment are not only mechanisms for incorporating alternative values and pursuing social and environmental justice, but also vital sources of complementary knowledge required to obtain a deeper understanding of the system dynamics at play, and an effective lever for changing established practices, routines, and organizations. (Wolfram et al. 2019, p. 443, emphases in the original)

A study about Swedish ‘local sustainability initiatives’ – that is, locally based initiatives with the aim of transforming the society towards environmental sustainability7 – concludes that the barriers and drivers towards sustainability transformations are to be found within actor-specific features but also within organizational and structural factors. Even though the majority of the initiatives in the study were led by civic or grassroots actors (for example, in the form of an urban agriculture network, a transition and permaculture project), there are also some initiatives led by public and private actors. However, irrespective of the kind of actor leading the initiatives, these are all understood as providing ‘alternative solutions to local as well as regional sustainability challenges’ (Borgström 2019 p. 469). The study starts from a multi-level governance perspective, which assumes that the direction and implementation of decisions are influenced by interactions among numerous actors, but also by formal and informal power structures across levels and sectors. While it is presupposed that purposeful and progressive collaboration – that is, a form of collaboration that is sensitive to diversity and that equally acknowledges the importance of the processes towards desired outcomes and not just the outcomes (Borgström 2019, p. 474f.) – is important in sustainability transformations, the results of the study indicate disconnected and excluding governance structures. These, in combination with the corresponding lack of collaboration between and isolation of actors, hamper any transformative move towards sustainability.8 An example of these excluding institutional structures can be found where more formalized civil society actors are privileged as they are most likely to attract funding from local authorities. Although it is evident that alternative initiatives exist even without involvement from public authorities (Bulkeley and Betsill 2013, p. 144), Borgström (2019) argues that, if diversity and new knowledge about how to meet sustainability challenges are to be encouraged and incorporated into the larger society, support will be needed for different types of alternative initiatives not just the formalized initiatives. Also, it is crucial to safeguard the initiatives’ freedom to explore alternative solutions (Borgström 2019, p. 474f.) that sometimes are in opposition to the currently dominating social and economic structures, and which could be hampered if and when they become too formalized. When considering the formal and sometimes excluding governance structures in combination with the lack of collaboration between and isolation of actors, it appears to be a daunting task to challenge the unsustainable status quo, represented through Gesellschaft, by new alternative and practices

438  Handbook of critical environmental politics following a community economy logic, represented by Gemeinschaft. However, since societal changes have occurred in the past as a result of initiatives following a community economy logic, for example, the women’s movement (Gibson-Graham 2006, pp. xxiii–xxiv), we believe that, with the right type of support, encouragement and acceptance of alternative practices and community-based initiatives, there are good reasons for emphasizing Gemeinschaft as a theme and the urban level as scale within debates on social-ecological transformations.

CONCLUSION In order to better understand the achievement and provision of sustainable welfare, it is advisable to go beyond a one-sided focus on the national level and consider other scales and levels in economy and society. The urban level is particularly important not only because cities and urban areas contribute a large share of global carbon-dioxide emissions, but for providing a location or site of practices and struggles relevant to social-ecological transformations. In this chapter, we have tried to understand practices and struggles around sustainable welfare at urban levels in relation to Tönnies’s Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Whereas Gesellschaft largely refers to the largely unsustainable status quo, we associate Gemeinschaft with potentially alternative practices and community-based initiatives following a ‘community economy’ logic. Even though the latter have the potential of challenging Gesellschaft, disconnected governance structures in combination with powerful social structures, such as the growth imperative and logics of productivism and consumerism, could be seen as tentative explanations as to why Gesellschaft has prevailed for the time being. Nevertheless, we hope to have shown that there are good reasons for emphasizing Gemeinschaft as a theme and the urban level as scale within debates on social-ecological transformations. Politically, we suggest efforts should be made to allow community economy and community-based initiatives to be encouraged and permeate the economy at national and global levels. Civic engagement may indeed facilitate what otherwise appears to be an overwhelming task: to change the logics of competition, status and growth that predominate the governance of today’s cities and societies. In continuing the exploration of community-based initiatives in their potential to spur change towards sustainable welfare, it would be valuable to map various urban initiatives and activities in different contexts around the world, and to study to what extent these challenge predominating social structures. Another key future research theme is the matter of scaling up urban initiatives. How are these alternative visions to be incorporated into society at large? We consider it promising to apply further the notion of place-based globalism (Gibson-Graham 2006), within which the urban level may be seen as a site for action and becoming in relation to the provision of sustainable welfare, in particular, and social-ecological transformations, in general.

NOTES 1. The Alliance of World Scientists (AWS) is an international assembly of scientists, which is independent of both governmental and non-governmental organizations and corporations. The main goal of the AWS is to be a collective international voice of many scientists regarding global climate and environmental trends, and how to turn accumulated knowledge into action. For more information see https://​scientistswarning​.forestry​.oregonstate​.edu/​(accessed 28 February 2021).

Sustainable welfare  439 2. Opening up for possible well-being losses in the context of a degrowth transition, at least in the short term, is an application of the precautionary principle. Examples of quick and parallel changes of nearly all existing societal institutions has in the past led to social exclusion and/or anomy (Durkheim 1893 [1997]), which, in turn, threaten to diminish the social base of the movement. There are very few (if any) examples for such changes of that calibre under democratic circumstances (see Büchs and Koch, 2017, 2019, for detailed arguments). 3. With inspiration from previous urban literature (McIntyre 2010), we use ‘urban’ and ‘city’ synonymously. There is no universal recognized definition of what actually constitutes the ‘urban’ (for example, UN DESA 2019). Often, ‘urban’ and ‘city’ are understood in relation to population size, density and heterogeneity, but also in relation to physical features such as buildings and parks or non-physical features such as human experiences and stories (Pile 1999). 4. Bo01 in Western Harbour and Hammarby-Sjöstad are two city districts in Malmö and Stockholm, Sweden. The two city districts were both realized on former industrial and harbour sites where the ground was polluted. From the planning and the construction start-ups in the 1990s, the expansion processes in the two city districts are still continuing. With sustainable alternatives and technologies for managing water, energy and waste as key components, the city districts are portrayed as modern eco-city districts and as examples of sustainable urban renewals (see, for example, Bibri and Krogstie 2020). 5. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, greenwashing is defined as: ‘The creation or propagation of an unfounded or misleading environmentalist image’ (OED Online 2022). 6. According to Gibson-Graham (2006, p. xxiv), the concept of place has a deeper meaning as it can provide a foundational site for ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. Thus, urban space, public arenas, communities, households, and so on can be seen as constituting ‘a politics of becoming in place’. 7. These initiatives relate to at least one or several of the following areas: energy, transport and mobility, food, water, resource management, the built environment, nature conservation and restoration, and education and knowledge production. Examples of initiatives are mobile carpooling, urban agricultural network, farmers’ market, transition movement, and so forth (Borgström 2019, p. 465ff.). 8. Other features contributing to the disconnected governance structure are, according to Borgström (2019): short-termism and ‘projectification’; dependence on personal engagement, both within the initiatives but also within the public sector; the difficulty with municipalities specific divisions (for an exploration of the latter, see Khan et al. 2020).

REFERENCES Anguelovski, I. (2014), ‘Urban gardening’, in G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge, pp. 192–4. Argüelles, L., I. Anguelovski and E. Dinnie (2017), ‘Power and privilege in alternative civic practices: examining imaginaries of change and embedded rationalities in community economies’, Geoforum, 86 (November), 30–41. Bibri, S.E. and J. Krogstie (2020), ‘Smart eco-city strategies and solutions for sustainability: the cases of royal seaport, Stockholm, and Western Harbor, Malmö, Sweden’, Urban Science, 4 (11), 1–42. Borgström, S. (2019), ‘Balancing diversity and connectivity in multi-level governance settings for urban transformative capacity’, Ambio, 48, 463–77, accessed 21 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​ s13280​-018​-01142​-1. Brandstedt, E. and M. Emmelin (2016), ‘The concept of sustainable welfare’, in M. Koch and O. Mont (eds), Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare, London: Routledge, pp. 15–28. Büchs, M. and M. Koch (2017), Postgrowth and Wellbeing: Challenges to Sustainable Welfare, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Büchs, M. and M. Koch (2019), ‘Challenges to the degrowth transition: the debate about wellbeing’, Futures, 105 (January), 155–65. Buch-Hansen, H. and M. Koch (2019), ‘Degrowth through income and wealth caps?’, Ecological Economics, 160 (C), 264–71. Bulkeley, H. (2013), Cities and Climate Change, London: Routledge.

440  Handbook of critical environmental politics Bulkeley, H. and M.M. Betsill (2013), ‘Revisiting the urban politics of climate change’, Environmental Politics, 22 (1), 136–54. Campbell, S.D. (2016), ‘The planner’s triangle revisited: sustainability and the evolution of a planning ideal that can’t stand still’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 82 (4), 388–97. Castán Broto, V. (2017), ‘Urban governance and the politics of climate change’, World Development, 93 (May), 1–15. Cattaneo, C. (2014), ‘Eco-communities’, in G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge, pp. 165–8. Cook, I.R. and E. Swyngedouw (2014), ‘Cities, nature and sustainability’, in R. Paddison and E. McCann (eds), Cities and Social Change: Encounters with Contemporary Urbanism, London: Sage, pp. 168–85. Corlet Walker, C., A. Druckman and T. Jackson (2021), ‘Welfare systems without economic growth: a review of the challenges and next steps for the field’, Ecological Economics, 186 (August), 107066. D’Alisa, G., F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds) (2014), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge. Davidson, M. (2017), ‘Governance’, in M. Jayne and K. Ward (eds), Urban Theory – New Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 146–57. Di Giulio, A. and D. Fuchs (2014), ‘Sustainable consumption corridors: concepts, objections, and responses’, GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 23 (suppl. 1), 184–92. Durkheim, E. (1893), The Division of Labour in Society, repr. 1997, New York: Free Press. Fenton, P. and S. Gustafsson (2017), ‘Moving from high-level words to local action – governance for urban sustainability in municipalities’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 26–7 (June), 129–33. Fitzpatrick, T. (2011), ‘Challenges for social policy’, in T. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Understanding the Environment and Social Policy, Portland, OR: Policy Process, pp. 61–89. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gough, I. (2017), Heat, Greed and Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Gottdiener, M., R. Hohle and C. King (2019), The New Urban Sociology, 6th edn, New York: Routledge. Haberl, H., D. Wiedenhofer, D. Virág, G. Kalt, B. Plank, P. Brockway, et al. (2020), ‘A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights’, Environmental Research Letters, 15 (6), 065003. Hickel, J. and G. Kallis (2020), ‘Is green growth possible?’, New Political Economy, 25 (4), 469–86. Hirvilammi, T. (2020), ‘The virtuous circle of sustainable welfare as a transformative policy idea’, Sustainability, 12 (1), 391. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018), ‘Global warming of 1.5 oC’, accessed 5 December 2019 at https://​www​.ipcc​.ch/​sr15/​. Johanisova, N., R. Suriñach Padilla and P. Parry (2014), ‘Co-operatives’, in: G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge, pp. 152–5. Kallis, G. and H. March (2015), ‘Imaginaries of hope: the utopianism of degrowth’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (2), 360–8. Khan, J., R. Hildingsson and L. Garting (2020), ‘Sustainable welfare in Swedish cities: challenges of eco-social integration in urban sustainability governance’, Sustainability, 12 (1), 1–17. Koch, M. (2018), ‘The naturalisation of growth: Marx, the regulation approach and Bourdieu’, Environmental Values, 27 (1), 9–27. Koch, M. and O. Mont (eds) (2016), Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare, London: Routledge. Latouche, S. (2009), Farewell to Growth, Cambridge: Polity Press. McIntyre, N.E. (2010), ‘Urban ecology’, in I. Douglas, D. Goode, M. Houck and R. Wang (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology, New York: Routledge, pp. 7–16. OED Online (2022), ‘Greenwashing. n.’, in OED Online, March, Oxford University Press, accessed 20 May 2022 at https://​www​.oed​.com/​viewdictionaryentry/​Entry/​249122. Pierre, J. (2011), The Politics of Urban Governance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sustainable welfare  441 Pile, S. (1999), ‘What is a city?’, in D. Massey, J. Allen and S. Pile (eds), City Worlds, New York: Routledge, pp. 3–52. Ripple, W.J., C. Wolf, T.M. Newsome, P. Barnard and W.R. Moomaw (2020), ‘World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency’, BioScience, 70 (1), 8–12. Seto, K.C., S. Dhakal, A. Bigio, H. Blanco, G.C. Delgado, D. Dewar, et al. (2014), ‘Human settlements, infrastructure and spatial planning’, in O. Edenhofer, R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, et al. (eds), Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 923–1000. Tönnies, F. (1887), Community and Society (Gemeinschaft Und Gesellschaft), repr. 1957, C. Loomis (ed.), East Lansing, MN: Michigan State University. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UN DESA) (2019), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420), New York: United Nations. UN Habitat (2017), New Urban Agenda, accessed 4 December 2019 at http://​habitat3​.org/​wp​-content/​ uploads/​NUA​-English​.pdf. UN Habitat (2018), Urban Themes: Climate Change, accessed 4 December 2019 at https://​unhabitat​.org/​ urban​-themes/​climate​-change/​. Van Deth, J.W. (2014), ‘A conceptual map of political participation’, Acta Politica, 49 (3), 349–67. Vojnovic, I. (2014), ‘Urban sustainability: research, politics, policy and practice’, Cities, 41 (July), suppl., S30–S44, accessed 21 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.cities​.2014​.06​.002. Walker, G. (2012), Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence and Politics, London: Routledge. Weiss, M. and D. Cattaneo (2017), ‘Degrowth – taking stock and reviewing an emerging academic paradigm’, Ecological Economics, 137 (July), 220–30. Wolfram, M. (2016), ‘Conceptualizing urban transformative capacity: a framework for research and policy’, Cities, 51 (January), 121–30. Wolfram, M., S. Borgström and M. Farrelly (2019), ‘Urban transformative capacity: from concept to practice’, Ambio, 48, 437–48, accessed 21 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s13280​-019​-01169​-y.

PART V MOBILIZATIONS

32. Climate change consensus: a depoliticized deadlock Erik Swyngedouw

THE CLIMATE IMPASSE Over the past two decades or so, the environmental question has been mainstreamed and climate change, in particular, has become the hard kernel of the problematic environmental condition the Earth is in. The climate has been elevated to the dignity of global political concern, spurred on by an effective alliance between increasingly successful climate activists, successive United Nations-led Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings that signaled an apparently genuine concern on the part of the international policy community, increasingly alarmist reports from the scientific world through the publication of a series of highly acclaimed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and intense media campaigns around, for example, Al Gore’s ‘An inconvenient truth’ (Gore 2007), Prince Charles’ climate quest, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (Klein 2014), or Greta Thunberg’s impassionate pleas for climate action (see Chapter 41 in this volume). There is now a widespread consensus about the facts of climate change and the urgent need to take immediate and far-reaching action. Nonetheless, despite the scientific concern and alarmist rhetoric, the climate parameters keep eroding further. Between 1990, the year of the first IPCC report, and 2018, global carbon emissions have risen by 65 percent, and continue to rise with about 2 percent annually. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continues its inexorable climb to currently more than 400 parts per million (ppm), the highest level ever recorded in the history of the Earth (Mauna Loa Observatory). These data demonstrate the paradoxical situation we are in. They confirm that access to and presence of knowledge and facts does not guarantee effective intervention. As renowned climate scientist Kevin Anderson emblematically put it: ‘Despite optimistic rhetoric, we’ve delivered three decades of abject failure in terms of reducing total emissions’. ‘This far’, he continues, ‘a litany of technocratic fraud’ has marked climate policy. As part of this litany, he includes, among others, ‘offsetting (… paying a poor person to diet for us), the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) (… state sanctioned offsetting), emissions trading, afforestation (… plant a tree, expand an airport) and Geo-engineering (… a sticking plaster on gangrene)’, to conclude, ‘We have not seriously tried to cut our CO2!’ (Anderson 2019). A global temperature increase of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century seems unavoidable now (New et al. 2011). This suggests that many climate interventions tend to be impotent techno-managerial dispositives (Chapter 22 in this volume) that are nonetheless triumphantly declared as rupturing the evolutionary trend and stabilizing the climate so that things can go on as usual (for a detailed account, see Swyngedouw 2018b). In this chapter, we argue that the denial of the real of political and socio-ecological antagonisms that marks the present (post-)politicizing process is starkly exemplified by the antics of the ecological predicament in general and the impotent climate interventions in particular. We maintain that the knowledge about the climate becomes mobilized in a post-truth discourse 443

444  Handbook of critical environmental politics that obscures what shapes the climate situation and, in doing so, keeps the environmental gaze circulating around a fetishized ‘thing’, assuring that nothing really changes. We shall mobilize a Lacanian psychoanalytically inflected gaze that might elucidate this impasse, in particular from the standpoint of the most passionate climate activists and movements. This is not an argument against climate activism. That should be supported by all means possible. However, it is a claim that much of the climate discourse and action dwells in a post-truth disavowal of the real of the situation, reveling in the surplus enjoyment of hysterical acting-out, melancholic despair, consumerist ethical action, libidinal attachment to the existing socio-ecological order, and a belief that we can continue doing what we are doing provided CO2 and its avatars are managed appropriately. This verdict of the political impotence of environmental action was already commented upon by Alain Badiou more than 10 years ago when he controversially stated with respect to the growing social and political concern with nature that the question of the environment had replaced religion as the fantasy condition that obfuscates the real of the situation: Let’s start by stating that after ‘the rights of man’, the rise of the ‘the rights of Nature’ is a contemporary form of the opium of the people. It is an only slightly camouflaged religion … It is a gigantic operation in the de-politicization of subjects. (Badiou 2008, p. 139)

‘JE SAIS BIEN, MAIS QUAND MÊME … ’: CO2 AS OBJECT-CAUSE OF DESIRE Despite the recognition of the seriousness of the climate problematic, effective change remains elusive. There is a cognitive dissonance between what we know and how we act (Dodds 2011). As the psychoanalytical theorist Octave Mannoni put it in 1964, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même ...’ (I know very well [the facts of climate change and the need for an ecologically sensible and socially just society], but nonetheless [I act as if I do not know]) (Mannoni 1964, p. 1262). For Mannoni (2003), this is the structure of fetishistic disavowal of the real of the situation (the underlying mechanisms that drive the climate system) and takes the form of a displacement of the desire for real change onto something else that becomes the stand-in for the bigger and apparently unachievable desire. This emptied space is filled out by what Lacan names as ‘the object-cause of desire’ or ‘objet a’ (Žižek 1989, Lacan 2007, Fletcher 2013, Pohl and Swyngedouw 2021). The desire for a just and ecologically benign and climate-stable future that underpins much of climate action becomes displaced in and articulated around a mission to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide and associated molecules (for example, methane) become the ‘thing’, the object cause of desire – objet a – around which action and symbolization circulate. Objet a permits retaining the fantasmic desire for a just and ecologically sensible society through a displaced centering of this desire around a particular thing that becomes viewed as pivotal terrain around which the realization of the desire fantasmatically revolves. This displacement (or denial) of the real socio-ecological processes that drive climate change to an object that is deemed to be the cause of the problem, I argue, is at the basis of the present climate impasse. It is this disavowal that enables (1) the climate problem can and is taken seriously, and (2) the solution can be situated within the contours of technological transformation/transition and adaptive or mitigating institutional governance, so that (3) no fundamental changes have to be considered or implemented in the existing socio-ecological

Climate change consensus  445 power relations. Thus the climate debate and policy is in itself depoliticizing and constitutes ‘a new opium of the people’ (Swyngedouw 2010b). It is not class and other power relationship, and the expansive universality of capitalism, through which greenhouse gas emissions become constituted, but this gaseous ‘thing’-like configuration itself around which symbolization and thus, policies, interventions, discourses, institutions, actions and technologies circulate. This fantasy structure articulates around the belief that dealing with the ‘thing’ is pivotal for the construction of a different and socio-ecologically more benign world. It is this spectral imaginary-material thing that sets in motion our desire, a longing for a harmonious, socially just and ecologically sensible world. Dealing with greenhouses gases becomes the stand-in for the thing, the impossible – since too far out of reach, too big to tackle, too unknown, too fearful to really contemplate, too impossibly distant – condition that will guarantee full satisfaction. Carbon dioxide becomes a real fetish. The jouissance (enjoyment) fantasmatically promised by the pursuit of desire becomes re-articulated around what Lacan terms (death) drive, the relentless and restless movement that circulates around the objet a. This becomes the ‘it’ that needs to be addressed and around which enjoyment circulates. The latter is the elusive, often painful, and repetitive drive to do something, to act in ways that we (often sincerely) believe will reduce greenhouse gases and begin to install the desired socio-ecological order (Lacan 2014). The point de capiton, the quilting or anchoring point, through which the signifying chain that weaves a discursive matrix of meaning and content for the climate change problematic proceeds, is indeed CO2. It simultaneously expresses our deepest fears and constitutes the locus around which the desire for change is expressed. The fetishist disavowal of the multiple and complex relations through which environmental changes unfold finds its completion in the double reductionism to this singular socio-chemical component (CO2). First, the complex capitalist socio-ecological (power) relations and mad dance of capital accumulation through which the unbridled release of carbon is orchestrated (see Harvey 2019) are customarily disavowed while, second, the pathological syndrome is reduced to an objectified and fetishized ‘thing’ (CO2 and other greenhouse gases) that is staged as the object-cause of concern that can be managed through socio-technical, managerial and ethical consumer adjustments, thereby further obscuring the political and socio-ecological relations sustaining climate change. This disavowal of the real but un-symbolized matrix of climate change through a fetishistic displacement of the causes of climate change to its symptomatic presence produces forms of neurotic anxiety, an uncanny feeling that permeates when the truth of the situation hits the impotence of the actions taken. This nurtures and directs forms of neurotic acting out – if not worse – and often leads to forms of melancholia, depression or cynical distantiation (Hoggett 2013). There are two forms of neurotic acting out. The hysteric, who is acutely aware of the situation, keeps on interrogating the master (the existing symbolic order or the dominant discourse of environmental modernization) and demands the master to take action, change course and do the ‘right’ thing. The obsessive activist, in contrast, will tirelessly pursue all manner of actions and interventions that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Without the obsessive’s acting, he or she believes, the climate, and thereby the existing socio-ecological order, will collapse. Both neurotic drives keep the existing situation intact, and nurture and re-enforce the stranglehold of the post-political configuration. They fundamentally support the imaginary existence of a master, pointing at those who we should trust to know (Žižek 1997) and have the power to act.

446  Handbook of critical environmental politics This fantasy is sustained by a double denial (Weintrobe 2013). It urges subjects to take action – recycle, reduce carbon footprints, live more soberly, consume socio-ecologically ‘ethical’ products, and so on (see Chapter 34 in this volume). There is this nagging uncanny feeling that we actually do know that these individual responses are not up to the formidable task of transforming climate dynamics: ‘I know very well, but all the same … ’. The complexity and global nature of the problem does indeed signal that small individual actions are futile. Nonetheless, the ethical injunction to undertake action despite knowing it will not be successful is overbearing, yet often compulsive. Second, the environmental arguments indicate both the scientific community and the political elites as, respectively, the bearers of the truth and the governors of the world. In Lacanian terms, the discourse of the university (Listen to the scientists! Put pressure on the governors!), which is the discourse of governing and its scientific support structures (see Lacan 2007), is invoked as the vehicle by which to change the state of the situation. Nonetheless, the discourse of the university is invariably a support structure for the discourse of the master, a discourse that maintains that the environment constitutes a serious challenge to the existing order but insists that a combination of knowledge (science) and governing (socio-technical transition and similar) can keep (trust in) the master in place (Fink 1995). This assures that things can go on as before, that we can maintain our libidinal attachment to the lives we lead as long as the proper techno-institutional climate machinery is put in place. Hence the systematic mobilization of depoliticizing empty signifiers that signal our desire but simultaneously cover up or displace the real of the situation: sustainability, resilience, adaptation, mitigation and transition suture the climate discourses (Swyngedouw 2007). These are signifiers without social or political content, and because of this speak to the many without acknowledging the highly triaged and truncated social realities that articulate with the socio-ecological condition. It is here that the void or gap at the core of the climate discourse become discernable: socially disembodied, consensualizing but vacuous names occupy the signifying chain of the climate discourse, thereby radically disavowing the real of class and other antagonisms through which both inequality and unsustainability are constituted. Nonetheless, this denial of the ‘truth’ of the situation reveals a deep-seated attachment to the status quo, a desperate attempt to assure that things can go on as usual.

SUCCUMBING TO CLIMATE POPULISM: POST-TRUTH DEPOLITICIZATION The particular consensualization of the climate conundrum, the mobilization of an apocalyptic imaginary, the technocratic commodification of greenhouse gas emissions, the focus on techno-managerial interventions, and so on, unfolds in parallel to a deepening populism (Swyngedouw 2010a; Andreucci 2019; McCarthy 2019). Mainstreamed climate discourse and policy that articulates around the pressing need for a sustainable and climate-sensitive future in light of the accelerating climate catastrophe is characterized by a string of populist arguments and post-truth discourses. There are uncanny formal-discursive parallels between right-wing xeno-nationalist populism, on the one hand, and the presumably progressive liberal climate arguments, on the other (see, among others, Canovan 1999; Mudde 2004; Laclau 2005). Both forms are symptoms of a deepening depoliticization of the existing socio-ecological configura-

Climate change consensus  447 tion (see Swyngedouw 2010a, 2022). The contours of the contemporary depoliticizing climate configuration can be summarized as follows: 1. The climate change conundrum is not only portrayed as global, but is constituted as a universal humanitarian threat. We are all potential victims. The environment and the people, humanity as a whole in a material and philosophical manner, are potentially in danger. However, the ‘people’ here are not constituted as heterogeneous political subjects, but as universal victims, suffering from processes beyond their control. There is an external threat that is disruptive and undermines the imaginary cohesion and unity of the people. The argument cuts across the idiosyncrasies of often antagonistic human and non-human natures and their specific acting outs, silences ideological and other constitutive social and class differences, and disavows democratic conflicts about possible different socio-ecological configurations by distilling a common threat to both nature and humanity (Hulme 2008). As Žižek (2017, p. 239) wrote: populism occurs when a series of particular ‘democratic’ demands [in this case, a good environment, a retro-fitted climate, a series of socio-environmentally mitigating actions] is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment produces ‘people’ as the universal political subject, … and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appear as part of a global antagonistic struggle between ‘us’ (people) and ‘them’ [in this instance ‘it’, that is, CO2].

2. The nature–society dichotomy and the apparently causal power of nature to derail civilizations are re-enforced. It is a process that Smith (2008, p. 245) refers to as ‘nature washing’: Nature-washing is a process by which social transformations of nature are well enough acknowledged, but in which that socially changed nature becomes a new super determinant of our social fate. It might well be society’s fault for changing nature, but it is the consequent power of that nature that brings on the apocalypse. The causal power of nature is not compromised but would seem to be augmented by social injections into that nature.

It is ultimately external ‘natural-physical’ processes that require re-calibration, and not the formative socio-ecological or political-ecological relations. 3. While the part-anthropogenic process of the accumulation of greenhouse gases is readily acknowledged, the related ecological problems are externalized. Carbon dioxide becomes the fetishized stand-in for the totality of climate change calamities and, therefore, it suffices to reverse atmospheric CO2 levels to a negotiated idealized time in history, to return to the climatic status quo ex ante. An extraordinary techno-managerial apparatus is under way, ranging from myriad new eco-technologies and Promethean geo-engineering proposals to unruly and complex managerial and institutional configurations, with a view to producing a socio-ecological fix, to make sure nothing really changes fundamentally in the socio-ecological structuring of the world (see, for example, The Royal Society 2009; Pellizzoni 2015; Neyrat 2019). Stabilizing the climate seems to be a precondition for life as we know it to continue. 4. The enemy is conceived as an intruder who has corrupted the system. Carbon dioxide is the classic example of a fetishized and externalized foe that must be controlled. Problems, therefore, are not the consequence of the system, of unevenly distributed power relations, of the networks of control and influence, of rampant injustices or of a fatal flaw inscribed

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7.

8.

in the system, but are blamed on an outsider (Žižek 2006). Consensual discourse ‘displaces social antagonism and constructs the enemy … the enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity [excessive CO2] (even if this entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice’ (Žižek 2006, p. 555). That is why the solution can be found in dealing with the pathological phenomenon, whose pharmakon resides in the system itself. The enemy remains socially empty and is homogenized; the enemy is a mere thing, not socially embodied, named and counted. Although a proper politics would endorse the view that CO2-as-crisis stands as the pathological symptom of the normal, which expresses the excesses inscribed in the normal functioning of the system, the dominant policy architecture around climate change insists that this state of excess is supernumerary to the system, while prophylactic qualities are assigned to the mobilization of the very inner dynamics and logic of the system that produced the problem in the first place. Hence the emphasis on market forces (privatization, commodification and market exchange of, often fictitious, CO2) (Swyngedouw 2018a). The climate consensus is conjured ‘in the name of the people’, but supported by an assumedly neutral scientific technocracy that elevates, often without much political mediation, ‘matters of fact’ into the dignity of ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004), and advocates a direct relationship between people and political participation. It is assumed that this will lead to a good, if not optimal, solution. The architecture of consensual governing takes the form of stakeholder participation or forms of participatory governance that operate beyond the state and nurtures forms of self-management, self-organization and controlled self-disciplining, under the canopy of a non-disputable liberal-capitalist order (Dean 1999; Swyngedouw 2005; Chapter 29 in this volume). These consensual tactics do not identify a privileged subject of change (similar to the proletariat for Marxists, women for feminists or the ‘creative class’ for competitive capitalism), but instead invoke a common condition or predicament, the need for common humanity-wide action, and multi-scalar collaboration and cooperation. There are no internal social tensions or internal generative conflicts. Yet, it is precisely the constitutive split of the people, the recognition of radically differentiated and often opposing social, political or ecological desires that call the political into being. The ecological problem, in its populist guise, does not invite a transformation of the existing socio-ecological order, but instead calls on the elites to undertake action so that nothing really has to change and life can generally continue as before. The climate consensus is inherently reactionary, an ideological (that is, imaginary) support structure for securing the socio-political status quo. It is inherently non-political and non-partisan. A Gramscian passive revolution has taken place over the past few years, whereby the elites have not only acknowledged the climate conundrum and, thereby, answered the call of the people to take the climate seriously, but are moving rapidly to convince the world that capitalism can not only solve the climate riddle, but can also make a refitted and more sustainable climate by unmaking the climate it has co-produced over the past few hundred years. Post-political climate governance (Swyngedouw 2010a) does not solve problems; they are simply displaced. Consider, for example, the current argument over how the nuclear option is again portrayed as a possible and realistic option to secure a sustainable energy future and as an alternative to deal both with CO2 emissions and peak oil (even after the horror of Fukushima). The nuclear fix is now often staged as one of the possible remedies to save

Climate change consensus  449 both climate and capital. It hardly arouses passions for a better and ecologically sound society. 9. Populist demands are generally directed to the elites. A populist project insists on the elites to take action (Stop migration! Save the Climate! Cure COVID19!). Ecological populism is not geared at changing the elite configuration, but calls on elite power to undertake action. It is inherently non-partisan and apparently non-ideological. 10. Most problematically, no proper names are assigned to a post-political consensual politics. Post-political populism is associated with a politics of not giving a definite or proper name to its domain or field of action. Only vague concepts, such as climate change policy, biodiversity policy or a vacuous discourse of sustainability, replace the proper names of politics. These proper names, according to Rancière are what nonetheless constitutes a genuine democracy; that is, a space where the unnamed, uncounted and, consequently, un-symbolized become named and counted (Rancière 1998). Climate change has no positively embodied political name or signifier; it does not call a political subject into being, that is, there is no political subject inaugurating its name. In contrast to other (empty) signifiers that signal a positively embodied content with respect to the future (such as socialism, communism or liberalism), an ecologically and climatologically different future world is only captured in its negativity; a pure negativity without promises of redemption, without a positive injunction that transcends/sublimates negativity and without political subject. Yet, the gaze on tomorrow permits recasting social, political and other currently pressing issues as future conditions that can be retroactively re-scripted as a techno-managerial issue. As demands are expressed (reduce CO2) that remain particular, post-politics forecloses universalization as a positive socio-environmental project. That is, the environmental problem does not posit a positive and named socio-environmental situation, an embodied vision, a desire that awaits realization or a passion to be realized. There seems to be an inexorable lure in this populist climate discourse, which is largely shared by liberals and progressives as well as by conservative eco-modernists. This phantasmagorical attraction requires further attention.

THE IMMUNO-BIOPOLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION The managerial and socio-technical dispositives of current climate change governance nonetheless promise and provide (albeit in socio-ecologically highly uneven manners) for an apparently immunological prophylactic against the threat of an irremediably revengeful nature. These immunological gestures project our survival into the future without considering the need or potential for a transformation of socio-natural relations themselves; it invites and nurtures techno-managerial adaptions to assure the ‘sustainability’ of the existing, albeit that ‘sustainability’ remains very much an empty signifier (Swyngedouw 2007; Chapter 9 in this volume). Climate change policies, which center on socio-technical arrangements and intermediaries to mitigate humans’ eco-physical imprint (from carbon trading to the manufacturing of carbon sinks and alternative energy sources), can at best only provide a palliative to postpone temporarily the endgame of an uninhabitable Earth. Concomitantly, it offers, in its eco-modernizing straitjacket (see Chapter 41 in this volume), the promise of a radical reinter-

450  Handbook of critical environmental politics pretation that nonetheless keeps capitalism on its course. That is, it promises the crafting of, according to Esposito (2008, 2011, 2012), an immunological biopolitics that will seemingly guarantee our survival. Esposito’s main claim insists on how current neoliberal governmentality is sutured by an immunological drive, a mission to hermetically seal-off objects of government (the population) from possibly harmful intruders and recalcitrant or destabilizing outsiders that threaten the bio-happiness, if not sheer survival, of the population, and guarantees that life can continue to be lived (Neyrat 2010). The COVID-19 pandemic and its uneven biopolitical governance is an example. Immunological should be understood for our purposes as the suspension of the obligation of mutual gift giving in a community. The (neo)liberal injunction of individual freedom and choice is the founding gesture of an immunological biopolitics, which is elevated to the key injunction pursued by neoliberal forms of governmentality. Immuno-politics are evidently at work, for example, in hegemonic Western practices around the environment, immigration or international terrorism. A rapidly expanding arsenal of soft and hard technologies is put in place in an ever denser layering of immunological technical, infrastructural and institutional-legal dispositifs – from stricter immigration laws and continuous surveillance to the construction of steel and concrete walls and barriers, as well as strict cordoning off when infectious diseases threaten to spatialize in manners that might penetrate the immuno-engineered bubbles of local elite life. The immunological state undertakes the dirty work so that the governed objects of biopolitical governmentality can continue to live everyday life in cocooned pod-like geo-political and geo-ecological capsules, apparently unencumbered by the dangers and risks that cut through our desire for an Arcadian life. For example, the attempts to geo-engineer the climate through large-scale solar deflection, deep-earth carbon storage, large-scale adaptation, and similar, promise an immunological prophylactic that permits life to go on for some without significant social or political-economic change (Neyrat 2014; 2019). As Garcia (2015, p. 321) wrote: An immunitary power takes control of the risks, dangers and fragilities of individuals to make them live in a peaceful manner while obscuring any form of dissensus.

The pursuit of an immunological biopolitics is one of the few remaining terrains of state power in a world where the privatization-cum-commodification of everything, combined with a hollowing out of territorial state sovereignty precisely because of the processes of globalization (see Chapter 29 in this volume), has nurtured a redirection of state functions primarily to the management of the population and its happiness. Immuno-biopolitics is, therefore, one of the vitally important structuring devices in the process of hegemonizing techno-managerial post-politicization (Ernstson and Swyngedouw 2018). However, while the immuno-biopolitical strategies in respect of migration, terrorism or economic-financial risk are often successfully displaced from the fear of disintegration to a discourse and practice of a crisis to be managed by the political elites, this tactic is increasingly failing in respect of the combined and uneven socio-ecological catastrophe. Is it not the case that immuno-political management techniques, such as adaptive climate policy, sustainable socio-technical arrangements, the commodification of greenhouse gases, ambitious but non-performing climate plans, and so on, produce a gnawing sense of unease and discomfort as socio-ecological parameters erode further, and that the range of measures offer at best only a temporary palliative? The mechanisms that allegedly produce an immunological response

Climate change consensus  451 threaten to undermine even further the socio-ecological conditions. Immuno-biopolitics turns into an auto-immunity that nurtures what Achille Mbembe (2003) describes as a necropolitics. The insisting reality of socio-ecological destruction fatally undermines this immunological fantasy script and demonstrates the unbridgeable gap between the symbolic (the discourse and practice of existing climate policy) and the real (accelerating climate change). The anxious, or at least uncanny, feeling that things are nor really as they should be keeps gnawing and becomes sublimated and objectified in that which we previously named objet a, the horrific ‘thing’ around which both fear and desire circulate. The hopelessly failing attempts to isolate and sequester CO2 demands ever more incisive actions to ward off catastrophe. That is, the immunological dispositive requires renewing and deepening, something increasingly offered by the promise of mega-Promethean geo-engineering projects and proposals, yet again supporting a fantasy that seems to permit postponement of the climate catastrophe to a distant impossibility. This immunological, but decidedly performative, fantasy that it is possible to sustain a deep libidinal attachment to the individual and social life we lead (despite often loudly proclaimed and impassionate claims to the contrary) forces the climate discourse further into a depoliticizing direction, whereby debate is limited to arguments about the appropriate technology, the adequate institutional form of the management arrangements and the amount of greenhouse gassed saved or displaced (Fletcher 2018).

TRANSGRESSING THE FANTASY: THE APOCALYPSE IS DISAPPOINTING The symptomatic base upon which the legitimacy of the environmental discourse, practice and many climate movements (see Chapters 33 and 35 in this volume) is predicated upon two repressed traumas, both of which are displaced onto a phantasmagorical imaginary. Opening up different political-ecological trajectories requires transgressing the fantasy that conceals these traumas. First, there is the insistent construction of a dystopian quasi-catastrophic future. This image is staged as the horizon that needs to be avoided or averted. That is, urgent action is required now in order to deflect the unfolding of this possible future. This view nurtures the idea that it is not yet too late, that the forecasted future can still be deflected. For many people around the world, however, they already live in the socio-ecological apocalypse, demonstrated by the large numbers of climate refugees and mounting socio-ecological problems in the poorest parts of the world (Parenti 2011; Miller 2017). The apocalypse has already occurred for them. The fear of the consequences of climate change in one place is paralleled by already existing socio-ecological disintegration elsewhere. The promise of a catastrophe to come is where middle-class desires and fears circulate (see Chapter 16 in this volume). While the elites nurture an apocalyptic dystopia that can nonetheless be avoided (for them), the majority of the world already lives ‘within the collapse of civilization’ (The Invisible Committee 2009, p. 138). The apocalypse is indeed a combined and uneven, both over time and across space (Calder Williams 2011; Harper 2020). I argue that sustaining and nurturing catastrophic imageries are an integral and vital part of the new cultural politics of neoliberal capitalism for which the management of fear is a central leitmotiv (Badiou 2007) and provides part of the cultural support for a process of populist post-politicization. At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily

452  Handbook of critical environmental politics powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms. That is, the presentation of climate change as a global humanitarian cause produces a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, which does not revolve around choosing one trajectory over another, or identifies clear adversaries in a political process; it is not articulated with specific political programs or socio-ecological projects or transformations (Swyngedouw 2018b). Transgressing this fantasy cuts through this deadlock. To begin with, the revelatory promise of the apocalyptic narrative has to be fully rejected. In the face of the cataclysmic imaginaries mobilized to assure that the apocalypse will not happen (if the right techno-managerial actions are taken), the only reasonable response is, ‘Don’t worry (eco-modernizers, Prince Charles, COP-meetings, many environmental activists, and so on), you are really right, the environmental catastrophe will not only happen, it has already happened, it is already here.’ Many are already living in the post-apocalyptic interstices of life, whereby the fusion of environmental transformation and social conditions, render life bare. That the socio-environmental imbroglio has already passed the point of no return has to be fully asserted. The socio-environmental ruin is already here for many; it is not some distant dystopian promise mobilized to trigger a response now. Water conflicts, struggles for food, environmental refugees, and so on testify to the socio-ecological predicament that choreographs everyday life for the majority of the world’s population. Things are already too late; they have always already been too late. There is no Arcadian place, time or environment to return to, no benign global socio-ecological past or an ideal climate that needs to be maintained or stabilized. It is only within the realization of the combined but uneven apocalyptic reality of the now that a new politics might emerge. Second, the climate discourse is mobilized through invoking the immanent dangers it poses to humanity. Humanity in this context is not just understood as the sum total of humans living on planet Earth but as a human civilization. As Blanchot argued in the early 1960s, this view is predicated upon the fantasy that humanity actually exists, that there is a global human civilization that requires or deserves salvation. Here again, the empty core of humanity is exposed. This is precisely a repressed trauma, namely the knowledge that there is no such thing as humanity (Blanchot 1971). The pervasive inequalities, the rampant uneven power relations, the continuous objective and subjective violence inflicted by some humans onto other humans (consider, for example, the genocide inflicted by the European Union on refugees dying in the Mediterranean or in North African concentration camps) demonstrate the radical antagonisms and conflicts that cut through the human and signal that a communitarian ‘humanity’ has never existed. It may never do unless a sustained political fidelity to its possible making is inaugurated. The disavowal in the climate discourse of the barbarism that also characterizes humanity is a classic form of traumatic repression. According to Blanchot, the fundamental challenge is the choice between an apocalyptic future that speeds ahead precisely because of the absence of humanity or the construction of a humanity now that, in turn, would deflect the course of the future in a different and more benign direction. The issue is, therefore, not to assure the future of a non-existing humanity as we know it, but first and foremost the creation of a humanity. As Zupančič (2018, p. 19) insists: Blanchot isn’t saying that the destruction of the world would be insignificant because there is no real (communal) world yet; he is not, that is, cynically saying, ‘Let it all go to hell, the world such as it is not worth the trouble anyway!’ On the contrary, Blanchot is suggesting that, now that we have at least an abstract idea of the world (humanity) as a whole, it is worth the trouble more than ever.

Climate change consensus  453 A significant post-truth imaginary seeps into the dominant climate discourse, a phantasmagoria of an abstract, but threatened, global humanity. In doing so, the real of class and other antagonisms that cut through the semblance of humanity is considered irrelevant or, at least, subordinate. The fetishistic disavowal or foreclosure of the class and other antagonisms that form the matrix of the social assures that nothing will really change. Traversing the current fantasy of a just climate transition through techno-managerial and (neo)liberal consumerist adjustments requires recognizing the trauma of the non-existence of humanity and that it is this non-existence, that is, the class and other dimensions that cut through humanity, that has already caused the existing climate catastrophe for many (Chapter 13 in this volume). Traversing the fantasy is predicated upon reversing the dominant argument: recognizing that it is already too late – the apocalypse has already taken place – and the only possible thing left to do is to engage in a process of constructing a real humanity, of producing a human world in the world. As The Invisible Committee (2009, p. 138) stated: It’s useless to wait – for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.

The latter necessitates foregrounding a radical politicization which necessitates articulating politicizing signifiers, such as communism, commonism or eco-socialism, and opening a terrain of debate over their content and how to get there. That is, if we really want to take the ecological condition seriously, we have to displace the question of ecology onto the terrain of agonistic politicization, animated by a sustained fidelity to what Badiou terms a passion for the real possibility and necessity of an egalitarian common world. It is through the naming of, and acting in, this political project that a common and enabling climate and environment might be constituted.

REFERENCES Anderson, K. (2019), ‘Nature cannot be fooled’, accessed 1 August 2020 at https://​redd​-monitor​.org/​ 2019/​09/​05/​nature​-cannot​-be​-fooled​-kevin​-anderson​-on​-mitigation​-as​-if​-climate​-mattered/​. Andreucci, D. (2019), Populism, emancipation, and environmental governance: insights from Bolivia, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109 (2), 624–33. Badiou, A. (2007), De Quoi Sarkozy est-il le Nom? Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes. Badiou, A. (2008), Live Badiou – Interview with Alain Badiou, Paris, December 2007, in O. Feltham (ed.), Alain Badiou – Live Theory, London: Continuum, pp. 136–9. Blanchot, M. (1971), L’Apocalypse Deçoit, in M. Blanchot, Amitié, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 118–27. Calder Williams, E. (2011), Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Washington, DC: Zero Books. Canovan, M. (1999), Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy, Political Studies, 47 (1), 2–16. Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage. Dodds, J. (2011), Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos, London: Routledge. Ernstson, H. and E. Swyngedouw (2018), Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: immuno-biopolitics and depoliticising ontologies in the Anthropocene, Theory, Culture, Society, 35 (6), 3–30. Esposito, R. (2008), Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, R. (2011), Immunitas, Cambridge: Polity Press. Esposito, R. (2012), Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, New York: Forsham University Press.

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Climate change consensus  455 Swyngedouw, E. (2005), Governance innovation and the citizen: the Janus face of governance-beyond-the-state, Urban Studies, 42 (11), 1–16. Swyngedouw, E. (2007), Impossible/undesirable sustainability and the post-political condition, in J.R. Krueger and D. Gibbs (eds), The Sustainable Development Paradox, New York: Guilford. Swyngedouw, E. (2010a), Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change, Theory, Culture, Society, 27 (2–3), 213–32. Swyngedouw, E. (2010b), Trouble with nature – ecology as the new opium for the people, in J. Hillier and P. Healey (eds), Conceptual Challenges for Planning Theory, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 299–320. Swyngedouw, E. (2018a), CO2 as neo-liberal fetish – the love of crisis and the depoliticized immuno-biopolitics of climate change governance, in D. Cahill, M. Cooper, M. Konings and D. Primrose (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism, London: Sage, pp. 295–306. Swyngedouw, E. (2018b), Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Democratic Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swyngedouw, E. (2022), ‘The unbearable lightness of climate populism’, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2022.2090636. The Invisible Committee (2009), The Coming Insurrection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The Royal Society (2009), Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty, London: The Royal Society. Weintrobe, S. (2013), The difficult problem of anxiety in thinking about climate change, in S. Weintrobe (ed.), Engaging with Climate Change – Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 33–47. Žižek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (1997), The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2006), Against the populist temptation, Critical Inquiry, 32 (Spring), 551–74. Žižek, S. (2017), Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels, Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press. Zupančič, A. (2018), The apocalypse is (still) disappointing, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 10–11, 16–30.

33. Ecological mobilizations in the Global South Pallav Das

INTRODUCTION All over the world, people’s struggle for environmental justice has gathered impressive and sustainable momentum in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Movements have emerged organically from within specific ideological and experiential locations and have spread to other spheres of resistance over time, even if they have ebbed at the point of origin. Not surprisingly, then, this process has been accompanied by an enormous amount of cross-fertilization of ideas, agendas and activism where environmental justice aspirations have coalesced with larger societal transformation goals and even guided their larger trajectory. In the industrialized North, for instance, it could be said that there’s a societal mobilizational continuum, which surfaced with the anti-globalization movement in the late 1990s, and then advanced through the anti-war, anti-racism and Occupy Wall Street phases over the next decade or so to further its transformative impulse. Yet, it was only when climate justice, anti-fracking, anti-extractivism and carbon energy divestment movements, and so on, became part of the broader struggle for change that a unified sense of direction and purpose intensified this societal mobilization, and resolved its lasting value in the minds of the people. Compared with the developed world, environmental movements (see Chapter 35 in this volume) have progressed on more dispersed paths in the Global South. The economy is not as unified and centralized, the socio-cultural landscape is marked by enormous diversity and the polity allows for severe interventions to disrupt or halt the growth of the movements. That the democratic quotient in the Global South is dispersed over a wide spectrum of efficacy simply complicates the matter further. Consequently, society has been unable to address adequately the myriad forms of inequality and discrimination inherent in the traditional social order, as well as those which have emerged on the economic and environmental fronts as a result of the region’s forced and contrived integration into the globalized economy by its power elite. Predictably, ecological movements have had to mobilize across a spectrum of issues beyond their natural orbit to counter the impact of these troubling attributes of the Global South. This chapter inquires and explores the universe of mobilizations maturing and taking shape all over the Global South in pursuit of environmental justice. Based on four crucial coordinates, it goes on to construct a feasible paradigm which could be helpful in imagining a world devoid of contemporary environmental stresses. These coordinates are charismatic leadership, human rights, development quandary and the conception of the sacred.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: THE FULCRUM OF MOBILIZATION As the discourse on the idea of ‘environmental justice’ acquires increasing complexity and rigor, it is necessary to explore its intellectual genesis as well as the contemporary academic framework within which it is being inquired before we unpack the process and architecture, 456

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South  457 which has emerged to meet that aspiration in the Global South (see also Chapter 13 in this volume). Environmental justice signifies the deep-rooted human yearning to live in a clean, healthy and safe environment. However, the broad sweep of that aspiration has made the task of crafting a tenable definition for the term difficult. Holifield et al. (2018) have grappled with that predicament, proposing that the term, ‘environmental justice’, could be used to reference multiple socio-political contexts. It could describe a specific measurable condition in which people live; or it could signify a standard which a community or a society could aspire to as an alternative to the current condition; or it could also be used as a functional initiative to coordinate and propel advocacy and activism to intervene in environmental problems caused by policies advanced to serve the interests of a dominant elite. It is not surprising that the genesis of the academic engagement with the idea of environmental justice is usually traced to the socio-economic debasement visited upon Black America owing to racial discrimination and its accompanying environmental repercussions. Efforts to theoretically grasp and analyze these race- and class-based oppressions formed an inseparable part of the Civil Rights movement, and they were duly affirmed by the protests against restrictive housing laws and practices, shabby living conditions and other forms of structural violence, in the 1960s. This scholarly undertaking, in return, helped crystallize the societal mobilization for environmental justice in the US. The rise of an astute, yet willful, response to environmental distress by a disempowered section of society has also been the focus of Martínez-Alier et al. (2016) who have coined the aptly resonant term, ‘environmentalism of the poor’, to describe this struggle for justice. They identify the severely altered state of socio-economic metabolism in industrial societies owing to the intensification of capitalist accumulation as the chief cause of environmental dispossession experienced by underprivileged communities all over the world. These could be indigenous people suffering the loss of their traditional lands owing to rampant extractivism, refugees fleeing a war caused by dropping water tables and drought owing to climate change, victims of an industrial toxic spill or the dislocated residents of a coastal city after a hurricane – all of which are inseparably linked to the struggle for environmental justice. Given that environmental justice is a distinctly transformative and proactive proposition, it is consistent and self-evident for its remedial impulse to challenge and often come into conflict with existing socio-economic and political orthodoxies. Le Billon (2015) has examined the power dynamic operative in society to suggest that the resultant stratification makes conflict irrevocable and necessary to ensure egalitarian social relations, and, thereupon, environmental justice. Martínez-Alier et al. (2016) also explain how communities suffering environmental oppression have to mobilize in opposition to the dispossession of sovereignty and self-governing authority knowing that this would bring them into conflict with the state or its corporate allies. Dahbour (2018) has scrutinized the irrational and unsustainable use of resources as a perceivable impetus for societal resistance and conflict. For him, carbon-producing, non-cyclical economic processes as well as chemical intensive agricultural practices that cause soil depletion represent people’s long-term loss of control over their means of production. The efforts to mobilize and reclaim this control are a clear expression of their desire for environmental justice. It has become evident that the contradiction between the promise of development and the constant foreboding of economic deprivation and environmental disasters is a lived reality throughout the Global South. That, however, has stimulated and further charged the continually unfolding process of ecological mobilization in a huge cross-section of environmental stress points there: industrial pollution, mining, deforestation, desertification, soil degradation,

458  Handbook of critical environmental politics toxic emissions, nuclear power, big dams, depletion of aquifers and myriad other crises. Given the inevitability of a direct confrontation with the state and corporate machinery, these attempts at resistance have come at great individual peril for activists and dire socio-economic and political consequences for their communities. Nevertheless, these movements have survived, and continue to gain new ground, which is a reflection of the expansion of their power base as well as the sturdy socio-political space they occupy, allowing for the launch of vigorous contestations from there.

MOBILIZATION AND CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP The origins of ecological mobilization in the Global South have been varied. Sometimes, they started as a response to the environmental havoc caused by a specific development project, and often they were lodged in larger social struggles, peasant protests and, even, labor movements. It was not surprising to find these two streams converging in their response to crucial societal upheavals when needed, often under a charismatic leader. A remarkable mobilization highlighting this type of confluence emerged in the 1970s in Kenya under the banner of the ‘Green Belt Movement’. Soon after its independence from British colonial rule, in 1963, Kenya launched an intensive agricultural and agro-forestry initiative to meet the growing needs of its population. The new model advanced plantations of fast-growing exotic trees and industrial-size farms, and for that purpose huge tracts of natural forests were cleared for farms and plantations. Soon enough, the adverse effects on the local ecology became evident as non-native trees drained the ecosystem of water and degraded the soil. Watersheds started drying up and streams began disappearing. The impact on the local people was immediate and immense as their food supply became less secure, the opposite of what the government had intended with the new development model. Women felt the most adverse effect of the failure of the government’s agricultural policy in Kenya in the 1960s and 1970s. The water sources for consumption as well as irrigation were becoming less reliable, the distances they had to cover to get firewood were increasing continually, their food sources lacked nutrition and the energy resources for domestic use were getting scarce. All this was a result of the rapid environmental changes that had taken place over a very short period of time, sending shock waves through the system that had sustained people over the years. Wangari Maathai, a biologist by training, realized the need for an immediate societal intervention in Kenya and went around meeting and consulting with people most hard hit by the development policy, particularly women. She concluded that planting trees on a large scale could address all the issues affecting people; trees would provide fuel wood, stimulate watershed recovery and replenish the soil, and fruit trees would promote better nutrition. In 1977, Mathaai started an ecological mobilization in the shape of tree plantings with the initial support of seven ethnic tribes. Soon, Kenya’s National Council of Women joined in the effort, and the Green Belt Movement launched a massive tree-planting operation to revive the critical environment of central Kenya. In the process, the movement brought back to life the tradition of community participation in local issues, which had been dormant since the adoption of the modern practices of development. Mathaai expanded the scope of the movement to include water harvesting and rainwater storage, and training in entrepreneurship, HIV/AIDS prevention and reproductive health care, and so on, ushering in a socio-economic resurgence in the Kenyan hinterland.

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South  459 Mathaai’s work and leadership was recognized internationally and she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She also made significant forays into public life in Kenya. Mathaai’s activism contributed to the legalization of opposition parties in Kenya in 1992, and she went on to become the Deputy Minister for the Environment in 2003. Yet, her relationship with the state was always contentious, with the government forever determined to undermine Mathaai’s leadership and efforts to chart a new path for the country’s environment. She was jailed, abused by the power elite, and suffered violence from the police as well as hired thugs. President Daniel Arap Moi called her a mad woman and a threat to Kenya’s security. As an independent thinking woman who had shaken up the patriarchal orthodoxy of a traditional society, Mathaai and her movement bore the brunt of state power for starting an ecological mobilization, which challenged its developmental model. As J.R. McNeill of Georgetown University explains: When strong enough grass-roots environmental movements won some concessions from governments; when not, they solidified anti-environmental attitudes in the corridors of power, inadvertently inviting elites to equate environmentalism with subversion and treason. The Green Belt movement proved strong enough to make an impact on the land and provoke a backlash: it had planted some 20 million trees in Kenya by 1993, but the government spokesmen vilified Mathaai and government thugs roughed her up more than once for her efforts. (McNeil 2000, pp. 351–2)

Given her focus on the larger picture and the critical point on the arc of evolution of environmentalism that the Green Belt Movement had reached, Mathaai had the courage and the wisdom to look beyond her individual suffering to say, ‘It is as clear as day. You cannot protect the environment if you do not have democratic governance and democratic space’ (quoted in Macdonald 2005).

ECOLOGICAL MOBILIZATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS The democratic space where discussions, evaluations and negotiations on the efficacy of the development model could take place has continually shrunk throughout the Global South. Part of the reason for that is an illusory belief among a section of the developing world that economic progress will eventually occur despite the societal hardships and ecological turmoil. However, a more pertinent issue is that of the anxious bond that exists between capital and development, which relies on the growth model for its sustenance. Capitalism depends for its survival on endless growth, for which it needs to extend its reach to the farthest corners for natural resources, to enclose new ‘commons’ for exploitation and extraction. It is in the Global South where those last remaining areas of abundance still exist. However, together with that need for resources, the global capital also requires the commodification of spheres of life and social processes, which have been hitherto untouched by the market and its pernicious logic of profit, which again are concentrated in the developing world. That anxiety to grow and guarantee profits finds democratic engagements to be diversionary and time consuming. An important challenge for ecological mobilization in the Global South has been to protect that democratic space from forever closing down. As Greenough and Lowenhaupt Tsing (2003, p. 5) explain:

460  Handbook of critical environmental politics Too often ‘development’ authorized the theft of marginal people’s lands and resources and forced them to bow to repressive state demands. What changed in the last decade of the twentieth century was that effective resistance became possible as local communities linked themselves to national and international allies. These wider movements championed the causes of displaced and expropriated marginal groups, and together with local leaders they articulated demands for ‘indigenous rights’ as well as social and environmental justice.

Over the past five or so decades, Latin America has seen local communities leading stiff resistance to a wide range of development projects, which caused large natural and social calamities. Brazil embarked upon an ambitious economic thrust in the 1970s, and its plans included deep incursions into the country’s hinterland, specifically in pursuit of electricity generation. The widespread disruption of people’s lives caused by large hydroelectric projects, however, was met with determined opposition all over the country over the next two decades. In the 1990s, a consolidation of these movements brought about the formation of a national organization named the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB). The overarching presence of MAB helped streamline the larger operative model for these movements. Carlos B. Vainer, an expert on Brazilian social movements has highlighted the MAB’s impact on the evolution of the resistance to large dams in the country. He explains: Central to the discussions on strategies and tactics was the affirmation of the grass-roots, community based nature of the organization; at the same time the need to build the movement of those affected by dams into a broad mass-movement was recognized. The main form of struggle and expression of this movement was to be direct action: mass demonstration, occupation of the sites of the government agencies or companies, marches on highways and in the towns, pickets on dam sites, sit-ins and so forth. (Vainer 2009, pp. 176–7)

As the MAB sharpened its catalytic role in mobilizing opposition to large dams in Brazil, it was also gradually tasked with the responsibility of articulating a critique of the government’s developmental policy – the broad strokes of energy policy, management of water resources and the environment that impact the lives of the people who it represents. These new responsibilities have challenged the MAB to recognize and align with environmental justice ideals, such as ecological sustainability and harmony with other people and nature, which are already embedded in the large cross-section of indigenous, independent forms of popular environmentalism in Latin America. Carruthers (2008, p. 16) underlines this point while writing about the harsh legacy that ecological mobilization has had to confront in this region: Throughout Latin America’s history, social injustice has been inextricably linked with grossly inequitable access to land and natural resources. Perpetual conflicts between landed elites and land-poor peasants explain much of the region’s contentious and violent political history, from conquest through colonialism and independence, and at every turn in the modern era.

In recent times, as the overall natural resource base for exploitation has shrunk throughout Latin America, state and corporate actors in pursuit of rapid development have become increasingly aggressive and irritated with those opposed to their agenda, particularly the indigenous people. As Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian President, declared indignantly at a meeting of state governors in 2019, ‘Indigenous people don’t lobby, don’t speak our language, and yet today they manage to have 14 percent of our national territory … One of their intentions is to hold us back’ (quoted in Simoes 2019). Wishing that the nuisance of indigenous opposition to development could have been taken care of in colonial times, as it was in North America,

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South  461 Bolsonaro reiterated a regret expressed earlier in his career, namely, that ‘The North American cavalry were the competent ones because they decimated their indigenous people in the past and today, they don’t have this problem in their country’ (quoted in Simoes 2019). Bolsonaro’s nostalgic desire for a brutal end to challenges to the vision of the power elite, however, exists throughout Latin America. Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) that tracks human rights abuse on environmentalists and activists defending socio-economic causes, found that out of the 207 murders of human rights defenders documented worldwide in 2017, 60 percent, or 124, took place in Latin America. Brazil accounted for 57 of these fatalities, the highest in the world for a country (Global Witness 2018). Environmental movements in Latin America have had to make a serious effort to address this downward spiral to a savage place. Over a five-year period from 2012 to 2017, activist representatives of movements from all over the region engaged and negotiated with their governments to reach a binding agreement, which would give environmental rights defenders legitimacy in their efforts to secure a healthy environment through legal recourse and government support for people or groups in vulnerable situations. Titled ‘Regional agreement on access to information, public participation and justice in environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean’, better known as the Escazu Agreement, it was adopted in Escazu, Costa Rica, in March 2018 under a United Nations (UN)-sponsored process (United Nations 2018). This is a remarkable attempt at addressing socio-environmental conflicts in a region which has been beset with these conflicts for centuries, and it would not have been possible but for the gathering strength of ecological mobilization in Latin America despite the heavy odds stacked against it. Lack of transparency and administrative and corporate obfuscation on infrastructure and extractive projects are the primary reasons why environmental conflicts devolve into repression and violence. The agreement elevates informed participation by activists and movements in the approval process, as well as monitoring development projects, by giving them legal standing and protection. Currently undergoing a ratification process, the Escazu Agreement eventually will help mitigate violence and repression and identify and prosecute those who decide to ignore or flout it – a rare victory for environmental movements.

CHALLENGING THE DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE For environmental movements in the Global South, the struggle against repression and violence was always an important part of the larger undertaking of questioning the orthodoxy of development, particularly at a time when forming an alternative narrative was extraordinarily difficult. The construction of dazzling myths about state and corporate-led development by the post-colonial power elite, as well as anxiety among the general populace to secure its eventual economic rewards, had put the discourse on development beyond the pale of any meaningful debate. Popular leaders, such as Nehru, Nasser, Nyerer and Sukarno, had also pumped enormous political capital, dipped lavishly in cloying nationalism, into that narrative. Nehru had deified the modern hydroelectric dams, steel plants and power generating installations as the ‘temple of modern India’. With an army of politicians, bureaucrats, business executives, academics and community leaders repeating ad nauseam the mantra of development, it fell to the environmental movements to make sense of the unfolding reality around them.

462  Handbook of critical environmental politics A stark realization that confronted environmentalists was that there was a price to be paid for development, and that price would be paid by people and by nature. As Bello (2007) explains: In the case of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation was seen as an inevitable consequence of a strategy of export-oriented growth imposed by World Bank-International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs that sought to pay off the country’s massive foreign debt with the dollars gained from exporting the country’s timber and other natural resources and manufactures produced by cheap labor.

Arundhati Roy, the noted Indian author and environmentalist, estimates that large dams had displaced about 33 million people until the first decade of the twenty-first century, about 60 percent of them being either ‘untouchables’ or indigenous peoples. India, in fact, does not have a national resettlement policy for those displaced by dams (Bello 2007). There is probably no other incident that highlights the tragic consequences of unregulated development on people as the Bhopal Gas tragedy of 1984, when 40 tons of methyl isocyanate was released into the air leading to the immediate death of 3800 people. An estimated 15 000 to 20 000 people died subsequently, owing to eventual organ failures caused by the poison, and thousands of others suffered blindness and congenital birth defects (Broughton 2005). It is no wonder that the imperative for environmental mobilization in the Global South emerges out of the basic need for people to survive in a politico-economic environment where particular lives can be sacrificed in the pursuit of lofty national economic objectives without much legal recourse for remedy. Importantly, and often, the socio-cultural conditions for this devaluation of lives are also ingrained in the structures of stratification already existing in societies. As a consequence, the response to tumultuous environmental events can itself be intense and desperate at the beginning, before being mobilized in an organized and deliberate manner. Conversely, an organized protest movement can also devolve into a confrontation if its peaceful engagements are rebuffed continually over a period of time, pushing it to a dead end. People ultimately embrace the urgency of survival as humans, before they can aspire to be transformation-seeking environmentalists. Even in a heavily regimented society, such as China, where mass protests can result in dire consequences for participants, there have been occasions when public outrage was aroused in response to official apathy and repression. A chemical pesticide project in the Zhuxi industrial district in Dongyang city of Zhejiang province faced serious public opposition owing to its environmental impact in the early 2000s. It had been relocated several times from urban areas owing to the threat of toxic pollution, but was deceptively lodged in this location because of illegal expropriation of the local people’s land by a lease agreement, which was forcibly signed between the local government and the village chief. The people in the immediate neighborhood petitioned the government to halt this development and engaged the local officials in a dialogue for over four years. It seems that the government was inclined to address people’s complaints favorably: ‘In April 2004, the State Council issued a new policy to strengthen control of land management and curb wanton development throughout the country. Taking action on this policy, the land and resource management bureau of Dongyang city issued a document to 12 companies to return their land and pay penalties’ (Otsuka 2009, p. 99). Encouraged by the new directives, people initiated lawsuits against the polluting factories at the Zhuxi complex as well as the local administration. They also began a fresh round of petitioning the town and provincial officials for compensation and redressal of other grievances. Predictably, though, with official apathy and suppression of the movement, those efforts ended

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South  463 up in a blind alley, bouncing around in officialdom for the next year. People’s frustration with the system and desperation for an end to the continuing pollution by chemicals ultimately forced them to take the situation into their own hands. On the 24 March 2005, they decided to blockade the entrance to the industrial park, preventing raw material and other supplies from reaching the factory floors. The local officials and police dismantled the first blockade, but in response the protest gained momentum as residents from 10 other villages joined the blockade. County leaders then turned to a more forceful approach. At about 3 AM on 10 April, the county leadership sent in over 1,500 local cadres and public security personnel to put an end to the encampment. Violence broke out during their efforts to clear out the protesters; over 100 officials or police officers and more than 200 villagers were injured, and 68 government vehicles were burned or damaged. (Deng and O’Brien 2014, p. 176)

The ensuing furor in international capitals as well as Beijing forced the Chinese government to send a team of investigators to look into the protest and work out a solution. ‘Under mounting pressure from above and below, Dongyang County agreed to close 11 of the factories in the park, and on 20 May the protesters allowed their tents to be taken down’ (Deng and O’Brien 2014, p. 176). For a political economy, which has invested enormous psychological capital into the growth imperative in pursuit of national glory for China, the decision to close these pesticide factories was a huge compromise. It was also a stunning example of a successful people’s movement in an authoritarian one-party system. A group of villagers in the Chinese hinterland were able to mobilize for an environmental cause overcoming official apathy and state repression; an achievement worthy of replication.

MOBILIZATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF THE SACRED While protest and mobilization situated in secular socio-political tussles have become an established practice in the Global South, forms of resistance framed in the context of the spiritual heritage of people have also emerged throughout the region, particularly among the indigenous communities. These movements draw inspiration and sustenance from the ancient ties with their land kept alive in their rituals, the myths of their people’s origins and the treasure trove of stories about people’s relationship with nature handed down from one generation to the next. Many communities throughout the world have given a special status to natural sites such as mountains, rivers, lakes, caves, forest groves, coastal waters and entire islands. Many of these have been set aside as sacred places. They may be perceived as abodes of deities and ancestral spirits; as sources of healing water and plants; places of contact with the spiritual, or communication with the ‘more-than-human’ reality; and sites of revelation and transformation. (Oviedo et al. 2005, p. 3)

This spiritual belief anchors the intense desire of the communities to protect the sacred character of their land from modern development projects. In recent years, multilateral environmental organizations have created platforms for fostering the idea of conserving sacred sites. For instance, in 2003, the International Union for Conservation of Nature put together the Task Force on Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas of the World Commission on Protected Areas, which works with a range of partners globally and nationally to protect sacred sites.

464  Handbook of critical environmental politics This emerging international appreciation of the spiritual and sacred link of indigenous people with their lands as part of a new paradigm for environmental conservation (see Chapter 20 in this volume), however, has not always been enough to secure their protection. As existing deposits of natural resources are depleted all over the world owing to heavy extraction, sacred sites are now under enormous pressure as the most abundant repositories of fossil fuels, precious minerals, timber, and so on. In 2016, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report declared that out of the 229 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) natural World Heritage Sites, 114 were threatened by mining and other development activities (WWF 2016). Incidentally, these sites are the best protected of all the sacred sites in the world. For indigenous people, environmental mobilization has been the necessary tool to continue to protect their sacred sites from oil and gas extraction, dams, logging, mining and corporate agricultural expansion as global capital swoops down on their lands for business and profit. A recent movement by the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon region is a prime example of mobilizing for the protection of a sacred land. They led a bold resistance, starting in the early 2000s, against a concerted effort by the Ecuadorian government and the Argentinian oil company Compania General de Combustibles (CGC) to open up their area for oil exploration. It is important to take note of the recent history of oil explorations in Ecuador to understand the alarm that this move caused in Sarayaku. The country had already suffered an ecological disaster caused by Texaco, the American oil giant (Chevron went on to purchase the company) in the early 1990s, around the time the company ended its operations in eastern Ecuador. The episode is often referred to as the ‘Rainforest Chernobyl’. Following an intense period of oil extraction beginning in the 1960s, the indigenous people claimed that, to save money and time, ‘Texaco intentionally dumped billions of gallons of poisonous waste onto the soil and surface waters and abandoned hundreds of unlined waste pits that leaked toxins and heavy metals into the groundwater’ (FoE 2012). The impact was catastrophic for the people – deaths from cancer and other illnesses, miscarriages, birth defects and even the threat of extinction for some indigenous groups. There were similarly devastating consequences for the ecology of the region. Naturally, the Kichwa were fearful of a repeat of that story in their area and organized to defend the sanctity of their land. From the beginning of the project, it was obvious that the government had not paid any heed to the earlier devastation caused by Texaco/Chevron when it launched the exploratory operations in Sarayaku. It did not consult the Kichwa people about the project and the villagers learned about the project only when the company’s helicopters landed in their villages, accompanied by armed men. In response, the Kichwa organized protests all over their area, which were met with repression and violence. Yet, they persisted, petitioning the government in Quito but also continuing with physical disruptions and protests in Sarayaku. The indigenous people also moved the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) on violations of their human rights. ‘The CIDH finally ruled in favor of the Kichwa people in June 2012, recognizing that the Ecuadorian State violated the indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation. The Government had to present public excuses’ (Greyl 2019). The threat to Sarayaku is not over yet, as the government has set new targets on two blocks in the same territory since 2015. However, the Kichwa now have the experience of a successful mobilization where they were able to build a network of national and international allies and engage the media to promote their movement as well as their court case with the Inter-American Commission, and this will give them the strength to launch another defense as and when needed.

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South  465 The consciousness of the sacred as a relevant precept for the protection of nature, as well as the fulcrum for opposition to the deep thrusts being made by extractive industries into indigenous lands, has spread to many other parts of the world. In recent years, India has seen the formation of several successful environmental mobilizations led by indigenous communities to protest against and, eventually, prevent the imposition of development projects on vulnerable sacred lands. A large mining project to supply bauxite was launched in the state of Orissa in eastern India by a global mining giant, the London-based Vedanta Corporation, in the early 2000s to supply bauxite to an aluminum refinery being installed in the Kalahandi district. The corporation had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the state government to this purpose. The proposal included opening up a sacred area, the Niyamgiri hills, for mining. The local indigenous community, the Dongriya Kondh, has traditionally considered the hills to be the abode of their deity, the Niyamraja, from whom they claim descent. They observe certain taboos and restrictions in relation to the hilltops of the Niyamgiri range of hills. Neither hunting nor the cutting of trees is permitted on them. It is quite possibly because of these observances that the Niyamgiri Hills can boast of the rich biodiversity that they are reported to possess. (Borde 2016, p. 110)

The Dongria Kondhs immediately launched a protest movement against the mega project, holding demonstrations locally, and sending a representation to the Vedanta shareholders’ meeting in London in July 2010. As a consequence of their outreach in London, ‘several organizations including the Church of England and the charitable Joseph Rowntree Trust disinvested from the company over the treatment of the Dongria Kondh tribe’ (Wachman 2010). The community also filed writ petitions in the state High Court and the Supreme Court, challenging the project. The immediate result was the deferral of the forest clearance required for the mining project to proceed. The Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of whether religious rights were held over forest areas being diverted for the mining project and asked the state government to ask the village council to give their opinion on the matter. Twelve villages summarily rejected the project, leading to the Ministry of the Environment rejecting the final forest clearance to the project. However, there have been repeated attempts by the state government to reintroduce the proposal and start mining in the region. Recently, the state mining corporation filed a petition in the Supreme Court to reopen the mining. The Supreme Court has refused to admit the petition and has asked the government to make the twelve village councils that had rejected the mining, parties in the petition. (Tatpati et al. 2018, p. 90)

The sacred lands argument for environmental mobilization has since become strong in India and has continued to give hope to indigenous communities facing pressure of development on their lands.

CONCLUSION In the current configuration of the market economy, power is expressed essentially through capital. Piketty (2014), in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has shown that wage growth always lags behind the rate of accumulation of capital. Consequently, the power dynamic will always favor the owners of capital, who will steadily want to acquire as many resources as

466  Handbook of critical environmental politics they access, in order to continue their quest for growth, which is particularly relevant to the contemporary implications of capitalism. Yet, the compelling blend of democratic resistance and traditional practices centered around human rights, sanctity of sacred lands, environmental sanity and climate justice can, on the whole, challenge the imaginary of capitalist development as well as the nexus between the state and corporations in the Global South. Ecological mobilization in the developing world has had to be operatively nimble and ideologically alive to the overlapping nature of societal issues. While nowhere in the world are environmental issues isolated from the larger societal context, in the Global South they come tightly intertwined with livelihoods issues, community ownership of land, forest rights, agricultural productivity and access to food, industrial and urban pollution distress, climate induced devastations and a host of other issues. Moreover, the economic exigencies encompassing these matters have their own potential socio-political quagmires. The alliances which have been formed to tackle these concerns, and to contest the policies and interests causing them, have had to be diverse and focused on tangible results without fixating much on ideological purity. Dissent and protest on various issues have taken new shapes, melded and morphed, experimented with the functional logic of a movement as well as its aims, shunned electoral politics and then sometimes stepped into it with restrained ambitions, hesitatingly (and skeptically) received promises from power and yet learned from their betrayal, constantly evolving with the unfolding experience. In the final analysis, however, as movements have tried to peel the layers off of their respective analytical discourses, they have tended to reach the same somber conclusion – whether it is climate change, environmental degradation or conflicts arising from the endless hunt for natural resources – all of them stem from the stranglehold of neoliberalism on the world order. The increasingly evident mayhem wrought on the Earth by a fossil fuel-based economy impelling an irresponsibly rampant consumerist lifestyle is forcing larger numbers of people to coalesce into movements in the Global South, which are challenging the destruction inherent in free-market fundamentalism and globalization. People’s resistance to the current politico-economic dispensation is the only way in which the future can be restructured.

REFERENCES Bello, W. (2007), The environmental movement in the Global South, Trans National Institute, Amsterdam, 12 October, accessed 20 December 2019 at https://​ www​ .tni​ .org/​ en/​ article/​ the​ -environmental​-movement​-in​-the​-global​-south. Borde, R. (2016), Legal interpretation of the sacred natural sites and cultural heritage of the Dongria Kondhs in India, in B. Verschuurren and N. Furuta (eds), Asian Sacred Natural Sites: Philosophy and Practice in Protected Areas and Conservation, New York: Routledge, pp. 107–17. Broughton, E. (2005), The Bhopal disaster and its aftermath: a review, Environmental Health, 4 (6), accessed 5 January 2020 at https://​ehjournal​.biomedcentral​.com/​articles/​10​.1186/​1476​-069X​-4​-6​ #citeas. Carruthers, D.V. (2008), Introduction. Popular environmentalism and social justice in Latin America, in D.V. Carruthers (ed.), Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise and Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–22. Dahbour, O. (2018), REDWeb series – Marx and political ecology, Radical Ecological Democracy, 21 December, accessed 2 April 2021 at https://​www​.radica​lecologica​ldemocracy​.org/​redweb​-anniversary​ -series​-marx​-and​-political​-ecology/​. Deng, Y. and O’Brien, K.J. (2014), Societies of senior citizens and popular protest in rural Zhejiang, The China Journal, 71 (January), 172–88.

Ecological mobilizations in the Global South  467 Friends of the Earth (FoE) (2012), The ‘Rainforest Chernobyl’: will U.S. investment treaty block justice for Amazonian people? Friends of the Earth Blog/Climate & Energy Justice, 1 March, accessed 17 December 2021 at https://​foe​.org/​blog/​rainforest​-chernobyl​-investment​-treaty/​. Global Witness (2018), Deadliest year on record for land and environmental defenders, as agribusiness is shown to be the industry most linked to killings, press release, 24 July, accessed 20 December 2021 at https://​www​.globalwitness​.org/​en/​press​-releases/​deadliest​-year​-record​-land​-and​-environmental​ -defenders​-agribusiness​-shown​-be​-industry​-most​-linked​-killings/​. Greenough, P. and Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2003), Introduction, in P. Greenough and A. Lowenhaupts Tsing (eds), Nature in the Global South, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–24. Greyl, L. (2019), Sarayaku – oil extraction in Block 23, Ecuador, Environmental Justice Atlas, 18 August, accessed 17 December 2021 at https://​ejatlas​.org/​conflict/​sarayacu​-oil​-extraction​-in​-block​ -23​-ecuador. Holifield, R., Chakraborty, J. and Walker, G. (2018), Introduction, in R. Holifield, J. Chakraborty and G. Walker (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, London: Routledge, pp. 1–11. Le Billon, P. (2015), Environmental conflict, in T. Perreault, G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, London: Routledge, pp. 598–608. Macdonald, M. (2005), The Green Belt Movement and the story of Wangari Maathai. Yes! Magazine, 26 March, accessed 3 January 2020 at https://​www​.yesmagazine​.org/​issue/​media/​2005/​03/​26/​the​-green​ -belt​-movement​-the​-story​-of​-wangari​-maathai/​. Martínez-Alier, J., Temper, L., Del Bene, D. and Scheidel, A. (2016), Is there a global environmental justice movement? Journal of Peasant Studies, 43 (3), 731–55. McNeill, J.R. (2000), Something under the Sun, New York: Norton. Otsuka, K. (2009), Strategies for fragmentary opportunities and limited resources; the environmental protest movement under communist China in transition, in S. Shigetomi and K. Makino (eds), Protest and Social Movements in the Developing World, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Elgar, pp. 79–109. Oviedo, G., Jeanrenaud, S. and Otegui, M. (2005), Protecting Sacred Natural Sites of Indigenous and Traditional Peoples: an IUCN Perspective, Gland: International Union for Conservation of Nature. Piketty, T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simoes, M. (2019), Brazil’s Bolsonaro on the environment, in his own words, New York Times, 28 August, accessed 28 December 2019 at https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2019/​08/​27/​world/​americas/​ bolsonaro​-brazil​-environment​.html. Tatpati, M., Kothari, A. and Mishra, R. (2018), The Niyamgiri story: challenging the idea of growth without limits, in N. Singh, S. Kulkarni and N. Pathak Broome (eds), Ecologies of Hope and Transformation: Post Development Alternatives from India, Pune: Kalpavriksh and SOPPECOM, pp. 77–114. United Nations (2018), Regional agreement on access to information, public participation and justice in environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, (Escazu Agreement), United Nations Treaty Collection Chapter XXVII, accessed 17 December 2021 at https://​ treaties​ .un​ .org/​ pages/​ ViewDetails​.aspx​?src​=​TREATY​&​mtdsg​_no​=​XXVII​-18​&​chapter​=​27​&​clang​=​_en. Vainer, C.B. (2009), Water for life, not for death: the Brazilian social movement of People Affected by Dams, in C.D. Deere and F.S. Royce (eds), Rural Social Movements in Latin America: Organizing for Sustainable Livelihoods, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, pp. 163–88. Wachman, R. (2010), Indian miner Vedanta faces avatar-style protest at its London AGM, Guardian, 25 July, accessed 17 December 2021 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​business/​2010/​jul/​25/​vedanta​ -faces​-avatar​-protest​-agm. Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) (2016), Protecting People through Nature, Gland: WWF.

34. Engaging the everyday: sustainability, practices, politics Alice Dal Gobbo

INTRODUCTION: THE SPACE OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS At first sight, everyday life might seem a residual theme as we go about thinking about the (contemporary) politics of the environment. It is normally constructed as a private sphere that does not have much to do with the big picture of planetary and geo-political relations. For this reason, its capacity to foster change and transformation on such a scale looks limited. Yet, interest in the role of daily practices in (re)producing and resisting the unsustainability of advanced capitalist societies is increasing (Rau 2018). Why is this so? First, the ecological crisis and ecological concerns more generally compel us to think differently about what we normally construct as private or individual actions. Anything we do in our daily routines necessarily has consequences, which are virtually global since the environments we inhabit are interrelated and interdependent (Adams 2015). A great deal of contemporary ecological devastation is also the direct result of a particular (Western affluent) way of life that is energy- and resource-demanding as well as wasteful. This is usually understood as ‘consumer capitalism’ (Blühdorn and Welsh 2007), although it is the capitalist system as a whole being called into question by the ecological crisis. One of the first issues for the (environmental) politics of everyday life is how this apparently private sphere can be in any way political, embodying a tension and intention towards collective transformation. This has been an ongoing interrogation in the field of critical thinking. Lefebvre’s (2014; see also Lefebvre 2011) Marxist contribution to the critique of everyday life (spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s) has been seminal in this. The effort was to theorise it as inherently political for two reasons: first, as it is embedded in wider forms of capitalist social organisation; and second, as it is irreducible to those forms and, therefore, a potential space of struggle. De Certeau (2011) highlighted the ways in which everyday life constructs its own politics as a form of constant invention of practices, conducts and meanings that elude those that are hegemonic, and often oppressive. Feminist thought has also been focusing for decades on how the activities that populate daily living, mostly carried out by women and focusing on life reproduction, are inherently political (Bhattacharya and Vogel 2017). Despite their being systematically hidden and devalued as banal, personal, activities of ‘getting by’, they are central to wider systemic reproduction. However, what is most important, they embody a logic of care that counters exploitative and competitive forms of relations, thus bearing the seeds for novel forms of relationality (Federici 2018, 2020). Everyday life has become of explicit interest for research on sustainability, ecological crisis and transitions throughout the past decades, and especially with the advent of neoliberalism and the consequent reorganisation of political participation. This new centrality has two facets. The first has to do with the management and governance of daily socio-technical assemblages. 468

Engaging the everyday  469 Currently, institutional politics are very keen to promote changes towards sustainability in everyday life, such as the promotion of recycling, reduction of home waste, energy and water consumption, ecological modes of transportation and the adoption of sustainable diets (Berglund and Matti 2006). These policies have been shaped by different types of knowledge, scientific practice and interventions that will be reviewed in the next section. Their common feature is that they promote top-down change, in which institutions set goals and implement strategies to reach them (Shove and Walker 2010). Alternatively, there are grassroots environmental mobilisations that articulate at the level of everyday life and that embody politics in a bottom-up movement of social subjects (Meyer 2015; Chapter 35 and 36 in this volume). Different forms of academic research and literature correspond to this, which start from the practices, desires and needs of everyday life to reflect on what sustainability is, how it is achievable and in the interests of whom (Chapter 9 in this volume). This is also analysed in the next section, which closes with a reflection on the role of critical thinking in this area of investigation. The third section moves from this exposition to pin down a few contentious issues. I conclude by indicating the opportunities that these debates open and perspectives for future research and practice.

TRACING THE FIELD: APPROACHES, CONCEPTS, FRAMINGS Policy and the Governance of Transitions The politics of the environment during the decades immediately after World War II have in large part neglected the sphere of everyday life, since the targets of their policies were macro-level dynamics and actors. Yet, with the advent of neoliberalism and the ‘rolling back’ of the state, ‘soft’ policies are preferred to command-and-control policies (Oels 2005; Heynen et al. 2007; Chapter 29 in this volume). These operate through monetary strategies, such as financial incentives and taxation (Tews et al. 2003), technological innovation for efficiency or green production (Herring and Roy 2007) and, finally, through the interpellation of individuals to act in pro-environmental ways (Autio et al. 2009). Everyday life is an important sphere of intervention of neoliberal politics because their methodological individualism implies that individual actions, summed up, have significant impacts on the environment. For instance, by choosing in the market, individuals have the power to stir production processes in desired directions. This has led many policy-makers to believe that if individual behaviours, attitudes and choices could be changed, then visible improvements could take place in our socio-environmental metabolism (Shove 2010). How to make people use a bicycle instead of a car, buy organic instead of non-organic products, and switch off the light when not in use? In this context, the idea of ‘ecological citizenship’ starts to gain visibility (Jagers et al. 2014): citizens – constructed as rational, ethical and free individuals – should take responsibility for pro-environmental change by engaging in ecologically virtuous behaviours (for example, green consumption, recycling, energy use reduction and efficiency) (Hobson 2013a). In neoliberal politics of the environment, governance does not disappear but works through subtly operating devices. One device is the moralisation of behaviours, constructed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on the basis of their (un)sustainability. Thus individuals internalise and reproduce the norms they are supposed to conform to (Butler 2010). Behaviour-change policies, for their part, aim at changing people’s (assumedly interior or mental) attitudes towards more

470  Handbook of critical environmental politics ecological options, in the hope these will determine more sustainable choices and actions (Hargreaves 2011). ‘Nudge’ strategies push behaviours in established directions by designing specific architectures of choice (Thaler and Sunstein 2009). Information provision and awareness-raising have also been employed, in the conviction that by knowing the consequences of their actions, people would act in a moral way, that is, do what is ‘best’ for the environment (Heiskanen and Laasko 2019). Yet these strategies have proven ineffective and have been variously criticised (Hobson 2013b). Their individualising tendencies, for instance, are evident and troubling on a number of levels (Hobson 2002). First, the idea of a sovereign subject whose behaviours linearly derive from interiorly held ideas and values, rational evaluations and free choices is idealistic. This is the main critique proposed by scholars drawing on social practice theory (see Schatzki 2008): people live in material and symbolic cultures that direct actions, set what is socially (un)accepted, are structured around embodied and affective habits. Available choices within a given setting are in large part determined, so behaviour change and sacrifice towards sustainability cannot be adequate responses (Hargreaves 2011). Interpellation of individuals is thus politically problematic; it seeks to govern sustainable transitions by targeting largely insignificant acts while obscuring the need for systemic change in the way resources are distributed, social expectations produced, and infrastructure systems created and maintained. This leaves the system and the interests that move it largely untouched (Shove and Walker 2010). In a more psycho-social and interpretive vein, other researchers add that also intersubjective commitments, affects, desires, attachments and unconscious investments contribute to make everyday behaviours and practices significant and enduring. Hence, interventions that do not address these aspects of everyday ‘texturing’ will not be effective and might also produce reactive and counter-productive responses (Randall 2009; Thomas et al. 2017). The multi-level perspective (MLP) on sustainable transitions holds, in response, that governance should take a more holistic view of systems’ transformation: socio-technical innovations promoted by institutional and private actors on the macro scale (for example, systems of energy provision) should go hand in hand with a change in everyday practices so that they can be accepted by social actors; processes of technological innovation should themselves see the active involvement of these actors so that they are tailored to needs and therefore welcomed (Geels 2010). The effort is to operate bearing in mind a more complex and nuanced vision of society and the way actors interact to produce or hinder change. Yet, the question remains whether the governance of transitions within current institutional and socio-economic organisation can be an effective and sufficient response to sustainability challenges. It does not question the whole ‘imperial’ (Brand and Wissen 2017) organisation of life within late capitalist societies, and in particular the everyday organisation of time, space and habit, its imaginaries, values and forms of subjectivity. For these reasons, it is important to investigate movements of change ‘from below’, that is, emerging within and from everyday life. Political Consumerism? Since the final decades of the twentieth century, participation in the public sphere and formal organisations diminished while the economy took centre stage in holding the social fabric. Consumption in the market became increasingly important as a means of self-expression, identity but also political demands and activism (Micheletti 2003; Forno 2019). The intentional and active choice of consumer behaviours, such as boycotting, buycotting and exerting

Engaging the everyday  471 pressures on big firms, inaugurated a way of conceiving purchases no longer in merely instrumental terms but as a way of fostering change, hence the concept of ‘political consumerism’ (Stolle and Micheletti 2013). In the wake of the ecological crisis, responsible, green or sustainable consumption has been seen as one of the instruments that the citizen, or better ‘citizen-consumer’, has at hand for pro-environmental change. If ecological problems and degradation are mainly caused by unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, the effort is to orchestrate consumption behaviours (for example, boycotting larger carbon dioxide producers) so that these anti-ecological dynamics are disrupted (Johnston 2008; Spaargaren and Oosterveer 2010). The historical fate of movements centred on political consumerism evolved together with reflections on their practices to profoundly critique this way of doing (environmental) politics. Capitalism was able to absorb critiques and demands, transforming them into further commodities to be sold on the market for profit; its greening did not yield significant results in respect of environmental sustainability and socio-economic equality (Hobson 2013b). Changes in everyday consumption choices (for example, buying green or fairtrade commodities) without a wider system’s change appear to be insufficient (Barr et al. 2011). In light of these issues, sustainable consumption has taken more radical forms, such as ‘anti-consumption’ (for example, reusing, recycling/upcycling, making things last and reducing consumption) (Black and Cherrier 2010). In this instance, the aim is not simply to change the content and form of commodities in the market, but also to disrupt the processes of valorisation that push our economies to increasingly unsustainable patterns of energy, resource use and waste. By questioning the role and place of consumption, anti-consumption practices challenge an economic system that, seeking infinite growth via commodification, is responsible for the ecological crisis. However, these efforts, if they only remain aggregates of politicised individual choices, continue to seem partial, limited and necessarily confronted with a wider socio-material organisation of life in which the opportunities for operating sustainable choices and practices are limited (Shove 2010). Think, just for example, of the time that some anti-consumption practices, such as upcycling, mending or do-it-yourself (DIY), require: within an increasingly precarious and stringent labour organisation, this becomes increasingly scarce. The instruments and resources to (re)produce life outside of the circuits of the capitalist market are not available to the vast majority of people (Kallis et al. 2020). But if we step out of a binary vision that distinguishes everyday from collective life, then we can see a transformative potential that transcends the isolation of individuals’ choices in the market. This applies to forms of organised consumption, where groups gather around everyday life issues to build material and socially sustainable assemblages that produce flows of matter, energy and information, alternatives to those that are unsustainable and capitalist (for example, alternative food networks, AFNs, for the procurement of food, and energy cooperatives) (Dal Gobbo and Forno 2020). In these examples, in activism and in academic research, we move to a conception of everyday mobilisations involving the construction of a different organisation of life instead of being only enacted within the given options provided by the system. The reconfiguration of material and symbolic flows through collective practice allows, for instance, new forms of valuation to emerge (Centemeri 2018). Within the capitalist economy, value is that process through which life as a whole becomes exchangeable and functional to accumulation. Alternative practices of sociality, ‘doing together’, knowledge, time and resources-sharing, solidarity, and so on are based on forms of valuation that are emplaced, qualitative, and responsive to the singular needs of communities and individuals (Centemeri 2019). Participation in alternatives for

472  Handbook of critical environmental politics meeting life needs, such as food consumption, also facilitates processes of politicisation; that is, everyday practices and subjectivities change as people change their views, understanding and stances towards mainstream forms of consumption (Forno et al. 2015). This materialises in everyday sustainable transitions. Yet, these forms of political consumerism tend to remain limited to some practices, which they only partially satisfy. Furthermore, they are difficult to sustain in the wider organisation of contemporary life since they are demanding of time and energy. Hence, they seem to remain niche innovations that coexist with mainstream systems of production, consumption and exchange (Signori and Forno 2019). Everyday Sustainable Materialisms and Prefiguration A step further in the becoming-collective of everyday engagements with sustainability and the environment are the enactments of ‘sustainable materialisms’ on the part of social movements and activists (Schlosberg 2019). In view of the ecological crisis and of the increasingly evident incapacity of institutions to tackle it, there is expanding interest in the constitution of movements that are able to respond to the basic necessities of life reproduction (for example, food, clothes, energy, housing and transport) in sustainable ways and outside of mainstream channels. The logic at the core of these mobilisations is not very different from that informing most radical forms of political consumerism considered previously. The main aim is that of collectively creating the preconditions for making basic life reproduction autonomous from the flows of the capitalist market, distancing from its escalating dynamics of production– consumption–waste and environmental degradation (Schlosberg and Coles 2016). Yet the material and symbolic critique of systemic unsustainability is deeper. For activists involved in everyday sustainable materialism movements the aim is a wider change in the overall organisation of existence that involves radical economic, sociocultural and subjective transformations towards sustainability (understood in its widest, not only environmental, meaning). Materially, these movements seek to promote parsimony, non-waste, endurance, creative reuse of objects, as well as a convivial mode of life that reinforces the importance of collective creativity, sharing, and control over the conditions of life reproduction (Meyer 2015). The purpose is not to convince individuals to engage in virtuous actions for the environment; the effort is of a collective type, for together it is possible to overcome those barriers that necessarily restrict the transformative capacity of individual actions set against systemic constraints (Schlosberg 2019). Socioculturally, sustainable materialisms seek to reconfigure the meanings and values around what is the ‘good life’ and of what ‘living well’ means. This reflection ultimately invests the sphere of subjectivity, as even the most apparently private enjoyments and pleasures can be rethought and recast, for instance, through the cultivation of ‘alternative hedonisms’ that are not harmful to the environment and other human beings (Soper 2004, 2008). Constructing alternative and richer ways of meeting basic life needs outside, or on the fringes, of capitalist production, exchange and consumption requires also recasting the conception of what life is and how it should be organised. For instance, this type of mobilisation contests the strict division between production and reproduction, and work and leisure. The two are no longer relegated to dichotomous spheres of action, such as alienated salaried labour and equally alienated consumption. Ultimately, life can be lived, at least partially, outside of the money nexus. It can involve care, reparation and co-beingness (Litfin 2016). In this, everyday sustainable materialisms can already be seen as ‘prefigurative’: they start to imagine

Engaging the everyday  473 and practice feasible alternatives to capitalist socio-ecological organisation (Asara 2020). This is sought, even more radically, within movements that establish communities (for example, ecovillages and permaculture) whose explicit aim is building relations of reproduction that are more radically independent from the capitalist organisation of labour and everyday life (Monticelli 2018). These ‘ecotopias’ build ‘moral economies grounded in forms of discourse other than dominant Western economic rationality and guided by the compass of justice and sustainability’ (Lockyer and Veteto 2013, p. 20), as well as more-than-human projects of cohabitation (Centemeri 2019). Although this is not completely accomplished, the tension is towards building the socio-material conditions for the whole of life to be free from ecologically and socially damaging forms of interaction with local and global environments (Anderson 2012). Individuals’ lives are embedded within more-than-human communities out of which they find living resources. This is often understood in respect of autonomy and sufficiency: the necessities of reproduction – such as food, housing, energy, education and health – are met in socio-ecological collectives that respond to communitarian logics, are not based on private property, individualism, competitiveness and oppression, and especially seek balance by respecting ecological limits (Anderson 2007). The relevance of these movements has been contested since they seem difficult to scale up and spread. Nonetheless, this is not necessarily their intent: there is an almost bespoke will not to do so and to remain a niche experience, often even lacking an openly political position. This might be seen as a form of retreatism, ultimately unhelpful for a more generalised transition towards a sustainable organisation of life. However, the significance of these movements is in their capacity to preserve, rediscover and generate forms of knowledge, political organisation and ecological practices that tend to be silenced and hidden from mainstream society, and thus to cultivate the seeds for alternative forms of life beyond capitalism (Litfin 2014). Furthermore, those who take part in these movements largely accept that a completely sustainable life is ultimately impossible to articulate in contemporary societies; yet, positively managing this tension is also a way forward to make ‘ecotopia’ permeate the daily socio-ecological dealings also of people ‘outside’ these niches (Anderson 2012; Groves et al. 2016).

CONTENTIOUS ISSUES By now it should be evident that the sustainability of everyday life is far from being an uncontentious field. Is it the individual’s responsibility to enact change even in the face of the apparent futility of such an act? What is and should be the role of institutions in the transition to sustainability? What are the opportunities for collective articulation of resistance and alternatives to the unsustainability of contemporary capitalism? Are such alternatives ultimately doomed to being either ‘absorbed’ by mainstream society or else remain niche practices that live alongside ecologically (and socially) destructive systems? This section is dedicated to shedding light on some of these tensions, starting from key concepts in the politics of everyday life.

474  Handbook of critical environmental politics Responsibility This concept is riddled with many contradictory and complex meanings, nuances and political implications; it sits on that problematic node where individual and collective, public and private, social and personal intersect and produce tensions in thinking sustainable transformations and green politics. The subject of modern liberal politics is expected or interpellated to act rationally and ethically, to be responsible for his or her own actions and therefore act so as not to damage – or reduce the damage to – other beings (humans and non-humans). As this subject is criticised by highlighting the non-rational, relational and contextual character of existence, then also the notion of individual agency and responsibility necessarily change. ‘Freedom of choice’ is restricted to the sociocultural, economic and material conditions in which we are born and live. Everyday practices comprise non-rational and non-deliberate aspects: routines, habit, desires, practices of care and libidinal attachments. Choices, in so far as they remain individual, tend to remain within the boundaries of an existing socio-ecological organisation, hence individuals’ capability to produce change is only limited. Should we conclude that assuming responsibility for ecological change through everyday micro-practices is but a way of denying ourselves that we are incapable of transformation, actually reinforcing the status quo and leaving it unaltered (Žižek 2011)? Should the responsibility for sustainable transitions be held by governments and institutions alone? The latter position assumes that there is a distinction between the social fabric and the institutions that represent it, producing an unhelpful splitting of agency. In its dichotomy, the individual is seen in its disempowered role and the state as the subject capable of making policies for transition. Within this framework, the governance of transitions on the part of institutions will be necessarily also a governance of everyday life, in which subjects are made to passively comply with socially accepted behaviours, deemed environmentally ‘good’. This encourages a technocratic and disempowering management of life and daily existence, in a form of biopower where discourses, political practices and the employment of dispositives of power/knowledge seek to shape everyday life and discipline it to established ends. This approach depoliticises the debate around what these ends are and obscures the more structural determinants of unsustainability (Shove and Walker 2010). More fruitful might then be re-thinking responsibility itself. Instead of something that pertains either to the individual or to some type of abstract political entity, we might introduce a relational view that sees transformative capacities as pertaining to more-than-human collectives, or assemblages (Alaimo 2012). Here, it is ‘response-ability’ – being able to respond to the other – that can be a first step towards an engagement with our environments that is cognisant of the limits of human action, giving the opportunity for reparation, creation and invention of new socio-ecologies (Haraway 2016). Everyday actions are always already political, collective and ecological. In this perspective, in order to actualise their transformative potential, it is important to expand connections, generating a shared aim and sense of belonging. Knowledge Related to questions about responsibility are questions concerned with the status and role of knowledge. If we assume that rational and ethical subjects act on the basis of the knowledge they have of a particular situation, then it is important to offer information on environmental issues and possible solutions, so that individuals develop awareness and capacity of choice.

Engaging the everyday  475 According to this view, knowledge on unsustainable practices changes attitudes and, as a result, also behaviours change (Stern 2000). Yet information provision alone, without structural changes to the material, semiotic and temporal cultures in which individuals are embedded, is not enough for them to practice what they learn to be a ‘good’ or ‘right’ behaviour – even if they are willing to do so. For instance, adopting sustainable behaviours might be expensive in money and time, so people need to accommodate their desire for ethical and sustainable daily choices to contextual constraints (Shove 2010). Having a great deal of information might even be counterproductive as the feeling of our inadequacy to change gives way to feelings of guilt and, ultimately, a nihilistic anything-goes attitude (Randall 2009). Perhaps more importantly, there remains the question of what and whose knowledge can be of help in making everyday life more ecological. There is a strong push for a top-down definition of environmental risk and adaptation that comes from institutions, and is backed up by official scientific discourse. Although this is an important source of knowledge, it becomes problematic in the moment it is deployed as a master-narrative that seeks to hegemonise the local and lived knowledges that inform socio-ecological dealings in concrete territories and histories. The hierarchisation of knowledge obscures those forms of local human non-human relationalities that have always sustained life reproduction, and which are able to come to terms with the concrete characters of ecological assemblages in order to preserve their vitality (Martínez-Alier 2002; Frandy and Cederström 2017). Everyday life politics might then also be about rediscovering different forms of knowledge, related to care and regeneration. These are not to be considered inferior to scientific understandings but as coexisting with them on the same plane and, possibly, providing the opportunity to rethink science as an embedded practice of resilience, r-existence and creation (Salleh 2017). Socio-Technical Innovations or Social Inventiveness? Part of the current unsustainability of everyday life is believed to depend on the systems of provision, infrastructures, materials and habits that embed everyday life and sustain its practices (Chapters 11 and 15 in this volume). These have been designed according to the affordances of fossil resources, such as carbon, oil and gas, which are now becoming scarce but, most importantly, are proving extremely ecologically problematic. Hence, one of the crucial steps in operating a transition to more sustainable livelihoods is that of devising new ways of living, of (re)producing life, without the side effects that fossil fuel economies imply. This change has often been thought in respect of socio-technical innovation (Geels 2010). The term ‘socio-technical innovation’ implies that transitions cannot be simply a top-down process in which new technologies are devised by experts who then impose them on the populace. In order for the new technologies to be politically acceptable and technically functioning, innovative systems of provision need to go hand in hand with changes in social organisation, practices, habits and ways of intending the world. For instance, the use of green-powered grids not only involves the implementation of complex technological assemblages ranging from solar panels to information and communication technology (ICT) software (Chapter 38 in this volume), but also demands that social subjects are capable and ready to change habits and routines (for example, using energy-demanding devices at different times), become literate with digital technologies, accept to have a different kind of control over the energy availability in their houses.

476  Handbook of critical environmental politics Who is to decide and shape this process of transition? For many, it is sufficient that practices of research and development (R&D) become participatory and include a sample of subjects who are prospectively to acquire the innovations in order to adjust the transformation process to their needs, desires, bodies and voices. For others, though, this is not so straightforward (Grinbaum and Groves 2013). Those who opt to see a sustainable transition as a matter of everyday-life mobilisation aimed at the construction of completely different modes of life problematise expert and institutionally led approaches as but another instance of technocratic and ultimately faulty way of managing transitions. By remaining within the ideological and practical coordinates of current modes of living, this would at best manage to improve energy efficiency and partially diminish emissions, but it might also show side effects in the long run. For instance, while electric cars and solar panels are seen as green alternative technologies that might promote everyday life sustainability, they also pose issues regarding the energy- and resource-intensive production and disposal of their components. Changing, Reducing and Transforming ‘Consumption’ We now encounter another, related, crucial node of the debate; that is, the role of consumption practices for sustainability. Is it sufficient to change the ways people consume in their everyday life (and, as a consequence, the ways in which commodities and utilities are produced), or is a more radical change in the whole socio-ecological organisation of life on the planet needed, including a profound reshaping of the ways we produce, exchange and use things? In between these poles, there are more nuanced positions such as those proposing that consumption can be made more sustainable if it shifts to non-material commodities, or that we can reduce consumption while leaving generally intact contemporary life formations. The answer depends on where different streams of thought locate the problem of unsustainability. Is it fossil-fuel? Is it consumerist societies? Is capitalist organisation of life, labour and human– non-human relationality to be held responsible? According to the different positions, solutions proposed range from a greening of consumption and production, to a need to put limits to consumption and thus growth, to a complete rethinking of what it means to (re)produce life on earth (Hobson 2013b). Labour and Autonomy To some extent, concerns about labour seem external to everyday life, the latter often being defined as what labour is not: reproduction and care versus production, personal relations versus contractual, paid, relations, and so on. However, looking more radically at everyday life sustainability leads us to also problematise these dichotomies and rethink the status of these terms (Chapter 41 in this volume). Ecofeminist literature (for example, Mies 2001; Salleh 2017; Chapter 3 in this volume), for instance, highlights that the unsustainability of contemporary capitalist patriarchal societies has at least part of its roots in this strict division of the two spheres: the everyday ‘private’ sphere that pertains to women, and that of salaried labour, where males sell their time to produce commodities. The latter activity, on the one hand, is subjected to the need for increasing (value) production and therefore the destructive dynamics of capital accumulation, but on the other, it presupposes the unpaid feminine labour of care and reproduction. In advanced capitalist societies, reproduction is more directly integrated into the formal capitalist economy; in order to sustain growth and accumulation, it starts to

Engaging the everyday  477 be based on an escalating consumption of commodities, itself becoming an environmentally damaging activity (Mies 2001). In this process, the ‘negentropic’ potential of reproductive labour, that is, its capacity to counterbalance the degradation of matter and energy that is involved in production processes (see Leff 2015; Leonardi 2019), is strongly limited and with it the opportunities of embodying different, less violent, relationships with living beings. The knowledge, sensitivity, habits and material cultures that foreground sustainable life reproduction are erased as this sphere is commodified (Chapter 4 in this volume). Hence, partially in line with Fraser’s (2016) observations on the contradiction between capital and care, we notice that capital systematically undermines the bases of social reproduction, generating a crisis to which it is incapable of responding. Ecofeminists hence propose that the non-appropriative and careful forms of daily engagement with other beings that women (as a result of their social positioning) constantly experience might be a first step towards re-embedding economies in the felt needs of specific, emplaced and concrete communities. Following the idea that human activities are to be directed to ‘living well’ instead of to growth and development imperatives, they propose an economy of autonomy and sufficiency that overcomes the distinction between productive and reproductive labour. Everyday life becomes the broader space of existence where exchanges with the rest of nature (action, knowledge and technology) can be reshaped towards an organic and purposeful reconnection; it is where needs and desires are embodied in their concrete, finite, forms, and happiness is sought in sufficiency: flourishing with the rest of nature, not through mastering it (Salleh 2017). Is Environmentalism for the Rich or for the Poor? These considerations bring me to one, final, contentious issue for the environmental politics of everyday life; namely, the debate that sees environmentalism as a bourgeois or middle-class preoccupation as opposed to the idea that the poor are those who most embody and recognise the need for sustainability. The ‘postmaterialist’ thesis (Inglehart 2007) is that environmental preoccupations in everyday life emerge after basic needs are satisfied and a particular degree of material well-being and affluence is attained. Environmental protection comes after socio-economic development, since the values foregrounding preservation of ecological balances are seen as secondary to preoccupations over material conditions. For instance, a consumer might start buying green commodities only after he or she does not need to penny pinch to get to the end of the month; given social groups mobilise for the environment only in the absence of more pressing problems, such as housing or feeding. Yet this view is problematic on a number of grounds (Meyer 2015). First, it dichotomises material and non-material aspects of existence, downplaying their interconnectedness. Second, it does not problematise the model and ideological construction of modern development and that it was in large part responsible for environmental degradation in the first place. Finally, it seems to suggest that it is the world’s poor who pollute more than the rich because they are not concerned with, and cannot afford, green lifestyles. On the contrary, ecological impact does not correlate with green values, conscience or ideals but with income and in the opposite direction: the richer you are, the more you pollute. This is owing to the habit(us) and affordances of a rich life being intrinsically more energy demanding and wasteful (for example, flights, more cars changed and rebound effects) (Meyer and Kersten 2016). Secondly, but even more importantly, taking a global perspective

478  Handbook of critical environmental politics we see that it has been the rich that, in order to produce profit or sustain their everyday life standards, have created ecological devastation worldwide. It is the world’s poor who, in many instances, engage in reparative and preserving practices for ecosystems that would otherwise be destroyed (Martínez-Alier 2002). Finally, as the new mobilisations around everyday sustainable materialisms suggest, social subjects tend to invent and make-do different, more sustainable and autonomous ways of life at those times when (capitalist) development fails. For instance, in moments of crisis and impoverishment, participation in mainstream consumption practices becomes more difficult and people experiment with reduction, creative reuse, self-production, and so on. Everyday life shows its capacity to produce sustainable alternatives to the dominant, ecologically damaging, forms of life (Bertell 2017; Schlosberg 2019).

OPEN QUESTIONS: WHAT ROLE FOR EVERYDAY LIFE IN RESHAPING SOCIO-ECOLOGIES? In this brief overview we have seen everyday life in its ambiguous and yet productive position as regards sustainability, the politics of the environment and transformative ecological practices. On the one hand, individual-based strategies for change at ‘micro’ level are destined to be ineffective and possibly counterproductive; on the other, not even macro-level changes in themselves will be enough, particularly if they are understood as top-down infrastructural interventions that aim at making more ecological the assemblages of everyday life (for example, energy, mobility and consumption). What seems to emerge from the discussion developed in this chapter is that everyday politics of the environment, if they are to be effective, ought to involve a profound transformation of the fabric of daily existence, at least in Western societies. This would require changes at systemic and subjective levels: in the way wider flows of energy, material and symbols circulate in society but also in how existence is experienced, interpreted and sensed. An open question in this regard is how much this change is to correspond with a complete systemic transformation: is it enough, for instance, that greening the means of (re)production goes hand in hand with changed environmental sensitivities and deeper responsibility for the non-human; or is it the case that sustainability needs a radical critique of socio-economic, socio-ecologic, organisation – such as questioning not only current capitalist economy but instead capitalism tout court? In any event, how is it possible to engage the everyday in processes of change and transformation? According to what answer one gives to each of these questions the levels of engagement will vary. A ‘shallower’ approach to sustainable transitions would see institutions collaborating with citizens in reshaping everyday practices, accommodating novel systems of provision to their needs and desires, meanwhile counting on awareness-raising and environmental information and education. Other forms of engagement can occur through consumption, as consumer-citizens make their preferences heard in the market, now representing the public sphere. More radically, we might hope to start from everyday needs and demands, building from there environmental mobilisations and forces of transformation. If environmental politics in times of crisis are brought to radical conclusions, the constitution of everyday life as ambiguous but independent private sphere of reproduction might be challenged. In the perspective of a re-embedding human productivity within concrete ecological assemblages in post-capitalist societies, there might not be the space for an economy

Engaging the everyday  479 distinct from those needs, demands and desires emerging from embodied and concrete experience. How human subjects go about their everyday existence would then be totally reshaped as a practice of common care for close and not-so-close living beings and ecological aliveness. Subjectivity is thus a key category of radical engagements for the everyday. As researchers, we should be attentive to this dimension since, as we strive to build new socio-ecologies, it is its joys and sorrows, repetitions and differences, that indicate systemic impasses and the need for transformation (Dal Gobbo 2020). This is not sufficient. Everyday experiences offer glimpses of change, sometimes evanescent events suggesting new political directions; they take place within contrasting systems of values and organisation, so they are contradictory; they differ widely according to biographical trajectories, geographical location and social context. The question of how to make everyday movements and needs a significant collective force remains open. Numerous grassroots movements have emerged that condense these demands. Yet, a wider politicisation of everyday life might be required if wider, stronger, oppositions to systemic unsustainability are to concretise (de Moor et al. 2021). Environmental justice movements and the global feminist movements are currently positing reproduction at the core of their critique and political practice. They might become important interlocutors and allies in articulating the implicit awareness of everyday life, that living always implies an effort to ‘live well’ with, not against, other beings. Whether we lay the premises for this depends on the socio-political forms that ecological communities build on an ongoing basis.

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Engaging the everyday  481 Hobson, K. (2002), Competing discourses of sustainable consumption: does the ‘rationalisation of lifestyles’ make sense? Environmental Politics, 11 (2), 95–120. Hobson, K. (2013a), On the making of the environmental citizen, Environmental Politics, 22 (1), 56–72. Hobson, K. (2013b), ‘Weak’ or ‘strong’ sustainable consumption? Efficiency, degrowth, and the 10 Year framework of programmes, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 31 (6), 1082–98. Inglehart, R. (2007), Postmaterialist Values and the Shift from Survival to Self‐Expression Values, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jagers, S.C., Martinsson, J. and Matti, S. (2014), Ecological citizenship: a driver of pro-environmental behaviour? Environmental Politics, 23 (3), 434–53. Johnston, J. (2008), The citizen-consumer hybrid: ideological tensions and the case of whole foods market, Theory and Society, 37 (3), 229–70. Kallis, G., Paulson, S., D’Alisa, G. and Demaria, F. (2020), The Case for Degrowth, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lefebvre, H. (2011), The Production of Space, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2014), Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition, London: Verso. Leff, E. (2015), Political ecology: a Latin American perspective, Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente, 35 (December), 29–64. Leonardi, E. (2019), Bringing class back in: assessing the transformation of the value-nature nexus to strengthen the connection between degrowth and environmental justice’, Ecological Economics, 156 (C), 83–90, doi:​10​.1016/​j​.ecolecon​.2018​.09​.012. Litfin, K. (2014), Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community, Cambridge: Polity. Litfin, K. (2016), Ontologies of sustainability in ecovillage culture, in J.M. Meyer and J. Kersten (eds), The Greening of Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 249–64. Lockyer, J. and Veteto, J.R. (2013), Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Martínez-Alier, J. (2002), The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Meyer, J.M. (2015), Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meyer, J.M. and Kersten, J. (2016), Introduction, in J.M. Meyer and J. Kersten (eds), The Greening of Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–10. Micheletti, M. (2003), Political Virtue and Shopping, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mies, M. (2001), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books. Monticelli, L. (2018), Embodying alternatives to capitalism in the 21st century, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16 (2), 501–17. Oels, A. (2005), Rendering climate change governable: from biopower to advanced liberal government? Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 7 (3), 185–207. Randall, R. (2009), Loss and climate change: the cost of parallel narratives, Ecopsychology, 1 (3), 118–29. Rau, H. (2018), Minding the mundane: everyday practices as central pillar of sustainability thinking and research, in M. Boström and D. Davidson (eds), Environment and Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 207–32. Salleh, A. (2017), Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Post Modern, London: Zed Books. Schatzki, T.R. (2008), Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlosberg, D. (2019), From postmaterialism to sustainable materialism: the environmental politics of practice-based movements, Environmental Politics, accessed 9 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 09644016​.2019​.1587215. Schlosberg, D. and Coles, R. (2016), The new environmentalism of everyday life: sustainability, material flows and movements, Contemporary Political Theory, 15 (2), 160–81. Shove, E. (2010), Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42 (6), 1273–85. Shove, E. and Walker, G. (2010), Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life, Research Policy, 39 (4), 471–6.

482  Handbook of critical environmental politics Signori, S. and Forno, F. (2019), Consumer groups as grassroots social innovation niches, British Food Journal, 121 (3), 803–14. Soper, K. (2004), Rethinking the ‘good life’: the consumer as citizen, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 15 (3), 111–16. Soper, K. (2008), Alternative hedonism, cultural theory and the role of aesthetic revisioning, Cultural Studies, 22 (5), 567–87. Spaargaren, G. and Oosterveer, P. (2010), Citizen-consumers as agents of change in globalizing modernity: the case of sustainable consumption, Sustainability, 2 (7), 1887–908. Stern, P.C. (2000), Toward a coherent theory of environmentally significant behavior, Journal of Social Issues, 56 (3), 407–24. Stolle, D. and Micheletti, M. (2013), Political Consumerism: Global Responsibility in Action, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tews, K., Busch, P. and Jorgens, H. (2003), The diffusion of new environmental policy instruments, European Journal of Political Research, 42 (4), 569–600. Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, revd edn, New York: Penguin. Thomas, G., Groves, C., Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. (2017), Texturing waste: attachment and identity in every-day consumption and waste practices, Environmental Values, 26 (6), 733–55. Žižek, S. (2011), Living in the End Times, London: Verso.

35. Environmental movements Viviana Asara

INTRODUCTION Environmental activism is a kaleidoscope concept that has taken manifold shapes, hybridised with different claims and generated diverse varieties of environmentalism. For this reason the chapter takes a broad definition of environmental movements, as ‘networks of informal interactions that may include, as well as individuals and groups who have no organizational affiliation, organizations of varying degrees of formality (including even political parties, especially Green parties) that are engaged in collective action motivated by shared identity or concern about environmental issues’ (Rootes and Brulle 2013). Environmental movements have been referred to also as a ‘very broad church’ (Berny and Rootes 2018, p. 947), a phenomenon that is highly diverse in its forms of organization and action, from the radical, but sometimes covert direct action of the ‘green’ movement (Doherty 2002) through demonstrative public protest, to the often publicly invisible actions of bureaucratised formal organizations that lobby governments or work in concert with governments and /or corporations to achieve desired environmental outcomes. (Rootes and Nulman 2015)

How to do justice to this broad field of study and phenomena is a challenging endeavour and it is impossible to be exhaustive. A critical approach to the topic of environmental movements entails, first, recognising that ‘mainstream’ debates have mostly been conducted and steered through a Western gaze, and they have privileged the study of a particular type of environmentalism, which is not much concerned with livelihoods, bodies and issues of social justice (see the Introduction and Chapters 2 and 37 in this volume). As discussed in the following sections, this has practically meant, aside from a few important exceptions (for example, Martínez-Alier 2002), an invisibilisation of non-Western environmentalisms, and often a consideration of Western movements that were giving centre stage to the entanglements of social and environmental concerns as not reaching the high ranks of environmentalism, as they were supposedly not pure enough. Relatedly, a Northern environmentalism has been held to differ in substance from a Southern environmentalism. While non-Western, Southern environmental activism is discussed in another chapter of this handbook (Chapter 33 in this volume), I reflect on and problematise this general bias and, in juxtaposition to that approach, look more specifically at how the environmental movements’ struggles for environmental sustainability in Western countries have overlapped with social concerns and – beyond a single-issue approach – consider their implications for democracy and transformation concerns. By so doing, I follow the conceptualisation of a strand of studies that have placed a democratic quest at the core of their understanding of environmental movements. This is particularly so for what I refer to as socio-environmental movements, that is, those movements whose expression of ecological concerns went hand in hand with broader socio-political claims that are perceived as intimately connected to ecological issues. This comprises many different movements that have often been attributed different names (for example, environmental justice movement, political 483

484  Handbook of critical environmental politics ecology groups, green movements and LULUs movements) or diversely identified (and often overlooked or not recognised) in different sociocultural contexts, but share some fundamental traits across borders. This chapter more particularly scrutinises the prism environment-democracy by looking at two dimensions: varieties of environmentalism and environmental movements (and evolution thereof), and the institutionalised versus grassroots dimension of environmental movements. The environmental justice movement will be used as an example of a socio-environmental movement to illustrate some of the debates. The final section concludes with reflections on the transformative potential of environmental movements.

VARIETIES OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS According to several authors, the collective identity of (some strands of) environmental movements cannot prescind from a democratic quest as well as from a broader link to wider socio-political challenges. For example, for Diani and Rambaldo (2007, p. 780), ‘the environment as a political issue can hardly be detached from grassroots, participatory politics’. Doherty (2002) identifies (and focuses on) a subset of the broader environmental movements on the basis of its democratic bent, what he terms a ‘green movement’, whose collective identity includes a commitment to non-hierarchical styles of organisation and acceptance of the value of changing our lifestyle to be consistent with political principles. This means, for Doherty, overriding ‘all those EMOs [Environmental Movement Organisations] that do not challenge the existing political or social system’ such as single-issue pressure groups (Doherty 2002, pp. 12, 14) or that merely argue for policy change without challenging ‘some feature of dominant cultural codes or social and political values’ (Doherty and Doyle 2006, p. 703). According to Doherty, the reason why a particular anti-authoritarian and pro-egalitarian form characterised the green movement since its inception, including an engagement with questions of power and social justice in contraposition to a Malthusian or eco-survivalist tendency (for example, featuring in 1970s authors such as Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin), stemmed from the influence the New Left exerted upon it. As noted by Doherty (2002, p. 33), ‘as the first major critic of the certainties of post-war politics’, the New Left’s radical democratic ideas acted as the basis of an alternative politics which challenged the limits of representative democracy and inspired the green commitment to grassroots forms of democracy. Also, while ecological themes were not central to the New Left, they were present, and it is possible to establish links between the ecological dimensions of parts of the New Left and contemporary green politics.

The environmental movements that emerged in many Western countries in the 1960s borrowed several themes from the New Left movement, from the radical democratic project and the expressive and convivial dimension of politics to the quest for change from below, for example, through protest and the creation of alternative communities (Doherty 2002). This wave of environmental movements (part of the broader cycle of new social movements) is also depicted as the second wave of environmentalism, following the first wave of the early conservation movement at the turn of the twentieth century, and preceding a third wave brought

Environmental movements  485 about by the efforts of the institutionalised movement to shape environmental legislation in the late 1980s and 1990s. Conceptions over varieties of environmentalism are intertwined with the articulation of different types of environmental groups, and these have been changing with the evolution of environmental movements. Doherty explicitly links his conceptualisation to Dobson’s (1990 [2007]) famous distinction between environmentalism and ecologism: while the former argues for a managerial approach to environmental problems without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production, ecologism holds that a sustainable and fulfilling existence presupposes radical changes both in relationship to the non-human natural world, and in our mode of social and political life. Dobson’s distinction reflected broader discussions ongoing since the 1970s within the nascent environmental movement that characterised the second wave of environmentalism and closely followed similar distinctions previously outlined by both political ecologists and social movement scholars. More particularly, his distinction recalls the one previously made by Gorz (1978, p. 24). For this founding figure of political ecology, while environmentalism only imposes new constraints to capitalist economic rationality without questioning the bottom tendency of the system, ecologism implies a change of paradigm, questioning the reasoning of techniques, production and consumption, and is aimed at reducing economic rationality and market exchanges for the benefit of societal and cultural goals at the service of individuals’ flourishing. In his seminal study on Italian environmental movements in the 1970s and 1980s, Mario Diani (Diani 1988; 1995, p. 26; Diani and Lodi 1988) elaborated a threefold diachronic typology of ecology movements in Milan that would be extensively relied upon. This distinction is interesting for the role he attributes to democratic concerns as a criteria for distinguishing a specific type of environmentalism, that is, political ecology. Based on interpretations of environmental problems as well as on their social and political roots (socio-demographic traits, political background and patterns of recruitment), Diani’s typology first pitted the new political ecology groups against more traditional conservation groups, and later identified a third current that emerged in the late 1970s (Diani 1988). Conservationists represented the only active form of ecological action in Italy until the 1960s. Many of their constituents holding no previous political activism, they envisaged defending the environment as understood largely in relation to natural heritage (parks, coasts, fauna, and so on) and in aesthetic and ethical terms, and attributed the cause of environmental degradation to irrational human behaviour and short-sighted utilitarianism (Diani 1988). Conservationists thus sought its remediation through the transformation of individual behaviour by engaging in moderate and reactive actions, such as consciousness-raising and education campaigns. This conservationist current has been singled out also by several other authors. Martínez-Alier (2002, p. 1) famously referred to it as the ‘cult of wilderness’ movement, dominating at the international level together with the other mainstream variety, the ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’.1 Concerned with the preservation of pristine nature by setting natural areas aside from human use, Martínez-Alier charged the cult of wilderness with excluding local people who have a stake and local lay knowledge of sustainable natural management, while being increasingly drawn into an economic language through the alliance with the gospel of eco-efficiency (Anguelovski and Martínez-Alier 2014). Instead, Diani named ‘political ecologists’ those new groups, that emerged in the early 1970s, that held diverse social and cultural roots and tightly linked environmental concerns with a democratic quest. Many of these groups originated in the discussions following the publication of the 1973 Limits to growth report (Meadows et al. 1972) – and previously, Rachel

486  Handbook of critical environmental politics Carson’s (1962) landmark book – and the turmoil this generated in public as well as academic debates, challenging widespread assumptions in mainstream economic thinking regarding the viability of perpetual economic growth (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015). Diani identified other roots of the political ecology groups in forms of class conflict developed both within and outside the factories. On the one hand, the organised opposition to industrial pollution and degrading quality of life in segregated deprived neighbourhoods, and, on the other, the concern of workers over health and safety issues in factories and the demands of wider control over the production cycle. Furthermore, an environmental counterculture spread out in diverse groups, such as youth subcultures, libertarian currents and free spaces, where alternative practices diffused. Created as ‘a new approach to environmental issues, emphasising their political and social implications’ (Diani 1995, p. 25), the political ecology variety blamed the capitalist mode of production for the exploitation of both nature and the labour force, envisioning a change of the goals of social production, coinciding during its first phase with mobilisations against nuclear power plants. This approach also entailed the mobilisation of a different notion of environment, which was not restricted to natural resources, but expanded to incorporate the social environment and urban areas. Unlike the reactive approach of conservationists, the democratic quest of political ecology groups entailed struggles for wider social change, grassroots democracy and direct control by the citizen of industrial production and of energy and economic policies. Furthermore, their members were involved in diverse political groups, which also was unlike the conservationists (Diani and Lodi 1988). This variety would overlap, at least in part, with what was referred to as the ‘environmental justice movement’, first in the USA and then in many other countries, and as urban environmental movements. Finally, Diani also identified a third component of the ecology movement to have emerged later in the 1970s, that is, environmentalism, with eclectic frames drawn from diverse traditions of ecologist thought and collective action, mixing reactive and proactive action through a pragmatic orientation and a weaker ideological coherence, and inclusive, more single-issue, and short-term patterns of participation. For Giugni and Grasso (2015, p. 341) environmentalists are thus characterised by more concrete campaigns, more specific issues and the combination of conventional and unconventional forms of action. Political ecology groups and, to a lesser extent, environmentalists were considered to be part of the new social movements (Diani and Lodi 1988). New social movements are a cluster of movements including the student, environmental, peace and second-wave feminism movements which were seen as products of post-industrial society, transcending class as the main social cleavage, focused on cultural and symbolic concerns linked to issues of identity and everyday life, and developing decentralised organisation and radical mobilisation tactics (Johnston et al. 1994; Buechler 1995). One central element that distinguished new social movements from old social movements was notoriously identified by Inglehart (1977) to lie in the development of post-materialist values following the transition from scarcity to relative affluence typical of post-industrial societies. For Inglehart, new social movements differed from the traditional labour movement in that they were less centred on material satisfaction and re-distributional issues and more on quality of life, democracy and environmental values, and were typically a middle-class phenomenon. Inglehart’s ‘silent revolution’, drawing upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and suggesting that humans develop higher, post-materialistic needs (such as self-expression and environmental concerns) only after having satisfied survival needs, had great influence upon the most important new social movements theorists (for example, Habermas 1981, p. 33; Melucci 1989, pp. 177–8; Dalton

Environmental movements  487 and Kuechler 1990). While other new social movement theorists, such as Melucci (1989) or Touraine (1989), underlined the fundamental challenge posed by environmental movements to contemporary democracies, for Inglehart environmentalism was a result of the successes of capitalist development. However, his theories were contested by several studies. Martínez-Alier (1995, p. 2) charged Inglehart with holding a ‘metaphysical view of economic growth’ oblivious of ‘the environmental conditions and consequences of affluence’. The ‘environmentalism of the rich’, rather than sprouting, as Inglehart postulated, from an affluence-induced liberation from survival needs which would have enabled the appreciation of environmental amenities, was instead linked, Martínez-Alier (1995, p. 2) noted, to ‘the effluents of affluence’, that is to increasing environmental pollution and depletion of natural resources in Northern countries, from acid rain and industrial contamination, to nuclear accidents and the increase of greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, Inglehart was disregarding the environmentalism of the poor, that is, of those who have a material interest in the environment as a source and a requirement for livelihood (Martínez-Alier 1995, 2002). This was also backed and further supported by the study of several environmental sociologists showing that affluence does not make people more concerned about the environment (Brechin and Kempton 1994; Dunlap and York 2008; Givens and Jorgenson 2011; Fairbrother 2013). The objective problems–subjective values (OPSV) hypothesis later introduced by Inglehart (1995) attempted to correct that bias, accounting for environmental concerns in less developed countries when environmental degradation directly affects people (Brechin 1999). However, this contributed to the still dominant idea of two different types of environmentalisms: in the South derived from citizens directly experiencing pollution and environmental problems (objective problems), and in the North from subjective, post-materialistic values (Dunlap and York 2008; Givens and Jorgenson 2011). This dichotomy of objective conditions and subjective values, between the material and the symbolic, is however problematic as material conditions are experienced and understood through values, and further inform them (Asara 2016; Schlosberg 2019). As stated by Schlosberg (2019, p. 4), ‘the postmaterialist thesis implies that objective material environmental harms in “developed” countries are sufficiently minimal that they do not distract much of the populace from the pursuit of “higher” values, and that only such “higher values” stimulate environmentalist action’. This type of dual conceptualisation can be found in, and has supposedly influenced, several social movement studies, whereby a Northern environmentalism is held to differ from a Southern environmentalism in both content and movement constituency. For example, Doherty and Doyle (2006) identify three types of environmentalisms: post-material, focused on the largely non-anthropocentric concerns of nature conservation in the New World; post-industrial, in Western Europe, characterised by a political ecology approach which alongside nature conservation issues wrestles with questions of social inequalities and structural change; and post-colonial, in the global South, where green concerns are cast in the light of the coloniser versus the colonised through a structural lens, and with an orientation towards issues of environmental security involving the rights of people to gain access to the fundamental resources for survival (see also Doyle 2004). In a similar fashion, a few studies have noted that, while Northern environmentalism is focused on more standard green concerns, Southern environmentalism is focused on brown concerns, such as protection from environmental hazards and pollution. This (by far, dominant) conception accordingly sees new environmental movements in Western countries as a predominantly new middle-class phenomenon, consist-

488  Handbook of critical environmental politics ing of highly educated individuals employed in teaching, creative, cultural or social services, and some of the young administrative specialists in public service (Offe 1985; Kriesi 1989; Kriesi et al. 1995). Brown concerns in the Global South have instead been found to hold a more heterogenous social constituency (Pakulski and Crook 1998; Giugni and Grasso 2015). Here, environmental movements’ entanglement with broader socio-political issues is sometimes even considered to diminish their environmentalism. For example, Rootes and Brulle (2013) write that ‘in the Global South, however, environmental campaigns are usually so bound up with campaigns for human, democratic and economic rights that they often do not take the form of environmental movements’ (see also Diani and Rambaldo 2007, pp. 782–3; Giugni and Grasso 2015). Other studies have indicated two different types of environmentalisms even within Europe, with the South suffering a Mediterranean syndrome of environmental backwardness (see, for a rebuttal, Kousis et al. 2008; Lekakis and Forno 2019). However, note that, similar to the distinction between material concerns and environmental values, brown and green concerns are not always easily distinguishable as they can be intertwined in activists’ motivations. Furthermore, they can both be found in countries of the Global North and Global South. For example, Scheidel et al. (2020) have found that what differentiates Global North and Global South, instead of green versus brown concerns, is (staying with the colours) the type of brown. While environmental conflicts occur across all income groups, the relative presence of conflict type changes with economic development: conflicts over conservation, biomass and land, and water management constitute the bulk of conflicts in low-income countries but only a small share in high-income countries, while the reverse happens for conflicts over waste management, tourism, nuclear power, industrial zones and other infrastructure projects. Even this distinction of conflict types may increasingly be called into question by the far-reaching consequences of climate change. Furthermore, according to Doherty and Doyle (2006, p. 706), ‘the South can exist within the North’ and the reverse. Alternatively, by adopting a political ecology lens, ‘the interstitial South is the otherness within the North … the poor are everywhere, even within the rich societies of the so-called developed countries. The urban space reproduces segregation and social stratification, creating the interstitial South of ghettoes’ (Armiero 2014). An example is the environmental justice movement, which originated in the USA ‘in deliberate juxtaposition of what it perceived as the white elite environmental movement’ (Doherty and Doyle 2006). Relatedly, a few recent studies have contested a representation of environmental movements as having a middle-class basis, showing instead that they have a much broader and diverse constituency (Mertig and Dunlap 2001; Norton 2003; Botetzagias and van Schuur 2012). Recently, an increasing number of studies have re-discovered or emphasised how labour environmentalism (Stevis et al. 2018) or working-class environmentalism (Barca and Leonardi 2018) has played an important, though undervalued, role in both the first and the second waves of environmentalism.2 In some countries, at least since the 1960s, struggles for industrial and public health within and outside factories were waged through an alliance between militant scientists, workers and environmentalists, and have contributed to a great extent to the politicisation of the environmental movement combining ecological with social justice claims (Barca 2012; Armiero et al. 2013; Baracca 2020). Militant scientists and health professionals were coming from the ranks of new social movements (student, environmental, feminist and radical left) and, together with organised workers, they questioned the neutrality and objectivity of science by denouncing its collusion with corporate and state power.3 This was part of a broader trend of new social movements in many countries, which came

Environmental movements  489 to practice alternative approaches to science and technology, critiquing technoscience, its exploitative approach to nature and its relationship to the military-industrial system (Jamison 2006). Eyerman and Jamison (1991) refer to a cognitive praxis undertaken by environmental movements, characterised by knowledge-making activity, combining ‘new worldview or cosmological assumptions with alternative organisational forms and technological criteria’ (Jamison 2006, p. 56). This bottom-up knowledge production is later transformed into various types of expertise, institutionalised in public and private sectors, partly incorporated as part of the political culture, and affecting the policy domain (Jamison 2006). In the USA, the occupational health movement and the work of union leaders such as Anthony Mazzocchi played an important role in the passage of environmental reforms, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clear Water Act, while the United Farm Workers of Cesar Chavez raised, in the early 1960s, the issue of pesticide poisoning as a health struggle uniting both workers and consumers (Barca 2012). According to Barca (2012), in Italy, compared with the US experience, there was a stronger link between environmentalists and the labour movement, often backed by the role of the Communist Party (Armiero 2013, p. 34). Struggles for the recognition and regulation of industrial hazards gave shape to new methodologies of research on occupational health, based on the direct production of knowledge on the part of workers, to claims for the direct, democratic control over the work environment on the part of workers and to the development of a popular epidemiology. These advances were instrumental to the passage of important social reforms such the Labour Statute (1970) and the Public Health System (1978) (Baracca 2020; Ruzzenenti 2020). According to environmental historians Poggio and Ruzzenenti (2020, p. 40), this ‘labour model of intervention for the decontamination of work environments’ anticipated, in the 1960s, several features of the ecological culture that were to develop in the following decade: the subjective experience and active participation of those directly involved as a necessary requisite for risk prevention and environmental decontamination; the priority given to prevention, refusing the logics of compensation; and the non-delegation to science and technicians, whose role turns into one of counselling and support for workers, depositaries of the right to control and verification. In the 1970s this working-class environmentalism raised the issue of social justice because noxious environment was not harming social groups in a homogenous manner in the factory and in the urban fabric, and contributed to the debate over not only ‘how to produce, but also what to produce and for which goals, for which development model’ (Ruzzenenti 2020). This has led some to speak, ex post, of an environmental justice movement or environmentalism of the poor ante litteram (Armiero 2013; Ruzzenenti 2020). In general, research on environmental practices and engagements of the labour movement ‘is still comparatively scarce’ (Stevis et al. 2018, p. 441) and there is great potential to be reaped out of cross-contamination between the fields of environmental labour studies and social movement studies. The environmental justice movement is a paradigmatic example of what I broadly refer to as a socio-environmental movement, that is, a movement where concerns for the environment are deeply intertwined with socio-political claims, such a social justice, through the formation of hybrids with a multi-issue focus. While, according to some authors (for example, Benford 2005) this can create an overextension of frames, a defuse conceptualisation and even subordination to socio-political issues, or a reduced or impure environmentalism (see above), according to other social movements scholars, intertwining socio-political with ecological claims can reap several benefits, such as the capability to reach a more heterogeneous con-

490  Handbook of critical environmental politics stituency (Heaney and Rojas 2014) and an enhanced transformative potential (Asara 2020; Gottlieb 2005). In the next section I consider in more detail the origin and evolution of the environmental justice movement as a paradigmatic example of a socio-environmental movement putting centre stage the linkage between ecology and democracy claims.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT AS A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT According to Pellow’s (2016, p. 222) definition, the environmental justice (EJ) movement ‘is composed of people from communities of colour, indigenous communities, and working-class communities who are focused on combating environmental injustice – the disproportionate burden of environmental harm facing these populations’. For the EJ movement, social justice is inseparable from environmental protection. While in the early 1970s researchers in the USA had found strong correlations between social class and air quality, the first mobilisation achieving national visibility only took place in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, when 414 demonstrators were arrested during a protest against the siting of a toxic waste facility in a black and low-income neighbourhood (Agyeman et al. 2016). The environmental justice movement challenged the ‘cult of wilderness’ and a post-material environmentalism detached from the needs of people (Sicotte and Brulle, 2017). Emerging from a critique of bureaucratic ‘reform’ environmentalism (Brulle 2000; Gottlieb 2005), at least in its origins, the EJ movement contested ‘mainstream’ and formalised environmental movement organisations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the environmental justice movement started in the USA, in many countries the mainstream environmental movement had already started to experience a process of institutionalisation. Since its early history, the movement also involved a critique of the limitation of conceiving the environment as wilderness, and a quixotic elsewhere, broadening its notion to include the places where we live, work, and play, that is, the environmental conditions in which people are immersed in their everyday lives, thus reframing environmental issues as injustice issues. The environmental justice movement champions the environmentalism of the poor (Anguelovski and Martínez-Alier 2014) and, as an example of a socio-environmental movement, shares some common ground with Diani’s political ecology movement for its contamination with wider socio-political issues and for its embedding in a web of other social movements, such as movements for racial equality and the rights of Indigenous people and the poor, farmers, workers and movements for urban hygiene, and occupational and public health (Sicotte and Brulle 2017). While the term ‘environmental justice’ was originally coined in the USA as linked to the inequitable exposure of racial/ethnic, minority communities to environmental ‘bads’ in urban settings, the concept and its application progressively experienced a substantial expansion. I partly borrow from Schlosberg’s (2013) identification of three main expansions of the environmental justice concept. First, a horizontal expansion involved the inclusion of a broader range of issues: from so-called environmental ‘bads’, such as the unequal exposure to toxics and dumps, to environmental ‘goods’, such as access to green space, to issues linked to land use, transportation, water quality and distribution, energy development and jobs, brownfield refurbishment and food justice. Furthermore, the environmental justice discourse evolved from a primary focus on distribution of hazards or vulnerability to an increasing demand for

Environmental movements  491 participation/procedural justice by, and recognition of, those most affected by environmental injustice (Schlosberg 2013; Vanderheiden 2016). Recognition increasingly involved the consideration of other categories of difference, from race and class to gender and sexuality, and the way they are entangled in the production of environmental injustice through an intersectionality lens (Di Chiro 2008; Pellow 2016; Asara 2020). Procedural justice has involved movements denouncing the lack of transparency and democracy in decision-making processes, and sometimes succeeding in establishing new structures of accountability and the inclusion of participatory procedures and environmental regulations and rights through, for instance, environmental impact assessment mechanisms for mining projects approval (Barnett and Scott 2007; Urkidi and Walter 2011). Secondly, a vertical expansion entailed the use of the discourse of EJ in an increasing number of countries as well as the examination of the globalised and transnational nature of environmental justice movements and patterns of responsibility through the combination of a political economy lens (Pellow 2007; Schlosberg 2013). An example is the climate justice movement, which emerged at the COP6 climate negotiations in 2000 when the EJ movement and the UK-based grassroots group Rising Tide combined the emphasis on the inequity between North and South (calling for the repayment of ecological debt) and the heightened vulnerability of the poor towards climate impacts with a demand to phase down and divest from fossil fuels and tackle the climate crisis at its root, that is, seeing climate change as deeply linked with (and caused by) social and economic inequality (Ciplet et al. 2015; Sicotte and Brulle 2017; Ciplet and Harrison 2020) and rejecting market-based solutions. The climate justice movement would constitute the radical flank of the climate movement at the COP negotiations, in dialogic antagonism to the Climate Action Network (see the Introduction to this volume). Finally, a third expansion for Schlosberg (2013, p. 44) relates to the concern for the relationship with the non-human world, namely, a shift of emphasis ‘from environmental conditions as an example or manifestation of social injustice to one where justice is applied to the treatment of the environment itself’. This cultural dimension has been traditionally missing from environmental justice debates, where an anthropocentric approach has been dominating conceptions of justice. An outgrowth of this field, however, has recently investigated new materialist movements, foregrounding human practices and material flows that do not undermine environmental processes and systems (Schlosberg and Coles 2016), and looked at the type of ontological politics performed in everyday practices (Centemeri and Asara 2020; Chapter 34 in this volume). According to Pellow (2016), expansion of the EJ discourse has corresponded with the shift from a first-generation, primarily focused on documenting environmental inequality on the base of race and class, to a second-generation study, referred to as critical environmental justice studies (see also Pellow and Brulle 2005) which intend to address several limitations and tensions within EJ studies. One of these involves an understanding of the entrenched and embedded character of social inequality, and of the ways marginalised human populations are treated as inferior and less valuable, or as expendable (Pellow 2016), or even as invisible (Velicu and Kaika 2017). For example, Velicu (2020) has looked at how socio-economic and political inequalities determine a prospective environmental injustice, that is anticipated, as it occurs even before a formal decision is taken as regards the development of mining projects. These bring about land-grabbing, slow community disappearance and marginalisation, daily psychological damage, disavowal of alternatives and disqualification as political subjects. Others have also argued that the EJ movement is often side-lined by the rest of the environ-

492  Handbook of critical environmental politics mental movement (Dauvergne 2016) and left to face increasing violence, especially in the Global South. An Environmental Justice Atlas4 study, including more than 2700 cases of environmental conflicts, has shown the degree of systemic violence, whereby 21 per cent of the conflicts provoke displacement, 20 per cent criminalisation of dissent, 18 per cent physical violence and 13 per cent assassinations, a percentage rising to 19 per cent when Indigenous people are involved (Scheidel et al. 2020). The environmental justice frame, or livelihood-orientated concerns, have increasingly been included in the agenda of more conservationist EMOs (Di Gregorio 2012; Rootes and Brulle 2013) and even in official United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) documents, such as the Paris Agreement.5 This has often occurred, however, by means of a resignification of the meaning of environmental justice, emptying it of its more radical bent. Furthermore, alliances between environmental justice and conservationist EMOs entailing communication and resource exchanges have taken place in both the Global North and the Global South based on some distinct but compatible values (Di Gregorio 2012). Finally, according to some (Della Porta and Diani 2004), a stronger divide now may not be between conservationist and political ecology/environmental justice groups, but between grassroots and big, institutionalised EMOs, whose debate I address in the next section.

INSTITUTIONALISED VERSUS GRASSROOTS MOVEMENTS Internal democracy is another dimension of the democratic quest of environmental movements, and of their commitment to grassroots forms of democracy. While EMOs (mostly focused on nature preservation) have existed since the late nineteenth century (first wave of environmentalism), it is during the second wave that an increasing number of EMOs (for example Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace) started to organise at the transnational level, following increasing recognition of the global nature of environmental problems. This second wave was also characterised by a deep process of institutionalisation unfolding at two levels (Berny and Rootes 2018). External institutionalisation involved the role of environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) as authoritative and reliable sources of expertise for governments, their integration into policy networks, their provision of services to government and, in some countries, their reception of financial support from governments. Internal institutionalisation involved, especially in the 1980s, a process of formalisation, bureaucratisation and professionalisation following their organisational growth in respect of membership and financial resources through contributions from members and sympathisers, and through government subsidies (Kriesi 1996; Gottlieb 2005; Giugni and Grasso 2015; Berny and Rootes 2018). The type of relation between, on the one hand, formalisation, professionalisation and institutionalisation, and on the other, transformative and democratic potential has long been debated. While Piven and Cloward’s (1979) seminal work argued that formal organisations undermined movements’ disruptive capacity, resource mobilisation scholars have stated that larger and formalised organisations are more effective in engendering mobilisations because they are more capable of mobilising other types of resources, such as money and labour (Edwards and McCarthy 2004). Political opportunity studies have underlined that a movement’s institutionalisation is a sign of its strength, whereas the movement uses more disruptive repertoires of actions when political opportunities are closed and the movement is weaker (Caruso 2015;

Environmental movements  493 Rootes and Nulman 2015; Della Porta et al. 2019). For some, organisational size, formalisation and professionalisation are even associated with politicisation (Giugni and Grasso 2018). However, the third wave of environmentalism accentuated these institutionalisation trends, giving rise to two phenomena. First was the birth of green parties in the 1970s – often as an outcome of anti-nuclear campaigns – in particular prospering and winning seats in some European legislatures since the 1980s (Rootes and Brulle 2013). The literature has emphasised their double identity as ‘movement-parties’ and difficulty to combine grassroots democracy principles (what Kitschelt 1986 termed ‘the logics of constituency representation’) with traditional strategies required by parliamentary systems, thus veering gradually towards the ‘logics of party competition’, where choices of organisational form, programme, recruitment and strategy depend on patterns of electoral competition (Bomberg 1998; Kitschelt 1986, 2006). Secondly, EMOs were accused of having turned into ‘protest businesses’ (Jordan and Maloney 1997), that is centrally managed corporate entities competing for recruiting members and engendering commercialisation, with an increasing provision of paid services to its members (Kriesi 1996; Dauvergne 2016). Furthermore, EMOs were blamed of being dominated by salaried professional staff whereby members had no democratic voice but only served to fund organisational activities (Jordan and Maloney 1997). Similarly, according to Brulle (2000), external funding from foundations (the second largest source of funding after membership) and the institutionalisation and the involvement of EMOs in the legal and technocratic policy process, which drew EMOs into networks of economic and political power, led to the development of centralised and oligarchic organisations. He highlights that these are dominated by professional staffs and bureaucratic structures (with self-selecting boards) and deprived of internal, participatory democracy, thus contributing to a moderation of their political goals and the adoption of conventional political tactics: ‘instead of being governed by democratic and rational discourse, movement organizations become subordinated and controlled by market institutions’ (Brulle 2000, p. 274). Several studies have analysed how, for many EMOs, institutionalisation turned into co-optation (Dowie 1995; Dauvergne 2016). Especially after the Agenda 21 forged at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (Doyle 1998), the focus increasingly shifted from public regulation to private initiatives in the belief that growth and environmental concerns can be reconciled through the promotion of market-based instruments (Gomez and Naredo 2015), turning EMOs into mediators between the state and the market, involved in stakeholder participation, partnering with business to set up eco-labelling and ecocertification (Dauvergne 2016; Doyle 1998) or acting as service providers (Osti 1998). As noted by Dauvergne (2016, p. 14), ‘embracing the discourses of sustainable development, eco-business, stakeholder partnerships, and eco-consumerism opens up many opportunities for NGOs to access new resources, money, and corridors of power’, but it ends up ‘turning to consumers as sources and forces of change, urging them to be “consumer activists”’. With neoliberal environmental governance, EMOs institutionalise and participate in policy networks with governments and business through new practices of responsibilisation, whereby civil society and business get involved in political responsibilities previously associated with the state by expanding the public role of private actors, potentially leading to a depoliticisation of environmental issues ‘through a moral discourse and a technocratic practice that suppresses social conflict through consensus building’ (Thörn and Svenberg 2016, p. 593). The increasing trend towards political consumerism is seen as part of this new governance replacing political obligations with private autonomies (Pellizzoni 2012).

494  Handbook of critical environmental politics However, the institutionalisation of environmental movements is not a homogeneous phenomenon, and organisational consolidation does not ‘inexorably lead to bureaucratic and professionalised organisational models’ and to the abandonment of contentious forms of politics (Jiménez 2007, p. 363). Several authors have pitted the institutionalised and co-opted conservationist and mainstream EMOs – acting more like interest groups – against the more grassroots and radical environmental justice movements (Gottlieb 2005; Dauvergne 2016). Such a simple dichotomy has been countered by few others. For example, Brulle and Essoka’s study (2005) on the EJ movement, which has traditionally been considered a paradigmatic case of a grassroots movement, has challenged its very uniqueness. Their analysis of 140 EJ organisations has argued that rather than being a grassroots movement with decentralised structures based on multiple local community groups, its preponderant organisational structure is of an oligarchic type, similar to preservationist or reform environmentalism EMOs. Hence, for the authors, this casts doubt on the EJ movement’s legitimacy as representative of community concerns. Recognising the persisting vitality of local protest action and activism despite the trend of institutionalisation, Diani and Donati (1999) have offered a more complex picture than the dichotomy ‘institutionalisation versus radicalisation’ or ‘grassroots versus professional’. They have identified two dimensions of differentiation – professional versus participatory organisational models, and disruptive versus conventional forms of pressure – producing four types of movement organisations: the public interest lobby, the participatory protest organisation, the professional protest organisation and the participatory pressure group. However, note that in the conventional repertoires of action are included many different types of action, from lobbying techniques and petitioning campaigns to green shareholding, voluntary action in favour of the environment, educational campaigns and sponsoring commercial products. More recently Diani and Rambaldo (2007) have suggested that a new, important divide exists between movement groups mostly orientated towards protest and pressure repertoires and those foregrounding voluntary work and community service. Similarly, focusing more particularly on urban environmental movements between the late 1980s and the 1990s, Della Porta and Diani (2004) showed that besides the institutionalisation of the largest EMOs, and behind the less visible forms of action at the national level, rested the vitality of local movements, divided into protest-orientated and quality-of-life orientated forms of action of citizen committees in urban settings, and the service-orientated forms of action of the local environmental associations. Both, but especially the former, can mobilise against locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), thus constituting the backbone of what are known as LULUs movements – a specific type of, and often used as a synonym for, environmental justice movement outside of the USA. Despite the trends towards professionalisation in recent decades, recurring waves of protest have been revamping environmental movements. In general, grassroots environmental activism is considered to be a source of revitalisation of the environmental movement, because it represents ‘an important means of social learning about environmental issues, a school for participation generally, and an entry point for new activists and new issues’ (Rootes and Brulle 2013). Many of these instances of revamped environmental collective action have taken place at the local level, such as the British anti-roads protests of the 1990s and the many other LULUs/environmental justice movements in both urban, suburban or rural settings that have been (re)gaining media visibility or even increasing in mobilisation capacity in recent years, such as the Notre-dame-des Landes ZAD,6 the Ende Gelände blockades in Germany against

Environmental movements  495 lignite mining, the movement against the expansion of the Vienna airport, and the NO-TAP movement in the South of Italy against the TAP gas pipeline. In the literature at the crossroads between political ecology and ecological economics, the growth in global social metabolism is perceived as an important cause of the increase of global and local environmental conflicts (Muradian et al. 2012), or what in ecological economics are called ‘ecological distribution conflicts’ (Martínez-Alier et al. 2016). While these movements have been too easily depicted as Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY), they are often against a development model that sacrifices territories and communities for the sake of corporate (and colluded state) interests; thus, EJ movements often counterpose NIMBY with different slogans: Not in Anyone’s Backyard (NIAB), or Not On the Planet Earth (NOPE). Instead of simply representing selfish interests, EJ movements are often ‘the exercise of active citizenship, expressions of resistance to projects which seek to mask their own particularistic interests as broader causes for the ‘common good’ (della Porta and Piazza 2007, p. 866). Behind environmental conflicts there is a struggle over different values and conceptions of the common good. While these conflicts often arise from both environmental and health/safety concerns, and for this reason have sometimes been depicted as struggles for quality of life (Gould et al. 1996; Andretta et al. 2015), the democratic potential of LULUs movements also lies in that ‘it is through the expression of local concerns that we come to understand the “common good” for a diverse political community’ (McAvoy 1998, p. 288). The politicisation of expertise is an important component of environmental conflicts and it involves opening up a public space of discussion, releasing issues from necessity and duty and confronting the different positions in the public arena (Pellizzoni 2011). A few authors have located the recent increase and radicalisation of environmental justice/ LULUs movements in the closing of political opportunities at local, national or supra-national levels, owing to interconnected factors such as neoliberal forms of governance, the increasing role of global and corporate actors, the collusion between corporate and state interests, the gradual weakening of the intermediary role of political parties between society and the government, and the de-nationalisation of political authority (Caruso 2015; Della Porta et al. 2019). For this reason, some have argued that it is not enough to talk about the closing or opening of political opportunities as limited to the state level or to the political-institutional field, in order to understand the emergence, forms of action and transformative potential of environmental justice movements (Pellow 2001; Caruso 2015). For example, an important factor for successful remediation in environmental conflicts is the absence of counter-mobilisation by industry (Hess and Satcher 2019): industry actors can leverage political and economic ties and power to garner the backing from state institutions, community members or the media, or simply conceal essential information about environmental risks. A thorough understanding of these dynamics would thus require, at centre stage, an analysis of corporate power and the way powerful players can act as a serious hindrance for movements’ transformative capacity. In addition to grassroots environmental movements, global cycles of protests such as the 2019 environmental upsurge have been revamping environmental movements. This latest wave, which included different mobilisations, some more transnational such as Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR), and others more nationally based, such as the Gilets Jaunes in France and the US-based Sunrise movement, has been unprecedented in scale and coordination, bringing over 7 million protesters onto the streets in 185 countries during the third global climate strike in September (de Moor et al. 2020b). While this ‘new’ climate activism shares several elements of continuity with previous climate movements, a few

496  Handbook of critical environmental politics distinguishing elements mark this last wave (de Moor et al. 2020a). In addition to the capability to mobilise people without previous activism – especially many youngsters and school students for the FFF – these new movements display a powerful return to state-addressing forms of political claims, despite the low confidence in governments’ ability to address the climate issue (de Moor et al. 2020a). This is achieved by employing innovative repertoires of action, more disruptive (street blockades for XR) or less so (school/climate strike for FFF). Furthermore, while the FFF strives to pressure politicians to listen to the ‘united science’ to look for solutions – a position accused of scientisation – and the XR uses a morally charged discourse, both movements present a narrative with apocalyptic tones (Pellizzoni 2019; de Moor et al. 2020a). Also, while XR does not address issues of justice and inequalities, FFF inherited justice frames from the climate justice movement – though more emphasis is placed on intergenerational justice – combining these with a critique of the development model (Doherty et al. 2018; Leonardi 2020). Their stance towards international agreements and the United Nations (UN) system to deal with the climate crisis differs, with the FFF asking to follow the Paris Agreement and XR denouncing its ineffectiveness (Pellizzoni 2019; de Moor et al. 2020b, p. 26). However, as highlighted in the introductory chapter of this volume, there is a rising distrust in the UNFCC process, which set in after the failure of COP 15 in Copenhagen to reach an agreement (de Moor and Wahlström 2019) and heightened after COP 24 in 2018, as an efficacious venue for dealing with the climate crisis – Greta Thunberg’s ‘blah blah blah’ speech is an example (see the Introduction to this volume). This has in many respects contributed to a relative unification of the climate movement, by moving the reformist strand closer to the more radical strand (de Moor 2018). Also, it has gradually led to an increasing focus on decentralised actions and organising in the climate movement (de Moor 2018, 2020), as in the Transition Towns and the Climate Justice Action movements (Kenis 2019). While the pandemic situation has implied a halt to street protests, there seems to be an ongoing politicisation process in the environmental and climate movement sectors, with the cross-fertilisation of new movements with older climate justice and LULUs movements, as well as with the movement for workers’ health, and the feminist movement (see, for instance, Imperatore and Leonardi 2021). This underlines how the current pandemic crisis is not only closely linked with the ecological crisis, but has differently affected socio-economic strata, exposing to a greatest extent those holding jobs considered as ‘essential’ (for example, in the care and health sector) but undervalued, low-paying and precarious (see, for example, Workers Inquiry Network 2020). Finally, another important type of grassroots urban socio-environmental movement7 can be discerned in movements mainly devoted to the creation of interstitial ‘alternatives’, centred on the collective organisation and enactment of actions alternative to and aimed at transforming dominant socio-economic and cultural practices and structures – instead of focusing on state-addressing or contentious repertoires of action – through their prefiguration and institutionalisation of different modes of being and relating to human and non-human world (Asara 2022; Asara and Kallis forthcoming). These forms of action have been relatively less investigated in social movement studies, owing to a general ‘bias towards adversarial social movement mobilisation and highly visible social conflict’ (Yates 2015, p. 237). However, there has recently been a blossoming of studies (Forno and Graziano 2014; Bosi and Zamponi 2015; Yates 2015; Zamponi and Bosi 2018; Varvarousis et al. 2021) investigating what appears to be an increasing trend towards everyday forms of political action. Similarly to LULUs movements, this rise has been associated with

Environmental movements  497 a waning trust in the responsiveness of representative institutions to citizens’ demands for socio-environmental concerns, thus shifting political action ‘from traditional political processes and towards material practice’ (Schlosberg 2019, p. 6). The global economic crisis and the implementation of austerity regimes (Hayes 2017), have represented a significant spur to these forms of action, catalysed by the movement of the squares, cycle of protest (Varvarousis et al. 2021). From sustainable community movements (Forno and Graziano 2014) to alternative action organisations (Giugni and Grasso 2018; Zamponi and Bosi 2018), from alternative forms of resilience (D’Alisa et al. 2015; Kousis 2017) to the new materialist movements (Schlosberg 2019; Schlosberg and Coles 2016), a panoply of concepts have been forged to make sense of these alternative forms of collective consumption, production and reproduction created by social movements. Agro-ecological food networks, repair and recycle activities, eco-production and do-it-yourself (DIY), permaculture experimentation, and so on, are some examples of movement attempts to build different society–nature relationships. By enacting alternative forms of needs satisfaction in different spheres (housing, health, childcare, food provisioning, education, energy, and so on) and different ways of being and acting in common in the everyday – from decommodification of exchanges and consumption, to sharing resources and egalitarianism in decision-making and work relations (Yates 2015; Varvarousis et al. 2021) – these alternatives can contribute to a ‘counter-neoliberal urban transformation’, while often making a difference in the lives of ordinary people (Certomà and Tornaghi 2015, p. 1123; MacGregor 2021). Their ecological prefiguration can visibilise a potential ontological alternative by developing alternative value practices – those social actions through which people define what is valuable in a given situation and act accordingly to attain and maintain the condition deemed valuable (Centemeri and Asara 2020).

CONCLUDING REMARKS Since their emergence, environmental movements have been perceived as key actors for social and political change (Touraine 1978). This chapter has argued that their transformative and democratic potential is related to a great extent to their capability to combine ‘green’ demands with broader socio-political claims following the recognition that the locus of environmental problems (and solutions thereof) lie in social and political patterns. I referred to this broad category as socio-environmental movements – a term that can be thought to encompass what other authors have called ‘ecologist’, ‘green’ and ‘political ecology’ movements, as well environmental justice movements and other types of (urban) radical environmental activism. Socio-environmental movements put forth a fundamental critique of the way societies are structured and organised, questioning the bottom tendency of the system (for example, economic growth), the reasoning of techniques, the goals and modes of production and consumption and the relationship with non-human beings, and further combine this with an ontological critique where alternative modes of valuation and imagining life are developed. By taking a critical approach to the subject, I have highlighted a general bias within movement studies against a type of environmentalism tightly linking social and livelihoods concerns with environmental claims. I have looked at what environmental movements’ foregrounding of democracy claims has meant for their struggles, focusing more particularly on the environmental justice movement. Furthermore, scrutinising the debate over movements’ institutionalisation,

498  Handbook of critical environmental politics I have reflected on how their action has not been free from contradictions and ambiguities linked to forms of actions, types of strategies and organisational modes. Recently, some analysts have depicted environmental movements as fundamentally co-opted and have noted their ultimate failure to bring about the fundamental changes required to reverse the climate and ecological crisis (Dauvergne 2016; Blühdorn and Welsh 2007; Spash 2019). Some of these debates resonate with those of a few decades back around the fourth wave of environmentalism (Douwie 1995). While these analyses are correct in underlining the limits and challenges of movement action, often these movements’ failures are linked to the entrenched character of power inequalities and the way these are diffused and reproduced throughout various institutions and cultural meanings, as highlighted by critical EJ studies. A critical approach to social movement studies should thus seek to unravel the causes and dynamics of their successes and failures, as well as the broader cultural effects of their ontological critique, beyond some idealistic vision of an abstract and disembedded movement actor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Laura Centemeri, Luigi Pellizzoni and Niccolò Bertuzzi for the useful feedback they have provided on previous versions of this chapter.

NOTES 1. With this expression Martínez-Alier meant the defence of a wise use of natural resources, market mechanisms and technological improvements without considering the unavoidable environmental and health impacts of rapid industrialisation. This is paradigmatic in concepts such as sustainable development, smart cities, ecological modernisation or ecosystem services. 2. The ‘environmentalism of the working class’ has been conceptualised as ‘the day-to-day struggles that workers at the bottom of the agriculture, industry and service sectors lead, both individually and in organized form, to defend the integrity and safety of their working environment and of the environment where their families and communities live’ (Barca 2012, p. 66). 3. In some countries, the occupational health movement has however older roots dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the USA for example, the independent physician and public health crusader, Alice Hamilton, between the 1910s and World War II broke new ground in the areas of worker and community health, exploring the environmental consequences of industrial activity (Gottlieb 2005). 4. The EJ Atlas is the largest global inventory of environmental conflicts, currently including more than 3600 cases (see https://​ejatlas​.org/​). 5. The Paris Agreement refers to ‘climate justice’ in its annex. 6. The Notre-dame-des Landes ZAD (zone à défendre) is a resistance and social experimentation area lying on a 1600-hectare field, created in opposition to the Grand Ouest airport project in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Started more than 10 years ago, it continued even after the airport plans were abandoned. 7. ‘Urban movements’, refers to all those movements trying to achieve some control over the urban environment. This can include disparate but connected issues, such as the built environment, the social fabric of the city, issues related to collective consumption, urban planning and infrastructural policies, and the local political process (Pruijt 2007; Andretta et al. 2015).

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Environmental movements  501 Diani, M. (1988), Isole nell’arcipelago. Il movimento ecologista in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino. Diani, M. (1995), Green Networks. A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Diani, M. and Donati, P.R. (1999), Organisational change in Western European environmental groups: a framework for analysis, Environmental Politics, 8 (1), 13–34, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 09644019908414436. Diani, M. and Lodi, G. (1988), Three in one-currents in the Milan ecology movement, in B. Klandermans, H. Kriesi and S. Tarrow (eds), International Social Movement Research, vol. 1, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 103–24. Diani, M. and Rambaldo, E. (2007), Still the time of environmental movements? A local perspective, Environmental Politics, 16 (5), 765–84, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09644010701634109. Dobson, A. (1990), Green Political Thought, 4th edn 2007, London: Routledge. Doherty, B. (2002), Ideas and Actions in the Green Movement, London: Routledge. Doherty, B. and Doyle, T. (2006), Beyond borders: transnational politics, social movements and modern environmentalisms, Environmental Politics, 15 (5), 697–712, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 09644010600937132. Doherty, B., De Moor, J. and Hayes, G. (2018), The ‘new’ climate politics of Extinction Rebellion? OpenDemocracy, https://​www​.opendemocracy​.net/​en/​new​-climate​-politics​-of​-extinction​-rebellion/​. Dowie, M. (1995), Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Doyle, T. (2004), Environmental Movement in Majority and Minority Worlds: A Global Perspective, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Doyle, T. (1998), Sustainable development and Agenda 21: the secular bible of global free markets and pluralist democracy, Third World Quarterly, 19 (4), 771–86. Dunlap, R.E. and York, R. (2008), The globalization of environmental concern and the limits of the postmaterialist values explanation: evidence from four multinational surveys, Sociological Quarterly, 49 (3), 529–63, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1533​-8525​.2008​.00127​.x. Edwards, B. and McCarthy, J.D. (2004), Resources and social movement mobilization, in D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule and H. Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Blackwell, pp.  116–52, online, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​9780470999103​.ch6. Eyerman, R. and Jamison, A. (1991), Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach, London: Polity Press. Fairbrother, M. (2013), Rich people, poor people, and environmental concern: evidence across nations and time, European Sociological Review, 29 (5), 910–22, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​esr/​jcs068. Forno, F. and Graziano, P.R. (2014), Sustainable community movement organizations, Journal of Consumer Culture, 14 (2), 139–57, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​1469540514526225. Giugni, M. and Grasso, M. (2018), Alternative action organizations: social solidarity or political advocacy? American Behavioral Scientist, 62 (6), 778–95, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0002764218768855. Giugni, M. and Grasso, M.T. (2015), Environmental movements in advanced industrial democracies: heterogeneity, transformation, and institutionalization, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 40, 337–61, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1146/​annurev​-environ​-102014​-021327. Givens, J.E. and Jorgenson, A.K. (2011), The effects of affluence, economic development, and environmental degradation on environmental concern: a multilevel analysis, Organization and Environment, 24 (1), 74–91, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​1086026611406030. Gómez-Baggethun, E. and Naredo, J.M. (2015), In search of lost time: the rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy, Sustainability Science, 10 (3), 385–95, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​ s11625​-015​-0308​-6. Gorz, A. (1978), Ecologie et politique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Gottlieb, R. (2005), Forcing the Spring. The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Washington, DC: Island Press. Gould, K.A., Schnaiberg, A. and Weinberg, A.S. (1996), Local Environmental Struggles: Citizen Activism in the Treadmill of Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1981), New social movements, Telos, 49, 33–7, https://​doi​.org/​10​.3817/​0981049033. Hayes, G. (2017), Regimes of austerity, Social Movement Studies, 16 (1), 21–35, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14742837​.2016​.1252669.

502  Handbook of critical environmental politics Heaney, M.T. and Rojas, F. (2014), Hybrid activism: social movement mobilization in a multimovement environment, American Journal of Sociology, 119 (4), 1047–103, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1086/​674897. Hess, D.J. and Satcher, L.A. (2019), Conditions for successful environmental justice mobilizations: an analysis of 50 cases, Environmental Politics, 28 (4), 663–84, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09644016​.2019​ .1565679. Imperatore, P. and Leonardi, E. (2021), Pandemia, Green New Deal e transizione ecologica. Ci serve un piano per la giustizia climatica, in Cantiere delle Idee e Fairwatch (ed.), Un altro mondo è ancora possibile? Lo spazio dell’alternativa vent’anni dopo Genova e Porto Alegre, Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, pp. 113–30. Inglehart, R. (1977), The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, R. (1995), Public support for environmental protection: objective problems and subjective values in 43 societies, PS: Political Science and Politics, 28 (1), 57–72, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​ S1049096500056080. Jordan, G. and Maloney, W. (1997), The Protest Business? Mobilizing Campaign Groups, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jamison, A. (2006), Social movements and science: cultural appropriations of cognitive praxis, Science as Culture, 15 (1), 45–59. Jiménez, M. (2007), The environmental movement in Spain: a growing force of contention, South European Society and Politics, 12 (3), 359–78, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13608740701495244. Johnston, H., Laraña, E. and Gusfield, J. (1994), Identities, grievances and new social movements, in D. Laraña, H. Johnston and J. Gusfield (eds), New Social Movements. From Ideology to Identity, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 3–35. Kenis, A. (2019), Post-politics contested: why multiple voices on climate change do not equal politicisation, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37 (5), 831–48, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0263774X18807209. Kitschelt, H. (1986), The Logics of Party Formation: Ecological Politics in Belgium and West Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kitschelt, H. (2006), Movement parties, in R. Katz and W. Crotty (eds), Handbook of Party Politics, London: Sage, pp. 278–91. Kousis, M. (2017), Alternative forms of resilience confronting hard economic times: a South European perspective, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 10 (1), 119–35, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1285/​i20356609v10i1p119. Kousis, M., Della Porta, D. and Jimnez, M. (2008), Southern European environmental movements in comparative perspective, American Behavioral Scientist, 51 (11), 1627–47, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0002764208316361. Kriesi, H. (1989), New social movements and the new class in the Netherlands, American Journal of Sociology, 94 (5), 1078–116, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1086/​229112. Kriesi, H. (1996), The organizational structure of new social movements in a political context, in D. McAdam, J.D. McCarthy and M.N. Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 152–84. Kriesi, H., Koopmans, R., Duyvendak, J.W. and Giugni, M. (1995), New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, London: UCL Press. Lekakis, E.J. and Forno, F. (2019), Political consumerism in Southern Europe, in M. Boström, M. Micheletti and P. Oosterveer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.  456–78, online, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780190629038​.013​.21. Leonardi, E. (2020), Giustizia climatica e lotte operaie nella pandemia: Note a supporto di una convergenza possibile, Le Parole e Le Cose2, http://​www​.leparoleelecose​.it/​?p​=​38895. MacGregor, S. (2021), Finding transformative potential in the cracks? The ambiguities of urban environmental activism in a neoliberal city, Social Movement Studies, 20 (3), 329–45, https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​14742837​.2019​.1677224. Martínez-Alier, J. (1995), The environment as a luxury good or “too poor to be green”?, Ecological Economics, 13 (1), 1–10, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​0921​-8009(94)00062​-Z. Martínez-Alier, J. (2002), The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar.

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504  Handbook of critical environmental politics Schlosberg, D. (2013), Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse, Environmental Politics, 22 (1), 37–55, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09644016​.2013​.755387. Schlosberg, D. (2019), From postmaterialism to sustainable materialism: the environmental politics of practice-based movements, Environmental Politics, 8 March, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09644016​.2019​ .1587215. Schlosberg, D. and Coles, R. (2016), The new environmentalism of everyday life: sustainability, material flows and movements, Contemporary Political Theory, 15 (2), 160–81, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​cpt​ .2015​.34. Sicotte, D.M. and Brulle, R.J. (2017), Social movements for environmental justice through the lens of social movement theory, in R. Holifield, J. Chakraborty and G. Walker (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, London: Routledge, pp. 25–36, online, https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​ 9781315678986​.ch3. Spash, C.L. (2019), The climate movement: what next? 9 May, http://​www​.wrongkindofgreen​.org/​2019/​ 05/​09/​the​-climate​-movement​-what​-next/​. Stevis, D., Uzzell, D. and Räthzel, N. (2018), The labour–nature relationship: varieties of labour environmentalism, Globalizations, 15 (4), 439–53, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14747731​.2018​.1454675. Thörn, H. and Svenberg, S. (2016), ‘We feel the responsibility that you shirk’: movement institutionalization, the politics of responsibility and the case of the Swedish environmental movement, Social Movement Studies, 15 (6), 593–609, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14742837​.2016​.1213162. Touraine, A. (1978), La Voix et le Regard, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Urkidi, L. and Walter, M. (2011), Dimensions of environmental justice in anti- gold mining movements in Latin America, Geoforum, 42 (6), 683–95, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2011​.06​.003. Vanderheiden, S. (2016), Environmental and climate justice, in T. Gabrielson, C. Hall, J.M. Meyer and D. Schlosberg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, online, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780199685271​.013​.13. Varvarousis, A., Asara, V. and Akbulut, B. (2021), Commons: a social outcome of the movement of the squares, Social Movement Studies, 20 (3), 292–311, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14742837​.2020​.1793753. Velicu, I. (2020), Prospective environmental injustice: insights from anti-mining struggles in Romania and Bulgaria, Environmental Politics, 29 (3), 414–34, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09644016​.2019​ .1611178. Velicu, I. and Kaika, M. (2017), Undoing environmental justice: re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement, Geoforum, 84, 305–15, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2015​.10​ .012. Workers Inquiry Network (2020), Struggle in a pandemic: a collection of contributions on the COVID-19 crisis, http://​www​.intotheblackbox​.com/​articoli/​struggle​-in​-a​-pandemic​-una​-raccolta​-di​-contributi​ -del​-workers​-inquiry​-network/​. Yates, L. (2015), Rethinking prefiguration: alternatives, micropolitics and goals in social movements, Social Movement Studies, 14 (1), 1–21. Zamponi, L. and Bosi, L. (2018), Politicizing solidarity in times of crisis: The politics of alternative action organizations in Greece, Italy, and Spain, American Behavioral Scientist, 62 (6), 796–815.

36. More-than-social movements: politics of matter, autonomy, alterontologies Andrea Ghelfi and Dimitris Papadopoulos

INTRODUCTION: THE INTRUSIONS OF GAIA The sixth mass extinction, climate crisis, soil depletion, oceans acidification, human displacement and forest destruction; the traces of the global ecological crisis are everywhere. The unpredictable consequences of the ongoing modifications of the chemical, biological and geophysical composition of the Earth are ungovernable. This condition of unpredictability forces us to stay with the many ‘intrusions of Gaia’ (Stengers 2017): all the environmental events and disasters that upset, interrupt, destabilise and threaten the human world mean that the inconvenient truth of the ecological crises will be part of our present and future. Gaia is the name of the Greek mythological deity, the primordial Mother Earth goddess who shows a resolute indifference in relation to the effects of its actions: she does not act in order to punish someone or to restore justice. She acts, full stop. The ‘intrusions of Gaia’ interrupt any idea of historical progress, geocentric humanism or passive nature. As philosopher Michel Serres (Serres and Latour 1995, p. 189) reminds us: ‘it no longer depends on us that everything depends on us’. This statement is not an invitation to inaction. On the contrary, it seems to contain a call for action, an invitation to experiment within new modes of doing by undertaking actions without guarantee. In this chapter we focus on movements that, starting from situated practices, are constructing other ways of inhabiting our planet. The movements we refer to sit uneasily within the broader political category of social movements. They are more-than-social movements in that their practices and aims are not only directed to challenge power relations or established institutions, but better, they are doing more than that. By experimenting with other ways of engaging with the materiality of life more-than-social movements are making fragments of alternative common worlds beyond the dichotomy nature–society. Insisting on the emergency of more-than-social movements is for us a way to highlight the transformative power of these movements: their capacity to set up alternative material configurations and everyday practices that aim to materialise justice in the human-non human everyday continuum.

WHEN POLITICS COMES TO MATTER In recent years a series of contributions in science and technology studies (Winner 1986; Haraway 1991; Latour 1993), cultural anthropology (Holbraad et al. 2014; Tsing 2015; Viveiros de Castro 2015), geography (Braun and Whatmore 2010a), philosophy of science (Barad 2007; Stengers 1997) and related fields have invited us to take seriously ‘the stuff of politics’ (Braun and Whatmore 2010b). This expression emphasises the necessity of developing a fully materialist conception of politics that does not separate politics from the 505

506  Handbook of critical environmental politics socio-material basis of life and from the concrete practices through which forms of life are created. For example, Holbraad et al. (2014) in ‘The politics of ontology’ pose the actuality of a ‘demand of politics’ by starting from the turn to ontology in cultural anthropology. They introduce ontology as ‘the multiplicity of forms of existence enacted in concrete practices, where politics becomes the non-sceptical elicitation of this manifold of potentials for how things could be – what Elizabeth Povinelli, as we understand her, calls “the otherwise”’ (Holbraad et al. 2014). In this quote, ‘ontology’ is synonymous with modes of existence, ways of living and forms of life enacted in concrete practices and ‘a possible otherwise’ that refers to the processes of everyday transformation of things and beings: the politics of ontology is about the question of how persons and things ‘could alter from themselves’ (Holbraad et al. 2014). The ‘power of difference’ and the ‘otherwise’ are political concepts that refer directly to the ontological constitution of entities: to what they are becoming. Thinking together what is becoming and what could be is not a way of projecting a future in the present. Instead, it is a way of opening the present to manifold possibilities. In the book Political Matter, Braun and Whatmore (2010b) start from the acknowledgement of the significant role of more than human agencies and technological objects in the fabric of social conduct and political association. They use the term ‘materialisation of politics’ to recognise the constitutive nature of material processes and entities in social and political life, the way that things of every imaginable kind – material objects, informed materials, bodies, machines, even media ecologies – help constitute the common worlds that we share and the dense fabric of relations with others in and through which we live. (Braun and Whatmore 2010b, p. ix)

Politics here refers to a ‘politics of matter’ (Papadopoulos 2014), that is, politics that partially shapes and emerges inside the ecologies in which we live, inside our common worlds made though a multiplicity of more than human relations. A politics of matter is capable of taking into account artefacts and technologies, animals, plants and bacteria, modes of materialisation and mattering in the analysis of how situated collectivities are assembled. A politics of matter is about the creation of common worlds, that is, the commoning of more than human ecologies, beyond the nature–culture ontological divide. More-than-social movements, as we will show in the next sections, are taking seriously ‘the stuff of politics’ by experimenting with a form of transformative politics in which commoning is primarily about experimenting with possible ‘otherwises’ in the ways in which ‘people’ and ‘things’ relate to each other (Chapter 14 in this volume).

COMMONING IN MORE THAN HUMAN WORLDS The concept of the commons (Pellizzoni 2018) offers an understanding of politics grounded inside the relation between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ – ‘the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature’ (Linebaugh 2008, p. 279). Something similar is proposed by Hardt and Negri (2009) in their Commonwealth in which the notion of common – singular – permeates both human society and the natural elements of Earth. Therefore, ‘We might call this an ecology of the common – an ecology focused equally on nature and society, on humans and the nonhuman world in a dynamic of interdependence, care, and mutual transformation’ (Hardt and Negri 2009,

More-than-social movements  507 p. 171). Despite the attempt to overcome the nature and society split, many approaches to the commons place alongside this hybrid intelligibility an affirmative political hypothesis based on the idea1 that it is only by changing the social power relationships first that ecological and socio-environmental justice can be established (Chapter 35 in this volume).2 One of the key issues of different approaches to commons consists in thinking of human society and the nonhuman world as two different and separated spheres. Politics, consequently, pertains to the sphere of society and the principal avenue for social transformation passes through seizing the centres of social and political power. Forms of life and modes of existence, so what makes irrelevant every essential distinction between human society and material world, are often erased from what matters as politics. Moreover, this insistence on the notion of power sometimes risks neglecting an account of the material alternatives that these commons movements are constructing, the emergence of alternative forms of socio-ecological reproduction, and the many entanglements between politics and ontology. More-than-social movements are world-makers, and this affirmative tension is the focus of this chapter. More-than-social movements testify to the emergence of a form of politics that attempts to make a difference in the ontological configuration of the world through experimenting with alternative material politics. In this perspective, commons refers to actively shared worlds: commons are about co-action, material practices and self-organisation. When the commons are about communing, we enter the field of processual, more than human worlds. It is what Bresnihan (2013) terms the ‘manifold commons’ and Reid and Taylor (2010, p. 20) term the ‘body–place–commons’ as they emphasise the ‘dynamic, interactive process of human and nonhuman production and reproduction’. The commons rarely exist in the abstract and never outside of a specific ecology and specific material spaces. As Wall (2014, p. 127) writes, ‘[d]ifferent forms of commoning give rise to different sustainable environments’ and multispecies communities (see Castellano 2017). When the commons are about socio-material and ecological commoning we can approach the concept of autonomy through a new lens. Autonomy historically refers to the idea that social mobilisations and social conflicts drive social transformation, instead of being a mere response to social and economic power. The key strategy of more-than-social movements consists in something less and something more than simply contesting and addressing existent political institutions. More-than-social movements rework and expand autonomy to engage with questions of justice in more than human worlds by highlighting the relevance of creating alternative everyday politics of matter (Chapter 34 in this volume). Emergent socio-ecological movements are reclaiming everyday materiality by actively recomposing and rearticulating it. In more than human worlds, autonomy means organising interdependencies that allow for creating other forms of life that divert existing material articulations in unexpected ways. Autonomy is about recombining materialities that instigate ecological and social justice. When movements encounter matter as a strategic field of action for experimenting generative practices of justice, a new idea of autonomy emerges. Autonomous politics requires material interconnectedness, practical organising, everyday coexistence and fostering of ontological alliances. These are always more than human, more than social. They entail interactions, ways of knowing, forms of practice that involve the material world, plants and the soil, chemical compounds and energies, other groups of humans and their surroundings, and other species and machines. Autonomy is a call for direct action, for material recombination, for practical reparative justice.

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DOING-WITH OTHERS Political ecology3 is a field of study that in the past 50 years has in many ways politicised the impact of human life and human production on the environment. This is a critical approach to environmental studies that takes theoretical inspiration from different sources, among others political economy, human geography and critical theory. Political ecology is committed to question the status of powerful actors (governments, corporations, conservation organisations) within dominant environmental politics. In recent years an emergent scholarship operating at the intersection of Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Humanities is developing an understanding of political ecology beyond the modern bifurcation between society and the environment.4 With the insertion of more than human worlds into the practices of social movements a renewed sense of political ecology emerges: the emphasis here is on the ability of a common problem and a matter of common interest to capture the attention of different actors. What is common, as Stengers (2005) mentions, is not a common property or a shared substance, but rather what brings different actors into play, what forces them to think, to invent, to act in concert depending on each other. The common within an ‘acting with’ is what lies between us, that in various ways challenges us, what calls us and forces us to think and act. The common, therefore, reactivates a collective capacity for composition among different actors, who compose themselves by refusing the presence of an external authority, of a moral arbiter.5 For Haraway (2016) ‘acting with’ means to be in the world and to make the world as an always collective and multiple exercise of becoming-with significant others. The co-actors, the companion species, the commensals of the Earth carry on forms of partial recovery, work the Earth within the Earth, create multispecies shelters and learn from each other starting from the situated materiality of the problems they face: ‘nobody lives everywhere; they all live somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something’ (Haraway 2016, p. 31). Co-acting is a necessary condition to make unexpected kinship, to be with the Chthonian creatures, with the thousand names they take and the thousand stories that these Indigenous creatures of the Earth tell. Co-action conceptualises the political ecology of our current historical moment in a very different way than the narratives of Anthropocene and Capitalocene (Chapter 5 in this volume). The symptom Anthropocene testifies to the indelible traces of human presence on planet Earth, positioning humans as equally the source of the problem and the key to the solution. In a similar pattern, Capitalocene anthropomorphises an economic system by assigning to it some form of human agency as if it is the system itself that is the subject of history.6 In both narratives the ecological is dependent on the social, and humans are positioned as the culprits and, simultaneously, the guarantors of social and ecological peace. Within the framework of more-than-social movements and the imperative to ‘act with’, something else emerges: human beings are in and with Earth, and the abiotic and biotic powers of the planet make up the key actors of this story. In this narrative, regenerating the biodiverse powers of Earth is the work and the sympoietic game of what Haraway (2016, p. 55) names the ‘Chthulucene’, an alternative grid to define an era that should be dominated by multi-species responsibility and material, experimental justice. Within these conditions more-than-social movements invent new collective practices from below, practices of imagination, experimentation, composition, reparation, transition and change. More-than-social movements bring with them an understanding of ecological

More-than-social movements  509 composition that marks a clear discontinuity with an idea of politics in which agreement and unity are based on a supposed common belonging that we all have to some form of everyday or transcendent universalism. This approach to the theme of the commons suggests we think political ecology beyond the founding role of the notion of nature, and reminds us that acting with others is an endless activity and a necessary condition for making common worlds populated by divergent heterogeneities that can never become a universalistic whole but, at best, many fragile and revisable material microcosms.

AUTONOMY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY More-than-social movements offer a vision of materialism that engages seriously with the challenges of political ecology, a materialism that allows us to think of the commons as not only a social process. The threshold of the material sustainability of modernisation has been crossed. An alternative politics of matter is emerging; that is, alternative forms of coexistence between species, inorganic substances and artefacts. Political ecology is not only the field in which a multitude of revolts against injustice are recorded on a global scale; political ecology is also the field for experimentation with everyday practices of socio-ecological regeneration. The autonomy of the twenty-first century comes from the rediscovery of the dense network of interdependencies that we allow to live, from the end of every essentialist division between nature and culture, from the ability to create infrastructures able to support, defend and remake alternative forms of existence. We find this autonomous politics in a myriad of contemporary movements that, starting from specific practices and heterogeneous contexts, invent other forms of material existence. By inventing ways of reactivating heterogeneous elements, creating ecologies of existence that are rich and responsible enough for cultivating worldly prosperity and the least possible suffering for all the entities that inhabit them, these movements are inventing material and practical justice in the politics of everyday life. From food sovereignty movements to practices of solidarity for the right to health, from permaculture to occupied factories, from feminist and queer movements to indigenous resistance, and from environmental justice campaigns to alternative autonomous subsistence movements, a central point of contemporary political ecology lies in the experimentation of other ways of relating among humans, animals and plants, objects and technologies. If a constituent politics refers first to the capacity to forge material transformations, this capacity to act cannot be defined as a human agency or as a universal goal to be achieved. If historical materialism has been characterised by an extraordinary capacity to hold materialism and activism together around the knot of class struggle, the materialism that emerges from the practices of more-than-social movements re-articulates this old relationship between materialism and activism.7 Instead of situating politics within the social sphere of production, it places politics in the cosmos, in the forest, in the scientific laboratory, in the clinic, in the commune, in the field and the farm, in the hackerspace and in the many other places where we are learning to decolonise our relationship with the materiality of life.8 A reader might ask, what are the main differences are between a social movement and a more-than-social movement? Social movements conceive political transformation as a matter of power renegotiation inside the sphere of social relations of instituted power. Social relations here refer to the idea that movements enact a form of political intervention which aims primar-

510  Handbook of critical environmental politics ily at the transformation of the governance of social life. Identity, symbolic representation and rights are often the main ingredients that feed strategies and forms of mobilisations orientated to renegotiate the organisation of political power. In social movements the struggles for social transformation come first. In more-than-social movements social transformation takes place through more than human and material transformation; that is, social transformation is driven by collective direct action on the immediate level of material life. This forces later social institutions and political governance to respond and reorganise. However, the first direct aim is not social transformation but the creation of an alternative infrastructure of material life that enacts a different form of everyday more than human existence.9 The boundaries of social movements and more-than-social movements are blurred, and it is good that this is so. We could argue that most social movements cannot exist without some form of material activism and more-than-social movements cannot exist without some form of social-institutional politics. Moreover, many social movements oscillate between the two forms of action or move in phases from one form of mobilisation to the other. We could even argue that many social movements have a hidden history of more than human, material action that remain unrecognised owing to the dominance of the social over the material. We have elsewhere argued that an alternative exploration of the histories of social movements could uncover these hidden histories.10 The necessity to defend or extend alternative practices of more than human material transformation and autonomous infrastructures often brings more-than-social movements to practise standard protest politics or engage in contestation and negotiation with social institutions and political governance. Also, many social movements are taking into account the role of everyday alternatives in shaping new forms of subjectivities and social imagination. Moreover, the many entanglements between mass mobilisations, everyday crafting of alternative forms of existence and the emergence of innovative forms of community governance are relevant keys for making autonomy durable and for experimenting with partial more than human connections and alliances for eco-social transitions.11 That said, we see in the ‘more-than-social becoming’ of social movements an important dimension for thinking autonomy in our century, and in the following sections we introduce four keys to this more than human material politics of more-than-social movements.

KEY 1: NO CHANGE WITHOUT ALTERONTOLOGIES With the term ‘ontology’ we refer to the capacity of certain actors for shaping and changing the material configuration of their space of existence. So, if ontologies are spaces of existence in which matter is organised in a specific way and not another and can be changed in specific ways and not others, the making of alternative configurations of matter means the making of alternative ontologies: ‘alterontologies’.12 In each ontological configuration the practices and the interactions among particular humans and nonhumans shape the material world in specific directions. Social change cannot be thought independent of ontological change; social transformation towards justice requires alterontological practice (Chapters 13 and 41 in this volume). Take agriculture as an example. Starting at the end of the 1960s, the ‘green revolution’ has transformed in a significant manner the ways through which agriculture has been developing – not without resistance and important exceptions – on a global scale (Chapter 10 in this volume). A central role of

More-than-social movements  511 mechanisation, the adoption of new technologies, the selection of high-yielding varieties of cereals, and the extensive use of chemical fertilisers and agro-chemicals are the main features of current industrial agriculture. These technologies of food production have wide-ranging eco-social implications for biodiversity and climate change, and they entail a relation of strong dependency between farmers and the world’s largest chemical producers. Agroecology (Rosset and Altieri 2017) appears nowadays as one of the alternatives for overcoming the shortcomings of the green revolution. Agroecology is a response to the question of how to transform and repair our material reality in food systems and rural worlds starting from the ecological practices of peasants and farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban food producers, and so on. Food movements and agroecological farming represent a direct alterontological form of politics: by seeking different material circulations, they enact different possibilities of human–Earth relations – alterontologies. Following the example of an Italian network of farmers, Genuino Clandestino (Genuine Clandestine), we can see how agroecology can be understood not only as a science that is transforming our understanding of soils and as a set of practices that is redefining the everyday doing of farming, but also as a movement that is trying to redefine the political, economic and juridical space of action of organic food producers. In the Genuino Clandestino, agroecology is synonymous with making alternative forms of life. The network was born in 2010 in order to defend the existence of a multiplicity of alternative rural forms of living and to promote agroecological knowledges and practices. Genuino Clandestino’s practices include grassroots farmers’ markets that promote food sovereignty, innovative forms of trust between producers and consumers through a self-organised process named the Participatory Guarantee System, civic use and collective care of land as commons, and strong links between the movement and scientific research on soil ecology and food sustainability. Genuino Clandestino can be seen as an example of a novel movement that fuses traditional environmental social movement campaigns, for example, against the use of pesticides in agriculture, with the experimentation of alterontological farming and the building of alternative communities, transforming to a genuinely more-than-social movement. The reclaiming of rural forms of life is not a way of restoring some form of premodern vision of social conditions. In the politics of Genuino Clandestino, the farmers and activists who define themselves as contadini (peasant) reactivate the capacity to invent other spaces and times of existence. By borrowing experiences from past social movements (such as the ‘back to the land’ movement of the 1960s) the peasants of Genuino Clandestino reclaim alternative technoscientific practices and the right to make their own food on self-sufficient farms to create an alterontological form of slow living in which farming is not an entrepreneurial activity but a diverse way of cultivating a ‘practicality’ of life within the cycles of the land. How can we become a companion of the Earth by taking part in more than human communities of food? This is the open question that accompanies the making of alterontologies in the Genuino Clandestino network. This is the open question that forces this more-than-social movement to invent, from the farm to the fork, alternative networks of eco-social reproduction.

KEY 2: THE EVERYDAY AND THE ONTOLOGICAL IS ONE More-than-social movements operate an alterontological politics embedded within the fabric of everyday life. Political and social autonomy can be performed to the extent that it is rooted

512  Handbook of critical environmental politics in transformative everyday material practices. What constitutes more-than-social movements’ action is the capacity to set up alternative mundane practices that later force power and control in a specific field to reorganise itself, often in unexpected ways, as in the example of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) treatment activism in the 1980s. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded in 1986–87 in the USA. The formation of ACT UP could be read as a coagulation of practices that have been going on since the start of the epidemic in 1981. Starting from the very beginning groups, individuals and communities living with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) shared practices and languages, created common spaces and different modes of engagement with the virus. These forms of activism and these everyday material practices created a movement that could no longer be ignored. By contesting existing forms of injustice and by creating alternative ways of dealing with the virus and its world, AIDS activism became possible as people created the ontological conditions that allowed them to negotiate their sometimes very divergent experiences of the epidemic. From the perspective of situated politics, the purpose is not primarily to acquire the right credentials or to participate in governance and institutions but to engage with, and compose alternatives to, dividing forms of power in social, material and ecological environments that enable a movement to exist. We are interested in how actors constitute themselves long before they are formally recognised. The example of AIDS activism enables us to see that the making of socio-material actors on the level of everyday existence comes before any formalisation of the movement vis-à-vis social power and governance, as occurred with the constitution of ACT UP in 1987. Long before that, AIDS activism and the entanglements of nonhuman actors (the HIV virus, medications, tests for viral loads, and so on) and human actors (patients, activists, researchers, and so on) emerged as a politics of material composition whose primary aim was to enable forms of life that would allow the gay community under threat to continue to exist. A movement is constituted by its capacity to set up alternative forms of everyday relationality and material existence. From very early on, gay men and their communities developed and invented a multiplicity of practical engagements with an epidemic that quickly became a devastating social and public health crisis. Building on the work of Puig de la Bellacasa (2015) on the temporality of care, we reconceptualise these practices as emergency care. The following is a list of these practices: challenging medical decisions; campaigning to raise money for alternative research; organising support and volunteer caretaking; creating autonomous service provision (AIDS service organisations); setting up new community spaces and community organisations to engage with the new challenges of the crisis; extensive experimenting with your own body and (not officially approved) drugs; getting involved in intensive lobbying of medical associations, doctors, hospitals, local councils and public health officials; negotiating the meaning of their own subjectivities by setting up community meetings, educational initiatives and debates; developing new forms of affection, intimacy and reciprocity; educating themselves in medical, health, legal and policy issues; (re-)politicising white, mostly middle-class, gay men who started to realise that their relatively privileged positions were inherently precarious; militant action and confrontational activist practices, such as sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, blockades, occupations, picketing, AIDS walks and rallies; inventing and reinventing new sexual practices and sexual expressions; taking direct action and holding contentious protests; defending gay bathhouses and other sex establishments; setting up buyers’ clubs of illegally manufactured or illegally imported drugs; attempting to maintain self-respect and gay pride, and navigate

More-than-social movements  513 through all these conflictual feelings about your own community produced by the hostile social environment and the constant stigmatisation and demonisation; defending gay male sexuality within the terror and panic of mysterious deaths and diseases; being proud of the community’s attempt to face the crisis; and giving love to the ill and dying.13 Through these compositional practices, AIDS activism gradually took shape and constituted itself after the start of the epidemic. Watney (1997, p. xii) wrote that what we could call ‘the’ gay community ‘did not pre-exist the epidemic in any very meaningful sense’, and we could add here that AIDS activism did not pre-exist the emergence of this community. This means that AIDS activism is not just a reaction to the epidemic, as if the epidemic remained the same since it erupted, and AIDS activism was conceived by a community as a full-scale strategy of response. Instead, AIDS activism is the outcome of a long formation process in which thousands of gay men and their communities tried to grapple with a devastating virus. AIDS activism is the outcome of an ontological encounter and an ontological conflict between human bodies and HIV retroviruses unfolding within a hostile homophobic culture and a specific biomedical regime. This group of gay men became a community and engaged in AIDS activism as a way of understanding and managing this ontological encounter. AIDS activism is the attempt to create an alterontology: a material, biochemical, medical, social and cultural space in which the relationship of human body and HIV could be negotiated and reshaped after the initial outbreak of the epidemic. However, the first concern was to just survive this encounter. AIDS activism became possible because of the everyday alterontological practices that allowed the community in the making to sustain itself.

KEY 3: WITHOUT ORDINARY JUSTICE THERE ARE NO MORE-THAN-SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Justice is never given, is rarely here; it is something of another world, something to come. When justice exists it is now and, as we have seen with AIDS activism, justice is in the ordinary and concrete making of it. The question of justice comes with the emergence of the invisibilised and the imperceptible, of those who have no place within existing normalising political institutions. Justice comes when those who have no part (Rancière 1998) change the material conditions of existence in a way that cannot be overheard or simply included in existing political institutions. We focus on how actors create alternative ecologies of existence that become inhabited by these silenced and absent others, by those who have been rendered residual and invisible. This is a politics of matter not because humans are in charge of matter, but because certain groups of humans and nonhumans can continue to exist only to the extent that they develop alternative entanglements with matter. For this reason, in more-than-social movements justice is restored materially. Also, without ordinary justice there are no more-than-social movements. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) reminds us, material engagement often starts from an obligation to protect an ecology from degradation and to make it a liveable place for all the participants in it; as with permaculture, a global ecological movement whose aim consists in creating ecological justice from below. Permaculture is a movement of alternative ecological design that takes multiple shapes: rural and urban, projects of local food production, natural building and knowledge production, and experiments with different forms of social organising. Born from observations on how a forest works as an ecosystem, the idea of permaculture consists of creating consumable and

514  Handbook of critical environmental politics resilient ecosystems. Permaculture is a situated and minor art of recuperation, an alternative response to the environmental crisis based on the idea that humans are subject to the same energetic laws that govern the material universe, including the evolution of life. One of the most popular current definitions of permaculture is ‘consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs’ (Holmgren 2002, p. xix). Permaculture can be seen as both an ethical-philosophical point of view and a practical approach to everyday doing (Centemeri 2018): a mundane practical ecology. In the words of Patrick Whitefield, ‘the central aim of permaculture is to reduce our ecological impact. Or, more precisely, to turn our negative impact into a positive one’ (Whitefield 2004, p. 5). Permaculture is just one of the names given to practices by which movements of ecological practice are converging currently in emphasising a need to attend to the health of soil by becoming soil growers (Puig de la Bellacasa 2014). In permaculture, among other things, restoring justice means transforming human relations with soils and its inhabitants by participating in its material regeneration. However, moving from soil destroyers to soil growers means recognising that ecological agency is a collective multispecies agency. Justice is about the ordinary making of ecological reparation; the collective enterprise of creating an alternative lifeworld within the interactive dynamics that inhabit the soil. Justice is a more than human affair: ecological regeneration does not pass through a good ‘Anthropos’, but through its decentralisation into the multifaceted interdependencies of more than human communities. In permaculture, nothing can be achieved without acting with existing entities and forces that are populating a territory. Permaculture’s essential kit of knowledge politics consists in cultivating a capacity to feel and act with these forces: in composing your design with the activities of these entities, in calculating interdependencies and in the ability to act inside an ‘ecology of canals’ (Ghelfi 2015), in which commensality defines the ontology of more than human life. In commensal coexistence actors just leave stuff around, and other actors use them (or not). This is not an ontology of exchange, but an ontology of coexistence. In order to foster coexistence, actors have to reduce their presence, their subjectivities, and leave space for other actors to exist. While exchange presupposes a strong self that negotiates and transacts, commensality presupposes the careful retreat of the self: de-individualisation, interdependence, contingency and involvement. Do it without yourself.14 In permaculture, space is crisscrossed by a multitude of ecologies of canals which work via transforming the surpluses of one entity into the substance of the other. Here nothing can be achieved alone, none has the power to take the place of the universe and nothing can be done without participating in the more than human practices of eco-sharing that constitute and maintain the commons of the Earth.

KEY 4 AND CONCLUSION: INFRASTRUCTURES MAKE AUTONOMY DURABLE Traditional social movements are constituents of social power by inventing and creating alternative institutions. More-than-social movements do the same. However, they do this through the co-emergence of politics and matter which creates alternative spaces of existence. These spaces are the infrastructures that sustain more-than-social movements. More-than-social movements achieve their autonomy through the making of alternative infrastructures. The

More-than-social movements  515 quest of these autonomous infrastructures is to restore justice step by step, through everyday material practices. This is a mundane material and generative justice. Justice is fought for on the level of matter and through close alliances between engaged groups of animals and plants, committed groups of humans, and accessible material objects. The autonomous politics of more-than-social movements are relational, ontological struggles to create alternative material articulations. An autonomous politics emerges in the infrastructures of more-than-social movements: political autonomy as material interconnectedness, being in the quantum vortex of constant interdependences, knowing and naming your allies and building material communities of justice. More-than-social movement infrastructures are autonomy made durable: transparent, unnoticed and persistently present spaces that incorporate political practice in their workings. Infrastructures allow more-than-social movements to politicise ontological practice. These infrastructures shape political developments and life without the need to start again and again from scratch. They become part of infrastructural imagination: the capacity to transfer infrastructures beyond a specific spatial and temporal location, and to reclaim it for a different ontology; the capacity to connect, tweak and reconnect different infrastructures; the capacity to extend infrastructures over time and to redeploy them in the future. Instead of enclosed, privately or state managed infrastructures, more-than-social movements create generous infrastructures: the infrastructures of the commons, that is, infrastructures that allow for communities to maintain and defend the ontological conditions of their forms of life even when instituted infrastructures break down through failure or by intent. These infrastructures are directly political. Politics (and the social) do not come on top of the infrastructures that more-than-social movements create. Is a self-managed, non-privatised water system an infrastructure for sustaining access to water or an environmental justice campaign? Is an educational workshop in a hackspace a socio-technical learning infrastructure or a tool for achieving other social goals, such as promoting hobbyism or hacker culture? Is a cooperative farm an infrastructure for subsistence or a political project for community empowerment? Is an open-access bicycle workshop an infrastructure or a commitment to a different lifestyle? Most of these infrastructures do both at the same time. If there is a split between the material and the political, infrastructures cease to be generous, they cease to be infrastructures of the commons. They are no longer autonomous, and they are appropriated for other social aims and political targets. They become managed as tools. Instead, generous infrastructures always involve the entanglement between human and nonhuman others, between materiality and sociality, and only by doing this do they become an alterontological practice. This is the new institutionalism of more-than-social movements. Together with the creation of alterontologies (key 1) that cut across everyday life (key 2) as a response to the quest for generative justice (key 3), these new generous and autonomous infrastructures (key 4) constitute what more-than-social movements are today.

NOTES 1. On the practical level the notion of the commons can have very different implications for political practice. Central to the notion of the commons is dispossession, that is, the private enclosure and capitalist appropriation of the livelihoods and environments, the means of productions and the products of work of people and their communities. Now, the practical responses to this process of appropriation, as conceived in the traditional workerist grand narratives of social liberation

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

(Mezzadra 2011), is a movement for reappropriation, that is, the organisation of a historical subject that can achieve the reappropriation of what has been enclosed by capital. The question of power in this perspective is thought via social antagonism, and politics is reduced to actions of humans alone. On commons and communing, see previous references and Bollier and Helfrich (2012), Caffentzis (2010), Dardot and Laval (2019), De Angelis (2017), Gibson-Graham (2006), Linebaugh (2014). For a review of the field of political ecology see Robbins (2012), Bennett (2010) and Ernstson and Swyngedouw (2019). See, for example, Alkon et al. (2017), Braun and Whatmore (2010a), Bresnihan (2016), Carse and Kneas (2019), Carse et al. (2020), Mansfield (2017), Millner et al. (2020) and Pellicer-Thomas et al. (2016). See, for example, Bresnihan and Hesse (2021), Carse (2014), Mansfield and Doyle (2016), Millner (2017), Pellicer-Thomas et al. (2016), Pinto García (2019) and Singh (2015). On the concepts of Anthropocene and Capitalocene see Crutzen (2002), Zalasiewicz et al. (2010), Moore (2016), Malm and Hornborg (2014). This new understanding of materialism resonates with Guattari’s ecosophical thinking (Guattari 2000). See also Papadopoulos (2010a). See for example Rose (2004) and Rivera Cusicanqui (2010). See also Monticelli (2018), Pickerill (2021), Brown et al. (2012) and van de Sande (2013). See Papadopoulos (2010b, 2018, ch.5). In our forthcoming article, ‘What are ecological transitions? Green democracy, more-than-social movements and the ecological condition’, we discuss the relation between more-than-social movements and the rise of new forms of institutionalism, the question of scales in processes of political transformation and the link between socioecological movements and the emersion of innovative forms of community governance. See extended discussion in Papadopoulos (2011, 2018). For an extensive discussion of these practices see Papadopoulos (2018) and Gould (2009). See also Papadopoulos et al.(2008) and Papadopoulos (2015).

REFERENCES Alkon, A.H. and Guthman, J. (eds) (2017), The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (eds) (2012), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Amherst, MA: Levellers Press. Braun, B. and Whatmore, S. (eds) (2010a), Political Matter. Technoscience. Democracy and Public Life, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Braun, B. and Whatmore, S. (2010b), The stuff of politics: an introduction, in B. Braun and S. Whatmore (eds), Political Matter. Technoscience. Democracy and Public Life, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. ix–xl. Bresnihan, P. (2013), John Clare and the manifold commons, Environmental Humanities, 3 (1), 71–91. Bresnihan, P. (2016), Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature & the Commons, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Bresnihan, P. and Hesse, A. (2021), Political ecologies of infrastructural and intestinal decay, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4 (3), 778–98. Brown, G., Kraftl, P. and Pickerill, J. (2012), Holding the future together: towards a theorisation of the spaces and times of transition, Environment and Planning A, 44 (7), 1607–23. Caffentzis, G. (2010), The future of ‘the commons’: neoliberalism’s ‘plan b’ or the original disaccumulation of capital? New Formations, 69 (1), 23–41. Carse, A. (2014), Beyond the Big Ditch. Politics, Ecology and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

More-than-social movements  517 Carse, A. and Kneas, D. (2019), Unbuilt and unfinished, Environment and Society, 10 (1), 9–28. Carse, A., Middleton, T., Cons, J., Dua, J., Valdivia, G. and Cullen Dunn, E. (2020), Chokepoints: anthropologies of the constricted contemporary, Ethnos, accessed 17 May 2022 at https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​00141844​.2019​.1696862. Castellano, K. (2017), Moles, molehills, and common right in John Clare’s poetry, Studies in Romanticism, 56 (2), 157–76. Centemeri, L. (2018), Commons and the new environmentalism of everyday life. Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permaculture movement, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 39 (2), 289–314. Crutzen, P.J. (2002), Geology of mankind, Nature, 415 (23), art. 415023a. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2019), Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, London: Bloomsbury. De Angelis, M. (2017), Omnia Sunt Communia. On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, London: Zed. Ernstson, H. and Swyngedouw, E. (2019), Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities, Questioning Cities, London: Routledge. Ghelfi, A. (2015), Worlding Politics: justice, commons and technoscience, PhD dissertation, University of Leicester. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gould, D.B. (2009), Moving Politics: Emotion and Act Up’s Fight Against AIDS, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Guattari, F.L. (2000), The Three Ecologies, London: Athlone. Haraway, D. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Holbraad, M., Pedersen, M.A. and Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014), The politics of ontology: anthropological positions, Fieldsights, 13 January. Holmgren, D. (2002), Permaculture. Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Victoria: Holmgren Design Services. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Linebaugh, P. (2008), The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Linebaugh, P. (2014), Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, Oakland, CA: Spectre. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014), The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene, The Anthropocene Review, 1 (1), 62–9. Mansfield, B. (2017), Folded futurity: epigenetic plasticity, temporality, and new thresholds of fetal life, Science as Culture, 26 (3), 355–79. Mansfield, B. and Doyle, M. (2016), Nature: a conversation in three parts, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107 (1), 22–7. Mezzadra, S. (2011), The topicality of prehistory: a new reading of Marx’s analysis of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, Rethinking Marxism, 23 (3), 302–21. Millner, N. (2017), Terra plena: revisiting contemporary agrarian struggles in Central America through a ‘full earth’ perspective, in M. Jackson (ed.), Postcolonial Transition after Ontology and Posthumanism, London: Routledge, ch. 4. Millner, N., Peñagaricano, I., Fernandez, M. and Snook, L.K. (2020), The politics of participation: negotiating relationships through community forestry in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala, World Development, 127, art. 104743. Monticelli, L. (2018), Embodying alternatives to capitalism in the 21st century, tripleC, 16 (2), 501–17. Moore, J.W. (2016), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Papadopoulos, D. (2010a), Activist materialism, Deleuze Studies, 4 (suppl.), 64–83. Papadopoulos, D. (2010b), Insurgent posthumanism, Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 10 (2), 134–51. Papadopoulos, D. (2011), Alter-ontologies: towards a constituent politics in technoscience, Social Studies of Science, 41 (2), 177–201.

518  Handbook of critical environmental politics Papadopoulos, D. (2014), Politics of matter: justice and organisation in technoscience, Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, 28 (1), 70–85. Papadopoulos, D. (2015), DIWY! Precarity in embodied capitalism, in A. Dimitrakaki and K. Lloyd (eds), Economy: Art, Production and the Subject the 21st Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 123–39. Papadopoulos, D. (2018), Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Papadopoulos, D., Stephenson, N. and Tsianos, V. (2008), Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, London: Pluto. Pellicer-Thomas, R., De Lucia, V. and Sullivan, S. (2016), Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-Embodiments, London: Routledge. Pellizzoni, L. (2018), The commons in the shifting problematization of contemporary society, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 39 (2), 211–34. Pickerill, J. (2021), Making climate urbanism from the grassroots: eco-communities, experiments and divergent temporalities, in V. Castán Broto, E. Robin and A. While (eds), Climate Urbanism: Towards a Critical Research Agenda, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 227–42. Pinto García, L. (2019), Disentangling war and disease in post-conflict Colombia beyond technoscientific peacemaking, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2 (1), 94–111. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2014), Encountering bioinfrastructure: ecological struggles and the sciences of soil, Social Epistemology, 28 (1), 26–40. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2015), Making time for soil: technoscientific futurity and the pace of care, Social Studies of Science, 45 (5), 691–716. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (1998), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Reid, H.G. and Taylor, B. (2010), Recovering The Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2010), Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: una reflexiòn sobre pràcticas y discursos descolonizadores, Buenos Aires: Tinta Limòn. Robbins, P. (2012), Political Ecology, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Rose, D.B. (2004), Reports from a Wild Country. Ethics for Decolonisation, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Rosset, P. and Altieri, M. (2017), Agroecology: Science and Politics, Black Point, Nova Scotia: Femwood. Serres, M. and Latour, B. (1995), Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Singh, N.M. (2015), Payments for ecosystem services and the gift paradigm: sharing the burden and joy of environmental care, Ecological Economics, 117 (C), 53–61. Stengers, I. (1997), Cosmopolitiques, vols 1–7, Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Stengers, I. (2005), The cosmopolitical proposal, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 994–1003. Stengers, I. (2017), Autonomy and the intrusion of Gaia, South Atlantic Quarterly, 116 (2), 381–400. Tsing, A.L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van de Sande, M. (2013), The prefigurative politics of Tahrir Square – an alternative perspective on the 2011 revolutions, Res Publica, 19 (3), 223–39. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2015), Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Antropology, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Wall, D. (2014), The Commons in History. Culture, Conflict, and Ecology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watney, S. (1997), Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, London: Cassell. Whitefield, P. (2004), Earth Care Manual. A Permaculture Handbook for Britain and Other Temperate Climates, East Meon, Hampshire: Permanent. Winner, L. (1986), Do artifacts have politics? in L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 19–39.

More-than-social movements  519 Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Steffen, W. and Crutzen, P. (2010), The new world of the Anthropocene, Environmental Science & Technology, 44 (7), 2228–31.

PART VI NEW DIRECTIONS

37. Decolonising environmental politics Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner

INTRODUCTION When Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring in 1962 (Carson 1962 [2002]) to denounce the destructive effects of synthetic agricultural chemicals and pesticides on wildlife, it quickly acquired a wide Anglo-American readership, assuming almost cult status within nascent American environmental movements (Lear 1993). Retrospectively, within the next decade, the book’s publication would be regarded as one of the defining moments of the making of a modern environmentalism, a global movement seeking to name and resist the damages wrought on more-than-human ecologies by newly industrialised production systems. Through the 1960s and 1970s, mass protests would appeal to Carson while objecting to new contamination risks posed to water, air and soils, new scales of waste disposal and new levels of deforestation that were an inseparable part of post-war ‘progress’. These movements highlighted the effects of synthesised chemicals on humans as well as on bird and animal life, and brought fresh attention to the fragile interdependency of wider webs of ecological relationships. Although the book’s publication holds an important place in the emergence of a modern environmentalism, its claims emerge from a much wider context of ideas and struggle. These existing concerns helped the book to travel, and to gain wide resonance. However, existing dividing-lines along racial, class and gender lines hindered concerns with the impacts of pesticides on wildlife from being connected with other, contemporaneous struggles related to similar pollutants, such as protests led by migrant workers against the use of pesticides because of their health effects (Pulido and Peña 1998), or anti-war activists protesting the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, the first intentional example of ecocide (Wenzel 2019). North American environmentalism also tended not to associate with the anti-colonial struggles defending rights to land and labour that were taking place as the technologies of the US-led ‘Green Revolution’ were being trialled in countries such as Mexico and India. In this chapter we retrace these dis/connections to draw an alternative genealogy of modern environmentalism. We show that there was a wider context of movements and currents of thought concerned with land, labour and livelihoods which are not generally counted as part of environmental politics (Chapter 2 in this volume). Many of these movements, particularly those occurring outside of Europe and North America, highlighted issues of race and colonialism as being central to questions of land and ecology – issues that have often been considered peripheral to environmental concerns. Owing to this emphasis, these movements have been segregated out of the memory of the history of environmental politics. We emphasise here how much is lost – in both global resonance and of political purchase – when these issues become separated. This observation grounds a commitment to the decolonisation of environmental politics, an idea we unpack in more depth in the next section. With decolonial scholars (Rose 2004; Whyte 2017), postcolonial thinkers and activists (Nixon 2011; Wenzel 2019) and many environmental historians (Cronon 1996), we emphasise, first, that the drive to imagine and protect 521

522  Handbook of critical environmental politics environments has involved the dispossession of peoples from land they formerly used, and, moreover, has played a role in legitimising white visions of spatial management and development. It is a mistake to suppose that processes of environmental destruction can be reversed without recognising that white Euro-American visions of progress are part of the fundamental problem at stake in widespread resource exploitation and degradation. A second aim of the chapter is therefore to unsettle the idea of the environment as a solely nonhuman concern that cannot be mixed up with questions of human labour and livelihoods. Renewed attention to the human histories of coloniality in the making of modern environments can refresh and revitalise contemporary environmental politics (Davis and Todd 2017; Yusoff 2018). Against a simplified, Americanised or Europeanised hero story of resistance to damaging pesticides, we therefore move to unearth the wider meshwork of connected concerns that have animated collective action since the 1960s in relation to land, ecologies and livelihoods. In this task we are indebted to a mass of scholarship which spans the varied disciplines and subdisciplines of the environmental social sciences and humanities. These contributions have their own histories and geographies, documenting and challenging processes of spatial and environmental injustice that surface the intimate connections between environment, society and power: environmental justice and racism as it developed in North America; ‘environmentalism of the poor’, focusing largely on regions in the Global South (Chapter 33 in this volume); Indigenous scholarship from settler-colonial contexts; labour environmentalism and environmental health; social reproduction and feminist politics; and more recent work within postcolonial environmental humanities. Drawing on this work, we show how the dominant stories of environmental politics, as they have congealed over time, have solidified the idea of a separation between nonhuman environments and the people who inhabit them – an emphasis that was much less present in the rich history and geography of environmental struggles, where the links between chemicals, bodies, gender and work were often central (see Chapters 3, 35 and 36 in this volume). This brings us to our third aim: to explore what we might term an ‘aesthetic politics’ at play in the making of modern environmentalism. This is, the way in which a concern is rendered perceptible precisely by altering what, and whom, it is possible to see (Rancière 1999). We are concerned to unsettle the boundaries of what can, and cannot, be classed as environmental, by tracing the common threads that connect diverse movements that were taking place at the same time, even where they were not associated. Thus we intend to disrupt, within the concept of the environment, the notion that ecological conservation can ever be thought without attending to broader issues of production, consumption, labour and livelihood. The structure of the remainder of this chapter is as follows. First, we provide a brief overview of recent scholarship on decolonisation and the way we understand and apply the concept to environmental politics. Second, we revisit the moment of the ‘birth’ of modern environmentalism in the 1960s to explore the broader technological, political and aesthetic conditions that fostered the growth and expansion of incipient protest movements. Third, we focus on the constitution of civic platforms and alternative networks that erupted through the 1980s and 1990s as decisive points of resistance to neoliberal globalisation and the global governance frameworks that sought to reconcile capitalist expansion with environmental limits. Fourth, we explore what has been distinct about political and decolonial movements since 2000, noticing in particular the fresh emphasis on the politics of knowledge at the heart of (a specifically decolonial) environmental politics. After tracing these distinct lineages we

Decolonising environmental politics  523 identify key ‘common threads’ emerging from the alliances and conversations around decolonial environmental politics.

WHAT IS DECOLONISATION? What does decolonisation mean, and why is it important to consider the different historical and geographical contexts in which it is used and applied? This chapter cannot provide a comprehensive review of literature on the meanings and uses of decolonisation, but we offer three different perspectives and why it is important to consider them in the context of environmental politics. First, decolonisation is not a metaphor. As Tuck and Yang (2012) argue, decolonial politics in settler-colonial contexts, such as North America and Australia, is premised on the repatriation of Indigenous lands and the fostering of Indigenous sovereignty. In these contexts, historic processes of dispossession through treaty agreements and war have never halted, but continue through institutional, economic and environmental forms of violence. These include exclusionary legal and regulatory systems, lack of social investments in Indigenous livelihoods and protections, siting toxic industries close to Indigenous lands, and environmental policies that deem Indigenous lands ‘wastelands’ (for example, for renewable energy) or ‘wilderness’ for conservation. For Tuck, Yang and many other Indigenous scholars and activists working in and from these contexts, using the term ‘decolonisation’ to describe other social justice concerns (from education to housing) fails to acknowledge that the repatriation of stolen lands fundamentally unsettles the continuation of settler-colonial culture and society. Taken out of context, and applied to concerns that are not connected to movements seeking the repatriation of land to Indigenous people, claims to ‘decolonise’ can thus reinforce the settler status quo in unintended yet powerful ways. We discuss this in a subsequent section in the context of Standing Rock and the climate justice movement. A second perspective on decolonisation situates itself in the world-historical context of anti-imperial struggles and the making of the Third World that begins with the end of World War II and still carries on. Focused in the Caribbean, the African continent and South-East Asia, these struggles gave rise to the utopian horizon of a Third World, distinct from visions of the Capitalist West or Communist East. This promise was short-lived as newly independent nations became the theatre for the Cold War, and were unable to break free of deeply inequitable (neo)colonial economic systems. Postcolonial environmental humanities scholars, such as Rob Nixon, Jennifer Wenzel and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, have traced how anticolonial and decolonial intellectuals and activists have repeatedly emphasised the scandal of European opulence, founded as it is on slavery and the continuing extraction of resources. This is key as it makes colonialism the starting point for environmental politics, forcing environmental scholars and activists to situate their politics within these longer histories and uneven geographic relationships. Without this expanded perspective, we can inherit a truncated view not only of history but of environmental justice. A third perspective on decolonisation emphasises the knowledge politics at stake in efforts to resist and forge alternatives to colonial modernity. Here, decolonisation names the active dismantling of modern humanism, what Wynter (2003) understands as the figure of the human as Western man, thus banishing everything else to the category of ‘nature’ (including women, Indigenous, animals, plants, and so on). The ethic and practice of relating to living

524  Handbook of critical environmental politics and non-living matter as creative and sacred, as something more than resource or wilderness, has, as we have signalled previously, a long history within Indigenous contexts. Extending this perspective beyond Indigenous contexts, however, Papadopolous (2018, p. 172) contends that a decolonial politics of matter is more generally ‘a politics that challenges epistemic coloniality by transforming materially everyday ontologies of existence’. He describes an eclectic series of more-than-social movements which have developed through decolonial practices of matter, that is, making new worlds instead of seeking their representation or inclusion within existing governance arrangements. This includes ecological movements relating to reclaiming land, alternative forms of agriculture, seed saving, as well as HIV activism that re-configured relations to the body and health through collective infrastructures of care. These are all forms of craft, that are not specifically about seeking entry to the public or opposing state-capitalist developments, but experimenting with other forms of life that, in the process, change the constitution of life. Our intention is not to conflate these three different perspectives, rooted as they are in different geographies, historical experiences and intellectual traditions. However, it is part of the premise of this chapter that environmentalism, as a force of cultural, political and social resistance, needs to be nourished by the wider web of radical and political struggles and narratives that push back against land appropriation, cultural dispossession and extractivism, as well as cultivating fresh awareness and engagement with nonhuman ecologies and technologies. This is what we mean by a decolonisation of environmental politics.

REVISITING THE BIRTH OF MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM Fifteen years after World War II, a moment when industrial chemicals created for warfare were being used more liberally than ever before, Rachel Carson imagined a future without birdsong. The technological optimism and abundance of military technologies, synthetic chemicals and strategies that accompanied the post-war restructuring of society, was not, at that time, limited by an idea of the ‘environment’ that might be affected by this barrage, and against masculinist representations of chemicals as important weapons with which to fight social problems (Sellers 1999), Carson’s book targets the drive to ravage the environment for progress as an essential problem. This flips the Cold War narrative of threat, essential to the US imaginary of geopolitics at the time, so that modern technologies for maximum extraction become the antagonist (not Russia), and industrial chemicals (not communism) the ‘hidden enemy’. It is not only the futures of birds or wildlife that are thrown into question in this careful study of its effects and production, but the whole question of technological futures and the startling possibility that they might bring about an end to human civilisation. Up until that time in US culture and politics, environmental concerns were ‘over there’, if at all, located in distant landscapes of ‘wilderness’ that needed to be preserved from or for human civilisation. As Cronon (1996) has traced, the US ‘cult of wilderness’ was born out of a masculine culture of the romantic sublime and settler frontiers – artists and cowboys. Rachel Carson, a powerful writer, begins Silent Spring with a deliberately idealised and emotive evocation of an ‘average’ small town in America, impressing urgency on her predominantly white, middle-class readers by revealing the threats to their known worlds. Although a trained scientist, rigorous in her research and arguments, she knew that feeling mattered more than knowledge to meaningful collective action. This also made Carson a target. The undermining

Decolonising environmental politics  525 of her work by vested interests and by those who refused to accept the amateur findings of a woman, has been discussed in the context of the second wave feminism developing in this period. Silent Spring was a popular book for women’s reading groups, for example, and no doubt worked to raise support for her cause from women. What is less well emphasised in these discussions is Carson’s role in shifting environment politics from the monumental, masculinist geographies of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, to the familiar spaces of social reproduction occupied by women. As the nascent environmental justice movement in the US would go on to show in the 1980s, home and community were crucial sites of environmental contestation that intersected with race, class and gender. Concerns about new, industrially produced chemicals surfaced in other works and struggles contemporaneous with Carson’s work, and it is interesting to consider why these concerns are not often associated. Bookchin’s (1962 [1974]) Our Synthetic Environment, for example, which was published a few months before Carson’s Silent Spring, similarly describes a broad range of environmental ills associated with industrial applications of new technologies but received little attention owing to its perceived political radicalism (McCord 2008). Meanwhile, when Dolores Huerta, a Latino civil rights activist, voiced concerns about how the use of pesticides impacted on the health of Mexican agricultural workers in the US, these barely registered on the national stage (Pulido and Peña 1998). Where Carson faced the misogynistic cultures of her time, backed by a powerful industrial lobby, migrant workers in California faced racism, well-organised agri-business seeking to protect profit margins, and prevailing assumptions within public health that failed to recognise the links between chemical exposure and ill health (Nash 2006). Official public health professionals and agencies initially dismissed the health claims of the farm workers, explaining the effects to be the result of the weak Mexican constitution and the reduced immunity of Mexican bodies. Owing to these and other concerns around labour, health and chemical agriculture, Huerta, along with César Chávez, would go on to establish the United Farmers Workers Union in the late 1960s, an organisation that is not commonly considered ‘environmental’. Yet this movement does connect, in important ways, with the ideas of an aesthetic politics outlined in the introduction: it was a matter of rendering communicable the effects of industrial chemicals on particular bodies, and of revealing how endemic racism and Californian industrial agri-business were embedded in the problem (Mitchell 1996). An important aspect of retelling the histories of environmentalism through a decolonial perspective, then, is to unsettle the hero narratives and (usually white, Anglo-American or European) figures from their apparently central roles, and link them with a wider meshwork of associated people, ideas and movements. This is part of what we termed an ‘aesthetic politics’ in the introduction to this chapter. Also, just as this politics involves questioning how figures become iconic in the history of environmentalism, it also involves challenging how certain bodies and places are exposed to harm and risk in the broader social field. Some bodies, more than others, were exposed to toxic chemicals through agriculture, and some places, more than others, were used as sites of experimentation for technologies of war, industrialised food production and public health (see Box 1). The Pacific was deemed a legitimate testing-ground for nuclear weapons during the post-war period, causing damage to bodies and soils for generations (DeLoughrey 2013). The Marshall Islands, for example, were subjected to 67 American atmosphere tests from 1948 to 1958, the largest equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)1 declared the islands to be the most contaminated place in the world, and well into the 1980s people were still delivering ‘jellyfish babies’

526  Handbook of critical environmental politics (Nixon 2011). Meanwhile, India and Mexico became experimental sites for testing genetically modified seeds and chemicals required to kill off the new pest problems they incurred – most famously, the dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) pesticide that Carson took issue with, through what became known as the Green Revolution.2 Nixon emphasises the slow violence in play as these poisons leached into soil through the experiments, because the harm occurred mostly out of sight of international headlines, and had its impact on timescales that were too long to cause a dramatic public outcry. While the US prided itself on ‘modernising’ Mexico’s impoverished economy as part of Green Revolution experimentation, critics at the time and decades later saw these projects as being rooted in geopolitical ambitions. Kloppenburg (2005, p. 161) goes so far as to call Green Revolution projects the ‘modern successor to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical gardens’. Where botanical gardens had focused on moving plant germplasm laterally to colonies as the basis of plantation-based economies, this strategy focused on defusing the twin threats of communism and famine in the Global South (Patel 2013). Thus, governments were persuaded that if they did not adopt the new agricultural technologies they would have a ‘Red Revolution’ on their hands, that is, a communist revolution. Meanwhile, although the Mexican government was persuaded by the arguments of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Mexican Agricultural Programme (MAP) was met by critiques, even in the 1940s. American cultural geographer Carl Sauer, for example, was one of the experts consulted by the Rockefeller Foundation regarding the proposals for the MAP. Sauer (cited in Bebbington and Carney 1990, p. 35) advised strongly against the plan, warning of the dangers of applying agricultural science ‘to recreate the history of U.S. commercial agriculture in Mexico’ and advocated a more ‘bottom-up’ process that respected the integrity and complexity of already-existing agricultural economies and biodiversity systems. At the same time, agronomists in Mexico, such as Edmundo Taboada, Edmundo Limón and Pandurang Khankhoje, emphasised that the new hybrid varieties interrupted traditional practices of seed-saving (the new varieties had to be bought anew each year and could not self-reproduce). These critiques, which resonate with more contemporary rationales for developing ecological alternatives within agriculture (Chapter 10 in this volume), were dismissed. Yet together these critical voices helped give rise to alternatives that were not so reliant on external inputs, later to consolidate as movements for ‘agroecology’ (Astier et al. 2015). In the decades that followed, wider webs of activists and scholars based in affected regions would connect the ravaging of land with longer histories of colonialism, and develop new types of agroecological training schools and networks (Rosset and Martínez-Torres 2012) as well as post-colonial activism (Gupta 1998). Taboada was a particularly important figure in these earlier decades of critique. Similar to other figures, such as Amílcar Cabral in Guinea, an agronomist engaged in land rights issues (see Dhada 1993; Wood 2016; César 2018), Taboada was involved in experimental agronomy in field stations where long-standing practice was seen as the basis for future science, rather than quick-fix industrial solutions. Neither Taboada nor Cabral are often remembered in genealogies of environmentalism, we suggest, owing to their interest in land and labour rather than an idea of an environment without people. Cabral explicitly thought about his work in decolonial terms that are useful for reconnecting these contemporaneous movements. A Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, intellectual, poet, theoretician, revolutionary, political organiser, nationalist and diplomat, Cabral worked first in Cuba in Portugal and later in Guinea and Angola, becoming part of liberation movements as well as

Decolonising environmental politics  527 developing novel approaches to soil repair and restoration from the early 1950s onwards. Influenced by the Africana tradition of critical theory, which he also influenced, Cabral connects together geological and social histories, emphasising agronomy as a way to reveal (and transform) peoples’ lived conditions under colonialism (César 2018, p. 256). Cabral’s emphasis consequently falls on improvising practices that can transform and restore soil health and alter colonial power dynamics. This he engaged through experimental technical agronomy and agronomic theory, on the one hand, and participation in postcolonial nationalist revolutionary struggles, on the other. Bringing the two together came, for Cabral, under the category of ‘groundwork,’ encompassing care not only for land, flora and fauna but for people (‘men’) and their wider social relations. Through such projects and his account of them, Cabral’s work evidences how ecologies have been damaged through histories of unfair labour, land appropriation and colonial dispossession, as well as how repair might take place through experimental practices that seek to reintegrate dispossessed farmers and colonised people as experts of their own experience.3 These entanglements between people and ecologies have been largely excluded in environmental imaginaries, not by accident, but as part of the perpetuation of colonial forms of appropriation that legitimise the dispossession of people in the name of environmental protection or conservation. It is essential that we attend to these claims to land and labour, and the ways they have been overwritten by environmental imaginaries, as part of any vision for ecological repair (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011). This emphasis is not new but is exists in postcolonial thoughts of the time: for example, Frantz Fanon, a Martinican author, writes about land in 1961 ‘as a primary site of postcolonial recuperation, sustainability and dignity’ (cited in DeLoughrey and Handley (2011, p. 3). Contemporary postcolonial environmental scholars note that although Fanon was not writing about the environment per se, the vital interconnection of dispossession, land rights and degradation was central to his work (Wenzel 2017; Gray and Sheikh 2018). In concluding this section, it is important to observe that people have, through all time, been absorbed in everyday social and material practices that involve land, water, technology, plants, animals and materials, as part of a mode of protecting and sustaining them, that is rarely classed as environmentalism. These entanglements, which tend to be experimental in character and transversal in their operations (see Papadopolous 2018), need to be included in an expanded conceptualisation of (decolonised) environmentalism, for, although they are not always counted as part of the radical movement, they contribute vitally to practices for sustaining ecological relationships and adaptation over time.

ALTER-GLOBALISATION AND THIRD WORLD ENVIRONMENTALISM Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was just one aspect of an input-intensive, productivist agricultural system that emerged globally after World War II. As the Green Revolution, spearheaded by the US, was trialled first in Mexico and India, and then in countries across Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia (Patel 2013), global economies and environments were transformed at every scale. Resistance to these transformations also intersected with anti-colonial movements and thought in novel ways that have not always been noted. In this section, we outline how new forces of globalisation and debt-induced economic restructuring

528  Handbook of critical environmental politics emerged, together with new movements and campaigns that raised objections to these shifts through concerns about social justice, human rights, livelihood, development and the environment. These are essential elements of the rich alternative movements that have grown since the 1980s until now. Global economic restructuring was largely driven by what became known as the Washington Consensus: a set of economic reforms pushed by financial institutions based in Washington, DC, onto crisis-wracked countries across Latin America, the African continent and South-East Asia. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) at the heart of these reforms opened up new territories and resources across the Global South to extraction, commodity production and industrial use to fuel the global economy, primarily via bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (McNally 2006). These agreements made privatisation, deregulation and economic restructuring effectively mandatory for sovereign nations of the Global South if they wished to remain within debt assistance programmes and participate in the benefits of the emerging global economic community. These ‘adjustments’ transformed not only economies but environments. In response, countless Indigenous and local communities most directly affected – those who lost access to resources and ecologies they depended on – resisted. This has been described as ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Martínez-Alier 2003; Guha and Martínez-Alier 2013) or ‘liberation ecology’ (Peet and Watts 2004), referring in each instance to diverse movements of primarily marginalised populations, organising to resist the state and/or private companies threatening community existence and territorially based livelihoods, health, culture and autonomies. Importantly, these movements not only articulated opposition to land appropriation, contamination, industrial infrastructures, or proprietary biotechnologies that adversely affected them; they also modelled experimental alternatives to these modes of production by linking together novel farming and ecological practices with innovative modes of social organising. These experiments are not luxuries but are animated by the need to survive, for what is at stake here is not only access to resources or uneven exposure to risks, but long-sustained and lively forms of subsistence living and ecological livelihoods, understood here as more-than-human collaborations (De la Cadena 2015). One of the most well-known and important activist figures within this Third World environmentalism is the Nigerian poet and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who helped organise the dynamic Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Since the 1960s, the Ogoni had experienced systematic state violence and chronic environmental violence, most notably the contamination of air, water and soil through the drilling operations of global oil companies in the Niger Delta. Although Saro-Wiwa is widely remembered, Nixon (2011) reminds us that his efforts to draw the support of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Amnesty, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to the plight of the Ogoni people initially fell on deaf ears. Amnesty International only responded to the human rights abuses that amounted to direct military killings or detention of people without a proper trial. Yet Saro-Wiwa insisted that the Ogoni were victims of an unconventional war, carried out on his people’s ecologies and means of subsistence. The linking of state violence, human rights and environmental degradation in this position – so novel at the time and so vital – could not be grasped through the narrow, single-issue frameworks through which these concerns were understood at the time, helping us understand why it failed to gain wide resonance until much later. Nixon (2011) aligns this example with other instances of ‘slow violence’ where the protracted timescale of the violence also keeps it from public perception. That the Ogoni people had suffered these abuses for

Decolonising environmental politics  529 over 30 years – similar to the bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals, melting ice caps, or loss of biodiversity in other places – is difficult to perceive as violence precisely because it does not manifest as a sudden catastrophe (Chapter 16 in this volume), but over a long period, in diverse arenas of life. The work of postcolonial writers, such as Guha and Said, are vital to Nixon’s argument that this is a form of violence that has a specifically colonial history: it is allowed to take place in some places and to some humans, rendered disposable, while others remain protected and at a remove from even hearing about the effects. Nixon’s account of the ‘long dyings – the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological’ (Nixon 2011, pp. 2–3) offers important clues to the political-aesthetic inquiry of this chapter, for his account explores not only what happened, but how to testify to slow violence in a manner so as to transform the conditions of political speech. This concern is central to the postcolonial environmental humanities, which invite us to remember that the environment is always-already a history of colonial appropriation and ways of seeing. Euro-American environmentalism has tended to imagine tracts of pristine forest or land to be preserved as part of national heritage or a conduit to divine transfiguration: an environment without humans in it. Against these forms of continuous, wilful, passive and slow erasure, a decolonial environmental politics can be understood as a collective labour to render visible and audible longer, colonial histories of ecological devastation, and to overturn prevailing Euro-American environmental imaginaries that keep privilege in place (Cronon 1996). The importance of intersectional alliances was not lost on Saro-Wiwa, whose political imaginary may have been rooted in the Niger Delta, but was shaped and articulated through an international awareness and engagement with minority environmental movements resisting extractive operations around the world. He came to his own tactics partly through lengthy travels in the Soviet Union and North America, including visiting an environmental group in Colorado seeking to protect a wilderness from corporate and state assault (Nixon 1996). Saro-Wiwa was part of a generation of environmental justice activists who were capable of making the links across geographies and between the concerns of human rights, postcolonial and environmental activists. In the process, these examples revealed fresh possibilities for international movement-building.4 The international experience and connections of activists such as Saro-Wiwa, Chico Mendes and Wangari Mathaai, signal the emergence of new sites, movements and frameworks of global environmentalism throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This was a highly contested process, as Indigenous and community-based movements for alternative land-use and resource control were both antagonists and targets of evolving regimes of global development. As environmental concerns were increasingly mainstreamed into public awareness, a new industry emerged under the guise of ‘environmental management’ that was seemingly more interested in establishing global economies and standards than in heeding the concerns of specific communities. At the same time, and partly in response to this failure to connect new ecological issues with colonial violence and fresh rounds of dispossession, Indigenous and local organisations were forging their own international networks and grammar, orientated around ideas of alter-globalisation and post-development. In some instances, social movements were able to adapt regulatory conditions that were initially disempowering and exclusionary, to radically democratic ends, through the innovation of social forms of organisation that integrated issues of land and livelihoods into the heart of decision-making mechanisms. For example, in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, an alliance of local and transnational organisations was able to transform the initially disempowering conditions of a community-based forest conser-

530  Handbook of critical environmental politics vation scheme, imposed in a top-down manner, into the basis of a rural social movement with both economic and environmental objectives (Millner et al. 2020). Although these innovations have subsequently influenced global environmental strategy, they have rarely been recognised as part of the genealogy of environmentalism per se. This is important, because the globalising politics of sustainable development that developed through the 1990s has been frequently misunderstood as the product of Global North imaginaries. Instead, key ideas and concepts that are now important to sustainable development have developed through resistance to, and even ‘hacking of’, ideas imported from specific local contexts and then applied as a type of universal model onto others. New vocabularies and symbols for intersectional movements within and beyond the Global South demand a different type of basis for collaboration, which values historical forms of stewardship and situated forms of ecological knowledge and practice above one-size-fit-all solutions. This counter-model is perhaps most powerfully illustrated through the appearance of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) on the global stage through the activism of transnational agrarian movements in the 1990s, and later, within debates over the rights of nature in Bolivia and Ecuador. The subject, object and translocal witness of environmental healing, the figure of Madre Tierra – composed through Mayan and other Indigenous imaginaries of ecological relationality – stands as a shared referent for the project of constructing transnational vision for postcolonial ecological healing (Millner, 2021).5 While leaning on specific cosmologies and histories in specific contexts, Madre Tierra has thus become a type of metonymic referent between contexts standing in for resistance to neoliberal and neocolonial projects of extractivism. The intersection of concerns embodied in the iconography of Madre Tierra have helped create a shared set of witnessing practices that now connect countless agrarian and food-based social movements around the world who object to the social and ecological violence of the global food regime. The transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina (LVC) is an important example of the alternative claims being raised through these practices, which have succeeded in making claims on and in global economic forums6 (Borras 2010). It is perhaps not surprising that new icons, such as Madre Tierra, emerged to capture the shared experience of dispossession across the contexts that such movements connect, not least because of the ‘slow violence’ being enacted – both by global forms of extractivism and by new models for environmental management – on the rich cosmological fabrics that have sustained these practices for centuries. Decolonial environmental politics seek to apprehend and learn from these emerging aesthetic linkages, and the histories they render visible, rather than reducing them to policy-based questions of what will work, or not work, for all. The contradictions embedded within United Nations (UN) institutions were a particular target for emerging collaborations. Coercive tactics employed by the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) to enforce the liberalisation and deregulation of indebted national economies in the name of ‘food security’ were seen to stand directly at odds with aspirations mapped out by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Food Programme (WFP) (Ziegler et al. 2011). In 1996 LVC introduced their counter-concept, ‘food sovereignty’, to the UN World Food Summit, where definitions of food security were being approved. Security is meaningless, LVC argues, unless it safeguards the autonomy of small-scale farmers to choose how to grow and refuses to open the best agricultural land to the vagaries of the global food market. Returning to the broader theme of decolonising environmental politics, the issue is that the agenda’s force has emerged from an exchange not only between knowledge content,

Decolonising environmental politics  531 but between forms of knowledge that derive from diverse world views, cultural contexts and experiences of neoliberal globalisation (Borras 2010). The knowledge production processes of movements such as LVC have, more latterly, been heralded as a potential model for democratic knowledge production, owing to the distinctive dialogic practice that has shaped the movement since its inception (Rosset and Martínez-Torres 2012). As these movements make claims on the global food future, and are increasingly recognised as experts in the deliberation of options for sustainable production, it is imperative that we do not lose sight of the intersectional dialogue or the innovative connections rendered between diverse domains of production and reproduction, that made these collaborations fertile in the first place.

DECOLONISING THE ANTHROPOCENE This fresh emphasis on the politics of knowledge is central, not peripheral, to decolonial environmental politics. From the 1990s moving into the 2000s and towards the present day, these concerns have been increasingly framed in ontological terms; that is, in terms of the accounts of the world and the stories used to understand and inhabit it that animate diverse systems of knowledge and practice around the world. When Indigenous ontologies are taken into account, it becomes evident that not only human subjects, but living and non-living matter, can be regarded as active participants in disputes over land and environments. While this ontological turn, as it is named in academic circles, emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century, the ethic and practice of relating to the nonhuman world as creative and sacred, as something more than resource or wilderness, has a much longer history. In the debates over the rights of nature that have animated protest in Bolivia and Ecuador, in Latin American articulations of the ‘pluriverse’ and ‘cosmopolitics’, and in new aesthetic traditions, such as afro-futurism and Indigenous futurism, there is fresh emphasis in addressing the denial of worlds that has taken place through colonial appropriation. This violence can be seen, through the perspective of decolonial environmental politics, to be perpetuated in environmental models of governance. The way that struggle against these forms of violence are being contested on an ontological basis can be seen as we follow the movement of Madre Tierra from agrarian struggles into efforts to redefine national constitutions in dialogue with ideas of the ‘rights of nature’. As we saw in the previous section, Madre Tierra is a hybrid construction that flourished in neo-traditional sites of exchange, such as transnational agrarian movements in Mesoamerica and, more recently, as Pachamama, in debates surrounding the rights of nature in Bolivia, Ecuador and beyond. In the Andean region, Pachamama is another Earth Mother figure linked with the life force of soil, humans and nonhumans. Pachamama appeared on the global stage in the Bolivian Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April 2010, which brought together people from more than 140 countries as a direct response to the UN COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, popularly perceived as a failure. This appearance constituted an international dialogue over what it would mean to make Mother Nature a subject of legal rights (De Angelis 2011). Wide participation in this conference and the wider debates would later lead to the production of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth that was used to articulate the rights of nature for the first time in Bolivia and Ecuador’s state law regimes (Caputi 2016). What is significant about this manifesto, in ontological terms, is the way it attempts to translate an alternative fabric of knowing life into the heart of modern institutions. Some see this effort as a failure: in

532  Handbook of critical environmental politics Bolivia, it did not disrupt the elaboration of the neo-extractive imperative and the suppression of dissenting Indigenous voices. When the Indigenous idea of Sumak Kawsay was translated into policies for buen vivir (living well), there were similarly objections that what was going by the name of buen vivir did not equate in any way to Indigenous modes of coexisting with the more-than-human world (Gudynas 2011; Radcliffe 2012). What is evident through such failures, however, is that what is at stake in Madre Tierra is not an alternative set of environmental policies, but a dispute between non-compatible modes of worlding the world.7 We thus arrive at a central point articulated in contemporary decolonial environmental politics – the politics of incommensurability. Decolonial anthropologist Marisol De la Cadena (2010) summarises the politics that arises from acknowledgement of this non-compatibility of different life-worlds by articulating what she, with other decolonial theorists and activists, refers to as the ‘pluriverse’. The pluriverse is a direct affront to the projects of building ‘universal’ bases for rights and law in the project of modernity. While pluriversal scholars do not reject the ethos of building bridges between diverse cultures of inhabitation, nor of constructing shared principles of human rights and justice, there is an objection at the heart of this concept: what has been called universal is highly specific and local to Anglo-European forms of knowledge, organised according to colonial hierarchies of claimed supremacy and civilisation. Against the notion that the projects of the European enlightenment could – as the ‘Encyclopedia’ knowledge project aimed to do – know and master all there is, pluriversal commitments open out onto multiple designs for living well in the world (Escobar 2018). Collaboration aiming towards the construction of just and ecologically sustainable worlds has to begin with disagreement over the givens of the known world. This must take place before the elaboration of any global solutions. This analysis clarifies the nature of the politics of aesthetics that is at stake in global environmental politics. Political philosopher Jacques Rancière names this as a problem of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Panagia 2014; Rancière 2015). Therefore it matters how concerns are communicated, since the figures we tend to rely on frequently serve to reproduce dominant ways of seeing and saying the world, rather than disruptively re-figuring the world, as we may hope. Signalling Rancière’s notion that politics is not made up of power relations between given actors in a common world, but of relations between socio-natural ‘worlds,’ De la Cadena (2010) reinterprets Rancière’s work for environmental struggles in the Global South by describing it as a negotiation of the relationships between these ‘worlds’ – diverse ways of knowing land, environment and being that are non-commensurable with one another. De la Cadena’s concern is specifically with the way that what she terms ‘earth beings’, such as the mountain Ausangate, known in the Peruvian city Cuzco as a powerful earth-being, the source of life and death, break onto political stages that do not yet recognise them as political entities. Claiming reality and meaning in spheres that are structured according to other types of rules is what renders Ausangate a contentious object (De la Cadena 2010, p. 342), and promises to ‘reshuffle’ hegemonic principles that have structured environmental governance for centuries (De la Cadena 2010, p. 343). This allows us to look back on struggles of the past with fresh perspective. Essential to Cabral’s (2016) postcolonial agronomic practices, for example, was a cartographic imagination that linked people (in their collective form) with mountains as part of the constitution of the soil as a terrain of struggle. De la Cadena’s pluriverse is therefore a utopian, but practical, project in which partially connected heterogenous socio-natural worlds negotiate their ontological disagreements politically, that is, via conflict. There are two steps to the enactment of the pluriverse in this account,

Decolonising environmental politics  533 she explains: first, to recognise that the world is more than one socio-natural formation; and, second, to interconnect this plurality without making the diverse worlds commensurable (De la Cadena 2010, p. 361). Thought of in this vein, the appearance of Madre Tierra in social protests, such as De la Cadena’s (2010, p. 336) ‘earth beings’, promise a moment of ‘rupture’ of modern politics and an ‘emergent indigeneity’ – which is not a new mode of being Indigenous, but an ‘insurgence of Indigenous forces and practices with the capacity to significantly disrupt prevalent political formations’. These concerns resonate with a growing field in anthropology that follow closely the way that ‘environmental’ worlds are constructed in animist ontologies (De Castro 1998; Kohn 2015) and through other modalities (Descola 2003; Rose 2004; Povinelli 2016). Attention to this multiplicity of worlds challenges Euro-Western assumptions about what there is and how solutions are to be organised, revealing that ontology is not only constructed through process and over time, as philosophers have long known, but also plural, without one temporal origin (De Castro 1998, Blaser 2009). These insights are just as important for geographies of urban and rural transformation, where Indigenous practice needs to be viewed as a set of entangled practices, not set apart from the new, but integral to it (De la Cadena 2010; Simpson 2017). Decolonial environmental politics, inspired by these ideas, is thus a way of rendering perceptible the entanglement of humans and nonhumans (see Chapter 36 in this volume), natures and cultures, cosmologies and scientific practices, in such a way that makes room for the innovation and ontological challenges embodied by Indigenous forms of knowing and experimental knowledge production. This texture has been visible not only in emergent theory but in the forms of protest that have emerged across the past 20 years, as in the actions by First Nations peoples and solidarity activists at Standing Rock in relation to the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline.8 What became the #NoDAPL movement and a focus for global environmental activism was led by leaders of the Dakota and Lakota peoples of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, objecting to the part of DAPL’s construction that was to take place on lands and waters the tribe never ceded consensually to the US (Whyte 2017). Though struggles against fossil fuel infrastructures and the logics of extraction they materialise had been taking place for many years prior to 2016, often led by Indigenous communities, the #NoDAPL movement marked an important shift in activist strategy and connections, bringing Indigenous symbology and acts to the forefront of an international resistance (Klein 2016). However, although the intersection of Indigenous, territorially based politics with climate politics is potentially valuable for the building of a more equitable environmental movement, it is also important to acknowledge the challenges posed by these seemingly harmonious alliances. As Whyte (2017) argues, the #NoDAPL movement led by the Sioux tribal leaders was never primarily about climate change or inadequate risk assessment procedures, but what in this chapter we have referred to as colonial and ontological forms of violence. Whyte quotes LaDonna Brave Allard of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, who asks that: We must remember we are part of a larger story. We are still here. We are still fighting for our lives, 153 years after my great-great grandmother watched as our people were senselessly murdered. We should not have to fight so hard to survive in our own lands. (Cited in Whyte 2017, p. 154)

These words frame the proposed DAPL, and policing of it, as the latest episode in a long history of violence, dispossession and erasure inflicted on Indigenous peoples in North America. Settler-colonialism is not a one-off event but an ongoing, systemic process. The

534  Handbook of critical environmental politics spectacular opposition at Standing Rock can, from this vantage, even detract from the more insidious, slow and less perceptible forms of settler-colonial violence that leach away the life-giving capacities of waters and lands in Indigenous territories (Nixon 2011) – for example, the uranium mines that have been left open in Western South Dakota since 1978 (see Voyles 2015). These toxic legacies are not easily remediated or reversed, any more than the longer histories of violence are undone by single spectacular events of resistance, even where these are successful in meeting their immediate objectives (Bresnihan 2019). In the context of climate justice and urgency around environmental problems, there remains, consequently, a real danger that the particular and unsettling demands of decolonial justice could (again) be obscured and incorporated into an undifferentiated environmental movement. This is what Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 2) caution against in their article ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, which identifies the multiple ways that ‘the metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity’. For Tuck and Yang, the understanding that settler-colonialism is a structure, not an event, is necessary to perceive that the violence of colonialism is still enacted every day, and is working to uphold a status quo that is anathema to the epistemological, ontological and cosmological relationships of Indigenous peoples. Non-metaphorical decolonisation requires the return of sovereignty to Native peoples, including possession of lands that have been taken from them, not mere lip-service to cultural difference. Solidarity of non-Indigenous civil rights and social justice activists with Indigenous peoples is thus no easy task, and will remain ‘an unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 4). This gives rise to an ethos, which the authors refer to as an ethic of incommensurability, which takes as its starting point the idea that different projects cannot simply speak to one another, or be easily aligned or allied. They argue that collaborations should only ever be taken as strategic and contingent, and warn of the risks associated with assumed longer-lasting solidarities. This is not to say that it is not essential to forge links and alliances between diverse concerns and associated social movements, such as those defending social justice, postcolonial agendas, human rights and environmental issues, as we have argued. The broader environmental justice movement embodies these connections in important ways. However, instead of merely amalgamating distinct movements into a single, unified movement, we might imagine ways of organising and struggling around common goals that do not require the flattening or suspension of difference.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have sought to build on three strands of decolonial environmental politics. First, decolonial environmental politics is not just resistance to dispossession or the inequitable distribution of environmental risks, but the articulation of different relations to environments that manifest in cultural practices, knowledge and economies that are not directed towards extraction and accumulation. This has come to the fore over the past two decades not simply as a matter of cultural difference or different knowledge systems, but as ontological difference, the making of different worlds and ways of worlding that may overlap but are not commensurable. From a decolonial perspective, the world is more than one socio-natural formation, posing a direct challenge to liberal, humanist political formations.

Decolonising environmental politics  535 Second, although struggles and movements have arisen since the 1960s in response to historically specific political-economic dynamics and environmental concerns, the decolonial articulation of these politics is always connected to longer histories and accounts of colonialism. Articulating these longer, slower forms of violence is a vital part of decolonial environmental politics. This has become visible again in debates over the term ‘Anthropocene’. Against the prevailing belief, throughout industrial modernisations, that these transformations were working for the good of the global community, decolonial and critical scholars link the Anthropocene era to the beginnings of colonialism, opening space for ‘a critical project that understands that the ecocidal logics that now govern our world are not inevitable or “human nature”, but are the result of a series of decisions that have their origins and reverberations in colonization’ (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 763). Third, there is no easy distinction between North and South, Euro-American and Indigenous, in the context of decolonial environmental politics. While it is important to recognise long-standing forms of resource and cultural extractivism wrought by formerly imperial nations, an insistence on a fundamental difference between the two regions can obscure forms of environmental politics within the industrialised North that have much in common with Third World environmentalism, in so far as they insist on linking environmental concerns with wider concerns including the erosion of urban and rural livelihoods, the systematic disowning of women’s labour, and the politics of knowledge (Barca 2014). What critical scholars and activists need to attend to is how experiences, knowledge, forms of socio-ecological organisation and histories are imagined, re-worked and mobilised within different but potentially allied political projects. Making alliances and solidarities across these differences are, to borrow Tuck and Yang’s words, always unsettled and uneasy, and should be approached accordingly. For example, the protest at Standing Rock may have become an important galvanising event for the global climate justice movement, but it is important to recognise that Indigenous demands for reparative justice and territorial sovereignty may not easily align with the demands of the mainstream climate movement. A decolonial aesthetics does not just mean attending to marginalised or absent voices, but how, when, where and through whom Indigenous experiences and concerns are made to appear. This approach keeps open a critical space for fostering alliances across different political strategies and ideas that have been emerging in recent years. An aesthetics of the earth looks for a more political, solidaristic form of environmentalism by excavating the particular discourses of decolonial politics that have surfaced on a ‘hundred dates and in a hundred places all over the world’ (Martínez-Alier 2003, p. 172).

NOTES 1. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was an agency established by the US government after World War II to foster and control the peacetime development of atomic science and technology. The agency had a significant influence on scientific thinking of the time, and would later play a key role in the development of the field known as Ecosystem Ecologies, sponsoring explorative research projects in the arctic and subarctic regions. See Masco (2010). 2. Coordinated by scientists such as US agronomist Norman Borlaug through the 1940s and 1950s, the Green Revolution involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grain together with the expansion of irrigation infrastructure, the consolidation of land holdings, and the distribution of hybridised seeds, synthetic fertilisers and pesticides to farmers (Marglin 1996). The programmes for modern agriculture this brought about quickly transformed the biodiversity of rural areas, focusing production of a handful of adapted corn or bean varieties from thousands of

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

cultivars, as well as transfiguring economies, as seeds had to be bought, together with fertilisers and pesticides, from new US-based companies (Kloppenburg 2005). They also, critically, consolidated a solutions-focused ‘white science’ that functioned to equate whiteness with scientific superiority and indigeneity with underdevelopment (Eddens 2019). In an book on Cabral’s work and Africana critical theory, Rabaka (2016) argues that Cabral was interesting not only because he does not reduce to being an Africanist or a Marxist, an African nationalist, or a revolutionary humanist, but because he crossed these boundaries in new and promiscuous ways. His work was responsive to changing historical and cultural conditions, especially in Africa and its diaspora, and connects soil and land practice with the decolonial project. Other important figures in this decade include the biologist Wangari Maathai, who claimed that national debt to ‘first world’ agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are one of biggest obstacles to environmental sustainability (Clapp and Dauvergne 2011). A dominant influence on the visual representation of Madre Tierra is the historical Maya civilisation that persists today in communities across Mesoamerica, such as the Maya-Kaqchikel in the Guatemalan highlands, the Q’eqchi’ in the Guatemalan and Belizean lowlands, and the Yucatec Maya in Southern Mexico and Belize. The influence of Maya symbology on contemporary practice may be partly owing to the richly symbolic visual representations of ecological and planetary relationality in the Maya cosmovision that have been preserved until now. However, both Indigenous and campesino communities appeal to Madre Tierra to articulate a neo-Indigenous form of identity, grounded in campesino agriculture, and linked with future-orientated practices of cultural healing, and soil repair (Millner, 2021). La Vía Campesina was established during the early 1990s by agricultural producers from around the world against a backdrop of global agrarian crisis and the withdrawal of support for domestic agricultural sectors across the Global South (Edelman 2014). Founding members linked the subsidisation of large-scale export crops with the large-scale dispossession of small-scale farmers, as well as endemic forms of pollution (Desmarais 2007; McMichael 2014). They also rejected emerging definitions of food security for presuming that colonially grounded, structural inequalities might be solved by solutions based on market-based economics. Prior to the establishment of LVC, responses to material and cultural enclosures at both national and transnational scales led to cross-border alliances connecting issues such as food poverty, cultural dispossession and environmental degradation, elaborated through shared experiences in agroecological movements and peasant training schools in the Americas, Africa and Asia. ‘Worlding’ relates to a shift from recognising and cultivating distinct epistemologies (ways of knowing the world), to recognising and cultivating distinct ontologies (ways of being in the world). As a verb, ‘worlding’ signifies both material and social processes and activities, more-than-human collaboration and the making of alternative forms of life (see Papadopoulos 2010). In April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux tribal members, gathered at camps near a crossing of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The DAPL is a 1172-mile pipeline for transporting crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The setting up of the camps launched the #NoDAPL movement (see Whyte 2017).

REFERENCES Astier, C.M., Argueta, Q., Orozco-Ramírez, Q., González, S.M.V., Morales, H.J., Gerritsen, P.R. et al. (2015), Historia de la agroecología en México, Agroecología, 10 (2), 9–17. Barca, S. (2014), Laboring the earth: transnational reflections on the environmental history of work, Environmental History, 19 (1), 3–27. Bebbington, A. and Carney, J. (1990), Geography in the International Agricultural Research Centers: theoretical and practical concerns, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80 (1), 34–48. Blaser, M. (2009), The threat of the Yrmo: the political ontology of a sustainable hunting program, American Anthropologist, 111 (1), 10–20. Bookchin, M. (1962), Our Synthetic Environment, repr. 1974, New York: Harper & Row.

Decolonising environmental politics  537 Borras, S.M. (2010), The politics of transnational agrarian movements, Development and Change, 41 (5), 771–803. Bresnihan, P. (2019), Water, our relative: trauma, healing and hydropolitics, Community Development Journal, 54 (1), 22–41. Cabral, A. (2016), Resistance and Decolonization, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Caputi, J. (2016), Mother Earth meets the Anthropocene, Systemic Crisis of Global Climate Change: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender, New York: Routledge, pp. 20–33. Carson, R. (1962), Silent Spring, repr. 2002, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. César, F. (2018), Meteorisations: reading Amílcar Cabral’s Agronomy of Liberation, Third Text, 32 (2–3), 254–72. Clapp, J. and Dauvergne, P. (2011), Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cronon, W. (ed.) (1996), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York and London: W.W. Norton. Davis, H. and Todd, Z. (2017), On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 16 (4), 761–80. De Angelis, M. (2011), Climate change, mother earth and the commons: reflections on El Cumbre, Development, 54 (2), 183–9. De Castro, E.V. (1998), Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4 (3), 469–88. De la Cadena, M. (2010), Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’, Cultural Anthropology, 25 (2), 334–70. De la Cadena, M. (2015), Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DeLoughrey, E.M. (2013), The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific, Cultural Geographies, 20 (2), 167–84. DeLoughrey, E. and Handley, G. (2011), Introduction: towards an aesthetics of the Earth, in E. DeLoughrey and G. Handley (eds), Postcolonial Ecologies. Literatures of the Environment, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–39. Descola, P. (2003), Constructing natures: symbolic ecology and social practice, in P. Descola and G. Palson (eds), Nature and Society, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 92–112. Desmarais, A. (2007), La Via Campesina: globalization and the power of peasants, Journal of Rural Studies, 21 (3), 359–71. Dhada, M. (1993), Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free, Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. Eddens, A. (2019), White science and Indigenous maize: the racial logics of the green revolution, Journal of Peasant Studies, 46 (3), 653–73. Edelman, M. (2014), Food sovereignty: forgotten genealogies and future regulatory challenges, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41 (6), 959–78. Escobar, A. (2018), Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gray, R. and Sheikh, S. (2018), The wretched Earth: botanical conflicts and artistic interventions – introduction, Third Text, 32 (2–3), 163–75. Gudynas, E. (2011), Buen Vivir: today’s tomorrow, Development, 54 (4), 441–7. Guha, R. and Martínez-Alier, J. (2013), Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, London: Routledge. Gupta, A. (1998), Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Klein, N. (2016), The lesson from Standing Rock: organizing and resistance can win, 4 December, accessed 27 April 2020 at https://​www​.thenation​.com/​article/​archive/​the​-lesson​-from​-standing​-rock​ -organizing​-and​-resistance​-can​-win/​. Kloppenburg, J.R. (2005), First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Kohn, E. (2015), Anthropology of ontologies, Annual Review of Anthropology, 44, 311–27. Lear, L.J. (1993), Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’, Environmental History Review, 17 (2), 23–48.

538  Handbook of critical environmental politics Marglin, S.A. (1996), Farmers, seedsmen, and scientists: systems of agriculture and systems of knowledge, in F. Apffel-Marglin and S.A. Marglin (eds), Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 185–248. Martínez-Alier, J. (2003), The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Masco, J. (2010), Bad weather: on planetary crisis, Social Studies of Science, 40 (1), 7–40. McCord, P.A. (2008), Divergences on the Left: the environmentalisms of Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin, Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate, 13 (1), 14–34. McMichael, P. (2014), Historicizing food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41 (6), 933–57. McNally, D. (2006), Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Millner, N. (2021), More-than-human witnessing? The politics and aesthetics of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) in transnational agrarian movements, GeoHumanities, 7 (2), 391–414. Millner, N., Peñagaricano, I., Fernandez, M. and Snook, L.K. (2020), The politics of participation: negotiating relationships through community forestry in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala, World Development, 127 (March), 104743, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.worlddev​.2019​.104743. Mitchell, D. (1996), The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nash, L. (2006), Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nixon, R. (1996), Pipe dreams: Ken Saro-Wiwa, environmental justice, and micro-minority rights, Black Renaissance, 1 (1), 39. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Panagia, D. (2014), ‘Partage du sensible’: the distribution of the sensible, in Jacques Rancière, London: Routledge, pp. 107–15. Papadopoulos, D. (2010), Insurgent posthumanism, Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 10 (2), 134–51. Papadopoulos, D. (2018), Experimental Practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-than-Social Movements, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Patel, R. (2013), The long green revolution, Journal of Peasant Studies, 40 (1), 1–63. Peet, R. and Watts, M. (2004), Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development and Social Movements, London: Routledge. Povinelli, E.A. (2016), Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pulido, L. and Peña, D. (1998), Environmentalism and positionality: the early pesticide campaign of the United Farm Workers’ organizing committee, 1965–71, Race, Gender & Class, 6 (1), 33–50. Rabaka, R. (2016), Introduction, in A. Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization, R. Rabaka (ed.), London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 3–42. Radcliffe, S.A. (2012), Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak Kawsay, living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador, Geoforum, 43 (2), 240–49. Rancière, J. (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (2015), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Rose, D.B. (2004), Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Sydney: UNSW Press. Rosset, P.M. and Martínez-Torres, M.E. (2012), Rural social movements and agroecology: context, theory, and process, Ecology and Society, 17 (3), http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.5751/​ES​-05000​-170317. Sellers, C. (1999), Body, place and the state: the makings of an ‘Environmentalist’ imaginary in the post-World War II US, Radical History Review, (74), 31–64. Simpson, L.B. (2017), As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012), Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1), 1–40. Voyles, T.B. (2015), Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Decolonising environmental politics  539 Wenzel, J. (2017), Turning over a new leaf: Fanonian humanism and environmental justice, in U.K. Heise, J. Christensen and M. Niemann (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, London: Routledge, pp. 181–9. Wenzel, J. (2019), Toward insubordinate nature, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 6 (2), 272–8. Whyte, K. (2017), The Dakota access pipeline, environmental injustice, and US colonialism, Red Ink: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities, 19 (1), 154–69. Wood, D. (2016) Imbrications of coloniality. An introduction to Cabralist critical theory in relation to contemporary struggles, in R. Rabaka and A. Cabral (eds), Resistance and Decolonization, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wynter, S. (2003), Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3), 257–337. Yusoff, K. (2018), A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ziegler, J., Golay, C., Mahon, C. and Way, S. (2011), The Fight for the Right to Food: Lessons Learned, New York: Springer.

38. Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability Ingmar Lippert

INTRODUCTION Consider the power of critiques that are coupled with discursively privileged promises. Think of the promises of sustainable development, of data-driven governance of human-nature relations, of restructuring capitalist development to secure optimal techno-economic solutions. These promises are powerful, this chapter outlines, in how they define the problems which the promises promise to solve. Beyond their discursive effects, I argue that these promises also configure material infrastructures, shaping society, economy and the environment. The digital sits centre-stage, it stabilises key promissory developments in environmental politics and affirms itself. I consider three promissory developments. First, sustainable development is a discourse that turned hegemonic in the 1990s (Chapter 9 in this volume). It promises a political frame in which social, economic and environmental interests of current and future generations are negotiated and best policies developed. This discourse binds civil society, corporations and governments. Second, the use of information and data to power governance of human–nature relations can be identified across instances of empire-building and imperialism, often preceding current discourses of evidence-based decision-making. Contemporary governance promises to optimise control by establishing infrastructures for information gathering and processing. Yet, that control is systematically partial. Third, the restructuring of capitalist development is an ongoing process, reacting to economic, social and political crises. Promising to take on the modern horizon of crises (climatic, ecological and fiscal), capitalist accelerationisms address the political left and right, proposing techno-capitalist progress towards realising utopian futures (Chapter 15 in this volume). I argue that these promissory developments play out not only discursively but also infrastructurally: digitalisation effects a promissory power that infrastructures environmental politics. It is infrastructural in involving materiality, human and non-human agencies and relations (Bowker 2005). It is promissory in imagining a future in order to enact a present to develop that future (Rajan 2006). To make this argument I mobilise sensibilities developed in science and technology studies (STS): STS’s ontological turn (Verran 2001; Mol 2002) allows recognition of the political consequences of material and bodily practices that may, in situated practice, neither cohere with that which practitioners claim nor with formal ontologies. A bridge can be built in many ways, and neither the architect’s formal plan nor the master engineers can perfectly determine how each brick is set. Recognising epistemic and ontological politics powers analysis of specific dispositifs that stabilise these promissory discourses. I illustrate difference

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Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability  541 and similarity of patterns of how discourses and dispositifs locate subjects and environments using two contexts that matter environmentally, politically and economically: ● smart cities, which are economically valued at around USD 1 trillion (Sadoski and Bendor 2019, p. 545) and ● carbon accounting, which comes as part of carbon pricing instruments, capturing 20 per cent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and raising USD 44 billion in 2018 (World Bank 2019, p. 12). A corollary of my argument for an infrastructural critique of promissory discourses in environmental politics and governance is to question an analysis of greenwashing as merely symbolic. Contexts such as smart cities or carbon accounting and pricing are better not analytically ‘reduced’ to linguistic phenomena; instead, I propose analysing these contexts for how, in their dispositifs, material entities – including digital infrastructure as well as natural and environmental entities – are reconfigured, that is repositioned or relocated to effect specific political, organisational or economic realities. This chapter proceeds in four steps. The next section portrays the analytical resources, drawn from STS. Presenting results of analyses in environmental sociology, anthropology and human geography, the third section lays out the three promissory developments and critics of these; and the fourth section presents analyses of the two empirical contexts of smart cities and carbon accounting. The final section concludes the chapter in relation to infrastructural entanglements.

TURNING PROMISES INTO QUESTIONS OF INFRASTRUCTURAL RECONFIGURATION The sociology of technological expectations offers resources for studying the content of the futures set out in promises and of the actor constellations in ‘selling’ these expectations (Quet 2014, pp. 211–13). The strength of this literature is studying specific technoscientific research agendas in the service of policy problems. I am interested specifically in the making and stabilisation of the discursive and material frames in which policy problems and solutions conduct their social and political life. Broadly, this type of interest can be considered post-structuralist. I address the relational constitution of how subjects and environments are imagined and positioned. The interdisciplinary field of STS has developed key analytical resources for empirically studying in the here and now as well as the historicity of socio-techno-natural relations. Bowker (2005) indicates that managing and governing environments have a history of using informational techniques to know natures. These techniques are not mere questions of epistemology but involve material shaping and form. Natures become entangled in, and accounted for, as environments. This allows governing of human subjects not only directly via human powers but also indirectly via the shaping of environments. Then, in line with Gabrys (2016b) a focus on environmentality – research into how environments are materially–informationally–naturally configured to shape social, political and economic life – becomes apt. Configuration emerges as a key concept that holds together these sensibilities. In configuration we find the figure, a character or a number, to play their part in a particular storyline that may be materially and semiotically enacted. For the storyline to work, figures are put in relation to each other, they emerge together (this

542  Handbook of critical environmental politics togetherness is designated with the prefix ‘con’). Suchman (2012) shows how these configurations are highly political, in their genesis, genealogy and what they generate. Yet, figures are not necessarily thoroughly captured by ontologies; indeed, some stories are played out in routinised practices that are never explicated or theorised – which STS accounts for as ontics (Verran 2009; Raasch and Lippert 2020). Ontics are part of stabilising and destabilising dispositifs. I use this STS literature to study how promissory discourses socio-materially configure or prefigure social, environmental, political and economic effects.

PROMISSORY DEVELOPMENTS? This section sketches the discursive trajectories of three contemporary ‘developments’ and critiques of these – sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist acceleration. Digitalisation provides a promissory power on which the other two developments feed. Sustainable development is widely referenced back to the ‘Brundtland report’, authored by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). Typically foregrounded in this reference is the norm of intergenerational, primarily ecological, justice. Another key reference is von Carlowitz’s (1713) call for scientific forestry, that is, sustaining the yield for timber production, and promising to optimise ecology for economy. The 1990s innovation was to link this economic-ecological rationality to concerns of social justice and equality (Redclift 2005). This innovation promises a development to be sustainable, if the development considers social, economic and ecological criteria. Drawing in voices from the Global South and the Global North, sustainable development was established as hegemonic discourse at and in the aftermath of the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit. The discourse analysis of sustainable development by Dingler (2003) identifies four key promissory moves. (1) Production is supposed to be de-coupled from resource consumption; this implied that the limits of growth could be grown; and for optimising resource use and dump (pollution) in the market, resources need to be internalised, informationally via accounting and economically via taxes or trade instruments. (2) Technological innovation would deliver on all these material expectations. (3) Global environmental management would identify and act, via policy advice, on ecological problems if the economy was not swiftly enough achieving greening. (4) In parallel, these processes and changes would be transparently accompanied by letting publics participate. The Earth Summit’s ‘Agenda 21’ proclaimed participation at all levels and ecological modernisation implied nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) would be invited into policy-making. Ecological modernisation ties in with, and strengthens, this discourse. Ecological modernisation policy, first conceptually prepared by thinkers such as Huber (1988), pushes for a neoliberal reaction to global and local environmental crises. Environmental problems were framed as market problems, thus environmental troubles emerge as costs. Hajer (1995) identified fittingly, first, a shift away from judicial administration towards de-regulation – allowing the environment to be managed by the market. Second, the costs of environmental protection were reimagined as ‘pollution prevention pays’, rationalising the internalisation of all resources and pollution. Third, polluters were pushed to take on the burden of proving they internalised and managed the environment well, while environmental NGOs were increasingly included in environmental governance. Relevant for environmental social sciences, ecological modernisation theory argues that ecological modernisation delivers – that environmental concerns

Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability  543 became central to, at least, Western societies, and effect gradually the greening of economies (Mol 2001; Huber 2008; Jänicke 2017). The hegemonic discourse of sustainable development is accompanied by a range of voices and critics. Some identify a long history of a caring relationship between people and their lands (for example, Washington 2015). Others note the managerialist drive towards an ‘ecocracy’ (Escobar 1995, p. 193), the side-lining of the critique of modernisation theories and not allowing more economic justice globally (Eblinghaus and Stickler 1996). Blühdorn (2007) analyses sustainable development as sustaining the unsustainable. Digitalisation is a process in which life worlds and their entities are, supposedly, ever more datafied, that is, recorded and maintained in data-sets. This promises some of the players and users in these worlds improved management and control, a systematic accounting and oversight of that world. The notion of digitalisation easily evokes the imaginary of radical change, an informational revolution, challenging the human understanding of our own and our world’s existence (Floridi 2009). In principle, the discourse of digitalisation promises that everything can be datafied, thus better controlled. Supposedly, the promises merely depend on technical progress. This discourse meets several political and analytical critiques. First, if a life world becomes widely digitalised and thus rendered subject to control, the controlling actors will use the data to govern, and the politics of that may well be hidden behind a technocractic veil. Second, the assumption that something can be fully digitalised is normally not realistic; pretending this, it ignores the entities or qualities that do not fit into the patterns of programming and data-basing. Programming requires choices in how to conceptualise the entities that are recorded (and to be managed). Recognising this makes evident that digitalisation involves decision-making that cannot be neutral and can never be conducted outside of societal influence. With Verran, we can name this ontological politics (see also Chapter 41 in this volume). Finally, running hardware and software requires energy and resources, human and natural. Digitalisation is unavoidably bound to environmental, social and economic exploitation. These critiques are not innovative; instead they indicate that to a significant degree, digitalisation’s imagined radical newness may not be the case. Informational politics – decisions about who records something, how something is recorded, and how the recording is processed and used – have decades and centuries of history (Bowker 2014). Capitalist acceleration has been evoked as a strategy towards a better world by both the political left and political right. One evocation, ‘An ecomodernist manifesto’, emerging in the context of The Breakthrough Institute, promises a ‘great Anthropocene’ (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015, p. 31, original emphasis). The other, the ‘Manifesto for an accelerationist politics’, emerging in the left’s reaction to Nick Land’s (right-accelerationist) thought, promises a post-capitalist future (Williams and Srnicek 2013). The ecomodernist manifesto rejects notions of harmony between humans and nature, instead calling for, for example, the intensification of agriculture, nuclear energy and geo-engineering. The other manifesto is more utopian, arguing to propel technological progress and experimentation (similar to the 1970s’ Chilean Cybersyn project) to exceed existing capitalist forms. On the way, this post-Marxist proposal suggests, the current capitalist and neoliberal infrastructure should be the base on which to build towards post-capitalism, ultimately accelerating our technological race into outer space. The overarching line of critique against both versions of accelerationisms problematises their technological determinism. Both are committed strongly to the use and acceleration of

544  Handbook of critical environmental politics technological development, that is, progress and innovation, to ensure abundant energy, food and prosperity (and for the leftist version, also increasing freedom). While both accelerationisms problematise specific forms of old technologies or of the governance of technologies, both manifestos uncritically presume their preferred technological development to deliver on their intended uses. This technological naivety does not consider the politics necessarily written into hardware, middleware and software. Environmentally, Pellizzoni (2019) identifies in both manifestos a disregard for the rebound effect, that is, that technological efficiency gains can be expected to lead to more absolute resource use. The ecomodernist manifesto operates with a redefined concept of nature that allows the authors to make the claim that renewable energy production leaves less room for nature than nuclear power (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015, p. 18). Williams and Srnicek’s (2013, s. 22) manifesto, similarly, suggests that the alternative to their techno-utopian approach leads, via primitivism, to ecological collapse. Despite their differences, these three developments share the promise of mastery of nature and of aligning that mastery with social and economic satisfaction. Digitalisation provides the promissory and material infrastructure for conjuring up the imagined feasibility of this success story. Over the past two decades sustainable development was deeply recast by the promissory discourse of digitalisation and numerical indicator/target-orientated reporting (see also Mol 2008). The 1992 United Nations (UN)-led Agenda 21 process was appreciated in expert discourse as leading to globally distributed take-up of sustainability ideas in local governance structures. Agenda 21 also called for sustainability monitoring and reporting. However, the same process was weak in ensuring this reporting. In reaction to this weakness, the UN first centrally introduced the Millennium Development Goals, ‘proving’ that global indicator-driven reporting was possible. The current SDGs demand more of nation states in respect of (re)datafying all sorts of sustainability dimensions (differentiated by 232 indicators). Persson et al. (2016, p. 67) expect the ‘data revolution’ to innovate monitoring of current indicators. However, unsurprisingly, this digitalised approach to monitoring sustainable development is characterised by conflict and debate about the choice and design of indicators (Hák et al. 2016; Spangenberg 2016). Despite the radical talk of revolution – Mol (2008) refers to the accelerating information revolution – technological progress in environmental data configuration does not resolve conflict, but propels contestation and ambiguities. Environmental data grows even more complicated and problematic when it becomes interwoven with the assemblages of the Internet of things (IoT), Big Data analytics and remote, for example, satellite driven, monitoring/sensing. Gabrys (2016a), Lippert (2016a) and Nadim (2016) show how these promissory assemblages put at risk both democratisation and economies.

PROBLEMATISING THE RELATION BETWEEN DIGITALISATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT This chapter has sketched resources for analysing infrastructural, ontological and epistemic politics and configurations, drawing on STS. Thus informed, considering sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist accelerationisms suggests that material practices at the intersection of these promissory developments raise significant critical concerns. To ground this suggestion, I analyse smart cities and carbon accounting. Specifically, this section illus-

Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability  545 trates how subjects and environments are differently (con)figured in these exemplary critical contexts. Smart Cities The notion and discourse of smart cities emerges in the context of urban infrastructural experimentation for sustainability transitions (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013). While the notion of smart cities became widespread in the early 2000s, the re-imagination of cities’ informational configuration includes older phenomena, such as the introduction of cable television into cities or cybernetic control hopes (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 805). While smart cities can be discursively differentiated from eco-cities, both discourses privilege economic growth and technological progress as powering the envisaged sustainable future (Cugurullo 2017, p. 74), such as a climate-resilient city (Allen and Deal 2018). Social scientific analyses of smart cities identify three sets of transnational actors as shaping specific urban experiments (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 803; Sadowski and Bendor 2019). For experimenting, (1) transnational corporations, such as IBM and Cisco, collaborate with the specific city’s authorities, firms and researchers. (2) Transnational corporations and (3) intergovernmental organisations (for example, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Union) are decisive in shaping the discourse and defining what counts as smart (Leitheiser and Follmann 2020). Translocal rather than transnational organisations, for instance, city networks (C40 Cities, Covenant of Mayors, and so on), are accorded attention in literature on policy mobility, networked governance and polycentric governance (Heijden 2018). In these actor arrangements, smart cities are proposed as viable solutions to grand problems, within the framing of sustainability, typically including rapid urbanisation, fiscal austerity and climatic catastrophe (Sadowski and Bendor 2019, p. 549), and to squaring solutions for these problems with economic growth (Viitanen and Kingston 2014). However, perhaps not unsurprisingly for such a promissory discourse, smart cities are also found to promise justice – both environmental (Gabrys 2016b, p. 202) and social justice (Trencher and Karvonen 2017). Imagined as an automatic consequence, the users of a smart grid in a city are figured as smart citizens (Levenda 2019, p. 573). The technological narrative mobilised to promise fitting solutions claims that data from everywhere will allow precise data gathering, modelling and, thus, governance, allowing for deeply informed sustainability (Kitchin 2013).1 That is, the smart city is a promise for an eco-city. While the promissory language of smart cities superficially signals a master plan and singular implementation, discourse analysis identifies several types of imaginaries of implementation (Sadowski and Bendor 2019, pp. 554–5). On the ground, different actors in smart developments have different visions of users and of technologies (Schick and Winthereik 2013). Smart city implementations do not operate top-down but involve contestation and negotiation (Cugurullo 2017, p. 74). Recognising that the smart-city promise does not deterministically imply a singular implementation provides the sensibility to ask how smart city discourses are patterned. Sadowski and Bendor (2019) show the typical narrative as structured by four figures: first, the city faces multiple crises; second, the city is in need of transformation; third smartness is the solution; and fourth, that smartness needs implementation. The multinational companies involved offer themselves as guides and collaborators in cities’ process to get smart. Specifically, these corporations promise to remove the uncertainties of

546  Handbook of critical environmental politics the process and of the risks of people and environments, such as of the unpredictable climate (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 805; Sadowski and Bendor 2019, pp. 549–50). The technical solution envisaged is framed by Cisco as connecting people, data/information and things, and by IBM as coupling sensors, monitoring and analyses (Sadowski and Bendor 2019, pp. 551–2). The data empowering these connections are supposed to be big (big data!) and available in real time (Kitchin 2013). In the logic of big data, these mantras results: data can never be enough – the more the data, the better the government. Critical scholars focus very much on how a range of urban environmental policy imperatives is translated in the dominant discourse into individual responsibilities to act differently and to track that difference with data (Levenda 2019). This raises the question of who defines and constructs data, and who includes or excludes data from data gathering and analysis (Kitchin 2013, pp. 8–9). Social scientists have problematised the democratic control over these practices. Viitanen and Kingston (2014, p. 814), Leitheiser and Follmann (2020) and Sareen and Rommetveit (2019) suggest that in smart city and grid arrangements, citizens are more likely to take on the role of figures that are informed than of figures that are involved in handling and control over energy/data; corporations and algorithms are figures that are attributed more agency to shape the city, and individual users lose choice and freedom (Levenda 2019, p. 574). Aligned with this critique is the social scientific recognition of resistance against smart cities on the ground (Leitheiser and Follmann 2020). The smart city meets the non-smart; alternative imaginaries thrive – consider the informational politics of urban governance drawing on urban social justice, urban commons and civic hacking (North and Nurse 2014; Sadowski and Bendor 2019, p. 544). Science and technology studies draw out how smart city dispositifs are not necessarily strictly organised in a binary struggle between citizens and hegemonic actors. Instead, studies of socio-technical assembling nuance the political critique by noting that within expert discourses, a range of alternative subject positions are considered and contested (Schick and Winthereik 2013). Not only does the smart city engage citizens, but also consumers, technocrats, managers and engineers; and people typically occupy complicated subject positions, not just being, for instance, a worker or a capitalist but also a parent, citizen and activist. According to Gabrys (2016b, p. 196), citizenship is transformed into citizen sensing; the citizen is turned into ‘a data point, both a generator of data and a responsive node in a system of feedback’. In consequence, the mode of political participation is redefined in relation to data: the citizen senses his or her city, lets the smart city conduct analyses and decisions, and subsequently the citizen is acted upon (Gabrys 2016b, pp. 199–200). However, the dispositif is still allowing for complexity: a user can act outside that which algorithms expect, intentionally subversively or unintentionally so. Cities, the state and corporations do not appear as a monolithic front, but as a heterogeneous urban assemblage, in which players, such as Facebook or Google, may be far more easily publicly rendered accountable compared with the range of start-ups and other short-living firms involved, little known and controlled, but providing ‘smart’ services for the other players. It is expertise of data and software that matters, rather than of specific or situated knowledge of urban context and specific complexities (Söderström et al. 2014). No wonder, then, that in a smart city implementation we may find an environmental public authority excluded from the role of key actors (Cugurullo 2017, p. 85). Beyond analyses of the partial control over users and data, smart cities also reconfigure urban–environment relations. As not every square metre can be equally well datafied, the practical politics of where sensors are placed is acted out; what does remote sensing focus on

Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability  547 (Parikka 2017)? Using specific corporation’s technologies in reconfiguring the city, means that the access and relation to the environment itself becomes subjected to issues of vendor lock-in (if we assume effective control of the smart technologies) or of a buggy and hackable city (considering the impossibility of complete control of and by smart technologies) (Kitchin 2013). Beyond configuring the environment via data, the smart city is intensively characterised by new hardware and maintenance needs and intensive software upgrades (requiring ever more resource-hungry devices). Gabrys (2016b, p. 198) observes that the corresponding environmental impacts are not subject to smart-city deliberation and seem implicitly assumed to be ‘smartly’ conjured away. This ignores how the smart city, and its generally complicit inhabitants, socio-materially configure an increased consumption of energy and hardware (Viitanen and Kingston 2014). The discourse of smart cities discursively and materially stabilises a set of interrelated promises. Presumably, smart cities are eco-cities; and smart cities perform stakeholder participation, orchestrating encounters between (some) citizens, corporate players and governments. In that respect, smart cities form a frictionless part of the hegemonic discourse of sustainable development. That smart cities thrive on the promises of digitalisation is obvious: the smart city is digital, and the more digital, the more data, the better, and the more sustainable it claims to be. The smart city provides a material space of experimentation for capitalist transformation. Corporations are not merely part of global governance (Google and Facebook), but also of local sustainability transformation. In the smart city, companies find a framework to perform promises of innovation. Typically backgrounded within the entangled promises are the epistemic and material politics of smart cities: their new infrastructures are strongly shaped by the distribution of what is considered relevant knowledge about data/natures; as infrastructure, these epistemic politics is materialised, written in bits, bytes and bricks. Datafying Corporate Carbon Emissions The hegemonic climate governance discourse employs a model of GHG that privileges attention to universal gas concentration: the global average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and other GHG drives global warming. In this model it does not matter where these gases are emitted. That the gases are emitted is understood as a market failure – emissions are framed as externalisation of costs (Stern 2006). The solution is to internalise the emissions via market systems (trade or taxes: cf. Lohmann 2009). In the logic of ecological modernisation, emitters know best what they emit. Therefore, the organisations that emit are to account for their emissions themselves. In the following, I primarily consider how corporate emissions are accounted for under least-regulated market conditions. How do organisations account for themselves? They do so within an inter-organisational network. This typically encompasses a range of organisations: the emitter; a standardisation organisation that defines what counts as emissions and how emissions are to be counted; an auditor that scrutinises the emitter’s practices for whether the chosen standards are met; and organisations that control the social and public license to operate and continue emitting, a category which includes NGOs in partnership with companies and public authorities that refrain from conducting monitoring themselves. In these inter-organisational relations, a lock-in can be observed that stabilises the network, tying the organisations together, preventing critique and avoiding troubling questions asking how emissions are reported (Lippert 2016b).

548  Handbook of critical environmental politics Beyond the politics that can be identified in this network, such as in the standardising organisations (Lovell and MacKenzie 2011) and in the technical devices for measuring emissions (MacKenzie 2009; Liu 2017), the work of datafying carbon, of constructing a carbon footprint, within the emitting organisation has emerged as a site of political choices and normative assumptions. Vesty et al. (2015) identify how carbon numbers do not simply quantify emissions but are also used to value responsibility of actors within organisations or to normatively compare organisations. Lippert (2015) shows how carbon data is enacted involving internal contestation and conflict. And that data is imagined to be ‘sourced’ from sites of emissions, which themselves do not allow straightforward simple measurement, but instead raise significant uncertainties and ignorance (Liu 2017; Lippert 2018). In a context in which the various involved actors within an organisation know, generally, about carbon datafication choices, politics and uncertainties, political and interpretative flexibility serves both as a chance and as a thread. One corporate reaction to this situation is to find ways of performing carbon that simultaneously satisfy competing demands and interpretations. For instance, the difference of paradigms for calculating a data point (resulting in different versions of that data point, different numerical values) can be rendered invisible by reproducing the genre of precise data (10.27 gigatonnes and 10.34 gigatonnes can both be rounded up/down to 10.3 gigatonnes). Beyond changing the data (presentation), it is also possible to change the data interpreters. Lippert (2013, ch. 4.4) shows how a company has removed all the environmental engineers and facility managers from the data collection process, substituting these with financial bookkeepers who were expected by the company to not know very well the physical matters relevant for carbon calculations (such as kilowatt hours for electricity consumption calculations). Substituting groups of workers can, then, deliver a process of carbon accounting that produces a footprint more smoothly, at the cost of ignoring uncertainties and conflicts of interest. After a carbon footprint is established, the organisation can outsource the emissions it has calculated as having emitted (Ninan 2011): it can buy negative emissions via the carbon market and add these to its footprint, calculatedly reducing its footprint by, for example, 20 per cent, or by 100 per cent to be carbon neutral, or by even more to be carbon negative. Fitting with the possibilities of these arithmetic exercises and with financialised carbon is the risk of a crisis of carbon finance, implying the risk of misjudging emissions at a global scale: subprime carbon (Chan 2009). In the historically new voluntary carbon market, innovation can lead to effects such as defining negative (avoided) emissions as being produced not only by planting trees or substituting a coal-fired power station by a wind power, but also by investing in a renewable energy project (as if the process of investing, the financial transaction, avoids emissions: cf. Lippert 2017). The market decides what counts as emission reduction. Datafying carbon reconfigures the organisation. Literally, carbon figures, that is, numbers, may be inscribed into manifold internal corporate processes. For ecological modernisation theory, this supposedly confirms their diagnosis of environments figuring more centrally in organisations. Specifically, a range of workers is demanded to consider, and communicate in respect of carbon, thus changing accountability relations. Also, some actors are typically assigned authority over carbon, reconfiguring their position in the organisation. Carbon figures also in external communication. By communicating carbon emission, the organisation showcases to its public audiences that it is a skilled member of an environmentally concerned society (Lippert 2011).

Digitalisation as promissory infrastructure for sustainability  549 Carbon gets configured in most of these practices as data (Lippert 2015). This means that carbon is not handled directly as molecules but as information that indexes emissions. This matters in so far as carbon as data can be reduced differently compared with actually handling emissions. Carbon-as-data can be reduced on paper, in a spreadsheet or in another database. Another form in which carbon is practised is aesthetically: carbon becomes both a symbol of sustainability (Vesty et al. 2015) and part of symbols of greening, such as trees, wind power, lakes and mountains (Lippert 2013, ch. 3.5). Datafying corporate carbon emissions effectively stabilises a set of promises. In relation to ecological modernisation, accounting for carbon emissions signifies environmental accountability, evoking the idea that companies partner in striving for sustainable development, alongside governments, science and NGOs. Using the language of carbon, or carbon dioxide (CO2), is also interpreted as a generic form of taking on greening and environmental sustainability. Digitalisation performs at least two significant promises in this context. On the one hand, a database of emissions serves to back up the discourse of evidence-based decision-making. On the other, turning environmental entities into informational entities enables the reconfiguration of this environment-as-data, for instance, by employing different algorithms and data formats. Carbon as a thoroughly informationalised entity becomes a referenceable object for economic transactions. Discourses of market, cap and trade or tax solutions consequently gloss over the unruly realities of material-molecular-industrial carbon relations on the ground. This set of promises is undermined by the frictions of knowing carbon. The datafication process necessarily ignores uncertainties and is not even able to grasp factors and problems on the ground that do not get documented in the first place.

RECOGNISING INFRASTRUCTURAL ENTANGLEMENTS Critical environmental policy studies are faced with powerful promissory discourses and transformations. This chapter considered sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist accelerationisms. Using two empirical contexts, smart cities and corporate carbon accounting, I showed that these promissory developments can also be entangled. These discourses can be analysed as mutually sustaining themselves. Infrastructurally, and shared in both contexts, are digital and environmental promises and premises. These premises do not merely matter discursively, but also materially. The promises themselves are entangled in infrastructures and are components in (infra)structuring the discourses of sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist accelerationisms. These discourses form a promissory infrastructure. Promissory discursive developments key to environmental politics are bound together by the imaginary of data. Also, data figures centrally in both contexts: data is the form in which the environment becomes significantly known, understood and processed. In that respect, environmental data is shaped by an epistemic politics: who knows environments and how, whose knowledge gets in or is excluded? However, environment as data is not disembodied. Environmental data comes in the brains of people who are included and excluded from meetings; data comes in databases that are materially based in hardware, which may fail; data is produced using sensors and algorithms that materially translate, and thus shift, what environment comes to be in and as data. The environment appears as a datascape (Lippert 2015). This type of analysis recognises that actors do not merely engage in epistemic politics but also in material politics that shape how environments are materially received, as data, and materially

550  Handbook of critical environmental politics translated. Environmental politics is thus played out in bits, bytes and bricks. Analysing this play as ontological politics, foregrounds how both contexts are shaped by formal ontologies and material practices of control: not all data matters equally, only some data is generated and processed for decision-making, other realities are silenced, or simply not given voice. However, not all is under control in environmental datascapes. While ontologies about environmental entities may be written into code, that writing process is as much prone to error, to ignorance and unknown unknowns, as are the practices of mapping environmental entities ‘out there’ onto a signifier in the database. In both empirical contexts I find human actors who take part in shaping environmental politics on the ground, shaping environmental infrastructures, but who do not and cannot completely identify all the ways in which their work practices shape environmental-data realities. Practices that shape reality but which are not completely (perhaps not even greatly) theorised and thought through can be meaningfully designated not as ontological practice but as ontic (Verran 2009; Lippert 2018). With infrastructure studies, I recognise how smart cities and carbon-accounting infrastructures are built not completely anew but always on a historically constructed base. The visionary futures of the promissory discourses then, not necessarily consciously, also have a reactionary effect as the existing material and political base is stabilised. Working critically and materially towards heterotopias needs to consider how any infrastructural work affirms and entangles the dynamics of material and power, which any promissory project or movement is based upon.

NOTE 1. A related, but not as prevalent, discourse understands a smart city as a region in which smart innovative knowledge is developed, enabled by information and communication technologies (Kitchin 2013).

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39. Eco-feminism and the commons: the feminization of resistance in Latin America Silvia Federici

INTRODUCTION ‘We are the soil, the air, the seed, the water. And the food we grow in the land becomes our body, our blood’ (Shiva 2016, p. 301). ‘No struggle for justice and for the construction of a better world is possible without the presence of women’ (Cáceres 2016, p. 279). The relation between feminism and ecology and, closely connected, women and nature, has not been easy. The long-standing identification, in the history of European philosophy and politics, of femininity with a set of fixed, immutable characteristics, and the related portrayal of nature as female,1 have stood in the way of a positive recognition of the connection between our struggle against gender-based discrimination and the struggle for the defense of our natural environment. Not surprisingly, the development of eco-feminism2 in the 1980s was often met with suspicion. Feminists who asserted that women have a special relation to nature were accused of ‘essentialism’ and of a dualistic notion of feminine and masculine values.3 Though at times justified,4 the critique of these first attempts to articulate the continuity between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of the earth should be also understood in the context of a movement that, by the 1980s, was striving to enter a male-dominated world and was, thus, highly interested in distancing itself from anything suggesting a naturalized concept of ‘femininity.’ Indeed, viewed retrospectively, the early eco-feminist celebrations of women’s life-giving, life-affirming disposition and identification with nature strike us now as provocative rejections of the devaluation of female experiences, as rejections of war and militarism, rather than affirmations of patriarchal stereotypes. Witness the importance of ecofeminist thinking in the anti-nuclear feminist movement that developed in Europe in the 1980s, culminating with the siege of the military bases at Greenham Common.5 Witness also the influence of eco-feminism on the feminist critique of technology, especially with regard to healthcare. As Puleo has noted, the new perspectives and debates that ecofeminism has generated have been very creative. They have inspired a feminist critique of anthropocentrism, expanding the range of subjects worthy of our consideration. They have also expanded our understanding of the nature of reproductive work, demonstrating that care work must include the care for the natural environment (Puleo 2011, pp. 43ff). Thirty years later, criticisms have given place to the recognition that eco-feminism is a plural movement, with many voices and – in Vidal’s words (Papuccio De Vidal and Ramognini 2018) – still ‘under construction’. It is now accepted that eco-feminism is born from a profound critique of Eurocentric thinking, of colonialism and capitalism (Castillo Huertas 2015, p. 27; see also, Chapters 2 and 4 in this volume), and that most ecofeminists attribute a special concern for ecology to women not because of any fixed pre-disposition, but because women are responsible for the daily reproduction of their communities, which includes the care of the lands, the waters, the animals and their relation to our economic and cultural life (Chapter 3 in this volume). The rise of ecological movements 554

Eco-feminism and the commons  555 of which women are the protagonists is driving this recognition. At the roots of the current growth of eco-feminist/feminist ecological movements there is the ‘feminization of resistance’ to ecological destruction. In this chapter, I look at this development, with particular reference to Latin America, to see its motivations and the new forms of feminism that it has inspired.

WOMEN AND ECOLOGICAL STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA There are several reasons why women, since the late 1970s, have been drawn to ecological issues and movements as a necessary extension of feminist theory and practice. A primary reason, perhaps, has been the sense, that so many of us at different points in our lives have had, of not being considered as fully human. A great deal has certainly changed since de Beauvoir (1949 [2011]) argued that in European literature and philosophy, man is activity and reason, whereas woman is matter, passivity and flesh. Yet, like the wealth of nature, much of women’s labor is still treated and appropriated like a standing resource, while our bodies are now more than ever sexually objectified, threatened with violence, and mined, like the earth, for eggs, placentas and surrogate births. On the more positive side, our ‘specialization’ in reproductive work has also contributed to develop, in many women at least, a great sensitivity to the limits and temporalities of natural/organic processes. Experiences such as pregnancy, childbirth, care work, catering to other people’s needs and caring for the sick have made generations of women potentially more aware of our bodies’ needs and desires, our affinity with animals, and the creativity of nature. However, what is currently driving the intersection of feminism and ecology is above all the war that neoliberal capitalism is waging on rural as well as urban communities through the privatization of lands and waters, the industrialization of agriculture and the pervasive use of contaminants and transgenic seeds – all developments that are depriving millions of people of their means of subsistence and, at the same time, are sparking off movements of which women are the protagonists (Chapters 10 and 35 in this volume). It is women currently, especially in Latin America, who are most strongly resisting the destruction of the ecosystem, which has reached such a genocidal level that everyday reproduction can no longer be guaranteed without an ongoing mobilization.6 ‘Genocidal’ is not too strong a word in this context. What is taking place across the world is nothing less than the systematic expulsion from their ancestral territories of populations who for centuries have lived in them, and the subjection of lands, waters and forests to the domination of a handful of international corporations that are gaining exclusive control over the world’s most vital supplies. These are the last steps of a long process of enclosure that has been the driving force of capitalist development since its inception,7 but is now reaching a point where the world’s rural areas – once the sites of greenery, regeneration and food production – are becoming places from which people flee, and where, every year, thousands die of cancer and other diseases, owing to the industrialization of agriculture and the poisoning of the earth that this process, as well as oil drilling and other mining activities, is causing. As in the past, while entire populations are affected, it is women who bear the heaviest cost of the destruction of the natural environment. Being directly engaged in the reproduction of everyday life and having less access than men to monetary income, women are more hard-hit when peasant agricultures are destroyed. Cultivating a plot of land, using the produce to feed their family, selling what remains at local markets, has been for many women in rural/ indigenous communities a source of economic autonomy, an escape from dependence on the

556  Handbook of critical environmental politics market and a condition for controlling what their families eat.8 When displaced, moreover, it is far more difficult for them to find alternative means of self-support. In the majority of cases, displacement means forced migration to the cities or abroad, to work as maids and caretakers, under the most vulnerable conditions, often the object of trafficking and not only for sexual work. This, in recent years, has been the lot of many women in Latin America, displaced by the expansion of soya production as well as cattle raising, or by fracking and, not least, the fires lit up for the purpose of deforestation, now ubiquitous in Paraguay, Brazil and other parts of the Global South.9 Women are especially vulnerable to the effects of the war that is being waged on the eco-system since the degradation of the environment intensifies their work and has especially pernicious consequences for their health. The availability and quality of water (for instance) has a different meaning for women than for men (Duré and Palau 2018, p.141). Many peasant women today, in rural areas, across Latin America as well as Africa, have to walk miles to fetch clean water in areas that have been desertified or where the water is contaminated by the many deadly chemicals now routinely used for agriculture and mining (mercury, cyanide and glyphosates), and the constant fumigations, which spray wide swaths of the territory including the waters that people drink and the crops they eat. It is women, moreover, who must deal daily with the illnesses which the poisonous environments produce: cancers, skin and eye diseases, kidney failures. Women’s bodies are especially affected by the contamination of croplands and waters because of their reproductive systems, since the poisons released into the environment go into their blood and milk and are then transmitted to the children they procreate and breastfeed. In Paraguay, where soya cultivation, an intensely toxic crop, has invaded every space, women today suffer frequent miscarriages and children are frequently born with malformations (Duré and Palau 2018, pp. 100–1). Suffering generates rebellion. This is why women today are in the forefront of the struggle against extractivism and for the defense of biodiversity, of food sovereignty and communitarian relations. The issue of food is particularly crucial to the continuation of the struggle. As María Ramona Acuña, a member of the Paraguayan peasant organization Cultiva, has stated, the production of food is an essential condition for people to be able to organize; as long as people can eat and eat food that does not poison them, they can resist (see Duré and Palau 2018, p. 44). Thus, controlling food production is an absolute condition for control over our lives. Agro-business understands this well. They know that controlling the world’s food supply gives them an immense power, which is why they have been waging a war on subsistence economies and all our other earthly commons. Indeed, liberalizing food production and trading has been a main staple of international policies and structural adjustment programs since the 1980s with consequences that have been best described as both scandalous and tragic. For the turning of food crops, whose life-giving properties were once the object of cultural celebration, into money-making commodities, has been the source of the many famines and dislocations that have characterized the lives of rural communities in Africa, the Caribbean islands, and Latin America throughout the past four decades.10 Corn, the once sacred crop of Abya Yala, has increasingly disappeared from the Mexican milpas, as thousands of tons of a transgenic variety are yearly dumped on Latin American by the US. The concepts of food as a basic human entitlement, and the process of growing it as an almost sacred rite, have also disappeared. In their place are the speculations of hedge funds, food-for-profit, Terminator Seeds, with the power to decide what people can or cannot eat residing in international markets and structures, infinitely removed from the lives of people on the ground and indifferent to their

Eco-feminism and the commons  557 well-being. Yet, despite the hegemonic control over the food supply by Monsanto, Cargill and the World Bank, resistance has been growing, fueled by a strong mobilization of women who are, in effect, placing their bodies ‘in the jaws of the machine’.

THE BECOMING-FEMINIST OF ECOLOGICAL STRUGGLES Evidence of an increasing ‘feminization of resistance’ is the great number of rural and indigenous women’s collectives and networks that have formed in recent years for whom the struggle against ecological destruction has become the driving organizational force. Exemplary of this process has been (among others) the formation of CONAMURI in Paraguay, of Saramanta Warmikuna (Hijas del Maíz) in the Ecuadorian Amazonia, the Movimiento en Defensa De la Tierra, and El Territorio por la Partecipación y el Reconoscimiento de las Mujeres in San Cristobal (Chiapas).11 Women have also created autonomous spaces within peasant and indigenous organizations, like the MST (The Landless Movement of Brazil) and Via Campesina. In all these examples, the confrontation with ecological issues very soon took on a feminist dimension, in the same way as opposition to a mine or a highway soon grew into opposition to neoliberalism and capitalist development as a whole. The reasons for this change of political consciousness are well stated by Etelvina Masioli, a leader of the MST. Referring to the experience of women members of the MST, during the land occupations in which they participated in the 1980s and 1990s, Masioli has argued that they were forced to confront gender issues and the problem of gender inequalities within the movement, as they realized that they were the ones who, on a daily basis, sustained the reproduction of the encampments, being those who remained in the encampments during the day while the men went to work in the fields, and nevertheless their work was unrecognized, devalued and they suffered abuses by men even within the movement (Longo 2016, pp. 162–3). In Via Campesina as well, the struggle against agro-business, land privatization and displacement has evolved into a struggle against patriarchal norms, for the recognition of women’s rights, such as the right of peasant women to social security, and the formation of all-women spaces within mixed movements.12 Also, women have recognized that the machismo that they encounter in their families, and even in the movement, weakens their capacity for resistance, since confronting the companies’ thugs and paramilitaries is not possible when your energies are daily depleted by the abuses suffered at the hands of your alleged companeros.13 A sign of the becoming-feminist of the struggle against dispossession, land privatization and ecological destruction has been the organization of yearly national women’s marches, women’s encounters and the adoption of 8 March as a day of mobilization. In Brazil, March 8 has become for the women of the MST a day of anti-capitalist protest, with the occupation of transnational corporations, like Cargill, Monsanto, Syngenta (Longo 2016, p. 165). As stated again by Etelvina Masioli, in an interview with Roxanna Longo: ‘We are building a rural and popular feminism’ (Longo 2016, p. 167). In the same manner that feminism has entered the politics of rural organizations, ecological issues have become a mainstay of feminist politics. The struggle of rural, indigenous women has changed the face of feminism internationally. As Duré and Palau have noted, with reference to peasant/indigenous women’s organizations in Paraguay, rural/ indigenous, campesina women’s organizations are rewriting the feminist script. Starting from an analysis of their reality, they are building a feminism that is anti-patriarchal but also anti-capitalist, where the

558  Handbook of critical environmental politics struggle for female emancipation is integrally connected to that for the de-privatization of land and resistance to the advance of transnational corporations (Duré and Palau 2018, p. 97).14 It is also a feminism that looks at reproduction as extending beyond domestic work and healthcare to the care of the environment, the protection of biodiversity, the struggle against the commodification of life. The concept of the ‘body-territory’ (cuerpo-territorio), articulated by indigenous women who call themselves ‘communitarian feminists’ (feministas communitarias), is expressive of this broader concern. For it expresses not only a realization that the body is for women the first line of defense, but also an awareness of the intimate relation between our life and health and the health and life of the land and all that lives on it.

FEMINIST RECONSTRUCTION OF THE COMMONS The importance of rural and indigenous women’s ecological struggle for the emergence of new forms of feminism is also evident at the organizational level, in the articulation of forms and objectives of struggle. Communalism, and in particular the practice of collective labor, are now generally recognized objectives and conditions of struggle in women’s movements, rural and urban as well. As in response to economic and ecological crisis women are going out of their homes, joining with other women and forming networks, communitarian practices are spreading, which both stretch available resources and strengthen their power. The creation of cooperatives, seed banks, collective kitchens, and merenderos for the children, and holding neighborhood assemblies, are now common practices, producing affective ties, as well as spaces and times in which women ‘experience the power of thinking together,’ together ‘evaluating tactics, building strategies’,15 and give each other protection from state violence and the violence of individual men. Protection, self-defense is much needed, as many have already paid a high price for their organizing. The assassination of Berta Cáceres, which the feminist movement termed a ‘territorial femicide’ (Gago 2019, p. 74) has evoked international condemnation, but is only one of the many examples of women’s leaders killed, disappeared or tortured, in recent years and months, in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Honduras, by soldiers and policemen as well as paramilitary forces, including narcotics traffickers and the guards that companies hire to fend off protest against their operations. Increasingly, rural areas are being militarized and this increases the violence against women.16 Through this violence a robbery recalling the process of ‘originary accumulation’ persists, now ‘tied to an accelerated process of dispossession’ that affects all material conditions and interactions, disrupting the relations with the natural world and endangering even the possibility of satisfying the need for food (Caputo 2013, pp. 48–50). Women also confront the violence of men in their own communities, as young men in particular welcome the arrival of extractivist companies or companies engaged in the construction (for instance) of a throughway, seduced by the prospect of a wage, in a context of lack of alternatives and prolonged, widespread unemployment. However, being responsible for most reproductive activities, from subsistence farming, to cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, women understand that as soon as the land is poisoned the community is doomed and soon the same youth who welcomed the mine are forced to take the path of migration.17 Thus, despite the relentless violence women suffer, their organizing carried on under the banner of ecological feminism continues. The now popular radical slogan ‘they wanted to bury us but forgot we are seeds’ holds here. Through a struggle conducted day by day, in the course of multiple

Eco-feminism and the commons  559 reproductive activities, women across the rural world are standing in the way of this new process of colonization, now aiming to eradicate the entire peasant economy with its culture, its forms of life, and the life and culture of indigenous populations. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of these efforts and not only for the communities immediately affected. It is now realized that we cannot struggle against global warming and the extraction of fossil fuel unless we also struggle against violence against women (Chapter 13 in this volume), since feminist/ecological movements are essential to ensure that people will have access to a reliable food supply and that the earth’s biodiversity and regenerative powers will be preserved. Women’s determination not to allow the life of their communities to depend on the market has already made it possible for subsistence agriculture to continue to thrive, despite the war waged on it by organizations, such as the World Bank, which have made land privatization and the hegemony of agribusiness their historical mission. This struggle is also slowing down and, sometimes, stopping the advance of mining activities. No less than the ‘defenders of the waters’ – as the Lakota women named themselves who opposed the construction of an oil pipeline at Standing Rock (North Dakota)18 – across Latin America women have been in the front line against gold mining, oil drilling, the spread of monoculture and agro-toxic activities as well as the construction of dams and other megaprojects that further encroach on their communities’ lands. The role that women play in the defense of nature is one reason why their struggle to assert their ‘right to land’ is crucial. This is not an easy question in a context in which communal land regimes are being replaced by processes of individual titulation that generally exclude women and favor well-to-do farmers who have the means to pay for the expenses that acquiring a title to the land involves. As Castillo Huertas has shown, with reference to the situation that has evolved in Guatemala, while land privatization and the formation of a land market has negatively affected the whole peasant population, in this case too, women have been those who have suffered the most, as single women have been systematically excluded from access to land (Castillo Huertas 2015, p. 125) and married women are discriminated against because if they become co-proprietors the family must pay twice as much for the title (Castillo Huertas 2015, p. 133). Moreover, even when they have achieved ‘co-titularity’, that is, joint-property rights, married women often find that it is a ‘paper right’, easily denied, for instance, when cooperatives are formed and only one member of a family is admitted to decision-making. Nevertheless, as women interviewed by Castillo Huertas have agreed, insufficient and problematic as it is, co-titulation is still an object of struggle as a defense against the possibility that husbands sell the land without their wives’ consent, and a means to block the advance of the companies that are striving to buy all available land. Women’s struggle for access to land is also growing, however, in indigenous communities where land is still communal property, but it is transmitted through the male line, so that women can have access to the land and the communal wealth only through the marriage contract and marriage with men of their community (Tzul Tzul 2016, p. 167). As Gladys Tzul Tzul, a Maya K’iché scholar/activist has argued, this means that women must carefully consider their matrimonial strategies, and cannot marry according to their desires, short of seeing their children excluded from all the benefits that being part of the communal organization provides (Tzul Tzul 2016, p. 169). Here, the challenge is how to ensure that women have full access without losing control over the communal land, that is, without resorting to the individualization of property – the ‘modern way of solving the problem of … male privilege’ – that ultimately facilitates dispossession (Tzul Tzul 2016, pp. 172–6). As Tzul Tzul (2016, p. 176) again notes, the task is especially

560  Handbook of critical environmental politics difficult in a context in which ‘the state is trying to invade and control communal land and the main defense is to exhibit a property title’. However, in indigenous communities as well, a social/cultural revolution is already underway, partly inspired by the struggle of the Zapatista women, whose mobilization has led to the Revolutionary Law of Women of 1993 which has recognized their right to decide whether or not to marry and to fully participate in all decision-making with regard to every aspect of communal life.19 Recognizing their contribution to the daily reproduction of life, indigenous women have begun a process of de-patriarchalization, breaking the silence about the gender-based inequalities and discrimination that permeates their communities, refusing to be made invisible, to be ignored, affirming the historical importance of their contribution to the reproduction of life and demanding the right to participate in assemblies and decisions-making processes from which in the past they have often been excluded.

CONCLUSION Already the struggle of rural, indigenous women has changed the face of international feminism. Ecological issues have now become a mainstay of feminist politics. There is now a realization not only that we cannot struggle against global warming and fossil fuel extraction without struggling against violence against women but, by the same token, we cannot fight against violence against women without taking on the oil companies, agro-business and all the destructive megaprojects that are threatening the survival of many rural/indigenous communities and impoverishing our natural habit in ways that affect people across the planet. Awareness of the necessary interconnectedness between the struggle against extractivism and the struggle against patriarchal relations is especially strong in Latin America where it is one more step in a long history of conquest. In La Potencia Feminista, Veronica Gago gives a broad overview of the many ways in which feminists in the region are structuring the debate on extractivism and ecological destruction, citing Mina Navarro’s concept of ‘multiple dispossession’, and again feminist denunciations in Chile of the country’s ‘sacrifice zones’. She also mentions Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s rethinking of the conflict surrounding the construction of a throughway through the territory of the TIPNIS, in Bolivia, from the viewpoint of women’s defense of the territory, and then examples of women’s struggles and organizations too numerous to mention (Gago 2019, pp. 9–95). As she notes, in this spirit, for the first time, indigenous and peasant women organizations are joining with feminist collectives and movements, each recognizing the need for women’s spaces and women’s networks in the face of the violence of the new conquistadores and to devise alternatives to the current development models (Chapter 37 in this volume). The connecting thread in these new alliances is the shared realization of the profound connection between the attack on women’s rights and the destruction of the land; the realization that the devaluation, invisibilization of women’s work and needs facilitates the attack of extractivist companies against rural communities. What is becoming increasingly evident is the patriarchal nature and foundation of corporate/capital power. The destruction of the land and waters is not only, for many rural women, the loss of economic autonomy and increased dependence on men. It is also the destruction of a system of reproduction that is a guarantee for the future. Never has this realization been as vividly felt as it is currently. For as we face the dramatic consequences of this destruction, secluded in our homes, owing to a ‘man-made’ global epi-

Eco-feminism and the commons  561 demic, the existence of growing women’s networks and movements is a strong sign and hope that an alternative is still possible.

NOTES 1. On this subject see Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980, ch.1. Merchant argues that although until the Renaissance the view of nature as a nurturing mother carried with it a set of ethical norms that precluded its exploitation (as for example, by mining), it later conveyed an image and assumption of passivity that justified its subordination and control by technological means. 2. The term ‘eco-feminism’ was introduced by the French feminist Françoise D’Eaubonne in 1974, in Le féminisme ou la mort, to stress the relation between feminism and ecology. It was soon appropriated by feminists in the United States, such as Ynestra King, a member of the Institute of Social Ecology in Vermont. See on this subject Puleo (2011). 3. This criticism was addressed (for example) also against eco-feminists such as Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva (1993 [2018]), who defined eco-feminisms as a movement seeking an alternative to the destruction of women’s bodies and the environment at the center of ‘patriarchal capitalism’ and against militarism and colonial domination. 4. In the case, for example, of eco-feminist theories assuming an innate tendency in men to violence. See on this question, and on the critique to ‘classic’ eco-feminism, the work of Puleo (2011, pp. 49ff.). 5. On eco-feminism’s role in the anti-nuclear movement, see Zitouni (1983 [2014]). See also Caldecott and Leland (1983). 6. On the protagonism of women in the struggle in defense of lands, waters and forests, especially against the devastation caused by extractivist projects, see Echart Muñoz and del Carmen Villarreal (2019). Affirming that ‘women are at the forefront of the struggle for land and the defense of natural resources and are daily protagonists of numerous mobilisations and resistance projects, as shown by the cases of socio-environmental conflicts evidenced’, the article, part of a broad research on extractivism, provides a great deal of evidence for this argument including a map of struggles led by women. 7. On this process and its effects on women’s lives and gender relations, see Federici (2004). 8. On the importance of access to land and forests for women and the high productivity of forestry as a supportive, reproductive, self-reproducing eco-system see Shiva (1989 [1997], ch. 4. 9. As Duré and Palau (2018) have observed, in relation to the changes that have occurred during the past decade, in Paraguay’s rural areas, the turning of a great deal of crop land into soya cultivation and widespread deforestation to make space for cattle rearing has not only forced large number of women (more than 50 percent of all migrants) to move to the cities or abroad; it has also led to a growth in the number of people, but women mainly, who are affected by cancer, skin problems and other diseases. 10. For an analysis of the liberalization of food production and trading in Africa, and the famines it has produced see, respectively, Bryceson (1993) and De Waal (1997). 11. On the formation of rural women ecological/feminist organizations see (among others) Longo (2012), Equit Instituto Gênero, Economia e Ciudadania Global (2013), Collectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo (2014), Korol (2016) and De Vidal and Ramognini (2018). 12. In the example of the women from the MST, they actively participated in the creation of the Articulacion Nacional de la Mujeres Trabajadoras Rurales (Longo 2016, p. 163). 13. See, on this question, Claudia Korol’s interview with Lolita Chávez, a Maya activist in Guatemala, in Korol (2016, p. 294). 14. In their work on the theory and practice of ecofeminism in Argentina, De Vidal and Ramognini mention three in particular: communitarian feminism, decolonial feminism and the popular feminism. 15. I quote here Veronica Gago’s discussion of the significance and function of assemblies which she describes as ‘a dispositive of collective intelligence’. See Gago (2019, pp. 157ff.). On the significance of women’s assemblies see also Korol’s interview with Bertha Cáceres. In Cáceres’s words:

562  Handbook of critical environmental politics Women’s assemblies are our spaces, spaces of great trust … We have seen in the assemblies that in sexual relations a hundred percent of women’s bodies are dominated. We can say what we feel when we are under the power of patriarchal bodies, of machistas, of men who think our bodies are their property. We can say what we like, what we desire, what hurts us, what upsets us. (Korol 2016, p. 289)

16. On this subject see Bertha Cáceres in Korol (2016, pp. 279–80); Gago (2019, pp. 61ff.); Papuccio De Vidal and Ramognini (2018, pp. 177ff.); Caputo (2013, pp. 48–9). 17. On women being forced to take the path of migration see (among others) Duré and Palau (2018, p. 23). They write that in Paraguay where, between 2006 and 2010, 180 000 persons migrated abroad, women were 55.3 percent of the migrants, more than 62 percent younger than 25 years old, and 57 percent or rural origin. 18. This was the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is being constructed through more than 800 miles of unceded Lakota territory. At the peak of the struggle, which was led by Lakota women, calling themselves ‘water protectors’, an encampment was built that hosted 7000 people, and for months stopped construction, in the most adverse conditions, freezing weather and constant police repression. See ‘Standing Rock: three years and still fighting’, resilience.org, 30 April 2019 (accessed 12 May 2022 at https://​www​.resilience​.org/​stories/​2019​-04​-30/​standing​-rock​-three​-years​-and​-still​ -fighting/​). 19. On the Zapatistas’ women mobilization to have the Revolutionary Law on Women adopted, see Klein (2015).

REFERENCES Bryceson, D.F. (1993), Liberalizing Tanzania’s Food Trade, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Caldecott, L. and Leland, S. (eds) (1983), Reclaim the Earth: Women speak out for Life on Earth, London: Women’s Press. Cáceres, B. (2016), ‘Las revoluciones de Bertha Cáceres. Pensamientos y práticas rebeldes’, Fragmentos de diálogos con Claudia Korol, in C. Korol, Feminismos Populares. Pedagogías y Políticas, Buenos Aires: Ediciones América Libre. Castillo Huertas, A.P. (2015), Las mujeres y la tierra en Guatemala: entre colonialism y el mercado neoliberal, Guatemala City: Servi Prensa. Caputo, L. (2013), Situaciones de violencia y trata contra las mujeres jóvenes indígenas en Paraguay, Asunción: Centro De Documentacion BASE Investigacion Sociales. Chavéz, L. (2016), ‘Feminismos Comunitarios. Yo también soy Lolita’, in C. Korol, Feminismos Populares. Pedagogías y Políticas, Buenos Aires: Ediciones América Libre, pp. 287–96. Collectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo (2014), La vida en el centro y el crudo bajo tierra. El Yasuní en clave feminista, Quito: Saramanta Warmikuna. De Beauvoir, S. (1949), The Second Sex, repr. 2011, London: Vintage. De Vidal, S.P. and Ramognini, M.E. (eds) (2018), Teoría y praxis del ecofeminismo en Argentina, Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires: Libreria de Mujeres Editores. De Waal, A. (1997), Famine Crimes. Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Duré, E. and Palau, M. (2018), Mujeres y agronegocios: una aproximación al impacto y las estrategias utilizadas, Asunción: Base Investigaciones Sociales. Echart Muñoz, E. and del Carmen Villarreal, M. (2019), Women’s struggles against extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean, Contexto Internacional, 41 (2), special issue, accessed 25 May 2022 at http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.1590/​s0102​-8529​.2019410200004. Equit Instituto Gênero, Economia e Ciudadania Global (2013), As Mulheres Na Rio+20. Diversas visões contribuindo ao debate, Rio de Janeiro: Equit Instituto Gênero, Economia e Ciudadania Global. Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Gago, V. (2019), La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Tinta Limón. Klein, H. (2015), Compañeras. Zapatistas Women’s Stories, New York: Seven Stories Press.

Eco-feminism and the commons  563 Korol, C. (2016), Feminismos Populares. Pedagogías y Políticas, Buenos Aires: Ediciones América Libre. Longo, R. (2012), El Protagonismo De las Mujeres En Los Movimientos Sociales. Innovaciones y desafíos, Buenos Aires: America Libre. Longo, R. (2016), Mujeres Sin Tierra: un feminismo campesino y popular. Diálogo con Etelvina Masioli, dirigente del MST de Brasil, in C. Korol and G.C. Campo (eds), Feminismos Populares. Pedagogías y Politicas, Bogotà: La Fogata Editorial, pp. 155–68. Merchant, C. (1980), The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins. Mies, M. and V. Shiva (1993), Ecofeminism, repr. 2018, London: Zed Books. Papuccio De Vidal, S. and Ramognini, E.M. (2018), Teoría y praxis del ecofeminismo en Argentina, Buenos Aires: Libreria de Mujeres Editoras. Puleo, A.H. (2011), Ecofeminismo. Para Otro Mundo Posible, Madrid: Ediciones Cátedras, Universitat De València, Instituto De La Mujer. Ramognini, M.E. (2016), ‘Ni una menos’: denuncias, movilización, propuestas y soluciones, in S.P. De Vidal and M.E. Ramognini (eds), Teoría y praxis del ecofeminismo en Argentina, Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires: Libreria de Mujeres Editores, pp. 177–92. Shiva, V. (1989), Staying Alive. Women, Ecology and Development, repr. 1997, London: Zed Books. Shiva, V. (2016), ‘Tenemos que reparar este sistema roto’. Entrevista de Claudia Korol, in C. Korol, Feminismos Populares. Pedagogías y Politícas, Buenos Aires: Ediciones América Libre, pp. 297–302. Tzul Tzul, G. (2016), Sistemas de Gobierno Comunal Indígena. Mujeres y trams de parentesco en Chuimeq’ená, Guatemala City: Maya Wui Editorial. Zitouni, B. (1983), Planetary destruction, ecofeminists and transformative politics in the early 1980s, repr. 2014 in Interface, A Journal for and about Social Movements, 6 (2), 244–70.

40. Geopower: genealogies, territories and politics Miriam Tola

INTRODUCTION Amid the intensification of extractivist economies and their attendant violence, the wildly uneven unfolding of climate change and debates on the Anthropocene narrative that centers the human species as dominant geological actor, the earth has come into new focus in contemporary criticism, theory and activism. The concept of geopower has been particularly generative to think through and with the earth, its densities, movements and temporalities. In political theory, geography and philosophy, geopower evokes the earth as terrain of capitalist capture but also as an assemblage of forces that at once subtends and exceeds human life. Feminist and anti-colonial perspectives have been playing a key role in exploring geopower and its implications for gendered and racialized bodies inhabiting a more-than-human world (Clare 2019). In order to grasp the concept’s various permutations, it is worth briefly addressing the shift from Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to geopower. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault (1976 [1990]) describes biopower as a form of productive power that emerged in the nineteenth century. Biopower comprises a series of regulatory interventions investing human populations, their bodily capacities and subjectivities. Enacted by the state and other institutional actors, biopower is concerned with the adjustment of biological processes such as birth, health, propagation and mortality in the interest of national economies. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, in his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault developed a working hypothesis for the analysis of liberal and neoliberal Western societies. During this time, he shifted focus from biopower to governmentality, broadly defined as the knowledges, regulatory techniques and subject positions that foster manageable conducts. Extending, and at times challenging, Foucault’s analysis, a range of scholars employ the term geopower to account for relations between social forces and environmental, or geological, forces. In this chapter I distinguish two approaches in the use of geopower. The first is inspired by Foucault’s ‘ontology of the present’, that is, the historical analysis of assumed social categories with the intent of investigating their conditions of possibility and transforming them. Scholars developing this line of inquiry (Luke 1995; Ó Tuathail 1996) broaden the scope of Foucault’s biopolitical thinking from human populations to environments, global spaces and the earth system. They use geopower to investigate ways of mapping and governing the earth, its territories, species and processes. The second approach (Grosz 2008) draws on Gilles Deleuze’s ‘ontology of difference’. It addresses the inhuman dynamics of the earth as generative of endless variations of life. From this perspective, the earth is not just an object of rule but a matrix of difference that enables social transformation. Based on this distinction, this chapter charts diverging understandings of geopower, and it identifies overlaps and attempts to complicate them in light of the emergence of the Anthropocene as dominant narrative of the ecological crisis (Neyrat 2016, 2019; Yusoff 2019). I suggest that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, as I show through 564

Geopower  565 the overview of recent critical engagements that connect geopower to the Anthropocene, they interrogate and challenge each other, leaving room for cross-pollination. Further, in order to complicate Eurocentric accounts of geopower in a great deal of Foucauldian and Deleuzian scholarship, I turn to scholarly work that investigates the relations between geopower and colonial histories (Clare 2013, 2019; Povinelli 2016; Yusoff 2019; Luisetti 2019). In the process, I include references to ongoing ‘geopower struggles’ that are helpful to assess and reorient the concept. Finally, I identify directions for future research.

GEOPOWER AS GOVERNMENTALITY Writing in the mid-1990s, the political theorist Timothy Luke and the geographer Gearóid Ó Tuathail introduced influential accounts of geopower. Working in the tradition of Foucault’s ontology of the present, they deploy geopower to index a planet-wide power-knowledge formation that maps, organizes and controls the earth. In Luke’s work, geopower is closely associated with what he terms ‘environmentality’ (Luke 1995). This concept refers to the practices of experts, including governmental protection agencies, academic institutions, global governance actors and non-governmental organizations that have turned natural forces into objects to measure, capture and manage. An expansive set of eco-managerial practices, Luke contends, has enveloped the biophysical world and turned it into a terrain of political calculation. In the United States, this discursive production can be traced back to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concerns with resource depletion and conservation in industrialized national economies. Already in 1908, President Roosevelt invited United States governors to discuss the future of the nation’s natural endowments and support federal policies for managing resources. However, environmentality became fully operative only after the 1960s. In a world marked by decolonization, nuclear confrontations and the rise of economic globalization, states and other governance actors faced the challenge of fostering population productivity while also attending to concerns about environmental degradation and ecological limits to growth. Expert eco-knowledge thus redefined nature as a cybernetic system that ‘can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce “resources” efficiently and in adequate amount when and where needed in the modern marketplace’ (Luke 1995, p. 71). Luke illustrates the shift toward environmentality through the work of the Worldwatch Institute, a non-governmental organization founded in 1974 with the goal of collecting data, forecasting environmental harm and develop solutions to avert it. The worldwatchers, he argues, infused economic instrumental rationality into environmental studies and, in turn, applied ecological system reasoning to economics. In so doing, they replaced the old truth regime of economic growth with the new paradigm of sustainable economy that integrates human production and consumption into biological systems. Recalling Foucault’s engagement with sexuality as a field of power relations, Luke (1995, p. 76) claims that ‘sustainability, like sexuality, becomes a discourse about exerting power over life’. While Luke goes to some length to flesh out the concept of enviromentality, his use of geopower is ambiguous. He describes a world ‘ringed by many eco-knowledge centers dedicated to the rational eco-management of its geopowers’ (Luke 1995, p. 74). This suggests an understanding of geopower as nature’s processes and energies that environmentality reduces to natural capital assets. This aspect of geopower, however, remains elusive as Luke focuses on how power over nature is generated through the disciplinary articulation of eco-knowledge.

566  Handbook of critical environmental politics From this perspective, geopower is a supplement of biopower, a form of biopolitical management that renders all life, human and non-human, into resources (Darier 1999) to bring ‘into the realm of explicit calculation’ (Foucault 1976 [1990], p. 143). The concepts of environmentality and green governmentality have been widely deployed to develop research on authoritative ways of seeing environments, strategies of environmental interventions and the production of ecological subject positions. These frameworks figure prominently in historical studies of the role of geology in the production of landscapes of resources (Braun 2000); empirical research of recycling habits (Darier 1996); analyses of how contemporary subjectivities are defined by green consumption (Rutherford 2011); and studies of neoliberal conservationist project that harnesses the economic value of conserved nature (Fletcher 2010). This robust body of work provides a valuable toolkit for countering dominant discourses that advance the project of converting scientific expertise into governance tools and technological fixes. However, this literature tends to conceive the planet as the stage of governmental operations. There is little sense of the earth as having an eventfulness of its own. What is missing is the consideration of earth’s planetarity, which Spivak (1999) defines as a form of radical alterity not to be confused with the knowable globe of computational models. In some respects, this tendency is even more pronounced in Ó Tuathail’s engagement with geopower. Foucault, but also Jacques Derrida, are the theoretical sources for his exploration of the entwined development of geographical knowledge and the modern state apparatus (Ó Tuathail 1996). Geography, for Ó Tuathail, is not a set of objective facts about the world, something already possessed by the earth. Instead, it is ‘an active writing of the earth’ (Ó Tuathail 1996, p. 2). Geopower, he argues, consists in the governmentalization of geography by state authorities. It mobilizes ‘an ensemble of technologies of power concerned with the governmental production and management of territorial space’ (Ó Tuathail 1996, p. 7). Ó Tuathail contends that forms of geopower have been operative from the sixteenth century onward with the colonial expansion of modern European states. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, when the European colonial project had turned the world-space into ‘an almost completely occupied and fully charted geographical order’ (Ó Tuathail 1996, p. 12), geopolitics emerged as a distinctive ‘genre’ of geopower. Coined in 1899, the term ‘geopolitics’ gradually coalesced into an intellectual tradition of statecraft engaged with the production and organization of global space. Geopolitics gained currency in Nazi Germany as a conception of the state as a living organism with expanding borders. It was then taken up in Latin America, as an anti-Marxist, right-wing approach to foreign politics. As Ó Tuathail reminds us, Augusto Pinochet was a professor of geopolitics at the Chilean War Academy before leading the 1973 military coup that crushed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. According to Ó Tuathail (1996, p. 13) this genre of geopower formation ‘had its foundations in the permanent realities of the earth. It was figuratively rooted in an imagined earth of natural laws, eternal binary opposition’. Ó Tuathail (1996, p. 201) posits critical geopolitics as a culture of resistance, struggling to decolonize imperial geography ‘so that other geo-graphings and other worlds might be possible’. This deconstructive intervention, however, sidesteps the question of what other imaginaries and realities of the earth may be worth investing in as alternatives to the imperial project of classic geopolitics. Ó Tuathail’s insistence on ‘geo-graphings’, ‘geopolitical scripts’ and ‘earth-writing’ indicates his concern with texts and discourses. Paraphrasing Derrida, we could suggest that in this framework ‘there is no earth outside the text’. This must be understood within the linguistic turn that for decades has preoccupied geography, the social sciences and

Geopower  567 humanities at large (Müller 2013). Noting the insufficiencies of this approach for creating social change, feminist geopolitics has brought the embodied, gendered aspects of geopolitics into discussion (Hyndman 2004). More recently, it has developed an account of geopolitics that focuses on corporeal geographies but also the earth temporalities within which life is embedded (Dixon 2015). If the approaches inspired by Foucault and Derrida frame geopower as the inscription of economic and political forces over the earth, feminist accounts of geopolitics suggest that there is earth outside texts, language and discourse.

GEOPOWER AS EARTHLY FORCES The prioritization of earthly forces with respect to discursive practices is central to the work of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. Grosz develops Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, p. 509) account of the earth as ‘the material through which human beings tap cosmic forces’. The earth, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 40), ‘is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions’. It belongs to the chaotic cosmos in which potential forms take shape only to disappear immediately. That is, the earth is a matrix of variation and difference, of continuous emergence and disappearance. Building on this, Grosz (2008, p. 102) considers the earth as geopower, a field of forces – electricity, gravity, temporality, oceanic tides and atmospheric forces – that ‘impinge on, transform, and become the objects for living beings’. Geopower generates problems and events that must be addressed and negotiated through symbolization or otherwise. Living beings, Grosz speculates, harness and transform the forces of the earth to create territories, provisional zones of cohesion, conceptual formations, bodily habits and modes of being together. As a field of potentialities, geopower constitutes human life, operating simultaneously through and apart from it. It subtends social transformation, allowing ‘us’ humans to become other than ourselves. Grosz’s geopower is part of a broader feminist project of troubling normative understandings of nature as realm of necessity. This entails a revaluation and re-engagement with notions of matter, nature and body that have been historically feminized and defined in opposition to the masculine realms of culture, language and mind. In Grosz’s work, features traditionally associated with human beings, namely, the capacity for transformation and invention, describe instead the modus operandi of nature and the earth. She offers a striking image of the planet. Unlike James Lovelock’s Gaia, it is not a living being tending toward equilibrium. Nor is it the benevolent, maternal organism that, as much environmentalism argues, has to be protected from human interference. Instead, the earth is the ground and condition for every human action (Grosz et al. 2017). This implies a challenge to conceptions of the human as agentic, self-inventive being, maker of its own history. Grosz (2017, p. 132) writes: To see life as coming from the earth and its forces … is perhaps the most powerful and direct way to destabilize our concepts of identity and agency. If the earth is riven by agents, acts and events – if it is not inert and passive – then life cannot be understood to master itself.

Geopower, Grosz continues, runs underneath and through power relations (Grosz 2008). It makes possible that which (at least in the Western tradition) has been traditionally understood as politics: the actions and movements of human beings, individuals and collectives, in relation to other individuals and collectives. For example, we can think about fossil fuel extraction, and the shift from coal to oil, as a particular way of capitalizing geological force,

568  Handbook of critical environmental politics which has had an important role in ‘altering the mechanisms of democracy’ (Mitchell 2011). However, geopower can be elaborated otherwise for creating alternatives to social formations ‘that have sought to contain and marshal those forces to particular oppressive ends’ (Grosz et al. 2017, p. 130). Grosz’s feminist ethic of difference has been an important source for recent scholarship attuned to affective tendencies, molecular processes and bodily sensations. Her prioritization of geopower as a generative cosmic force provides a profound challenge to established conceptions of agency, subjectivity and social change. However, it leaves wide open the question of how to pass from ontological potential to a politics capable of confronting the socio-ecological violence produced by the capitalist harnessing of geopower. As critics have noted, this philosophical project runs the risk of ‘unloosing of the socius from historical time’ (Rosenberg 2014) and thus minimizing imaginings of the futures beyond the grip of capitalism. The approaches to geopower outlined in this section are part of larger literatures that have rarely engaged with each other. However, they are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there is much to be gained, in analysis and politics, from engagements that combine the focus on planetary governmentality with non-deterministic understandings of nature. Both provide critical arguments for countering established narratives of the unfolding ecological crisis. They are particularly useful for calling into question Anthropocene discourses that bolster human exceptionalism while leaving untouched the prevalent market logic. After introducing and problematizing such discourses, the next section turns to Fréderic Neyrat’s elaboration on geopower that combines aspects of the ontology of the present with imaginings of the earth as that which eludes the capitalist techno-logic of detection, containment and management.

GEOPOWER IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Proposed by earth scientists in the early 2000s, the Anthropocene has gained traction as a new imaginary of the earth in which the human species figures simultaneously as agent of disruption and redemption. At its simplest, the Anthropocene master narrative goes like this: following scientific evidences, humans have become aware of their decisive role in shaping bio-geo-physical processes (Chapter 5 in this volume). We must acknowledge the bleak outlook for the planet and act swiftly by embracing the role of planetary stewards or (in a twist that reveals the pervasiveness of neoliberal rationality) managers of the earth. Through the virtuous combination of technoscientific expertise and global governance, our societies can continue developing within the planet boundaries without significant alterations of socio-ecological relations. As critics have argued, this narrative obscures the histories of colonial capitalism that have created vastly uneven social ecologies in which the burden of climate change, toxicity and waste falls on marginalized communities (Chapter 37 in this volume). Feminist, anti-racist and indigenous scholars have noted that the generic anthropos of the Anthropocene closely resembles the hegemonic model of the human, the white man of European modernity, entitled to appropriate indigenous land and the labor of women and slaves as his right (Todd 2015; Tola 2016; Di Chiro 2017; Vergès 2017; Pulido 2018; Barca 2020). Bonneuil and Fressoz (2017) understand the Anthropocene discourse as part of a geopower formation that attempts to neutralize political action. Treating the earth as object of knowledge and intervention and establishing the primacy of geological time-scales, the Anthropocene

Geopower  569 ‘seems to make the ordinary time of political action inoperative (if the problem is geological, what can the mere citizen do except trust experts?)’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, p. 88). While geocratic experts are seen as being in charge of developing technological solutions for global problems, the public is relegated to the role of responsible eco-citizen managing individual footprint. This leaves unchallenged the neoliberal vision of market forces as capable of addressing environmental challenges through a range of financial instruments and incentives (Chapter 27 in this volume). Working along these lines, the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat (2016, 2019) develops the connection between geopower and the Anthropocene but also theorizes an ecology of separation that gestures toward an outside, a stubborn an unpredictable alterity. He argues that geopower extends European capitalist modernity by advancing the ‘project of remaking the Earth as if it were a virgin land without history, without autonomous materiality, and without people inhabiting it and having produced cultural alliances with it’ (Neyrat 2016, p. 15). Geopower, which Neyrat also terms geo-constructivism, aggregates and exploits diverse, even contradictory, economic, scientific and philosophical positions. What they share is the claim that the earth, and everything making up planetary processes and ecosystems, can and must be reconstructed. In the face of the unraveling ecological crisis, the project of planetary remaking presents itself as ‘general ecological interest’ (Neyrat 2019, p. 2) achievable through technological fixes including synthetic biology, climate engineering and the de-extinction of lost species. For Neyrat, the notion that everything is constructible recurs in much contemporary ecological thought, from the ecomodernists who argue for the decoupling of human development and environmental impact, to Latour’s argument that a common world does not exist but must be composed through the careful association between disparate beings, human and nonhumans (Latour 2010; Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). Latour’s theory of networks, made up of hybrids and associations between society and nature but mostly devoid of hegemonies and power struggles, unwittingly provides theoretical foundations to geopower. It is not entirely surprising that, at least for a while, his invitation to ‘love our monsters’, abandon the notion of the environment to be protected and put aside the fear of technological interventions, made him an important reference for the ecomodernists (Latour 2011). In contrast to Latour’s view of a world composed of hybrids, Neyrat (2019) proposes an ‘ecology of separation’ as antidote to geo-constructivism. Central to this project are the categories of separation and unconstructability. If splits are juxtapositions without relations, separations open up the space for relationality. Human exceptionalism, a product of Western modernity, is based on a deep split for which the whole of being lies on the side of the human and everything else is commodified as object of exchange. Conversely, separation (another word for difference) is the condition of possibility for relationality in a more-than-human world. Rejecting the claim that nature does not exist or no longer exists, Neyrat (2019, p. 65) argues for an appreciation of the earth as ‘a form of alterity, an outside, a material recalcitrant to the control of engineers’. The planet is a traject, a historical trajectory lasting billions of years and carrying within itself uncountable forms of life and nonlife. As a vector of anti-production as much as production, it remains unconstructable, thus dwarfing the obsession with the remaking of nature. The ecology of separation contests not only the productivist model of geocapitalism but the category itself of production (Chapter 41 in this volume). The reorientation toward unmaking, rather than making, finds collective expression in a range of political projects. Neyrat cites the Zones to Defend (ZADs) as campaigns that have brought the unconstructable to the forefront

570  Handbook of critical environmental politics of struggle. Flourishing in France since 2007, the ZADs are activist communes intended to physically blockade development projects. In Italy, the decades-old struggle of the No Tav movement has been contesting the construction of the high-speed railway connecting Turin and Lyon, and inspiring a much larger protest against unnecessary and imposed mega-projects. In North Dakota, in the United States, indigenous activists led the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Water protectors at Standing Rock made clear that indigenous relations with land, water and air are incompatible with the colonial logic of extractivism (Estes 2019). Many more local groups and organizations, from indigenous groups in Ecuador to the Ende Gelände civil disobedience movement in Germany have been campaigning to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Popularized by Naomi Klein as Blockadia (Klein 2014), these are struggles that express a politics of the unconstructable. This means two things: first, as Neyrat notes, the politics of the unconstructable challenges the geoconstructivist notion that nature can be made and unmade as an empty space without history and without people inhabiting it. Second, it reclaims the existence of spaces exempt from value-creation. As a declaration of non-taking-place and experimentation with other modes of inhabiting the earth, these movements counter the productivist obsession at the core of geoconstructivism.

DECOLONIZING GEOPOWER Growing out of the collaboration with indigenous Australian groups, Povinelli’s work interrogates what she calls ‘geontopower’ via a critique of settler liberalism in Australia (Povinelli 2016). The questioning of geopower’s relation to colonial histories also provides impetus to Clare’s (2013, 2019) reading of geopower in Franz Fanon’s writings, Luisetti’s (2019) discussion of the re-westernizing impulse at the core of geopower and Yusoff’s (2018, 2019) connection between racialization and geology. Povinelli’s (2016) account of ‘geontopower’ and ‘geontology’ provides a counterpoint to the theories of green governmentality and the vitalist notions of geopower mentioned in the previous sections. Povinelli uses these concepts to interrogate the violence of colonial governance but also illuminate indigenous maneuvers to keep relevant practices of existence that do not conform to settler colonial division of materiality in active and passive forms (Chapter 2 in this volume). This distinction between the lively and the inert, biographical and geographical, bios and geos is, according to Povinelli, at the hearth of geontopower, the late liberal power formation that governs difference and markets in settler colonial contexts such as Australia. Povinelli suggests that although geontopower subtends biopower, critical theory has been focused on life – that which has potential for growth and will eventually die – as the central object of political calculus. Instead of questioning the conditions under which life has been historically established as the only form of being, contemporary critical theorists have contributed to the reproduction of the vitalist imaginary. Late liberalism has strategically deployed the distinction between life and non-life to disqualify indigenous geontologies, that is, arrangements of existence in which land, rocks and bones make demands to which indigenous persons feel obliged to respond. Colonized people have been both celebrated and discredited for retaining a premodern mentality that distinguishes them from the proper subjects of settler governance who abide to the separation of life and non-life. In Australia, the contemporary regime of multicultural recognition allows for the expression of cultural beliefs adjudicated as authentic, while also cutting welfare

Geopower  571 provisions and inciting indigenous people to turn land tenure into capital by granting concessions to mining companies. The expansion of extractivist economies diminishes indigenous arrangement of existence in which, Povinelli argues, biographies and geographies exist as simultaneously internal and external to each other so that it does not make sense to distinguish between them (Povinelli et al. 2014). If indigenous geontologies are Povinelli’s entry point to discuss contemporary power formations, Clare’s analysis of geopower explores how gendered and racialized subjectivities exist on this planet as embodied, sentient beings in relation to the earth. Drawing on Merlau-Ponty but deviating from a good deal of phenomenological research, Clare foregrounds power relations that, following Barad (2003), occur not just at the level of the social but also at the level of materiality. Considering the work of Franz Fanon, she argues that it sheds light on geopower, ‘the force relations involved in the physical transformation of the earth, especially its surface’ (Clare 2019, p. 68). In Fanon’s writings, the territorial and psychic dimensions of colonization are intertwined. Settler colonialism appropriates and transforms land through violence and law, engineering and planning, surveying and agriculture. By foreclosing psychic and physical access to land, earth and space, this transformation affects the colonized subject’s embodied experiences of the world. The process of decolonization, therefore, entails the collective re-appropriation of land, a re-marking of the earth that creates a new experience of space. For Fanon, the new human born out of anti-colonial struggles ‘emerges in his engagement with geopower, through partaking in struggles to give shape to the earth, struggles with humans, rocks, rivers, and plants’ (Clare 2013, p. 73). Clare observes that Fanon’s model of decolonial inhabitation through collective re-appropriation relies on a masculine model of proprietorship. She asks whether it is possible to conceive modes of inhabiting the earth beyond property. I would suggest that the contemporary reinvention of the commons points in this direction (Chapter 14 in this volume). Over the past two decades the commons, previously associated with shared pastures and land, has re-emerged to define a wide range of struggles, from protests laying claims to urban and rural spaces in Europe and Latin America, to alternative digital currency initiatives. Ongoing research has been exploring socio-ecological practices that engage nonhuman beings not as malleable resources but as actors with whom to make commons (Centemeri 2018; Tola 2019). As an experimental, contradictory and messy process, the reactivation of the commons manifests modes of use without appropriation. Drawing on the analysis of environmentality, Luisetti (2019) understands geopower as a neoliberal architecture made up of a range of actors seeking to govern flows of energy and matter through the frameworks of adaptation and resilience. However, what distinguishes this work from other analyses of green governmentality is the identification of a colonial logic at play in geopower. Luisetti contends that the Anthropocene narrative produced within geopower introduces a shift in the paradigm of the state of nature, a foundational category of Western political thought, but these changes do not neutralize the structural mechanisms of the state of nature. Specifically, they do not alter its colonial underpinnings. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries political philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, proposed the social contract as the path from the uncivilized state of nature to civil society. They modeled the state of nature after indigenous modes of living, seen as examples of violent anarchy (Hobbes) and unproductive egalitarianism (Locke). Luisetti (2019, p. 345) argues that the Antropocene, as a scientific construct, a policy goal and a contested concept in the humanities and social sciences ‘preserves and reconfigures the foundational

572  Handbook of critical environmental politics Western conjectural history of an unruly state of nature’. The Anthropocene narrative conveys simultaneously the unsettling image of a turbulent global environment and the notion of the earth as provider of ecosystem services that requires to be properly stewarded for preserving what the Stockholm Resilience Center defines as a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ (Rockström et al. 2009). This reconfigured state of nature of late capitalism carries with it new sovereignties, new civilizational gestures that promise to restore equilibrium. These, according to Luisetti, include Latour’s (2017) evocation of a new Leviathan that would allow to come to terms with Gaia, the image for an ecological state of war. As the divide between the civilized state and the state of nature continues to inform current political and theoretical frameworks, it also mirrors ‘the enduring geohistorical fracture between the Western Hemisphere and the rest’ (Luisetti 2019, p. 346). While geopower networks sustain the universalizing notion of the earth as a safe operating space for humanity, they obfuscate ongoing colonial violence that has created toxic geographies of abandonment for millions of people. Geopower, and the Anthropocene narrative it has unleashed, seeks to neutralize the political conflicts that arise in response to the reproduction of colonial violence in the circuits of late capitalism. Against this re-westernizing effort, environmental justice and indigenous struggles persist and multiply to preserve and create socio-ecological relations disentangled from colonial geopower. Yusoff brings into conversation Grosz and Povinelli to provide an account of geopower as analytic that allows us to grapple both with inhuman cosmic forces and their historical manifestations on particular bodies. Her work throws into relief the violence of racialization as the product of the specific colonial, anti-Black, capitalization of geopower, but also argues for the possibility of alternative elaborations of earthly forces (Yusoff 2013, 2018, 2019). While contesting the universalizing claims of the Anthropocene narrative, she also invokes a ‘geological turn’, a critical sensibility that accounts for the imbrications between social and geological strata (Yusoff 2013). This implies a reconsideration of prevalent notions of power, agency and subjectivity. If power, as Foucault argued, is a relation between forces, geopower directs attention to the role of geologic forces in particular power arrangements. The notion of geologic force also allows to question the distinction between agentic life and inert matter and its mobilization in historical processes of subjectification. Drawing on Black studies, specifically the seminal work of Wynter (2003) and Hartman (2007), Yusoff investigates the relationship between geological and human extraction in colonial regimes of slavery that turned racialized bodies into commodities. She understands slavery and its afterlife as a structure of oppression that expresses a particular capitalization of the material geopowers of the earth. She writes, ‘that a slave and a piece of gold was established as materially equivalent entities to the Crown was testament to how the coding of matter arranged political geographies and how geology became part of the spatial and subjective expression of colonialism’ (Yusoff 2019, p. 211). Geology, in effect, has been deeply implicated in regimes of racial violence that created hierarchical distinctions within the human and between life and nonlife. Building on Grosz, Yusoff also argues for the expansive virtualities of geopower as power of differentiation that may allow for the emergence of new geo-social formations. Yusoff’s geological turn seeks to open up new directions for critical geopolitics. Neither the questioning of the writing over the earth nor of resource appropriation, geopolitics becomes a project of ‘radical re-description of the relation (that might become politics and might not) between modes of subjectivity and the earth, and its materialities and temporalities; modes of descrip-

Geopower  573 tion that pay attention to how the ontological categorization of matter is used to do political work’ (Yusoff 2019, p. 214). These contestations of the Anthropocene, particularly the unveiling of its racial underpinnings, are vital. In this context, critical approaches that de-patriarcalize and decolonize the environmental sciences have an important role to play in debates on geopower and the Anthropocene. It is worth examining the complexities of scientific engagements with the Anthropocene. To cite a significant example, Lewis and Maslin’s (2015) article ‘Defining the Anthropocene’ (2015) traces the origins of the Anthropocene back to the sixteenth century when the colonization of the Americas unleashed a massive transformation that can now be detected in rocks and the atmosphere. This intervention, penned by an ecologist and an earth system scientist, brought colonial history into the pages of the journal Nature. This signals that in some scientific quarters the Anthropocene might have a politicizing instead of a depoliticizing effect (Swanson 2016). Having a sense of these nuances, and their political implications, is important for crafting collaborations and alliances across academic disciplines and among a variety of actors pushing for transforming socio-geological relations. In the concluding section I explore directions for further research orientated toward the making of alternative socio-geological futures.

CONCLUSION Scholarship on geopower shifts the terms of engagement with geographical, environmental and geological expertise that have made the earth knowable. This diverse body of work interrogates the dominant imaginaries of planetary predicament. It tracks power formations and their embodied effects while also indicating insurgent practices of inhabiting the planet and using its forces. After outlining current debates, including tensions and gaps, I identify three research paths attuned to struggles around geopower that seem particularly generative for thought and practice. A first line of inquiry concerns the politics of knowledge production in the earth sciences as it encounters collective mobilizations around climate change and broader ecological issues. Critical science studies have unpacked the truth regimes and constitutive exclusions in scientific practices implicated in colonial and capitalist histories of exploitation (Harding 2011; TallBear 2013). They have long been attuned to the contradictions and controversies that arise within the sciences and through their encounter with contentious publics (Hess et al. 2008). Building on these literatures, there is a great deal of work to be done to investigate the relationship between the sciences and current ecological movements. This might reveal ruptures, discrepancies and discontinuities in the networks of power-knowledge that constitute geopower as well as ways in which transformative energies from below translate into shifts in current power formations. A second, already well-established, research path looks at socio-environmental conflicts that stand in the way of the productivist obsession with the remaking of the earth and the expansion of extractivism (Chapter 35 in this volume). Conflicts that illuminate ‘the submerged perspectives’ (Gómez-Barris 2017) of those who have been confronting the ongoing realities of land dispossession and racial violence are particularly meaningful as they call into question prevalent understandings of past, current and impending catastrophe. Finally, a third research direction considers the relation between geopower and the experiences of gendered and racialized bodies. This work, including research engaging aesthetic projects and other experimental practices, can provide insights into how

574  Handbook of critical environmental politics historical relations of dispossession and subjection have affected simultaneously bodies and land. Further, it can make room for other means of encountering the earth. In order to confront geopower as technocratic planetary management, we must make space for other means of sensing the planet and dwelling with/on it. Taken together, these research paths have the potential to illuminate and feed relationships with the earth that do not reproduce the conditions that have led to the emergence of geopower.

REFERENCES Asafu-Adjaye, J., Blomqvist, L., Brand, S., Brook, B., DeFries, R., Ellis, E., et al. (2015), An Ecomodernist Manifesto, Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute, accessed 1 October 2021 at http://​ www​.ecomodernism​.org/​manifesto​-english/​. Barad, K. (2003), Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3), 801–31. Barca, S. (2020), Forces of Reproduction, Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonneuil, C. and Fressoz, J.-B. (2017), The Shock of the Anthropocene, London: Verso. Braun, B. (2000), Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada, Ecumene, 7 (1), 7–46. Centemeri, L. (2018), Commons and the new environmentalism of the everyday life. Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permaculture movement, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 49 (2), 289–314. Clare, S. (2013), Geopower: the politics of life and land in Frantz Fanon’s writing, Diacritics, 41 (4), 60–80. Clare, S. (2019), Earthly Encounters. Sensation, Feminist Theory and the Anthropocene, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Darier, E. (1996), The politics and power effects of garbage recycling in Halifax, Canada, International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 1 (1), 63–86. Darier, E. (1999), Foucault and the environment, in E. Darier (ed.), Discourses of the Environment, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–33. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaux. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Di Chiro, G. (2017), Welcome to the white (M)Anthropocene? A feminist environmental critique, in S. MacGregor (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, London: Routledge, pp. 487–505. Dixon, D. (2015), Feminist Geopolitics: Material States, Farnham: Ashgate and Routledge. Estes, N. (2019), Our History Is the Future, London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1976), The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, repr. 1990, New York: Vintage. Fletcher, R. (2010), Neoliberal environmentality: towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate, Conservation and Society, 8 (3), 171–81. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2008), Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia University Press. Grosz, E., Yusoff, K. and Clark, N. (2017), An interview with Elizabeth Grosz: geopower, inhumanism and the biopolitical, Theory, Culture and Society, 34 (2–3), 129–46. Harding, S. (ed.) (2011), The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hartman, S. (2007), Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hess, D., Breyman, S., Campbell, N. and Martin, B. (2008), Science, technology, and social movements, in O. Amsterdamska, E.J. Hackett, M. Lynch and J. Wajcman (eds), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edn, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 473–98.

Geopower  575 Hyndman, J. (2004), Mind the gap: bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics, Political Geography, 23 (3), 307–22. Klein, N. (2014), This Changes Everything, New York: Simon and Shuster. Latour, B. (2010), An attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’, New Literary History, 41 (3), 471–90. Latour, B. (2011), Love your monsters, in T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger (eds), Love your Monster. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute, pp. 17–25. Latour, B. (2017), Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lewis, S.L. and Maslin, M.A. (2015), Defining the Anthropocene, Nature, 519 (March), 171–80. Luisetti, F. (2019), Geopower: on the states of nature of late capitalism, European Journal of Social Theory, 22 (3), 342–63. Luke, T.W. (1995), On environmentality: geo-power and eco-knowledge in the discourses of contemporary environmentalism, Cultural Critique, 31 (pt II), 57–81. Mitchell, T. (2011), Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso. Müller, M. (2013), Text, discourse, affect and things, in K. Dodd, M. Kuus and J. Sharp (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 49–68. Neyrat, F. (2016), Returning from Afar. Returns in slight delay on La part inconstructible de la Terre, La Deleuziana, 4 (December), 11–18. Neyrat, F. (2019), The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, New York: Fordham University Press. Ó Tuathail, G. (1996), Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Povinelli, E. (2016), Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E., Yusoff, K. and Coleman, M. (2014), On biopolitics and the Anthropocene, Society and Space, accessed 1 October 2021 at https://​www​.societyandspace​.org/​articles/​on​-biopolitics​-and​-the​ -anthropocene. Pulido, L. (2018), Racism and the Anthropocene, in G. Mitman, R. Emmett and M. Armiero (eds), The Remains of the Anthropocene, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 116–28. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F.S. III, Lambin, E., et al. (2009), Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity, Ecology and Society, 14 (2), art. 32. accessed 9 December 2021 at https://​www​.ecologyandsociety​.org/​vol14/​iss2/​art32/​. Rosenberg, J. (2014), The molecularization of sexuality, on some primitives of the present, Theory and Event, 17 (2), https://​muse​.jhu​.edu/​article/​546470. Rutherford, S. (2011), Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, G. (1999), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, Vienna: Passagen. Swanson, H.A. (2016), Anthropocene as political geology: current debates over how to tell time, Science as Culture, 25 (1), 157–63. TallBear, K. (2013), Native American DNA, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Todd, Z. (2015), Indigenizing the Anthropocene, in H. Davis and E. Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 241–54. Tola, M. (2016), Composing with Gaia: Isabelle Stengers and the feminist politics of the earth, PhaenEx. Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, 11 (1), 1–21. Tola, M. (2019), The archive and the lake: labor, toxicity, and the making of cosmopolitical commons in Rome, Italy, Environmental Humanities, 11 (1), 194–215. Vergès, F. (2017), Racial capitalocene, in G. Theresa and A. Lubin (eds), Futures of Black Radicalism, London: Verso, pp. 72–82. Wynter, S. (2003), Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: toward the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument, New Centennial Review, 3 (3), 257–337. Yusoff, K. (2013), Geologic life: prehistory, climates, futures in the Anthropocene, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (5), 779–95. Yusoff, K. (2018), A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

576  Handbook of critical environmental politics Yusoff, K. (2019), The Anthropocene and geographies of geopower, in J. Agnew and M. Coleman (eds), Handbook on the Geographies of Power, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 203–16.

41. Post-work and ecology Luigi Pellizzoni

INTRODUCTION Post-work is a term associated with three main types of arguments: (1) for less work; (2) for a different work; and (3) for a withdrawal from work. The first argument assumes that work is often, if not as a rule, unpleasant and unrewarding; the second that pleasurable, rewarding work for most, if not for everyone, is possible; and the third that the whole structure of work relations currently in force should be changed. This distinction, however, holds analytically in the main. Critiques of work often intertwine considerations about the organization of labour in industrial capitalism and about the necessity of procuring the means for survival, with the consequence that whether the ‘post’ prefix refers to an overcoming of capitalism or of need, and the precise relation between the two, remains for the most part unclear. In any event, the alternative future usually outlined by post-work discourses is of a human activity – call it work or otherwise – coincident with self-development, fulfilment and expression in a world where scarcity, whether real or artificially created by unjust social relations, will no longer be an issue. This future, implicitly or explicitly, presupposes the same notions of individual emancipation, autonomy and authenticity to which capitalism itself subscribes. However, it is perhaps the very concept of work and its underlying values that need to be challenged in view of an ecologically sustainable future. Anarchist scholars have stressed how painful, unrewarding, compulsory work, and attempts to avoid it, are as old as the invention of agriculture and the establishment of sedentary societies (Zerzan 1999). However, a critique of work only emerges in the nineteenth century, namely, in the writings of Marx and Marxists, of utopians, such as Charles Fourier or William Morris, and of anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, in relation to the capitalist organization of labour and the work ethic it builds on, and simultaneously fosters (Seyferth 2019). Moreover, with the notable exception of Workerism’s case for the ‘refusal of work’, which was elaborated in Italy during the 1960s having Fordist industrialism as its target (see Wright 2002), discourses about post-work have developed in the framework of post-Fordist capitalism, gaining momentum with the growing precarization of employment, the neoliberal shift from welfare to workfare regimes, the advent of information technologies (IT) and the blurring of work and free time these changes have entailed, in a counterpoint between growing saturation of people’s life with work and decline of its individual and social meaning (Offe 1985; Weeks 2011; Frayne 2015). The relationship between critique of work and critique of technology has been strong, and ambivalent, since the beginning. In Marx, as in Fourier or Kropotkin, or currently in Accelerationism (see below), technology (machines) is, on one side, the source of alienated work and unemployment (which, in turn, swelling the ranks of what Marx names the ‘reserve industrial army’, increases capitalism’s power); on the other, it represents the opportunity for less painful, unrewarding work, or even the promise that no such work will be necessary in future. With some significant exceptions, addressed later, the relationship between work and the ecological problem has remained comparatively ill-explored (Hoffmann and Paulsen 577

578  Handbook of critical environmental politics 2020). When tackled, the focus is mainly on the relationship between ecological damage and capitalism’s accumulative thrusts, which fosters the creation of fictitious scarcity and needs, hence of unnecessary work and useless, ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018). In these accounts under scrutiny is the ideology which posits work at the centre of individual and social life. What remains largely off the radar is the understanding of work, and the relationship with the biophysical realm it presupposes. Yet, it may well be that the overwhelming role of work in capitalist societies and its very conception, with related ecological implications, are two sides of the same coin. The purpose of the chapter is to investigate this issue. While valuable accounts of the critical debate about work are available (for example, Frayne 2015; Seyferth 2019), and the gap between critique of work and sustainability research is beginning to be filled (Hoffmann and Paulsen 2020), the centrality of the question of work for ecology can be gauged in full, I submit, only if the notion of work, as developed in western modernity, is scrutinized. The argument for a withdrawal from work takes, as a consequence, a more radical meaning, as not just an exit from capitalist labour relations and work ethic, but from work as a relation with nature deemed instrumental through and through. Following the lesson of Weber and critical theory, that economic rationalization (capitalism) and scientific rationalization (naturalism) are expressions of a same logic, the chapter explores the idea of an implication between overcoming work’s unfreedom and overcoming work as action aimed at transforming a passive, or blindly resisting, valueless materiality. This approach, it is argued, helps understand current socio-ecological exploitation and grasp what a post-work society may really mean. I start by reflecting on the notion of work as consigned by modern history, arguing that the account of the human as a productive being is at the roots of both its social centrality and the endless instrumentalization of the world. Subsequently I deal with the post-work debate, showing how, despite formal recognition of the ecological implications of labour’s exploitation, it fails to question the dominative socio-ecological relations implied in assumptions about the worthiness of work, which remain in place also when claims are made about its overcoming, or about a withdrawal from the accumulative logic to which it is made subservient. Thirdly, I address the debate over ecosystem services, shedding light on how focusing on (human) work as the only source of value entails missing important changes in capital’s accumulative strategy, as increasingly indifferent to distinguishing between labour and biophysical dynamics, technology and nature, profit and rent. The time has come, I conclude, for a farewell to western naturalism and its separation and hierarchy between social relations and biophysical materiality, taking seriously Adorno’s claim that human and non-human exploitation presuppose one another and can be overcome only together; a direction towards which some ‘real utopias’ are ostensibly pointing.

WORK, MODERNITY AND CAPITALISM The way we have inherited the notion of work affects the meaning associated with it. Some languages have just one word (for example, French: travail; German: Arbeit; Italian: lavoro). English, instead, has two: work and labour. Though semantically unstable (Frayssé 2014), this distinction has proven relevant to reflections over the problematic. According to Raymond Williams, ‘work’ comes from the Old English ‘weorc’, as the ‘most general word for doing something’, though now mainly referring to ‘regular paid employment … [as] the result of the

Post-work and ecology  579 development of capitalist productive relations’ (Williams 1983, pp. 334–5). ‘Labour’ comes from French. It appears in English around 1300, conveying the idea of hard work, pain and trouble.1 In the sixteenth century, labour begins to be used in an abstract sense, referring to productive work as a social activity. In the eighteenth century, economists (notably Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations) apply it to indicate a measurable and calculable component of commodity production, beside land and machinery (Williams 1983, p. 177). Historical reconstructions (Komlosy 2018) show that, since antiquity, outlooks on human activities have revolved around oppositions, such as painful/rewarding, necessitated/free, instrumental/expressive and manual/intellectual – whether, as in classic Greece,2 to devaluate the first poles, or, as in the Latin and Christian traditions, to claim, to some extent, their dignity and value. Marx and Engels use work and labour to distinguish between what they consider a quintessential anthropological feature, the purposeful transformation and organization of nature to satisfy needs, and the historical condition of exploited work within capitalist relations of production. Capitalism alienates workers from control over their own labour-power and the materials, instruments and outcomes of its application.3 Work produces use-values, qualitatively determined. Labour, reduced to an abstract measure (the average, or ‘socially necessary’, labour time to produce a commodity, according to given technical and organizational conditions of production), delivers quantitatively determined value amenable to monetary representation, hence to exchange-value, which is what distinguishes commodities from other things. Overcoming capitalism, Marx and Engels hold, means returning work to workers, transforming it into ‘self-activity’ (Marx and Engels 1998, p. 91), according to inclinations and aspirations; ‘time for the full development of the individual’ (Marx 1973, p. 711). Elsewhere, however, Marx seems to think that the problem is not only, or so much, alienated work, but necessitated work: ‘The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond [the realm of necessity], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite’ (Marx 1981, pp. 958–959). Whether this idea of a work freed from necessity – or better, where labour as ‘eternal natural necessity’ (Marx 1967, p. 133) is offloaded to machines – contrasts with the idea of a work liberated from capital relations is still debated (Klagge 1986; James 2017). In any event, the focus on alienated and liberated work is not an exclusive feature of Marxian, and Marxist, reflections. For example, both Marxist Accelerationists (Srnicek and Williams 2015) and neoliberal Ecomodernists (Breakthrough Institute 2015) make a case for a liberation of humans from needs and constraints, the basic difference in their argument concerning whether or not the requisite technology advancement entails – depends on and triggers – an exit from the capitalist system.4 What remains undiscussed, in these and many other cases, is the descriptive and prescriptive content of the notion of work: the claim that a purposeful, self-conscious transformation of materiality is what distinguishes humans from other living beings. For Marx, ‘man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need’ (Marx 1992, p. 329). Hegel, explicitly followed by Marx (1988), refers to a dialectic between subject and its own production (literally, ‘putting forth’), suggesting that by looking at the things we make we better understand ourselves, and by changing and improving our products we accomplish ourselves. Before Hegel, both Hobbes and Locke held that humans are essentially producers, and proprietors of the result of the application of their labour-power. Weber has famously argued how some Protestant sects regarded work as an end in itself, a sign of salvation, kick-starting capitalist accumulation. What Agamben (2013)

580  Handbook of critical environmental politics names the ‘ontology of operativity’, whereby one is what one does, makes, gets or becomes, sits deep in the modern understanding of the human.5 This transpires not only from philosophy and religion but also from fiction (think of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe); from how science conceives of knowledge as growing technical control of the world, and – as we shall see – from how economic value is conceived. If that is so, however, what is historically contingent is not only (alienated) labour but also the very notion of work against which labour is posited. More precisely, the above indicates that at the roots of the modern notion of work lies a peculiar view of human relation with the biophysical world. Any living being is instrumentally related with the world, in that it draws the means for survival from its surrounding milieu. In the modern understanding of the human, however, something more is at stake – a question of self-definition, of meaningfulness of life, whereby doing and making become an endless task. It is this limitless instrumentalization of the whole world, not the circumscribed world proper to other living beings in their quest for survival, what Adorno and Horkheimer have in mind when they criticize instrumental reason (Chapter 1 in this volume). In this view, the growing ecological impacts of technology, as mediated, intensified work, are hardly accidental. The question, then, is whether a liberated work is going to treat the biophysical realm any differently from the present, and, symmetrically, whether a different approach to nature may affect human emancipation – a notion originally synonymous with liberation and freedom (from slavery and other situations of subjugation) that in modernity has gained traction as synonymous with progress and the exercise of reason (Rebughini 2015). Scholars have been increasingly committed to providing a ‘green’ portrait of Marx (Foster and Burkett 2016; Saito 2017; Chapter 4 in this volume). His account of the constitutive nexus between human societies and their biophysical milieu and his prescient depiction of capitalism’s ‘irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, prescribed by the natural laws of life itself’ (Marx 1981, p. 949) would allegedly balance the Prometheanism of his case for work. However, nowhere does Marx appear ready to withdraw from the western account of nature as a realm of blind reactivity to human action. In this framework, work and post-work remain a social affair; a matter of social relations. Yet, is that really the case? To answer, let’s consider first the place of nature in the case for post-work.

POST-WORK AND NATURE The case for post-work builds on a critique of modern, and especially late modern, work-based society. Work, it is stressed, is not just functional to satisfying needs and wants. It comprises first an ethic. The Protestant outlook on work has come to dominate western societies, in a secularized version whereby work fulfils a multiple task. It is deemed conducive to independence, self-development and self-expression. It performs a socially integrative role, ensuring social recognition and full citizenship. It is also integral to the social contract, being at once a right and a requirement (Weeks 2011; Chamberlain 2018). That is, work is regarded as ‘a moral duty, a social obligation and the route to personal success’ (Gorz 1989, pp. 219–20). Neoliberal theory has especially emphasized this threefold role of work (Dardot and Laval 2014). Yet, the spread of neoliberal rule throughout the world (Baccaro and Howell 2011) has coincided with the post-Fordist reorganization of capitalism, which entailed a significant attack on workers’ power by means of social dumping and, borrowing Marx’s terminology,

Post-work and ecology  581 replacement of ‘living labour’ (people) with ‘dead labour’ (technical innovation). In the past decades, therefore, the growing emphasis on work’s virtues has gone hand in hand with its crisis. The latter is linked by a relation of reciprocal causation to a crisis of realization of value, testified by the rise of financial capitalism and the expansion of proprietary relations over knowledge and natural resources – what Harvey (2003) terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’.6 In this situation, the theme of unconditional basic income (UBI) has gained momentum (Gentilini et al. 2020).7 As UBI seems a radical route to debunking the social centrality of work, the way in which it connects with ecology is particularly interesting. Unconditional basic income ‘breaks [the] link between making a contribution and receiving a benefit and so undermines the rationale of GDP growth’ (Fitzpatrick 2013, p. 263). It can also be regarded as a compensation for the private use of earthly resources which in principle belong to everyone. However, being parasitic on productive activities, it can have negligible effects on restraining growth, especially if set according to the high living standards of affluent countries. There is also the question of how free time is going to be used. These issues indicate that the positive ecological effects of UBI are contingent on two conditions: growing resource efficiency8 and orientation of liberated time from material consumption to ‘negentropic’ activities (Leonardi 2019), capable of catalysing and regenerating socio-ecological metabolism. This means either pre-industrial or ‘meta-industrial’ (Salleh 2010) forms of labour, such as traditional agriculture or child rearing, or dematerialized ‘self-cultivation’. These assumptions emerge from literature. Consider André Gorz. A prominent figure in the post-work debate, Gorz has claimed since the 1970s that labour’s unfreedom dovetails with ecological damage. His argument is that capitalist industrialism both impairs the capacity for autonomous production and, being aimed at production for its own sake, entails growing resource extraction and waste generation (Gorz 1980). Refocusing the scope and organization of work towards autonomy, therefore, allegedly leads to shrinking induced needs and environmental impacts. Gorz’s (late) support of UBI is owing to his persuasion that, currently, working time is ever less the measure of value and a means for social recognition, as post-Fordist capitalism thrives on human intelligence and creativity, amplified by information technology (IT) (Gorz 1999). However, he never abjured the ontology of work; hence a long-lasting opposition to UBI. For him, there is a basic human need of self-mastery, achieved through the appropriation and transformation of the world; a need for the individual ‘to impress his or her stamp upon it’ (Gorz 1994, p. 55), which gives work also a significant integrative function. Gorz agrees with Marx that ‘free time enables individuals to develop capacities (of invention, creation, conception and intellection) which give them a virtually unlimited productivity’ (Gorz 1999, p. 92); yet, again similar to Marx, he leaves unaddressed how time devoted to the free development of individualities is going to reduce the scope of extraction from nature. This outcome, as already noted, is premised on a distancing from material-intensive leisure. This might be favoured by the decreased affluence entailed by reduced working hours. Some evidence has been provided that shrinking working hours can decrease the pace of resource extraction and consumption (Knight et al. 2013). However, this can hardly be a necessary, or even just a robust, trend, as long as the modern sense-making of life as ‘productive’ life remains unchallenged.9 Similarly reticent, from an ecological perspective, is Autonomist Marxism’s case for the liberation from, or refusal of, work (Tronti 2007) as not ‘a denial of one’s own creative and productive powers’, but a refusal ‘of the capitalist command that structures the relations of production and binds and distorts those powers’ (Virno and Hardt 1996, p. 263). Similar to

582  Handbook of critical environmental politics Gorz, Autonomists consider the ‘cognitive turn’ of capitalism crucial in this respect. For them, the more the production of surplus value builds on capacities formed outside the sphere of production (knowledge, creativity, innovation, and affective and communicative skills), the less is capitalism able, and motivated, to keep labour under control (Virno 2004; Vercellone 2007). Again, the issue here is the heteronomy of work, not what one is going to do with liberated ‘creative and productive powers’ and their relationship with biophysical materiality. Similarly, Accelerationists assume that technologies forged in capitalism can be used against it and for promoting non-capitalist relations and ecological sustainability, as if the means and the relations of production were unconnected – if the former did not incorporate a model of society and could become eco-friendly by just changing the latter. The poor (to say the least) ecological performance of ‘real socialist’ countries indicates that things are unlikely to be so simple. Yet, the point is not so much the faith in technological eschatologies that transpires from Accelerationists, as well as from Gorz and Autonomists, as whether the technologies that liberate time from heteronomous work, and the use of such time, can make any difference if those technologies keep an instrumental relation to nature in the totalizing sense specified previously and, correspondingly, if self-development remains conceived as world-mastering and moulding. Even contributions challenging the ‘view of community as constructed by work’ (Chamberlain 2018, p. 16) that bring together Gorz, Autonomists and Accelerationists, fail to properly address this question. For example, in her case for ‘life beyond work’ in a society focused ‘not [on] the common production of value, but [on] the common reproduction of life’ (Weeks 2011, p. 230), Weeks does not elaborate on the connection between social reproduction and biophysical materiality. This despite capitalism is thriving ever more on the two-sided character of the body: the social and the material – consider gamete donation, gestational surrogacy and other forms of ‘clinical labour’ (Cooper and Waldby 2014). Equally silent about nature is Chamberlain’s (2018) endorsement of Nancy’s (1991) case for an ‘inoperative’ or ‘unworked’ (désoeuvrée) community, as a living in common based not on industriousness and world-making, but on the experience of finitude; a shared lack of identity, tasks and destiny. The relationship of this community with its biophysical milieu remains unexplored in Nancy, and in Chamberlain as well. Looking at Agamben, another potential inspirer of a radical critique of the work society, makes things no easier. For Agamben, the human is not the working but the workless animal, in that it has no predefined tasks, or ways of interacting with the environment. This brings to the fore humans’ impotentiality, that is, the possibility of leaving their potential unfulfilled. In turn, he claims, this capacity can perform a political role as destituent power. Leaving ‘works and productions inoperative [means] opening them to a new possible use’ (Agamben 2014, p. 69),10 arguably free from the affirmative, extroversive compulsion ingrained in the western ontology of work. The way the non-human sphere enters this process, however, remains unspecified, other than hints at a possible reconciliation of bios and zoē, social life and biological existence, humanity and its own animal underpinnings (Agamben 2004). Moreover, a potentiality left unexpressed can be actualized at any moment, just as self-restraint in production and consumption can always turn to expansion and excess (Pellizzoni 2021). It is precisely this possibility which gives humans an agency over biophysical reality that other living beings lack. Thus, if worklessness is just the negative side of work, rather than a critique of its meaning in the direction of a different approach to the world, the latter’s endless instrumentalization remains unaffected.

Post-work and ecology  583 Lack of elaboration of the connection between work and nature is a theoretical gap that significantly impairs critique. This can be gauged by looking at attempts to remedy Autonomists’ neglect of ‘the ecological dimensions of post-Fordism – its foundations in extractive energy economies, its links to the accelerating financialization of nature under the banner of so-called green capitalism, its harnessing of nonhuman capacities, and its wildly uneven toxic geographies’ (Nelson and Braun 2017, p. 224) – by way of extending to the non-human realm the claims about the emancipatory force of cognitive work. A case is made for the ‘infinitely productive’ potentiality of non-human nature, ‘as something presupposed, but not produced, by state and capital’ (Braun 2015, p. 11), and the growing relevance of ‘self-organizing dynamics and regenerative social-ecological capacities outside of the direct production processes’ (Nelson 2015, p. 462). However, just as, by any evidence, the expansion of cognitive work has no ingrained emancipatory force – digital capitalism harnesses and extracts surplus value from knowledge sharing (Berlinguer 2018) and cognitive workers operate in a context dominated by increasing precarization and prescriptive cultural-organizational models of fulfilment, achievement and reward, including performance criteria and client demands (Dardot and Laval 2014) – so the burgeoning economy of ecosystem services, on which I dwell in the following, shows how nature’s dynamics are increasingly enrolled in valorization processes, up to making human work apparently superfluous to accumulation.

NATURE’S WORK: MAKING SENSE OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES To address the issue we have to start from the question of value. Recent scholarship has stressed that value is not an intrinsic property of entities but the result of acts of valuation (giving worth to entities) and evaluation (assessing how an entity attains a certain type of worth) (Muniesa 2011; Lamont 2012). In turn, as the French economics of conventions school reminds us (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Thévenot 2007; Orléan 2014), worth refers to a condition of happiness and good, culturally embedded, and hence socially acknowledged. Different entities, or states of the world, can be regarded as more or less worthy, according to shared frameworks of meaning, or ‘orders of worth’, available for interpreting situations. Valorization, then, conveys the idea of an increase in worthiness. In capitalist societies exchange value that results from the quantitative evaluation of labour dominates as an alleged universal measure of worthiness. Premise of this is the worthiness of work, for its generic capacity of transforming the world, and increasing the happiness and good it delivers – just as money is praised for its own sake for its potential or promise of realization of achievements. From this perspective the often discussed contrast between labour-based and utility-based theories of value scales down considerably. For Smith, Ricardo and Marx, value is always related to the amount of labour directly (‘living’) or indirectly (‘dead’, incorporated in technology) responsible for the product. For neoclassic economics, instead, value depends on the utility assigned by the purchaser. However, a labour-theory of value assumes, at its most basic, that work is judged worthy for the results it obtains. A utility-theory of value, in turn, assumes that preferences are not totally erratic, otherwise organizing production would be impossible. That is, there is no value of something if not for someone; and there is no utility in things if not because of their arrangement, nor an increase in utility if not through a change in that arrangement. This applies also to changes that occur only in the eyes of the onlooker, by way of a cognitive act, a reinterpretation of the scarcity, or utility, of things. Cognitive

584  Handbook of critical environmental politics processes are themselves a form of labour, immaterial but in many ways related to materiality. Brains consume energy, which needs to be restored. Furthermore, a change in the appraisal of things usually leads to behavioural change. Labour can always be found lurking at the grounds of the appreciation of things. Think of an old piece of furniture that changes its status from scrap to antique. This type of reappraisal cannot but ultimately concern the work it contains or expresses, for its rarity, craftsmanship, and so on. In summary, in the framework of the modern understanding of the human, no theory of value can do without labour. The distinction between profit and rent builds on this. Economic theory calls rent revenue obtained not through work but thanks to someone’s willingness to pay for something on which others hold property rights, and which contains work or enables work. The difference in price between a piece of antique furniture and a functionally or aesthetically comparable item can be explained not only for the appreciation of the work it contains but also for the work it enables (for example, the purchasers may use the item in their restaurant, a stylish ambience helping justify higher bills). The same applies to selling or leasing land. In this example, however, it is unclear from what rent is precisely drawn – again work, located downstream, or perhaps nature’s own ‘work’? According to Walker and Moore (2018, p. 50), labour time ‘is always unified labour-nature time’. In rearranging things, labour always benefits from the ‘contribution’ of things themselves – organic dynamics but also the features of inorganic matter. Applying the term ‘work’ to nature, moreover, has become common sense since the advent of Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics. Crucially, conceptual traffic has not been one-way, from the human to the non-human realm. There is a close connection between the emergence of the thermodynamic notion of energy in the nineteenth century and the development of industry and the associated notion of labour as an abstract, measurable entity (Lohmann 2014; Daggett 2019), work ending up described as the application of energy (as with Marx’s notion of ‘labour power’) and, simultaneously, energy as the capacity of a physical system to do work. Against this backdrop, the rise of ecosystem services (ES) offers a clue to the current phase of capitalism, and the questions it raises for post-work. That capital’s value extraction from, or subsumption of, nature expands not only ‘horizontally’, or ‘formally’ (that is, resource appropriation without alteration, as with oil drilling) but increasingly ‘vertically’, or ‘really’ (that is, resource refashioning in order to work harder, faster and more efficiently, as with genetically modified organisms), has been recognized for some time (Boyd et al. 2001; Smith 2007; Fraser 2014).11 However, things seem different in regard to ES. These are defined as the benefits biophysical systems give to humans, from resource provision to regulative and supporting functions, such as carbon sequestration, waste decomposition, soil formation and crop pollination (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). Two main strands in the economy of ES are distinguished (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010): markets (MES) and payments (PES). Markets treat ES as tradable commodities. For example, forests or wetlands can be destroyed to make space for industrial or residential sites and re-created elsewhere, with connected financial transactions.12 Payments are, instead, transactions between holders of property rights and users concerning the provision of a service, such as carbon sequestration in biomass or soils, or the securing of freshwater flows to downstream users (Engel et al. 2008). As Castree (2003) notes, commodification can entail both a functional and a spatial abstraction. Functional abstraction ‘involves looking for real and classifiable similarities between otherwise distinct entities as if the former can be separated out from the latter unproblematically’ (Castree 2003, p. 281).

Post-work and ecology  585 Spatial abstraction adds to functional abstraction that ‘any individualized thing in one place be treated as really the same as an apparently similar thing located elsewhere’ (Castree 2003, p. 281), which allows for offsetting a loss somewhere with a gain somewhere else. Hence, we can say MES perform a functional and spatial abstraction, cutting and moving portions of reality, while PES perform only a functional abstraction, as they identify services by just disentangling them from the networks of functionings and relations in which these services are immersed. Whenever a functional abstraction is performed, however, a piece of nature seems to become a commodity not through work, but through a mere symbolic gesture, a cognitive interpretation or an ontological redefinition, thanks to which things ‘reveal’ their character of commodity – with which therefore they should have been endowed since the beginning. This makes controversial the character of subsumption (is it formal, as nature’s performance is left untouched, or is it real, as nature is refashioned as a commodity?), and puzzles scholars in relation to the origin of the value expressed in transactions. Some remain faithful to Marx’s tenet that commodification always entails work: The waterfall, like the earth in general and every natural force, has no value, since it represents no objectified labor and hence no price, this being in the normal case nothing but value expressed in money. Where there is no value, there is eo ipso nothing to be expressed in money. This price is nothing but capitalized rent. (Marx 1981, p. 787)

Rent, as stated previously, is revenue obtained thanks to property rights over a resource that others demand. It is the latter’s (or someone else’s) labour that creates value, part of which is appropriated by the rentier. Thus, for Swyngedouw, honey and energy have use-value but no capitalist value. Bees and land ‘work for free’ for the farmer and the oilman, who by selling honey and oil intercept instead the value others create by working on them. ‘Nature is not “valued” at all. … This is why capitalism is by definition destructive of nature’ (Kallis and Swyngedouw 2018, pp. 43–4). Similarly, according to Hiraldo, non-governmental organizations conservation programmes do not create value, but ‘indirectly appropriate a portion of workers’ value through donations and through the funding they receive from the state’; and the funding ‘comes from the collection of taxes, which represent a portion of workers’ labour-time’ (Hiraldo 2017, p. 58). In the same way, for Felli (2014, pp. 268–9), ‘what is being accessed through the buying of emissions rights is the right to access a necessary condition of production’. Carbon credits are not commodities, but rent drawn from the value industries create by ensuring themselves a right to pollute. Honey, oil, wetlands, forests and carbon dioxide: according to the labour-theory of value these are all pseudo or fictitious commodities; they take the form of a commodity having exchange-value, but do not contain labour, hence proper value, and therefore they are not proper commodities. Kallis, however, questions the explanatory adequacy of ‘designating non-human labour as “rent” or an exogenous “productivity increase” that enters the theory only through its effect on relative surplus value’ (Kallis and Swyngedouw 2018, p. 39). Similarly, for Castree (2003, p. 281), ‘not all capitalist commodities adhere to the labour-theory of value in a strict sense’, as commodification consists in rendering things monetarily equivalent, whatever the basis of this equivalence. In the same way, for Büscher (2013, p. 22), the value of nature-to-be-conserved ‘circulates through the capital embodied in and implied by its environmental services’. Nature becomes liquid: a fictitious capital circulating through financial transactions.

586  Handbook of critical environmental politics The debate is therefore open. We have seen that value is always a consequence of evaluation, an assignment of worth. It is therefore crucial for liquid nature to be ‘believable, legitimate and manageable’ (Büscher 2013, p. 22). From estimating the global warming potential of a greenhouse gas to distinguishing types of wetland or stream, the connection between nature as biophysical phenomenon and as discursive construction requires complex expert work, which includes taxonomies and definition of functions and processes to which, bypassing uncertainties and controversies, a value is assigned. Ecosystem services, therefore, depend on ‘our belief in, and consent to, the adequacy of these abstractions’ (Robertson 2012, p. 387). The orders of worth so established break down biophysical functionings and interconnections, recomposing them in ways suitable to being packaged into financial instruments. One can say that, as ES are the brainchild of experts, their value still stems from (human) work. However, on the one hand, this confirms – if necessary – that cognitive work has no inbuilt emancipatory implications against capitalist relations. Indeed, the ES (as the IT) case shows that, the more cognitive work expands the scope of abstraction, the more it provides avenues to capitalist capture, as capitalism thrives on abstraction. On the other hand, different from classic industrial applications of cognitive work which identify natural forces to funnel them into artefacts, this work does nothing but analyse ecosystem vitality to bring to light its, as yet unrecognized, commodity character and value. Hence, capitalist valorization seems increasingly indifferent about the source of value (whether nature or a particular way of accounting for nature) and about its character (whether, and for whom, it is profit or rent). It looks as though the blurring of labour power and energy, of human and non-human work, begun at the dawn of industrialization, has left the factory to encompass the whole reality. The idea of a world entirely commodified – made equivalent, hence fungible, that is, disposable – and ‘put to work’ (Daggett 2019, p. 12) turns from (dreamy or nightmarish) phantasy to accurate description. Against this backdrop, the problem of work can hardly continue to be treated as a social affair, impinging on but independent of the ecological question. Similarly, from an argument for less work, better work or withdrawal from existing work relations, the case for post-work cannot but turn to a critique of work – as expression of the modern approach to biophysical reality.

CONCLUSION Arendt (1958) has famously argued that in ancient Greece the sphere of human realization was not poiesis but praxis; not world-transformative but self-expressive action. Late modernity, it seems, has not so much rejected the latter, but conflated it with the former. Those uncomfortable with the idea of a direct commodification of nature are worried that this may make ‘the relations of exploitation between capitalists and workers … less relevant in explaining the survival of capital, becoming silenced as a consequence’ (Hiraldo 2017, p. 57). Again, this corresponds to putting nature and labour in competition, as if the liberation of the latter entailed a persistent or intensified exploitation of the former. The issue, however, is that for current capitalism the difference between human and non-human, living and non-living, nature and technology, matter and language, concrete and virtual, profit and rent, is of ever-lessening relevance (Pellizzoni 2016). Ecosystem services, we have seen, are simultaneously material and symbolic. The biotechnology industry claims they are doing what nature always did, just better, while their patents protect seeds and their genetic information at the same time (Thacker

Post-work and ecology  587 2007). The mining and algorithmic analyses of data detect a reality that to various extents they themselves create (Amoore and Piotukh 2015). ‘Clinical labour’ commodifies social and biological reproductive functions, making the human body a service provider (Cooper and Waldby 2014). In these circumstances, post-work cannot just mean liberation from painful occupations or capitalist relations, nor even pointing in the direction of an ‘unworked’ community, a ‘life beyond work’. Better, these goals cannot consider social relations alone. We have seen the ambiguity of UBI vis-à-vis growth. Some scholars suggest that degrowth (Chapter 7 in this volume) can be triggered by way of unproductive expenditure: doing things that ‘“burn” capital out and take it out of the sphere of circulation, slowing it down’, such as ‘spending in a collective feast, … subsidis[ing] a class of spirituals to talk about philosophy or leav[ing] a forest idle’ (D’Alisa et al. 2015, p. 217). However, the easiness with which all this becomes profitable (feasts can be professionally organized, intellectual circles can feed a thriving economy, forests left idle become ES, and so on) indicates that no decisive progress can be made unless the ontology of work, celebrated rather than questioned by its waste, is tackled at its roots. The simultaneous crisis of work and ecological crisis indicates that the time has come for a farewell to the idea, ingrained in western naturalist ontology, that ‘for the sake of removing socially unnecessary repression we cannot do without the exploitation of external nature necessary for life’ (Habermas 1983, p. 108); that human emancipation has to be obtained at the expense of the biophysical world. The issue with which we are dramatically confronted today is not, with Habermas, that instrumental reason (which capital embodies at its best, or worst) has colonized social life, confounding ‘labour’ and ‘interaction’, technical control of material reality and intersubjective understanding, but, with Adorno, that the instrumentalization of nature triggers and implies the instrumentalization of humans.13 However, again with Adorno, we should not regard technology as doomed to ravish nature, since ‘under transformed relations of production it would just as easily be able to assist [it] and … help it to attain what perhaps it wants’ (Adorno 2002, p. 68). As noted, it would be naive to believe that changing the relations of production is sufficient to this purpose. We need also to change technology, reorientated goals entailing reconceived means. We need, borrowing Benjamin’s (2003, p. 394) words, ‘a kind of labour which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials’. The term ‘labour’, or ‘work’, in this context takes a wholly different meaning to the received wisdom. Mastery and exploitation are replaced by companionship, care and reconciliation – at once of humans and nonhumans, between and among themselves, which ostensibly leads to giving the ‘struggle for life’, and even death (the great repressed of late modernity), a different meaning as well. The notion of emancipation also distances itself from its traditional reference in an account, so deeply intertwined with capitalism, of the individual as a self-standing agent faced with an open-ended, infinitely actionable reality (Pellizzoni 2022; Rebughini 2015). We can dismiss the above as empty utopia. Yet the case for post-work does build on a utopian tension, as it points towards a radical otherwise, compared with long-enduring historical circumstances; another way of living on the planet. Moreover, an ecological post-work utopia is not necessarily empty. Many ‘real utopias’ (Wright 2010; see also Chapters 34, 36 and 42 in this volume) are spreading throughout the world, united in their attempt to de-institute capitalist chains of equivalences by way of ‘alternative value practices’ (Centemeri 2018) – from participatory plant breeding (researchers cooperating with farmers to adapt varieties to local ecosystems, instead of the opposite: see Ceccarelli and Grando 2009; Demeulenaere and

588  Handbook of critical environmental politics Piersante 2020) to frugal innovation (products and processes reworked to reduce material and financial costs, instead of increase performance or profit: see Khan 2016); from permaculture and other forms of regenerative agriculture to farmers’ markets based on ‘just price’ (buyers pay farmers beforehand a sum to support their work, in return for an agreed amount of product – or even variable, depending on harvest results), or land occupations like the French ZAD (zone à defendre) mobilizations (Bulle 2018), which create places apart where non-proprietary means of relating among people and with things are deployed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to thank all those who read and commented on earlier versions of the chapter, especially Erik Gomez-Baggethun, for insightful and challenging remarks, and Viviana Asara for very useful suggestions. The final outcome is of course my own responsibility.

NOTES 1. The idea of a painful activity is already present in the Latin term ‘labor’, from which the French word comes. 2. From which Arendt (1958) has drawn her famous distinction between labour as a repetitive activity directed at meeting biological necessities, work as the creation of durable objects and action as the sphere of self-expression in intersubjective relations. 3. A usual reference concerning this distinction is a footnote of Friedrich Engels to the fourth German edition of Marx’s Capital (Marx 1967, p. 138). For an outline of the work/labour distinction as elaborated by Marx and Engels see Fuchs and Sevignani (2013). 4. Accelerationists make a case for overcoming capitalism, building on and accelerating its technological and organizational gains (especially automation, big data and logistics), whose potentials are deemed hampered by its ‘value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies’ (Williams and Srnicek 2013, s. 3.6), pointing to a future where machines will increasingly produce ‘all necessary goods and services, releasing humanity from the effort of producing them’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015, p. 109). Ecomodernists claim that shrinking environmental impacts does not mean harmonizing with nature, but on the contrary intensifying industrial and extractive activities via ever-more powerful technologies, to decouple society from the biophysical world, thus overcoming ecological crises while ensuring growth (Breakthrough Institute 2015). The affinity between the two positions is testified by Marxist endorsements of ecomodernist themes (Robbins and Moore 2015). For a critical appraisal see Gómez-Baggethun (2020). 5. According to Agamben, this ontology originates from the Christian Trinitarian doctrine, which, by splitting creation and administration – economy – of life, consigned the historical world to the latter, leading to a conception of being as contingent on the effects it produces. 6. This is consistent with Marx’s claim that, if the commodity-mediated accumulation process (M-C-M′) is hampered by overproduction and under-consumption, a relief valve for the capitalist system is making money with money (M-M′) and expanding rent (on which see below). For him, however, as surplus value always comes from labour, this can only be a temporary solution. 7. The topic, however, is hardly new. Someone traces it back to a 1796 text by the Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine (van Parijs 2013). 8. This assumption, a building block of both Marxist and neoclassic economics, is challenged by scholars (for example, Bonaiuti 2018) who – borrowing from Georgescu-Roegen’s (1970 [2011]) remark that ‘Promethean’ technologies, capable of making a quantum leap in resource efficiency, are historically exceptional (the mastery of fire, the adoption of agriculture, the conversion of fossil fuel into mechanical work) – stress that the third (bio-IT) industrial revolution is already losing momentum while it is highly uncertain that the fourth (automation) will ensure a new leap.

Post-work and ecology  589 9.

Note, moreover, that ‘dematerialized’ self-cultivation may have heavy material underpinnings. This is certainly the case as far as IT are concerned (see, for example, Borning et al. 2020). 10. The examples on which Agamben especially dwells are play, which transforms tools into toys and actions into self-finalized gestures, and festivity, when what is done ‘becomes undone, … liberated and suspended from … the reasons and purposes that define it during the weekdays’ (Agamben 2014, p. 69). 11. Think of the ‘FlavrSavr’ tomato, modified to make it more resistant to rotting, or the ‘AquAdvantage’ salmon, modified to grow quicker. Yet, plant and animal hybridization for industrial purposes precedes the advent of gene technologies. The idea of formal and real subsumption of nature to capital obviously mirrors Marx’s distinction between formal and real subsumption of labour, according to whether workers enter a wage relation with capital while retaining their own skills, hence a creative control over the labour process, or become cogs in the assembly line, their contribution to production being reduced to mere bodily-psychic energy. 12. An early example is the US Clean Water Act (1972), which introduced permits to damage wetlands in exchange of creating or restoring wetlands elsewhere. 13. It is not without significance that Habermas has more recently come closer to Adorno. See Habermas (2008, p. 201).

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. (2002), Aesthetic Theory, New York: Continuum. Agamben, G. (2004), The Open. Man and Animal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2013), Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2014), What is a destituent power? Environment and Planning D, 32 (1), 65–74. Amoore, L. and Piotukh, V. (2015), Life beyond big data: governing with little analytics, Economy and Society, 44 (3), 341–66. Arendt, H. (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baccaro, L. and C. Howell (2011), A common neoliberal trajectory: the transformation of industrial relations in advanced capitalism, Politics & Society, 39 (4), 521–63. Benjamin, W. (2003), On the concept of history, in W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 389–411. Berlinguer, M. (2018), The value of sharing. How commons have become part of informational capitalism and what we can learn from it, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 59 (2), 263–88. Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006), On Justification: Economies of Worth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bonaiuti, M. (2018), Are we entering the age of involuntary degrowth? Promethean technologies and declining returns of innovation, Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (2), 1800–1809. Borning, A., Friedman, B. and Logler, N. (2020), The ‘invisible’ materiality of information technology, Communications of the ACM, 63 (6), 57–64, accessed 20 July 2021 at https://​cacm​.acm​.org/​ magazines/​2020/​6/​245160​-the​-invisible​-materiality​-of​-information​-technology/​fulltext. Boyd, W., Prudham, S. and Schurman, R. (2001), Industrial dynamics and the problem of nature, Society and Natural Resources, 14 (7), 555–70. Braun, B. (2015), New materialisms and neoliberal natures, Antipode, 47 (1), 1–14. Breakthrough Institute (2015), An ecomodernist manifesto, Breakthrough Institute, Oakland, CA, accessed 28 February 2020 at http://​www​.ecomodernism​.org/​manifesto​-english. Bulle, S. (2018), Formes de vie, milieux de vie. La forme-occupation, Multitudes, 71 (2), 168–75. Büscher, B. (2013), Nature on the move I: the value and circulation of liquid nature and the emergence of fictitious conservation, New Proposals, 6 (1–2), 20–36. Castree, N. (2003), Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography, 27 (3), 273–97. Ceccarelli, S. and Grando, S. (2009), Participatory plant breeding, in M. Carena (ed.), Cereals. Handbook of Plant Breeding, vol. 3, New York: Springer, pp. 395–414.

590  Handbook of critical environmental politics Centemeri, L. (2018), Commons and the new environmentalism of everyday life. Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permaculture movement, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 59 (2), 289–313. Chamberlain, J. (2018), Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cooper, M. and Waldby, C. (2014), Clinical Labor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. D’Alisa, G., Kallis, G. and Demaria, F. (2015), From austerity to dépense, in G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds), Degrowth. A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge, pp. 215–20. Daggett, C.N. (2019), The Birth of Energy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2014), The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, London: Verso. Demeulenaere, E. and Piersante, Y. (2020), In or out? Organisational dynamics within European ‘peasant seed’ movements facing opening-up institutions and policies, Journal of Peasant Studies, 47 (4), 767–91. Engel, S., Pagiola, S. and Wunder, S. (2008), Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: an overview of the issues, Ecological Economics, 65 (4), 663–74. Felli, R. (2014), On climate rent, Historical Materialism, 22 (3–4), 251–80. Fitzpatrick, T. (2013), Ecologism and basic income, in K. Widerquist, J.A. Noguera, Y. Vanderborght and J. De Wispelaere (eds), Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 263–8. Foster, J.B. and Burkett, P. (2016), Marx and the Earth, Boston, MA: Brill. Fraser, N. (2014), Behind Marx’s hidden abode: for an expanded conception of capitalism, New Left Review, 86 (March–April), 55–72. Frayne, D. (2015), Critiques of work, in S. Edgell, H. Gottfried and E. Granter (eds), SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment, London: Sage, pp. 616–633. Frayssé, O. (2014), Work and labour as metonymy and metaphor, tripleC, 12 (2), 468–85. Fuchs, C. and Sevignani, S. (2013), What is digital labour? What is digital work? What’s their difference? And why do these questions matter for understanding social media? tripleC, 11 (2), 237–93. Gentilini, U., Grosh, M.E., Rigolini, J.P. and Yemtsov, R.G. (eds) (2020), Exploring Universal Basic Income: A Guide to Navigating Concepts, Evidence, and Practices, Washington, DC: World Bank, accessed 16 July 2021 at https://​openknowledge​.worldbank​.org/​handle/​10986/​32677. Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1970), The entropy law and the economic problem, repr. 2011 in M. Bonaiuti (ed.), From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen’s ‘New Economics’ in Eight Essays, London: Routledge, pp.49–57. Gómez-Baggethun, E. (2020), More is more: scaling political ecology within limits to growth, Political Geography, 76 (January), 102095, accessed 16 July 2021 at https://​www​.sciencedirect​.com/​journal/​ political​-geography/​vol/​76/​suppl/​C. Gómez-Baggethun, E., de Groot, R., Lomas, P.L. and Montes, C. (2010), The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: from early notions to markets and payment schemes, Ecological Economics, 69 (6), 1209–18. Gorz, A. (1980), Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press. Gorz, A. (1989), Critique of Economic Reason, London: Verso. Gorz, A. (1994), Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, London: Verso. Gorz, A. (1999), Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, Cambridge: Polity. Graeber, D. (2018), Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, London: Penguin. Habermas, J. (1983), Theodor Adorno: the primal history of subjectivity – self affirmation gone wild, in J. Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 99–110. Habermas, J. (2008), Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Polity. Harvey, D. (2003), The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiraldo, R. (2017), Value is still labour: exploitation and the production of environmental rent and commodities for nature tourists in rural Senegal, Human Geography, 10 (2), 54–71. Hoffmann, M. and Paulsen, R. (2020), Resolving the ‘jobs-environment dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research, Environmental Sociology, 6 (4), 343–54. James, D. (2017), The compatibility of freedom and necessity in Marx’s idea of communist society, European Journal of Philosophy, 25 (2), 270–93. Kallis, G. and Swyngedouw, E. (2018), Do bees produce value? A conversation between an ecological economist and a Marxist geographer, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 29 (3), 36–50.

Post-work and ecology  591 Khan, R. (2016), How frugal innovation promotes social sustainability, Sustainability, 8 (10), 1034, accessed 15 July 2021 at https://​www​.mdpi​.com/​2071​-1050/​8/​10/​1034. Klagge, J.C. (1986), ‘Marx’s realms of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (4), 769–77. Knight, K.W., Rosa, E.A. and Schor, J.B. (2013), Could working less reduce pressures on the environment? A cross-national panel analysis of OECD countries, 1970–2007, Global Environmental Change, 23 (4), 691–700. Komlosy, A. (2018), Work: The Last 1,000 Years, London: Verso. Lamont, M. (2012), Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation, Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 201–21. Leonardi, E. (2019), Bringing class analysis back in: assessing the transformation of the value-nature nexus to strengthen the connection between degrowth and environmental justice, Ecological Economics, 156 (C), 83–90. Lohmann, L. (2014), Energy, Work and Finance, Sturminster Newton: Corner House. Marx, K. (1967), Capital, vol. 1, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse, London: Macmillan. Marx, K. (1981), Capital, vol. 3, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1988), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Marx, K. (1992), Early Writings, London: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), The German Ideology, Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis, Washington, DC: Island Press. Muniesa, F. (2011), A flank movement in the understanding of valuation, Sociological Review, 59 (s2), 24–38. Nancy, J.-L. (1991), The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nelson, S. (2015), Beyond the limits to growth: ecology and the neoliberal counterrevolution, Antipode, 47 (2), 461–80. Nelson, S. and Braun, B. (2017), Autonomia in the Anthropocene: new challenges to radical politics, South Atlantic Quarterly, 116 (2), 223–35. Offe, C. (1985), Disorganised Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity. Orléan, A. (2014), The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for Economics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pellizzoni, L. (2016), Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Pellizzoni, L. (2021), Nature, limits and form-of-life, Environmental Politics, 30 (1–2), 81–99. Pellizzoni, L. (2022), A different kind of emancipation? From lifestyle to form-of-life, European Journal of Social Theory, 25 (1), 155–71. Robbins, P. and Moore, S. (2015), Love your symptoms: a sympathetic diagnosis of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, Undisciplined Environments, blog, accessed 16 June 2021 at https://​ undis​ ciplineden​ vironments​.org/​2015/​06/​19/​love​-your​-symptoms​-a​-sympathetic​-diagnosis​-of​-the​-ecomodernist​ -manifesto/​. Robertson, M. (2012), Measurement and alienation: making a world of ecosystem services, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (3), 386–401. Rebughini, P. (2015), Framing emancipations, Journal of Classical Sociology, 15 (3), 270–85. Saito, K. (2017), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Salleh, A. (2010), From metabolic rift to ‘metabolic value’: reflections on environmental sociology and the alternative globalization movement, Organization & Environment, 23 (2), 205–19. Seyferth, P. (2019), Anti-work. A stab in the heart of capitalism, in U. Gordon and R. Kinna (eds), Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 374–90. Smith, N. (2007), Nature as an accumulation strategy, Socialist Register, 43 (March), 17–36. Srnicek, N. and Williams, A. (2015), Inventing the Future, London: Verso. Thacker, E. (2007), The Global Genome, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thévenot, L. (2007), The plurality of cognitive formats and engagements: moving between the familiar and the public, European Journal of Social Theory, 10 (3), 413–427. Tronti, M. (2007), The strategy of refusal, in S. Lotringer and C. Marazzi (eds), Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 28–35.

592  Handbook of critical environmental politics Van Parijs, P. (2013), A Green case for basic income? in K. Widerquist, J.A. Noguera, Y. Vanderborght and J. De Wispelaere (eds), Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 269–74. Vercellone, C. (2007), From formal subsumption to general intellect: elements for a Marxist reading of the thesis of cognitive capitalism, Historical Materialism, 15 (1), 13–36. Virno, P. (2004), A Grammar of the Multitude, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Virno, P. and Hardt, M. (1996), Glossary of concepts, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 261–4. Walker, R. and Moore, J. (2018), Value, nature, and the vortex of accumulation, in H. Ernstson and E. Swyngedouw (eds), Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene, London: Routledge, pp. 48–68. Weeks, K. (2011), The Problem with Work. Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Williams, A. and Srnicek, N. (2013), Manifesto for an accelerationist politics, Critical Legal Thinking, blog, accessed 15 July 2021 at https://​c​riticalleg​althinking​.com/​2013/​05/​14/​accelerate​-manifesto​-for​ -an​-accelerationist​-politics/​. Williams, R. (1983), Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York, Oxford University Press. Wright, E.O. (2010), Envisioning Real Utopias, London: Verso. Wright, S. (2002), Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto. Zerzan, J. (1999), Elements of Refusal, 2nd edn, Columbia, MO: Columbia Alternative Library.

42. Transformative innovation Andreas Novy, Nathan Barlow and Julia Fankhauser

1. INTRODUCTION Future-fit socio-economic systems have to create new ways of organizing production and consumption as well as new routines and infrastructures. This is a huge challenge, as no country is currently achieving a high human development index while respecting planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al. 2018). There is increasing awareness in climate research that closing the emission gap requires ‘far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ (IPCC 2018, p. 1). As a consequence, transformation has become an increasingly important term in overcoming contemporary unsustainability but the how is still vague. Transformative innovation has the potential to critically guide practice and support theory. As we elaborate in this chapter, our definition of transformative innovation is context-sensitive. Whether a change is perceived as transformative and whether an action is seen as innovative depends on both an empirical analysis and a moral judgement. Therefore, transformative innovations are based on a conjunctural analysis as well as a specific concrete, and thereby context-sensitive, utopia. Thus, they require evaluating the effectiveness of different structurally constrained actions (Jessop 2005, p. 48). This is a most complicated challenge for Europe and other Western and rich civilizations, as their modes of production and consumption are structurally the most unsustainable. In this chapter, we distinguish and criticize different conceptualizations and link them to specific practices and policies, using a critical realist approach1 to link abduction – the search for adequate concepts, to make sense of the here and now – to an empirical analysis of ongoing social-ecological transformations (Buch-Hansen and Nielsen 2020). In a first approximation, we define transformative innovations as innovations that contribute to transformations. Therefore, the chapter, structured in six sections, has to elucidate the key concepts – innovation and transformation. It starts with a short history of innovation (section 2), followed by an overview of different strands of social innovation that contribute to sustainable transformations (section 3). Section 4 is about defining and systematizing transformative innovations, and section 5 presents a contemporary transformative innovation based on a conjunctural analysis. Section 6 concludes.

2.

A SHORT HISTORY OF INNOVATION

In his extensive work on innovation Godin (2015, p. 12) recorded over 500 definitions of ‘innovation’, acknowledging that innovation has permeated diverse discourses and disciplines. It has become ‘a trans-discursive term that everyone understands spontaneously’ and a ‘central cultural value’ (Godin and Gaglio 2019, p. 29). Although positively connoted as a panacea, it has remained a vague concept, a buzzword.2 593

594  Handbook of critical environmental politics For a long time innovation was understood as opposing existing political and religious structures (Godin 2015). Before the French Revolution, the term was used in political and religious texts by royalists to denounce revolutionaries and republicans as ‘innovators’, even forbidding innovation as a secular term for heresy (Godin 2020). Outcomes of the ‘plague’ innovation were perceived as negative and ‘dangerous’ (Godin 2012b, p. 99). In the nineteenth century, innovation gained a widely positive connotation, enlarging its meaning into the social. As progress, changing society and increasing individual freedoms, was seen as necessary to improve living conditions, the new was increasingly appreciated. Human-made change became innovation (Godin 2015). Republicans and democrats3 turned its former negative connotation on its head. Moulaert et al. (2017) identifies the cradle of ‘social innovation’ in this oppositional, thereby transformational use of the term by social movements and economic cooperatives (Martinelli et al. 2010). Innovative practices and policies were strongly linked to the social sphere.4 Only after World War II did ‘innovation’ shift from the social to the economic sphere. ‘Technological innovation’ was now constructed, presented and seen as a ‘process’ resulting in (novel) goods that can be commercialized, to highlight ‘the socioeconomic benefits of science’ (Godin 2006, p. 644). The focus on invention and technological progress spurred the vast use of the term innovation in business studies5 as well as a profound change in the attitude of governments towards innovation. Technological innovation was increasingly embraced as crucial for legitimizing public policies. Research and development (R&D) investments ensured national competitiveness (for example, in manufacturing) and social progress (for example, in health). Thus, ‘technological innovation became an instrument of economic policy’ (Godin 2016, p. 547). Technological optimism, operating within a logic of addition and obsession with the new, insinuated that technological change solves socio-economic problems. Building systems of innovation became the dominant policy framework, linking university and business in response to governance failure by promoting science hubs, clusters and meta-governance structures. Schumpeter (1934, p. 88) distinguished innovation and invention, as ‘to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it’. Innovation is a complex and systemic organizational process leading from invention to consumption. He undermined the dichotomy of old versus new by acknowledging that innovations are also new combination of existing concepts, of existing ways of doing things or of products. Both, past as well as current innovations, influence future innovations (Fagerberg 2018). Development always implies that the old will be replaced by novel forms and novel combinations. Therefore, Schumpeter coined the term ‘creative destruction’.

3.

SOCIAL INNOVATIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATIONS

For long a long time, social innovations were orientated towards what is commonly known as ‘social problems’, for example, poverty or exclusion. In the 1960s, social innovation had a first renaissance in the context of the civil rights movements and rising social problems. Later, new policy fields and topics came about; for example, integrated urban development, solidarity economy and social entrepreneurship. We focus on four important strands of social innovation that have all, over the past years, taken up environmental challenges: mainstream

Transformative innovation  595 social policies, sustainability transition research, the approach of Moulaert and colleagues, and radical ecological alternatives (Moulaert et al. 2013, pp. 15–17). Following the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, social innovation became prominent in mainstream policymaking offering a cheap way of fighting exclusion without having to take on financial responsibility or undertaking institutional change (Oosterlynck et al. 2018). The Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA)6 defines social innovations as ‘innovations that are social both in their ends and in their means’ and argues they are an effective way to ‘empower people’ and ‘drive societal change’ (BEPA 2010, p. 7). In this apparently pragmatic approach, social innovations empower consumers and introduce market mechanism in public service delivery, thereby reducing social innovation to a universal and homogenized recipe of fostering eco-social entrepreneurship and creating quasi-markets (Jenson 2015, p. 101). Unger (2015) names this the ‘minimalist’ version of social innovation, as it creates an ‘enabling welfare state’ which uses the creativity and personal commitment of citizens (BEPA 2011, p. 7). Its slogan is ‘to do more with less and to do it better’ (BEPA 2014, p. 93). The emerging novel institutions, however, are neoliberal, commodifying social services and reinforcing the unsustainable logics of capitalist market economies, especially the growth imperative and consumerism. These and similar minimalist social innovations take ‘modesty for realism’ (Unger 2015, p. 236), often leading to ‘dull repetition’ (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 133) of a cost-reducing optimization logic without changing the causes of social exclusion and ecological degradation. ‘To accept the present political and economic arrangements as the unsurpassable horizon within which the social innovation movement must act, is to reduce the movement to the job of putting a human face on an unreconstructed world’ (Unger 2015, p. 236). Sustainability transition research, later institutionalized in Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN), investigates changing sociotechnical systems in a multi-level policy (MLP) analysis, where ‘technological and social innovations are frequently seen as enablers for transition processes’. These innovations might ‘stretch and transform’ sociotechnical systems, or merely ‘fit-and-conform’ (Kivimaa et al. 2021, p. 111). Innovation is sometimes focused on technological change (Köhler et al. 2019), but often is aimed at ‘system innovation’ to design policies and change user practices, infrastructures and industry structures (Geels 2006). It investigates transition processes in which innovations are provided with different directions of development, not all of which are sustainable. What is decisive is that these processes are ‘subject to democratic debate’ (STRN 2010). Protected niches are necessary for game-changing non-regime actors, shielding it from mainstream pressures, enabling nurturing processes to develop path-breaking innovations. Research by the STRN tends to focus on analyses of niches7 and regimes, while being much weaker in specifying landscapes and analyzing structural change. The STRN and MLP research is further criticized for strongly focusing on markets and technology, thereby, operating in ‘unsustainable selection environments’ in which entrepreneurs and consumers hardly design ‘transition mechanisms beyond the market’ (Hausknost and Haas 2019, p. 4). In the STRN community, scholars have developed their own definition of transformative social innovation as a ‘process in which social relations, involving new ways of doing, organising, framing and/or knowing, challenge, alter and/or replace established (and/or dominant) institutions in a specific social-material context’ (Haxeltine et al. 2016, p. 22). Transformative social innovation ‘challenges, alters or replaces dominant institutions’ (Avelino et al. 2017, p. 1), perceiving climate change as a game changer (Campos et al. 2016). This apparently

596  Handbook of critical environmental politics non-normative approach offers a coherent framework for social innovation research, including efforts to operationalize power and landscape dynamics. It searches for new pathways and investigates selection processes and network evolution without defining ex ante whether these innovations are good or bad. Empirical research thus far, however, has been severely restricted by focusing on social innovation initiatives in small-scale projects, such as free Internet access in the favela, time banks or water supply programs. These initiatives, however, are dependent on a favorable political environment. To take an example: many of these initiatives arose in Brazil in the framework of solidarity economy supported by a benevolent government (Gordon 2007; Oosterlynck et al. 2019). Under the current Bolsonaro government they face huge difficulties. Therefore, while valuable in themselves, niche initiatives cannot have a transformative impact without a systematic link to public authorities and multi-level actors – or at least having a government that respects the boundaries of civil society spaces. The transformative potential of social innovations has for a long time been investigated by a more political research community. According to Moulaert et al. (2017) social innovations are defined by (1) satisfying needs, (2) changing social relations and (3) collective empowerment (Moulaert and Van Dyck 2013, p. 466; Moulaert et al. 2017), rejecting the logic of ‘there is no alternative’. Innovative thinking is always also about reframing problems and, thereby, creating different realities, broadening the scope of the possible. ‘Maximalist’ social innovations ‘are piecemeal and gradual in method but nevertheless radical in ambition’ (Unger 2015, p. 239). Owing to structures of domination and exploitation which constrain different actors in different ways (Jessop 2005), not all futures are possible. Creating here and now a context in which specific potentials can become actualized, enables the exploration of spaces of maneuver for empowering and emancipatory agency in adverse and conflict-ridden situations. Imaginaries, narratives, visions and concrete utopias are important elements of this type of social innovation (Novy 2019). A further characteristic of this strand of social innovation research is to better include vulnerable groups and individuals to various spheres of society by fostering individuals’ and communities’ empowerment and acceptance (Van den Broeck et al. 2019). Collective empowerment is crucial for grassroots innovations, empowering ‘access by the least powerful to the capacities for challenging power’ (Stirling 2014, p. 74) and to challenge the directions of innovations that affect them (Mehmood and Imran 2021). Therefore, these transformative social innovations require renewed democratic processes, ‘[to] impact and improve socio-political relations and democratic empowerment’ (Mehmood and Imran 2021, p. 3). This is in line with grassroots innovations defined as ‘the capacity of people successfully to exploit a new idea or method and realize some material and social effect’, which can present incremental, radical, or transformational changes to wider social life (Smith and Stirling 2016). Such innovation is ‘a negotiated political process of choice between multiple pathways’ and ‘a means to rise to the twin challenges of inclusive economic development and environmental sustainability’ (Smith and Stirling 2016, p. 2, original emphasis). Thus, departing from the focus of innovation on technology and science, Stirling and Smith echo earlier understandings of innovation as political and in response to (or promoting) societal change. They stress the potential of small-scale, local, place-based and democratically determined innovation, contrasting it to top-down, corporate, market-centered and/or technocratic innovation. Although sympathizing with bottom-up development, some proponents of this strand are aware of its limitations. Neither civic initiatives nor neighborhoods alone can save the city (Moulaert et al. 2010), as they all too often fall into the localist trap or even foster institutional lock-ins (Kazepov et al.

Transformative innovation  597 2019). Therefore, bottom-linked initiatives and multi-level governance dynamics are important for socially innovative initiatives to turn into maximalist social innovations that criticize actualism, which is, reducing the real to what exists at the moment, insisting on the openness of the world. This is related to transformative ecological approaches which stress the visionary potential of innovations. Degrowth visions often focus on radical social innovation from the bottom up (Liegey et al. 2020). Emphasizing the grassroots and local level is, however, in danger of being caught in the above-mentioned localist trap (Pansera and Owen 2018; Ibrahim and Sarkis 2020). A multi-scalar approach can overcome these shortcomings. ‘New narratives for innovation may include different perspectives and sources of knowledge, including heterodox economics, bio-economics, science and technology studies, and Post-Normal Science’ (Strand et al. 2018, p. 1849). This departs from the fetishization of small-scale and marginalized groups at the expense of other scalar considerations and the desirability/feasibility of local innovations for systemic transformations. It opens the space for radical innovation(s) to happen at all levels, across fields and space. As innovation is ‘creative destruction’, it includes exnovation which is not about implementing the (sustainable) new, but ending the (unsustainable) old. Exnovation is the underappreciated ‘variant’ (Kropp 2015, p. 13) or ‘sister’ (Arnold et al. 2015, p. 11) of innovation. This forecloses awareness that solutions do not necessarily have to add or rearrange something, but instead might have to end something in particular circumstances. Exnovation focuses on abolishing unsustainable practices by replacing or removing options (Paech 2005) by means of ‘purposive termination of existing (infra)structures, technologies, products and practices’ (Heyen et al. 2017, p. 326).8 In sustainability studies the concern with ‘ending’ by the phasing-out of non-sustainable practices has gained renewed interest over the past years. Technological innovations that improve point-value efficiency might lead to the co-existence of unsustainable practices or only marginally exnovated aspects with more sustainable practices. To cite an example: introducing the catalytic converter (KAT) for combustion engines has not impeded the ongoing growth of the fossil-fuel driven automobile sector. Innovation policies should therefore include the managing of exnovations in technological but also social endeavors.

4.

DEFINING AND SYSTEMATIZING TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION

Being able to identify innovations that contribute to transformations requires adequately conceptualizing transformations. In this section, we first distinguish the analytical from the normative use of the term transformation, then distinguish long-term and short-term transformations, and then show the importance of balancing progress and preservation in a novel way, acknowledging the dangers of progressively transgressing planetary boundaries. Finally, the section dwells on the dialectics of transformative innovation. Based on these conceptual considerations, we end the section by defining transformative innovation as innovations that contribute to those transformations that are desirable and feasible in a specific conjuncture.

598  Handbook of critical environmental politics 4.1

Transformations: Analytical and Normative

There are two ways to employ the term transformation: first is analytical, which describes ongoing changes to society–nature relations, describing a process. Second is normative, exploring desired social-ecological transformations, referring to specific changes in society– nature relations based on deliberation and moral judgement. The analysis of contemporary changes exposes multiple dimensions of the contemporary crises. The rise of Asia is perceived in the West as decline and loss of power, new forms of right-wing extremism emerge in the Global North and Global South, digitalization and precarious labor conditions create new forms of inequality and uneven development, and reinforce and transform old forms. Current capital-dominated society–nature relationships undermine the potential for climate-friendly living by destroying the biophysical conditions of the human-friendly Holocene, thereby, making human civilizations ‘as we know them’ untenable. Thus, in the current turmoil, the question is not whether profound changes will take place, since this is undoubtedly occurring. Instead, the question we focus on, and is pertinent for addressing the crises of the twenty-first century, is which dimensions of the socio-economic system and biophysical conditions will change and in which respect (Brie 2014; Brand 2016). Furthermore, it is open as to how this change will occur – in a chaotic way, as we are currently experiencing in dealing with a pandemic, or shaped by human agency, social mobilization, experimentation and planning. Transformation refers to ‘change in form or shape’ (Scoones et al. 2015; Linnér and Wibeck 2019, p. 25).9 Transformation research is aware of the structural conditioning of ongoing attempts to change practices and policies. Its focus on profound changes goes hand in hand with a normative aspiration to shape more equal and sustainable society–nature relationships. However, policymakers tend to underestimate the power of sustaining domination and exploitation via top-down policies (Brand et al. 2019), while activists stressing horizontal relations of commoning tend to exaggerate the potential of bottom-up niches (Exner et al. 2020; Liegey et al. 2020), both avoiding a robust analysis of short-term development, its potentials and limitations. This has implications for normative conceptualization. Our objective for the social-ecological transformation is the good life for all (Novy 2013, 2014)10 within planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al. 2018). This objective is shared by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although profoundly contradictory (Nogueira 2019), they aim at a form of global governance based on inclusive and sustainable provision of basic goods and services for all. However, not to live at the cost of others and to overcome the ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2017, p. 1) is more. It is a concrete utopia that is, in line with Bloch (1959) and Bhaskar (1993), not wishful thinking – of global bureaucrats or of grassroots activists. This utopia for a solidaristic mode of living is concrete in that it is ‘well rounded and appropriate for the purposes at hand’ (Hartwig 2007, p. 74 ff.). It is based on a theoretical critique of endism – ‘There exist alternatives to contemporary capitalism’ – as well as on lived experiences of alternatives, from the commons movement to welfare institutions (Hartwig 2007, p. 74 ff.). The concrete utopia of a good life for all within planetary boundaries is a contemporary context-sensitive actualization of eudaimonia, ‘human happiness and flourishing’ (Hartwig 2007, p. 187 ff.). In section 5, we propose a concrete strategy in line with this concrete utopia.

Transformative innovation  599 4.2

Transformations: Long Term and Short Term

Polanyi helps to understand that temporality is crucial in understanding processes of transformation. His analysis in The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Polanyi 2001) is not restricted – as is often insinuated in referring to Polanyi – to the long-term transformation towards an industrialized market society, but aims at better understanding the conjuncture of the post-war order after the defeat of fascism in the 1940s. Polanyi distinguished transformation as a metamorphosis, an evolutionary process of long-term change, and transformation as a certain political-economic moment of radical rupture, a specific conjuncture characterized by severe contradictions that might lead to abrupt political changes, that is, revolutions. Building on Polanyi’s distinction, currently the most important transformation as a long-term ‘metamorphosis’ (Polanyi 2001, p. 44) is social-ecological transformation with the climate crisis and the trespassing of other planetary boundaries at its core (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015), making the shift to decarbonized ‘socio-metabolic’ regimes an urgent task (Haberl et al. 2011). There is, however, confusion with respect to Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’, as Polanyi reserves the term ‘great transformation’ to short-term political changes in ‘our time’, similar to fascism and the New Deal in the 1930s (Novy 2020). Unlike most transformation research, including most of those based on Polanyi, Polanyi had a profound interest in short-term transformations and political agency. In the 1930s, he identified a general shift away from universal and liberal ideologies, and a spatial shift away from what he named universal capitalism towards nationalism and regionalism (Polanyi 1945). According to Polanyi, this politico-spatial turn was the consequence of the unwillingness of the liberal mainstream to implement social reforms. In analogy, it is important to interrogate how long-term and short-term dynamics interact today (cf. section 5). 4.3

Balancing Progress and Preservation

Transformation is not a linear process, a teleological development, necessarily progressing towards a good end-state, eudaimonia. The future might be worse than the present. Given the threat to the ecological base of a dignified and civilized life posed by consumerism, the growth imperative and authoritarianism, progressive thought has to be linked to concerns for conservation. In the current conjuncture, a new chapter in the long history of innovation navigating between progress and tradition has to be opened. Left-wing politics is not necessarily progressive, nor is the conservation of biophysical and sociocultural systems necessarily reactionary. Defending traditional forms of life, not only of indigenous populations, might be as important as progressive struggles for emancipation. Also both, traditionalists defending life forms and progressives struggling for individual autonomy, might become reactionary if they sustain the non-sustainable (Blühdorn 2013). Therefore, the discursive field of innovation itself has to be re-framed, overcoming the assumption that new ways forward are the principal solution. It does not come as a surprise that the critique of growth has led to increased interest in exnovation. Thus, transformative innovation must take seriously the role of disruption and rupturing change, on the one-hand, and preservation and exnovations, on the other. Given the acceleration of the climate crisis, democratically deliberating on limiting destructive practices will become increasingly crucial. This complicates political action, as it is much easier to add

600  Handbook of critical environmental politics a sustainable practice to available options than to erase one of the existing options. Therefore, transformative innovations have to focus on economic zones that are crucial for human flourishing and wellbeing. 4.5

Transformative Realism: The Dialectics of Transformative Innovations

Radical thinking has to re-link micro- and macro-changes in a systematic way. This requires a dialectical method of reasoning and acting which has long been part of progressive thought. It was named ‘revolutionary Realpolitik’ (Luxemburg 1903; Haug 2007), non-reformist reforms (Gorz 1968) or double transformation (Klein, 2014). All these concepts link short-term agency with long-term change, pragmatic compromising with revolutionary zeal, always aware that it is necessary to strike the balance between these dialectical moments. Transformative innovations are context-sensitive actions to promote a transformative vision for long-term change, a concrete utopia, by means of feasible short-term steps. They are a way forward towards more radical, disruptive change with an awareness of the necessity of incremental actions. In line with the concrete utopia of a good life for all within planetary boundaries, transformative innovations open the horizon beyond capitalism, while protecting existing habitats and local ways of life against marketization here and now. Such visioning combined with the search for concrete solutions provides guidance for ‘critical problem-solving’ (Eckersley 2020a, p. 247), reform strategies of systemic change that are effective in the short term. This helps avoiding the dualism of opposing small steps within the existing order to significant advances of radical change (Novy 2014, p. 35). Structure-aware agency valorizes effective pragmatic first steps of critical problem-solving in direction of radical change foreshadowing a different future. Such steps are moves in the penumbra of the ‘adjacent possible’ surrounding every state of affairs: the ‘theres’ to which we can get from here, from where we are now, with the materials at hand. ... Only because the piecemeal can be the structural can the social innovation movement do its work. (Unger 2015, p. 242)

However, piecemeal must not be confounded with bottom-up or project-centered, favorites of current social innovation and utopian thinking. In the current conjuncture this means collective action, political alliance building to institutionalize social-ecological infrastructures. This puts center stage the directive yet democratic design of provisioning systems to satisfy basic human needs. 4.6

Defining Transformative Innovation

Based on the conceptual considerations outlined in this section and returning to our preliminary definition of transformative innovation as innovations that contribute to those transformations that are desirable and feasible in a specific conjuncture, we expand on ‘desirable’ and ‘feasible’. Transformative innovations must be desirable in the normative usage of social-ecological transformation, in line with the considerations outlined in section 4.1. In addition, and highly relevant for conceptualizing transformative innovation, is balancing the contradictory change dynamics of innovation, exnovation and preservation as described in section 4.3. Transformative innovations must be feasible, which may be obvious, but it is a valuable

Transformative innovation  601 contribution of our conceptualization, bridging the gap and linking desired transformative change with the here and now by acknowledging ‘distinctive spatio-temporal selectivities of structures’ and ‘diffential spatio-temporal … action capacities’ (Jessop 2005, p. 49). This understanding of feasible draws on Jessop’s strategic-relational approach and aims at expanding the room for maneuver, and balancing an understanding of action that is neither restrictive nor unlimited. For transformative innovation, this implies exploring contemporary potentials for collective agency by linking long-term and short-term transformations (section 4.2) as well as linking planetary responsibility to local potentials here and now (section 4.4). Thus, this puts linking long-term environmental issues to burdensome short-term needs at the core of contemporary transformative innovations, which will be explored further in the next section where a promising transformative innovation in the current conjuncture is explored.

5.

TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION IN THE CURRENT CONJUNCTURE

In this section we propose a specific type of transformative innovation that is convincing in the current conjuncture. We start with a conjunctural analysis, a ‘critical method approaching transition tensions’ introduced by Eckersley (2020a, p. 245). Then, through relating the social-ecological transformation to other ongoing transformations, we sketch the need for collective and political actions to foster transformative innovations. Finally, by combining long-term analyses of transformations with a conjunctural analysis, we propose sustainable and inclusive provisioning systems as the most relevant type of transformative innovation. 5.1

Conjunctural Analysis

Short-term analysis of potentials and dangers must not impede agency towards long-term transformation. In line with Eckersley (2020b, p. 12 ff.) we propose ‘critical problem solving’ as the most promising entry point for transformative innovations. A ‘conjunctural analysis’ (Eckersley 2020a, p. 255) is the analysis of the here and now, the specific junction of certain spatio-temporal dynamics, of long-term and short-term transformations. A conjunctural analysis investigates how contradictory politico-economic dynamics, accumulation strategies, regulation efforts and civil society mobilizations merge in a ‘moment of condensation’ (Clarke, in Eckersley 2020a, p. 254). The contemporary conjuncture has specific similarities, and profound differences to the 1930s, analyzed by Polanyi. Different is not only the urgency of the social-ecological challenges, but the geopolitical constellation with the rise of China and a much more profound challenging of Western hegemony. This goes hand in hand with a crisis of democracy and social cohesion in the West. Processes of commodification, currently in the form of neoliberalism, are similar. Also, current transformations again take place in a contradictory conjuncture of an emerging anti-liberal and anti-globalist turn. In the West, the dominance of neoliberalism is challenged by a diversity of actors (critical environmentalists, socialists, but also economic populists on the Right). And again, right-wing extremism is linked to ideals of white supremacy (Novy 2020). Effective power strategies towards inclusion and sustainability

602  Handbook of critical environmental politics need concepts and practices that are not only radical and transformative, in accordance with the scope of the crises, but also nuanced, strategic and, thus, place-based and context-sensitive. There is a strong popular appeal of conservative values, reinforced by the pandemic. New forms of nationalistic capitalism combine anti-liberal and anti-democratic politics with neoliberal economic policies reinforcing inequalities and insecurity. These regressive political dynamics tend to undermine key pillars of liberal democracy and social cohesion, accelerate climate crisis and repress grassroots alternatives. Prioritizing long-term climate issues at the cost of ignoring these short-term challenges leads to resistance that is easily instrumentalized by the reactionary Right (Bärnthaler et al. 2020). It uses climate-skepticism to wage a cultural war defending the car, meat consumption and, in general, the accustomed way of life. Transformative innovations have to offer short-term and long-term answers to these supremacist movements. 5.2

Collective and Political Action to Foster Transformative Innovations

Contemporary social-ecological changes are long-term changes, while simultaneously society is facing urgent short-term changes, for example, the rise of climate-skepticism in the extreme-right or the annihilation of minority rights in illiberal democracies. To evaluate types of innovation requires a systematic analysis of potentials and dangers inherent in the current transformation. Depending on specific situations in which short-term transformations take place,11 current transformations offer diverse potentialities for social-ecological agency. Better understanding them helps the ‘reflexive transformation of structure by agency’ (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 49). To respect planetary boundaries requires a comprehensive societal reorganization, breaking with current unsustainable modes of living and working as well as revisiting old(er) practices. This needs agency that does not disrespect incremental changes nor the introduction of new products, novel processes and practices, such as re-usable shopping bags or car-sharing initiatives. However, it identifies incremental change as deficient. There is an urgent need of long-term changes of basic capitalist forms (of commodification, privatization, and so on), of modes of living, eating, working and whole provision systems, whether mobility or energy. This innovative and transformative agency has to include innovation’s often overlooked side of exnovation to end unsustainable practices. It needs collective action and political agency to articulate different transformative attempts. This will lead to conflicts and resistance to change. The art of politics in this conjuncture has to acknowledge the necessity of a new balance of progress and preservation, prioritizing the need for protection to sustain existential provision. Therefore, transformative agency has to be political agency in a broad sense, mobilizing resistance and building alliances. Cooperation with the like-minded in domination-free settings is a social skill that has been given huge importance by social innovation research and practice – whether Local Agenda 21 or the broad diversity of self-organized and entrepreneurial initiatives, such as food cooperatives and the commons (Exner et al. 2020). It does not help, however, to solve conflicts with antagonistic forces that do not share the same moral judgements – for example, in respect of the urgency of the climate crisis. More important, but also more ambitious, than performativity with its high moral code in communities of like-minded, is alliance building with different cultural milieus and social groups that live according to other moral codes (Haidt 2012) and prioritize objectives other than environmental ones. Effective agency in the given conjuncture requires distinguishing between allies, opponents and enemies

Transformative innovation  603 (Mouffe 2005) – a capacity that has suffered from a decade-long disinterest in political agency, denounced as dirty and easily coopted. It is to be expected that after the end of the COVID pandemic, social protection, a secure job and affordable costs of living will become even more important. This might empower reactionary politics that combine neoliberalism with sustaining pillars of the national welfare state. Not acknowledging this will lead to electoral defeats and severe backlashes for climate politics. 5.3

Sustainable and Inclusive Provisioning Systems

The best way to overcome the resistance against climate-friendly actions is effectively linking long-term environmental needs, such as sustaining biodiversity, and burdensome short-term needs, such as unemployment, exclusion or heat waves. In times of turmoil, this offers forms of protection that differ from current reactionary strategies of exclusion and widespread re-affirmation of capitalist market solutions. Even in capitalist societies, there are economic zones that are not dominated by capitalist logic, for example, the household and parts of the provisioning system in general. Therefore, contemporary struggles might be defensive as well. These zones are functional to reproducing labor power, but do not function as a market economy. Examples are public pension systems or municipal enterprises. Strengthening these economic zones enables linking the protection of biodiversity and the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with social protection measures that reduce the cost of living and, thereby, enables the satisfaction of basic needs (Buch-Hansen and Koch 2019). These sustainable provisioning systems are privileged sites for transformative innovations, as they shift the focus from exchange to use values, foster the satisfaction of needs without consuming commodities and classify economic zones that do not contribute to basic provisioning as secondary. Currently, resource-intensive individual consumption via markets structured by large corporations is the dominant model in food systems as well as in car-dependent mobility systems. Transformative innovations have to initiate the transition to less resource-intensive and more inclusive collective provision systems. This must not be limited to state provision via nationalization or a centralized welfare state. Care, health and energy can be provided by intermediary institutions as well, whether cooperatives, the third sector or municipal enterprises. The Foundational Economy Collective (2018) has even proposed a social licensing system for ongoing private provision, for example, in retailing by supermarkets. Market access for large corporations is traded for social contributions of the company to the locality and public wellbeing – for example, a public kindergarten or recreational area. It is widely acknowledged that transformative innovations have to search for alternative provision systems that satisfy basic needs with less resource use (O’Neill et al. 2018). Alternatives to the imperial mode of living currently exist at the margins and in niches, but effective strategies for generalizing these practices and ways of being have not yet taken root. Infrastructural configurations regulate access and quality of foundational goods and services, for example, via rent control, subsidies and zoning regulations. They frame the individual choice architecture: bicycle lanes or motorways, local markets or shopping malls, free access to the Internet or big-data controlled social media. Public authorities are crucial for providing these provisioning systems. However, reducing the political to state agency depoliticizes all efforts to democratize the social-ecological transformation. Dialectical reasoning widens the meaning of the political, stressing the civic-public interplay (Novy and Leubolt

604  Handbook of critical environmental politics 2005; Asara, 2019). Grassroots initiatives of social movements can be steps towards effective state interventions (for example, a Green New Deal) that help to generalize alternative forms of production and living (for example, by prohibiting combustion engines or expelling cars from city centers). Therefore, the state, its legislative and tax-collecting power, remains crucial for effective implementation, while civil society is crucial for social mobilization and preparing the ground, offering narratives and challenging power relations. Economic zones that do not reproduce these climate-inimical logics and practices must be strengthened to overcome the destructive logics of consumerism, endless competition and the growth imperative. The Foundational Economy Collective (2018, 2020) promotes the strengthening of the foundational economy, the economy of everyday activities to sustain a dignified life. This is in itself transformative and innovative, as it offers important criteria for climate-friendly policymaking. Distinguishing the foundational from the tradeable zone, it offers criteria for those sectors which – owing to their high externalities (transport costs owing to resource-intensive global supply chains; resource waste of individual consumption goods, obsolescence, and so on) have to shrink to achieve climate targets and those zones, that have to be reorganized (and might even grow), that guarantee a good life by satisfying basic needs – are often organized locally or regionally (Krisch et al. 2020; Schafran et al. 2020). To build sustainable and inclusive provisioning systems for health, education, housing, energy, care and mobility is a decisive transformative innovation, that depends on political agency and political decisions that prioritize the provisioning of foundational goods and services. What is needed are more sustainable and inclusive ‘choice architectures’ (Gough 2017, p. 158) that offer plural forms of collective provisioning favoring the satisfaction of basic needs as well as climate change mitigation. Deep changes, as those expected to take place in the current transformations, will lead to conflicts, increasing societal cleavages and reinforcing territorial competition. To implement these policies will encounter fierce resistance not only from dominant and vested interests (Geels 2014; Hausknost and Haas 2019), but also from the working and middle classes (Blühdorn 2019). Although the freedom to choose is valuable, in combatting the COVID-19 pandemics, public policies imposed severe restraints on choice and individual preferences. Transformational social-ecological actions and innovations will also have to strike the balance between individual freedom and collective and intergenerational needs.

6. CONCLUSION This chapter has developed a proper definition of transformative innovation. In our understanding, this is a unique definition that best mobilizes the potential of innovations for social-ecological transformation. This definition acknowledges a dialectical understanding of transformation, challenges binary understandings of innovation and emphasizes that desired changes must be feasible in the current time–space specific conjuncture. Key in the current conjuncture is exploring innovative policies, practices and infrastructure that link long-term environmental issues with short-term burdens. This implies focusing on strategies that can have transformative consequences but will probably require alliance-building beyond like-minded actors to expand the room for maneuver without reducing feasibility to merely that which is doable. Thus, strengthening sustainable and inclusive provision systems might be the most transformative innovation in the current conjuncture, upholding a radically ambitious

Transformative innovation  605 understanding of what is desired while acknowledging the possibility for collective political action in the here and now.

NOTES 1. Critical realism is a philosophy of science pioneered by Roy Bhaskar (1993), it has dialectical thinking at its core, acknowledges the presence of non-measurable and unobservable potentials within reality, and is primarily concerned with identifying causal mechanisms of phenomena to better explain reality, thus it stands between post-structuralism/post-modernism, on the one-hand, and positivism and empiricism on the other (Danermark et al. 2005). 2. For a detailed discussion of the polysemic, meaning-changing concept of innovation, see Godin and Gaglio (2019 p. 3 ff.). 3. On the history of social innovation since 1830, see Godin (2012a). 4. Godin (2016) describes the development of the term from being seen as invention in the arts towards the development of technological innovation. Examples of a broad use of the term are Thorstein Veblen, Simon Smith Kuznets, Alvin Hansen, Bernhard Stern and Joseph Schumpeter. 5. For a discussion of the promotion of the ‘linear model of innovation’ see Godin (2006); for the rediscovery of Schumpeter and understanding technological innovation as a process see Godin (2008) On a historiographic refutation of Schumpeter’s contribution to innovation, see Godin (2012a); for a contestation of Schumpeter’s influence on evolutionary economics see, for example, Hodgson (1993) and Fagerberg (2003). 6. The EU Directorate-General and Think Tank was founded in 1989, restructured and renamed under respective Presidents of the European Commission; Barroso-named BEPA, Juncker-named European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC) and Inspire, Debate, Engage and Accelerate Action (I.D.E.A.) since 2019. 7. In the STRN community, the terms niches, regimes and landscapes refer to different gradual and inter-related analytical units for transitions, with radical changes mostly blossoming on a niche level, capable of rule-altering and inducing system-change by reaching the regime level and changing the ideologies and societal values on a landscape-level or receiving support by the latter (cf. STRN publications; Geels, Schot, Loorbach). 8. Exnovation is defined as the act of intentionally stopping unsustainable practices, structures and modes of production and consumption, instead of continuing, accepting and trusting phase-outs or creative destruction as a ‘variant’ (cf. Kropp 2015) of innovation. It counters innovations’ often inherent idea of accumulation and addition. 9. Transition is a related concept (Stirling 2015), rooted in the notion of a passage, ‘going across’ from one state to another. 10. See transdisciplinary efforts stimulated by two congresses in Vienna: https://​guteslebenfueralle​.org/​ en/​home​.html (accessed 11 October 2021). 11. We base our argument strongly on Eckersley (2020a) as her concepts of ‘conjunctural analysis’ and ‘critical problem-solving’ are inspiring for our approach to transformative innovations. However, she confounds Polanyian terminology by calling for a ‘green great transformation’.

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Transformative innovation  607 Geels, F. (2006), ‘Multi-level perspective on system innovation: relevance for industrial transformation’, in X. Olsthoorn and A. Wieczorek (eds), Understanding Industrial Transformation: Views from Different Disciplines, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 163–86. Geels, F. (2014), ‘Regime resistance against low-carbon transitions: introducing politics and power into the multi-level perspective’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31 (5), 21–40. Godin, B. (2006), ‘The linear model of innovation: the historical construction of an analytical framework’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31 (6), 639–67, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0162243906291865. Godin, B. (2008), ‘In the shadow of Schumpeter: W. Rupert Maclaurin and the study of technological innovation’, Working Paper No. 2, p. 18, accessed 8 May 2021 at http://​www​.csiic​.ca/​PDF/​ IntellectualNo2​.pdf. Godin, B. (2012a), ‘Social innovation: utopias of innovation from c.1830 to the present’, Working Paper No. 11, Intellectual History of Innovation Project, p. 52, accessed 11 July 2021 at http://​www​.csiic​.ca/​ PDF/​SocialInnovation​_2012​.pdf. Godin, B. (2012b), ‘The politics of innovation – the controversy on republicanism in seventeenth century England’, in K. Palonen, H. Buchstein, L. Disch, T. Juvonen, K. Lindroos, T. Pulkkinen, et al. (eds), Redescription (Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory), Berlin: LitVerlag, 77–105, accessed at http://​urn​.fi/​URN:​ISBN:​978​-951​-39​-5297​-6. Godin, B. (2015), Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation over the Centuries, New York: Routledge. Godin, B. (2016), ‘Technological innovation: on the origins and development of an inclusive concept’, Technology and Culture, 57 (July), 31. Godin, B. (2020), ‘Innovation theology’, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montreal, p.  17, accessed 27 April 2021 at http://​www​.csiic​.ca/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​02/​ InnovationTheology​_BG​_2019​.pdf. Godin, B. and Gaglio, G. (2019), ‘How does innovation sustain “sustainable innovation”?’, in F. Boons and A. McMeekin (eds), Handbook of Sustainable Innovation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 27–37. Gordon, D.R. (2007), ‘Public-empowering justice: arguments from effectiveness, legitimacy and democracy, and the South African case’, Punishment & Society, 9 (1), 49–66, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 1462474507070551. Gorz, A. (1968), ‘Reform or revolution’, in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds), The Socialist Register 1968, London: Merlin Press, pp. 111–43. Gough, I. (2017), Heat, Greed and Human Need. Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Martínez-Alier, J. and Winiwarter, V. (2011), ‘A socio-metabolic transition towards sustainability? Challenges for another Great Transformation’, Sustainable Development, 19 (1), 1–14, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​sd​.410. Haidt, J. (2012), The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, New York: Knopf Doubleday. Hartwig, M. (2007), Dictionary of Critical Realism, London: Routledge. Haug, F. (2007), Rosa Luxemburg und die Kunst der Politik, Hamburg: Argument. Hausknost, D. and Haas, W. (2019), ‘The politics of selection: towards a transformative model of environmental innovation’, Sustainability, 11 (2), 1–18. Haxeltine, A., Avelino, F., Pel, B. and Kemp, R. (2016), ‘A framework for transformative social innovation’, https://​doi​.org/​10​.13140/​RG​.2​.2​.30337​.86880. Heyen, D.A., Hermwille, L. and Wehnert, T. (2017), ‘Out of the comfort zone! Governing the exnovation of unsustainable technologies and practices’, GAIA-Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 26 (4), 326–31. Hodgson, G.M. (1993), Economics and Evolution, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ibrahim, S.E. and Sarkis, J. (2020), ‘Technological innovations and degrowth opportunities from urban Egypt: initiating the discourse’, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 2, https://​doi​.org/​10​.3389/​frsc​.2020​ .492866. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018), ‘Summary for policymakers of IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5oC approved by governments’, IPCC, Geneva.

608  Handbook of critical environmental politics Jenson, J. (2015), ‘Social innovation: redesigning the welfare diamond’, in A Nicholls, J. Simon and M. Gabriel (eds), New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 89–106. Jessop, B. (2005), ‘Critical realism and the strategic-relational approach’, New Formations, 56 (January), 40–53. Kazepov, Y., Colombo, F. and Saruis, T. (2019), ‘The multi-scalar puzzle of social innovation’, in S. Oosterlynck, A. Novy and Y. Kazepov (eds), Local Social Innovation to Combat Poverty and Exclusion: A Critical Appraisal, London: Polity Press, pp. 91–112. Kivimaa, P., Laakso, S., Lonkila, A. and Kaljonen, M. (2021), ‘Moving beyond disruptive innovation: a review of disruption in sustainability transitions’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 38 (March), 110–26, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.eist​.2020​.12​.001. Klein, D. (2014), ‘Doppelte transformation’, in M. Brie (ed.), Futuring – Perspektiven der Transformation im Kapitalismus und über ihn hinaus, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 101–25. Köhler, J., Geels, F.W., Kern, F., Markard, J., Onsongo, E., Wieczorek, A., et al. (2019), ‘An agenda for sustainability transitions research: state of the art and future directions’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 31 (June), 1–32, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.eist​.2019​.01​.004. Krisch, A., Novy, A., Plank, L., Schmidt, A.E. and Blaas, W. (2020), Die Leistungsträgerinnen des Alltagslebens. Covid-19 als Brennglas für die notwendige Neubewertung von Wirtschaft, Arbeit und Leistung, Vienna, accessed 16 March 2021 at https://​foundationaleconomy​.com/​. Kropp, C. (2015), ‘Exnovation–Nachhaltige Innovationen als Prozesse der Abschaffung’, in A. Arnold, M. David, G. Hanke and M. Sonnenberger (eds), Innovation-Exnovation. Über Prozesse des Abschaffens und Erneuerns in der Nachhaltigkeitstransformation, Weimar: Metropolis Verlag, pp. 13–34. Liegey, V., Nelson, A. and Hickel, J. (2020), Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide, London: Pluto Press. Linnér, B.-O. and Wibeck, V. (2019), Sustainability Transformations: Agents and Drivers across Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luxemburg, R. (1903), Luxemburg – Gesammelte Briefe, Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag. Martinelli, F., Moulaert, F. and Gonzalez, S. (2010), ‘Creatively designing urban futures: a transversal analysis of socially innovative initiates’, in F. Moulaert, F. Martinelli, E. Swyngedouw and S. Gonzalez (eds), Can Neighbourhoods Save the City? Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 198–218. Mehmood, A. and Imran, M. (2021), ‘Digital social innovation and civic participation: toward responsible and inclusive transport planning’, European Planning Studies, 29 (10), 1–16, https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​09654313​.2021​.1882946. Mouffe, C. (2005), The Return of the Political, London: Verso. Moulaert, F. and Van Dyck, B. (2013), ‘Framing social innovation research: a sociology of knowledge perspective’, in F. Moulaert, D. MacCallum, A. Mehmood and A. Hamdouch (eds), The International Handbook on Social Innovation, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 466–79. Moulaert, F., MacCallum, D. and Hillier, J. (2013), ‘Social innovation: intuition, precept, concept, theory and practice’, in F. Moulaert, D. MacCallum, A. Mehmood and A. Hamdouch (eds), The International Handbook of Social Innovation. Collective Action, Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Research, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 13–24. Moulaert, F., Swyngedouw, E., Martinelli, F. and Gonzalez, S. (2010), Can Neighbourhoods Save the City? Community Development and Social Innovation, Abingdon: Routledge. Moulaert, F., MacCallum, D., Leubold, B., Mehmood, A. and Hillier, J. (2017), Social Innovation as a Trigger for Transformations: The Role of Research, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, accessed 9 September 2020 at http://​orca​.cf​.ac​.uk/​107122/​1/​social​_innovation​ _trigger​_for​_transformations​.pdf. Nogueira, C. (2019), ‘Contradictions in the concept of sustainable development: an analysis in social, economic, and political contexts’, Environmental Development, 30 (June), 129–35, https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1016/​j​.envdev​.2019​.04​.004. Novy, A. (2013), ‘Ein gutes Leben für alle – ein europäisches Entwicklungsmodell’, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 29 (3), 77–104.

Transformative innovation  609 Novy, A. (2014), ‘Die Große Transformation gestalten – Implikationen für Europa’, Kurswechsel, (2), 31–41. Novy, A. (2019), ‘Transformative social innovation, critical realism and the good life for all’, in P. Van den Broeck, A. Mehmood, A. Paidakaki and C. Parra (eds), Social Innovation as Political Transformation. Thoughts for a Better World, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 122–7. Novy, A. (2020), ‘The political trilemma of contemporary social-ecological transformation – lessons from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation’, Globalizations, pp.  1–22. doi:​10​.1080/​14747731​ .2020​.1850073. Novy, A. and Leubolt, B. (2005), ‘Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre: social innovation and the dialectical relationship of state and civil society’, Urban Studies, 42 (11), 2023–36. O’Neill, D.W., Fanning, A.L., Lamb, W.F. and Steinberger, J.K. (2018), ‘A good life for all within planetary boundaries’, Nature Sustainability, 1 (2), 88–95, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1038/​s41893​-018​-0021​-4. Oosterlynck, S., Novy, A., Kazepov, Y., Cools, P., Saruis, T., Leubolt, B., et al. (2018), Improving poverty reduction: lessons from the social innovation perspective, in B. Cantillon, T. Goedemé and J. Hills (eds), Decent Incomes for All: Improving Policies in Europe, Oxford University Press Online, pp.  179–98, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​oso/​9780190849696​.003​.0009. Oosterlynck, S., Novy, A. and Kazepov, Y. (2019), Local Social Innovation to Combat Poverty and Exclusion: A Critical Appraisal, London: Polity Press. Paech, N. (2005), Nachhaltiges Wirtschaften jenseits von Innovationsorientierung und Wachstum, Weimar bei Marburg: Metropolis. Pansera, M. and Owen, R. (2018), ‘Framing inclusive innovation within the discourse of development: insights from case studies in India’, Research Policy, 47 (1), 23–34, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.respol​ .2017​.09​.007. Polanyi, K. (1945), ‘Universal capitalism or regional planning?’, London Quarterly of World Affairs, 10 (3), 86–91. Polanyi, K. (2001), The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å, Stuart Chapin III, F. Lambin, E.F., et al. (2009), ‘A safe operating space for humanity’, Nature, 461 (7263), 472–5, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1038/​461472a. Schafran, A., Smith, M.N. and Hall, S. (2020), The Spatial Contract: A New Politics of Provision for an Urbanized Planet, the Spatial Contract, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schumpeter, J.A. (1934), The Theory of Economic Development, Routledge & CRC Press, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Scoones, I., Leach, M. and Newell, P. (2015), The Politics of Green Transformations, London: Routledge. Smith, A. and Stirling, A. (2016), Grassroots Innovation and Innovation Democracy, STEPS Working Paper No. 89, p. 36, accessed 15 May 2021 at https://​ steps​ -centre​ .org/​ publication/​ grassroots​ -innovation​-and​-innovation​-democracy​-3/​. Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., et al. (2015), ‘Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet’, Science, 347 (6223), p. 1259855. Stirling, A. (2014), ‘Transforming power: social science and the politics of energy choices’, Energy Research & Social Science, 1 (March), 83–95, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.erss​.2014​.02​.001. Stirling, A. (2015), ‘Emancipating transformations: from controlling “the transition” to culturing plural radical progress’, in The Politics of Green Transformations, Routledge, pp. 72–85. Strand, R., Saltelli, A., Giampietro, M., Rommetveit, K. and Funtowicz, S. (2018), ‘New narratives for innovation’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (October), pt 2, 1849–53, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​ .jclepro​.2016​.10​.194. Sum, N.-L. and Jessop, B. (2013), Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN) (2010), ‘Research agenda – STRN’, accessed 2 March 2021 at https://​transitionsnetwork​.org/​about​-strn/​research​_agenda/​. Unger, R.M. (2015), ‘Conclusion: the task of the social innovation movement’, in A. Nicolls, J. Simon and M. Gabriel (eds), New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 233–51.

610  Handbook of critical environmental politics Van den Broeck, P., Parra, C. and Mehmood, A. (2019), Social Innovation as Political Transformation. Thoughts for a Better World, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar.

Index

abduction 593 absence, normalization of 44–51 accelerationism 543–4 Accelerationists 582, 588 accumulation by dispossession 164, 166, 177, 581 Acosta, Alberto 108–11 acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) 512–13 activism 197–9 AIDS-related 512–13 democracy and 333–46 environmental activism 456–66, 483–98 materialism relationship 472, 509 Acuña, María Ramona 556 administrative declension 9 Adorno, T.W. 5–6, 29, 33, 35, 578, 580, 587 Aesthetic Theory 36 Dialectic of Enlightenment 23, 26–7, 30, 31 Negative Dialectics 27 AEC see Atomic Energy Commission aesthetic norms 147 aesthetic politics 522, 525, 532 affluent societies 129, 487 Africana critical theory 527, 536 Agamben, Giorgio 239, 579–80, 582, 588–9 Agarwal, Bina 62 agency 97–100, 419–20, 602 Agenda 21 146, 339, 493, 542, 544 agential realism 64 Aghazarm, C. 367 agonism 341–2, 422–7, 453 agonistic democracy 341 agrarian development 157–69 agri-business intensification 163 agricultural revolution 80 ‘agro-bio-data nexus’ 162–4 agroecology 160–161, 511 AIDS activism 512–13 Ajari, N. 45 Ake, David 40 Alario, M. 398 Alberta, Canada case study 388–401 Allen, A. 3 Allende, Salvador 566 Alliance of World Scientists (AWS) 438 alter-globalisation 11–12, 79–82, 527–31 alternative value practices 8, 497, 587 alterontologies 510–511, 513, 515 Altvater, Elmar 78

Ambrosini, P. 364 analytical frameworks, energy transition 247–8 analytical transformations 598 Anderson, Kevin 195, 443 Anglocene 94 animal welfare 325 Antarctic Treaty System 403 Anthrobscene 94 anthromes 97 Anthropocene 32, 46, 91–103 class-based eco-feminism 85–6 co-action 508 decolonising 51, 531–4 development 273 everyday reality of 92–4 geopower 564–5, 568–70, 571–3 global numbers’ argument 47 growth problem 217–31 nature restoration 382 (re)thinking 95–100 sustainability paradigm 148 anthropocentric dualisms 64 anti-austerity cycle 82–6 anti-authoritarian cycle 74–8 ‘apartheid ecology’ 50 apocalyptic imaginaries 451–3 apparatuses 301–3, 305 appropriation–exploitation distinction 165 Arago, Jacques Etienne 41 arbitrariness 33 Archer, D. 186 Archimedes of Syracuse 130 Arendt, H. 586, 588 Aristotle 130–131, 134, 207, 322 Armiero, Marco 84 ‘asset’ dispossession 177 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) 525, 535 Atwood, M., The Handmaid’s Tale 95 austerity 134, 497 authoritarianism 149–50 ‘autochthony’ 160 Autonomists 581–3 autonomous politics 507, 509, 515 autonomy 476–7, 507, 509–10, 514–15 autopoietic systems 208–9, 215 Aven, T. 312–13 AWS (Alliance of World Scientists) 438 Bacon, Francis 320

611

612  Handbook of critical environmental politics Badiou, Alain 444, 453 Bailey, I. 194 Bankoff, G. 369 Barad, Karen 64 Barca, Stefania 73, 85–6, 350, 352–3, 423, 489 Forces 83, 85 Barry, J. 423 Batalla, Guillermo Bonfil 107 Bateson, G. 217 Bauman, Z. 149 Bauwens, Michel 209 BBB (build back better) paradigm 238 Beamish, T. 397 Beck, Ulrich 145, 152, 234, 259, 308 Risk Society 150 Beeson, M. 252 behaviour-change policies 469–70 Bello, W. 462 Benadusi, Mara 238, 240 Bendor, R. 545 Benjamin, Walter 7, 25–6, 33, 587 Benkler, Yochai 209 Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika 59, 209 Benson, M. 148 Bentham, Jeremy 321, 324–5 Berlinguer, Enrico 134 Bernstein, H. 165 Berta, N. 380 Bhambra, G. 262 Bhaskar, R. 598 Bhavnani, K.K. 202 Bhopal Gas tragedy 462 biased knowledge production 47–8 Bielefeld approach see subsistence approach Biermann, F. 403 Biesecker, A. 61 big data 546 bio-based policies 175 biocapitalism 163 ‘biocide’ 349 biodiversity banks 380 biodiversity neutrality 381–2 biodiversity offsetting 326, 377–9, 381 bioeconomies 170–180 bioenergy 173 biofuels 173, 176–7 biophysical throughput 116, 118 biopolitics 449–51 biopower 566 biotechnology policies 175 Black people absence of 44 exclusion 40 silencing 41 Blanchot, M. 452

Bloch, E. 598 Blühdorn, I. 342, 407 bodies, discourse 48 ‘body-territory’ concept 558 Bollier, David 206, 209 Bologna, Sergio 79 Bolsonaro, Jair 460–461, 596 bomb spike 93, 101 Bond, P. 194 Bonneuil, C. 95, 568–9 Bookchin, Murray 42, 122–4, 215 Our Synthetic Environment 525 Borgström, S. 437, 439 Borlaug, Norman 535 bottom-up processes 17, 59, 526, 596–7, 598 Boulding, K. 132 ‘boundary commoning’ 208–9 boundary work 260 Bourg, D. 45 Bowker, G.C. 541 Brandstedt, E. 432 Braun, B., Political Matter 506 Bresnihan, P. 507 Bretton Woods Institutions 530 Bricmont, J. 370 Brock, A. 382 brown concerns 487–8 Brown, L. 364 Brulle, R.J. 493–4 Brundtland report 132, 143, 144–5, 338, 542 Buch-Hansen, H. 124 Buen Vivir (Good Life) 104–15, 278, 532 build back better (BBB) paradigm 238 Bullard, Nicola 198 Bullard, R. 43, 350 Dumping in Dixie 261 bureaucratic slippage 398 Burkett, Paul 79–81, 299 Marx 72, 80 Cabane, L. 234 Cabral, Amílcar 526–7, 532, 536 Cáceres, Berta 65, 558, 561–2 Caffentzis, George 207, 209 Callicott, Baird 48 Callon, M. 264 Calvert, Kirby 173 Caney, S. 193–4 cap and trade system 376, 377 capabilities approach 249 capital agrarian question 165 commons debate 213 development relationship 459 internal/external limits 74

Index  613 capitalism 23, 32, 76–8, 98, 270 climate justice and 197–8 cycle of struggles 79 degrowth and 119 democracy within 337–8 dualism of 300–301 ecosystem services and 584 food and 158, 159–60 growth imperative 217, 220, 459 just transition and 424 nationalistic 602 in nature 84 planetary damage 94 politics of 471 rent 588 societal metabolism 28–9 structural principles 408 sustainability paradigm 141–55 values 229, 322–3 work and 578–80 capitalist acceleration 542, 543–4 capitalist accumulation 59, 76 agrarian development 164, 166 degrowth and 119 ecology and 79 energy transition 249 fossil economy 83–4 just transition 421–2 nature 374 sustainable development 408 Capitalocene 94, 508 carbon accounting 541, 544–7, 548 ‘carbon colonialism’ 383 carbon credits 250–251, 377, 378–9, 585 carbon data 548 carbon democracy 172 carbon dioxide (CO2) 192, 250–251, 443, 444–7, 448 carbon economy 171–2, 420–422 carbon emissions, datafying 547–9 carbon energy 421, 427 carbon ETSs 378 carbon finance 375 carbon inequality 14 carbon markets 379 carbon neutrality 382–3, 385 carbon offsetting 377–8 carbon pricing 171 carbon sequestration 383 carbon trading 11, 380 ‘care’ concept 62, 227 Carruthers, D.V. 460 Carson, Rachel 526 Silent Spring 349–50, 486, 521, 524–5 Castells, M. 301

Castoriadis, C. 130–131 Castree, N. 249, 368, 584 catastrophes 33, 232–46 CDM see Clean Development Mechanism Centemeri, L. 8 certainty, rhetorics of 314 Césaire, A. 51 Chakrabarty, D. 45 Chamberlain, J. 582 charismatic leadership 458–9 Charles, Prince 443 Chávez, Lolita 561 chemicals, damage from 349–50, 524–5 Chertkovskaya, E. 87 China development discourse 462–3 ecological mobilisations 43 energy transition 251–3 exports to Latin America 275 innovation-as-politics 220–222 choice architectures 603–4 Christian Trinitarian doctrine 588 Christianity’s environmental policy 282 Chthulucene 94, 508 Chuji, Mónica 108 Cicero 130 Ciriacy-Wantrup, S.V. 136 cities 181–91, 433–5, 437 see also smart cities; urban areas ‘citizen science’ 352 citizen sensing 546 citizens’ assemblies 340–341 civil society 404, 406 civilization, crisis of 23 CJ see climate justice CJM see climate justice movement Clare, S. 571 class struggle 71, 74–8 class-based eco-feminism 85–6 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 11, 376, 379, 381 climate breakdown 200, 347, 420–422, 427 climate change adaptation measures 366, 410, 449–51 capitalist accumulation 84 causes/effects 196–8 consensus 443–55 debates/interventions 2 democracy and 334 displaced persons 365 inaction on 200 mitigation 449–51 social justice 192 social responsibility 432 technologically-driven 184

614  Handbook of critical environmental politics climate crisis, COVID-19 and 116 climate emergency 193, 199–200, 202 climate ethics 193, 194 climate justice (CJ) 11–14, 16, 86, 192–205, 341, 534 climate justice movement (CJM) 196–8, 200, 491 climate migrants 367 climate politics 96 climate populism 446–9 climate refugees 365–6, 370 climate-related human mobility 362–73 climate-smart agriculture (CSA) 163 ‘clinical labour’ 587 Clinton, Bill 238 Cloward, R. 492 co-action 508 co-optation 493 co-titulation 559 CO2 see carbon dioxide Cobián, M. 238 Cock, Jacklyn 421 coexistence, ontology of 514 cognitive work 583–4 Cold War threat narrative 524 collaboration, purposeful/progressive 437 collapsology movement 240 collective action 602–3 collective empowerment 596 collective labour 558 Collier, S.J. 236 colonialism 45, 157, 521, 523, 571–2 coloniality 3, 44, 86, 522 colonisation 47, 49 command-and-control policies 469 commensal coexistence 514 commodity frontiers 84–5, 160, 271, 279–80 common(s) 206–16 eco-feminism and 554–63 infrastructures of 515 plurality 206–10, 211–12 politics and 506–9 singular form 208, 210–212 ‘common goods’ 206, 495 common-pool resources 206, 213 commoning 206, 209, 212, 506–7 communitarian practices 111–12, 558 community 110, 209 community economies 435–8 community resilience programmes 187 complex systems 218–20 concrete utopia 598 Conference of the Parties see COP system configuration concept 541–2 conflict 276, 488 conflict transformation 416–30

conformism 25 conjunctural analysis 601–2 connectionless sympathies 48–9 consensus on climate change 443–55 consequentialism 324 conservation finance 379 conservationist approaches 42, 143–4, 485–6, 492 constructivist ontology 134–5 consumer capitalism 141–55 consumerism, politics of 470–472 consumption 272, 289, 295–6, 301, 426–7, 476 consumption corridors 432–3 Contéron, L. 105 contingent valuation method (CVM) 327 Cook, I.R. 434–5 Coole, Diana 64 COP system 1, 11, 12, 496 climate justice 193, 197, 198, 491 consensus 443 just transition policy 417 Copenhagen COP 197–8 Coronil, Fernando 270 corporate carbon emissions 547–9 corporations 120 CorpWatch NGO 196 Correa, Rafael 109, 111 COSIPLAN program 278, 280 COVID-19 pandemic 9, 84, 116, 124 arbitrariness 33 deforestation and 273–4 environmental movements and 496 neo-extractivism 278 nonknowledge transfer 314 sustainability 141, 148–9, 150, 152 transformative potential 238 Cox, R. 2 CPERI (cultural political economy of research and innovation) 217–31 Craig, R. 148 creative destruction 594, 597 crises administrative declension of 9 agrarian development 157–69 change in meaning 8–9 of civilization 23 critique relationship 2 paradigm shifts 124–5 of reproduction 75–6 crisis management 234, 240 critical agrarian studies 157 critical environmental politics conjunctural elements 9–16 future scenarios 9–16 critical-feminist degrowth approach 65–6 critical geography 63

Index  615 critical institutionalist research 407 critical political economy 407–9 ‘critical problem-solving’ 600–601 critical realism 605 critical state-theoretical perspectives 409 critical theory 2–3, 23–39, 143, 147 critique crisis relationship 2 as discourse deconstruction 5 Cronon, W. 524 crop land disappearance 556, 561 Crosby , A. 43 Crutzen, P. 47, 92 CSA (climate-smart agriculture) 163 ‘cultural commons’ 207 cultural political economy of research and innovation (CPERI) 217–31 cultural violence 348, 350 culturalism 4 culture 32, 97, 99, 130–131, 246 ‘culture industry’ 35 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera 560 CVM (contingent valuation method) 327 cycle of accumulation 71–2, 74 cycle of struggles 71–2, 73, 79, 82 Dahbour, O. 457 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) 533, 536 Dale, G. 133 Daly, H.E. 132 dams 272, 460, 462 DAPL see Dakota Access Pipeline Dardot, Pierre 207, 210–211, 213 dark green religion 286 Dasgupta Review 326, 379 data appropriation 183–4 data commons 214 ‘data revolution’ 544 datafication of carbon emissions 547–9 datascapes 549–50 Dauvergne, P. 493 Dávalos, Pablo 108 Davidson, D.J. 398, 434 Davos World Economic Forum 40, 44, 52 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) 349–50, 526–7 De Angelis, Massimo 207, 208, 215 de Beauvoir, S. 555 de Certeau, M. 426, 468 De la Cadena, Marisol 532–3 de Moor, Joost 341 De Sousa Santos, B. 34 De Vidal, S.P. 554 de Viteri, R. 105 de-politicisation 184, 338–40, 351, 443–55

decarbonisation 193–4, 199 decision-making processes 122, 258, 261, 285, 328 decolonial ecologies 40–57 decolonisation 521–39, 570–573 decommodification 120 decoupling hypothesis 118, 431 ‘deep green’ politics 337 Deflorian, E. 407 deforestation, COVID-19 and 273–4 degrowth 33, 58, 65–6, 110, 116–28, 136 CPERI approach 218, 223–4, 226 politics of 122–4, 423 social innovations 597 well-being 431 degrowth economy 120–121 Deleuze, Gilles 134, 207, 303, 564, 567 deliberation–participation differences 340 deliberative democracy 333, 335, 339, 342, 407 Delina, L. 201 Della Porta, D. 494 democracy 333–46, 406–7, 483–6, 490–497 crisis of 275–6 degrowth and 122–3 normative goal of 336 sustainability paradigm 145–6, 149–50 democratic politics 172 democratisation 333–46, 424–7 democratised science 260 Deonandan, K. 65 deontology 322, 325 deregulation of financial sector 374 Derrida, Jacques 134, 566 Descartes, Réne 3 Descola, P. 7, 107 desirable transformative innovation 600–601 determinism 183, 245–6, 543–4 development 106, 109–10, 273, 460–463 capital relationship 459 environment relationship 159 limits and 130 modernisation ideology 34 neo-extractivism 270 postcolonial feminisms 62 development paradigm 161–2 devices 301–3, 305 dialectical approach 24, 26, 27–31, 36, 80–81, 600 dialogical model 261, 267 Diani, Mario 484–6, 490, 494 dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane see DDT digital commons 207, 209 digital innovation 220–222, 225–6, 229 digitalisation 222, 540–553 Dingler, J. 542

616  Handbook of critical environmental politics direct democracy 122 direct violence 347–8 disaster capitalism 236–8 disasters 232–46 discourse deconstruction 5 discriminating universalism 45–6 displaced persons 365–6, 369–70, 556 dispossession 164, 166, 177, 515, 558, 581 distinct–separate confusion 320 Dobson, A. 485 Doherty, B. 484–5, 487 Domazet, M. 98 domination 3, 6, 24, 31–2, 337, 342 Döös, B. 368 Doyle, T. 487 drop-in biofuels 173, 176 Dryzek, J.S. 407 Duré, E. 557 Dwarkasing, C. 73 Dyer-Witheford, N. 74 dystopian imaginaries 451 earth sciences 92 Earth System 93 earth system governance (ESG) 405 earthly forces 567–8 EC see European Commission Eckersley, R. 601, 605 eco-capitalist realism 86 eco-cities 545, 547 eco-communities 437 eco-development 132 eco-feminism 53, 60–61, 67, 85–6, 476–7, 554–63 eco-Marxism 71–89 eco-modernism 94, 420–424, 542–4, 547 eco-politics 141–5, 151–2 ‘eco-social’ policies 432 eco-socialism 72, 81 eco-spirituality 283–4, 286–8, 289 eco-territorial turn 276–7 eco-theologies 284 ‘ecocide’ 354 ‘ecocracy’ 543 ecological crisis 74–6, 407, 410, 448 ecological economists 129 ecological exoticism 50 ecological mobilisations 456–67 ecological modernisation 94, 420–424, 542–4, 547 ecological movements 554–5 ecological struggles 555–8 ‘ecological transition’ 8 ecologism 72, 143–4, 485 ecology

agrarian development 157–69 decolonial 40–57 economy relation 145 environment as 7 Marxism and 71–89 post-work and 577–92 race and 50 religion and 282–94 ecology of separation 569 economic downturns 148 economic growth 8, 10, 117–19, 129–40, 197, 431–2 economic migrants 367 economic theory of value 328 economic zones 600, 603–4 economy ecology and 61, 145 new conceptualisation of 426 resocialisation 435 subsistence approach 59 ecosystem services (ES) 583–6 EDs see environmental defenders Ehrlich, P.R. 42 Einstein, Albert 101 EJAtlas 347, 498 EJM see environmental justice movement EKC (Environmental Kuznets Curve) 133 El-Hinnawi, E. 364 emancipation 3, 23–39, 131–2, 419–20 emancipatory politics 10, 133–4 emergency care 512 emergency-driven climate justice 199–200, 202 emissions trading system (ETS) 194, 202, 376, 377–9, 380–381 Emmelin, M. 432 EMOs (environmental movement organisations) 483–504 ‘end of nature’ thesis 32, 36 endism 598 energy, forms of 83 energy grids 302 energy metabolism 303–4 energy politics 245–56 energy regulation 390–401 energy transformations 99–100 energy transition 245–56 enforcement programmes 391–3, 395–6 Engels, Friedrich 26, 27, 579, 588 German Ideology 28 ENGOs (environmental non-governmental organisations) 492 enlightenment 3, 26, 30 Enlightenment ideals 99, 100 entrepreneurialism logics 434 environment

Index  617 development relationship 159 nature distinction 7 as political issue 2 environment-related human mobility 362–73 environmental defenders (EDs), violence against 347, 352 environmental degradation 74, 367, 369 environmental discourse 8, 51, 257, 338 environmental ‘ethics’ 42 environmental governance 402–15 environmental justice 43, 45–6, 353–4, 456–8, 460 environmental justice movement (EJM) 196, 261–2, 479, 486, 489–92 Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) 133 ‘environmental migrants’ 365–6 environmental movement organisations (EMOs) 483–504 environmental movements 10, 41–7, 240, 456, 483–504 environmental non-compliance 388–401 environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) 492 environmental politics 147, 333–46, 468–9, 521–39 environmental refugees 363, 364–5 environmental regulation 380, 396, 408 environmental values 321–3 environmental violence 347–61 environmentalism 7, 48, 484–90 decolonial ecologies 40–57 ecologism distinction 485 modern movement 521–2, 524–7 of the poor 477–8, 487, 528 for the rich 477–8, 487 Third World 527–31 environmentality 565–6, 571 epistemic diversity 262 epistemic rift 300 Erickson, Bruce 66 ES (ecosystem services) 583–6 Escazu Agreement 461 Escobar, Arturo 111 ESG (earth system governance) 405 Esposito, R. 450 Essoka, J. 494 ethical theories 321–3 ethics 42, 193–4, 322 of care 224–5, 227 climate justice 193–4 nature and 319 ETS see emission trading system eudaemonic values 329 Eurocentrism 108, 554, 565 European emission trading system 378–9, 380

‘European Green Deal’ 253, 410 everyday life concepts/framings 469–73 as ontology 511–13 sustainability of 468–82 ‘exceptionality’ 239 exchange-values 579, 583 exclusionary mechanisms 40–41, 46, 48, 51, 109, 289, 342 existence values 327 exnovation 597, 599, 602 expertise 257–69, 351 experts, definition 258 exploitation appropriation distinction 165 as unifying term 424 vulnerability driver 237 Extinction Rebellion (XR) 199–200, 240, 340–341, 495–6 extractivism 62, 98, 270–281, 388 Eyerman, R. 489 Fanon, Franz 527, 570–571 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 161 Fearless Cities network 123 feasible transformative innovation 600–601 Federici, Silvia 66, 207, 209 Felli, R. 368, 585 feminisation of resistance 554–63 feminisms commons’ reconstruction 558–60 degrowth 121 eco-territorial turn 277 environment and 58–70 everyday practices 468, 479 geopower 567–8 transformation 436 feminist ethic of difference 568 feminist political ecology (FPE) 63 feminist standpoint theory 58 Fernandez, G. 238 FfF movement see Fridays for Future movement financial capitalism 82–6 financial crises 147–8, 274 financialisation of nature 85, 374–87 Finney, C. 42 ‘fire lobby’ 278–9 fires, destruction by 50, 170 Firestein, S. 312 Fisher, Mark 86 Fletcher, R. 237 flows funds distinction 302 sociology of 301–3 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 161

618  Handbook of critical environmental politics food crisis, 2007–08 157, 161–4 food regime approach 159–60 food security 157–69, 530 food sovereignty 160, 530 Fordham, M.H. 234 Fordist accumulation regime 374 forestry, dispossession 177 fossil capitalism 78, 82–6 fossil economy 99–100, 475 fossil fuels 388–401, 416, 425 Foster, John Bellamy 79–81, 160, 299 Marx 72, 79 Foucault, Michel 5–7, 74, 134, 219, 220, 228, 302, 565–6 History of Sexuality 564 foundational economy 603–4 Fourier, Charles 577 Fournier, George 389–90 FPE (feminist political ecology) 63 fracking 272, 278, 279, 394 Francis, Pope, Laudato Si 282, 285 Franco, Marielle 53 Frankfurt School 23–4, 31, 34, 35 Frankopan, P. 262 Fraser, N. 3 free will 33 ‘freedom of choice’ 474 Fressoz, J.-B. 568–9 Freud, Sigmund 30, 33 Freudenburg, W.R. 398 Fridays for Future (FfF) movement 33, 65, 199, 341, 495–6 Friedmann, H. 159 Fromm, E. 25 Frost, Samantha 64 Frow, E. 174 ‘frugal abundance’ 136 functional abstraction 584, 585 funds–flows distinction 302 Gabrys, J. 541, 547 Gago, Veronica 561 Potencia Feminista 560 Gaia theory 505, 567, 572 Gaillard, J.C. 232, 240 Galtung, Johan 348, 350, 354 Garcia, P.-O. 450 Gardiner, S. 193 GDP (gross domestic product) growth 117 GE see green economy GEG see global environmental governance Gemeinschaft 431, 433–6, 438 gender approaches 58, 63, 166, 234–5 genealogies of environmentalism 48 genocidal destruction 555

geo-constructivism 569–70 geoengineering technologies 410 geography 566 geologic forces 572 geological turn 572 geontology 570–571 ‘geontopower’ 570 geopolitics 566–7 geopower 564–76 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas 78, 121, 129, 132, 302, 588 Gesellschaft 431, 433–6, 437–8 GHGs see greenhouse gases Gibson-Graham, J.K. 439 Giddens, A. 259 Gilbert, C. 232 Giugni, M. 486 Glaab, K. 285 Glissant, E. 53 Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) 347, 498 global climate justice 192–205 ‘global commons’ 206–7, 208 global environmental governance (GEG) 402–15 global–local connections 96–7, 435–6 global numbers’ argument 46–7 global warming 11–13, 64, 196–8, 201, 362, 408 Global Witness 461 globalisation 78, 158–60, 402, 530 Glowczewski, Barbara 46 GND (Green New Deal) 410 GNP (gross national product) 117 Gobineau, Antoine 41 Godard, Olivier 195 Godin, B. 605 Gogineni, B. 92 Gojowczyk, J. 288 Gómez-Baggethun, E. 408 Good Life (Buen Vivir) 104–15, 278, 532 goods, commons as 206, 213 Gore, Al, ‘An inconvenient truth’ 443 Gorz, André 10, 72–3, 77, 116, 121, 485, 581–2 Ecology 75–6 Gough, I. 432 Goupy, M. 239 governance 389–401, 446 cooperative forms 404–5 disconnected structures 439 historical-materialist approaches 407–8 multilevel perspective 437 municipalism 122–3 neoliberalism 450 policy-making shift 402 sustainability paradigm 146 technocratic depoliticisation 351

Index  619 of transitions 469–70 governance-based regulation 404 governmentality 564–7 Gramling, R. 398 Gramsci, Antonio 220, 448 grandfathering principle 194, 195, 199 Grasso, M. 486 grassroots democracy 333–4 grassroots environmental movements 469, 492–7 grassroots innovations 596 Gray, Alasdair 427 great transformation 28, 152–3, 599, 605 Green Belt Movement 458–9 Green Climate Fund 18 green economy (GE) 10–11, 74, 79, 163, 274–5, 426 green governmentality 566 green growth paradigm 421, 423 Green New Deal (GND) 87, 252–3, 410 green parties 493 Green Revolution 510, 521, 526, 527, 535 green theory 72–3 greenhouse gases (GHGs) accumulation of 447 conversion factors 377 datafying 547 disavowal of 445 emissions reduction 170–171, 195, 250 global numbers’ argument 46–7 market mechanisms 251 neutrality 381–2, 385 greening of religion 284–6, 290 Greenough, P. 459–60 greenwashing 439 Grosfoguel, R. 111, 113 gross domestic product (GDP) growth 117 Gross, M. 246 gross national product (GNP) 117 Grosz, Elizabeth 567–8, 572 Groundswell report 363 Grove, R. 43 growth capitalism and 143 crisis of 117–19 limits to 129–40, 408, 485 problem of 217–31 social limits to 78 see also economic growth growth-based capitalism 82–6, 143, 436 growth paradigm 66, 423 growth paradox 217–31 Gualinga, Patricia 65, 112 Guattari, Felix 207, 516, 567 Gudynas, Eduardo 110–111 Guha, R. 43, 529

Guillibert, P. 77 Habermas, J. 6, 26, 31, 587 habitat banking market 378 Häckel, Ernst 7 Hajer, M.A. 542 Hampton, P. 421 Haraway, Donna 58, 64, 300, 508 Hardin, G. 42, 213 Harding, Sandra 58 Hardt, Michel 207, 209–14 Commonwealth 506 Hare, Nathan 43 Hartman, S. 572 Harvey, David 31, 177, 178, 208, 211–12, 374, 581 Haug, T. 301 Haymes, S.N. 42 ‘hazards–disaster tradition’ 232 hazards perspective 233–4 Heede, R. 100 Hegel, Friedrich 27, 33, 36, 207 hegemonic growth ideology 91 Heisenberg, Werner 36 Helfrich, Silke 206, 207, 209 Higgins, Polly 354 Hiraldo, R. 585 Hirsch, F. 129 historical index of truth 26, 35 historical-materialist approaches 407–8, 411 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) 512 Hobbes, Thomas 571, 579 Hofmeister, S. 61 Holbraad, M. 506 Holifield, R. 457 Hollands, R.G. 184 Holm, I.W. 239 Honneth, A. 31 Horkheimer, Max 3, 24–5, 29, 33, 580 Dialectic of Enlightenment 23, 26–7, 30, 31 Hornborg, A. 300 household metabolism 298 housewifisation 59 Huber, W.A. 312, 542 Huerta, Dolores 525 Huertas, Castillo 559 Huff, A. 382 human agency 97–100 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) 512 human rights 459–61 humanitarian imperialism 370 humanity–nature relationship 80–81, 319, 320–322 hybrids 569 hydraulic fracturing see fracking

620  Handbook of critical environmental politics hysterical neurotic drive 445 ICT (information and communication technology) 182–5 Iftekhar, A. 238 ignorance 308–17 IIRSA see Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America Illner, P. 239 ILO (International Labour Organization) 418 immanence 213 immanent critique 5, 6, 16, 223 immigration policies 369 immuno-biopolitics 449–51 in-kind offsetting 378, 381 incommensurability, politics of 532, 534 indigenous geontologies 570–571 indigenous knowledge 264 indigenous movements 104–7, 110–112 indigenous peoples 47, 108 decolonisation and 52, 523–4, 532, 534 nature relationship 77–8, 325–6 ‘rights of nature’ 325–6 sacred land 464 women’s struggles 558–60 indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) 328 individual, concept of 29 industrial metabolism 298 industry self-regulation 392, 404 industry–state relations 388–401 inequality 4, 14 information and communication technology (ICT) 182–5 informational politics 543 infrastructural violence 350–351, 353 infrastructure 514–15, 540–553 Inglehart, R. 486–7 Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) 278, 280 innovation 220, 594–7 agency 602 history of 593–4 invention distinction 594 see also research and innovation innovation-as-politics 220–222 instituent praxis 211, 212 Institutional School 207–8 institutionalist approaches 407, 409, 410, 492–7 institutions, use of term 411 intentionality–unknowns relation 310 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) 264

international environmental policy 250–251, 402–3 International Labour Organization (ILO) 418 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) 418–19, 421 internationalisation of state 409 intersectionality 86, 491 intrinsic value–nature 318, 327–9 invention–innovation distinction 594 IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) 264 IPLC (indigenous peoples and local communities) 328 ITUC see International Trade Union Confederation Jamison, A. 489 Jansen, K. 166 Jasanoff, S. 96, 259 Jessop, B. 601 Johannesburg World Summit 403 Joint Implementation projects 376 Jones, T. 50 juridical common 211 just transition 226, 416–30 justice 194, 513–15 see also climate justice; environmental justice Kallis, G. 131, 133, 135, 436, 585 Kant, Immanuel 3, 33, 207, 322, 325 Kapp, A. 72 Karl, Terry 397 Kautto, N. 174 Keystone XL Pipeline 562 Kilomba, Grada 41 Kipling, Rudyard, ‘White man’s burden’ 45 Kissinger, Henry 132 Klee, Ernst, Angelus Novus 25 Klein, Naomi 236–7, 570 This Changes Everything 443 knowledge 107, 257–69 content/type of 263 in everyday life 474–5 ignorance relationship 309–11 politics of 531 knowledge exhaustiveness 6 knowledge/power relations 219–20, 222, 225 knowledge transfer 314–15 Kostakis, Vasilis 207, 209 Kristeva, Julia 134 Kronsell, A. 95–6 Kropotkin, Peter 577 Kuznets, Simon 117

Index  621 Kyoto Protocol 11, 197, 250–251, 376 La Vía Campesina (LVC) 530–531, 536 labour 157–69, 527, 589 autonomy and 476–7 long-term interests 422 metabolic interchange 299–300 pre-industrial forms 581 short-term interests 422 work distinction 578–9 labour of confusion 351, 353, 355 labour environmentalism 488–9 labour theory of value 80–82, 583, 585 Lacan, J. 444–6 Laczko, F. 367 Lakoff, A. 236 Lampedusa, Tomasi di, The Leopard 8 land decolonisation and 527 food security 162–4 indigenous 105, 108 offsetting schemes 381 race/colonialism and 521 rent and 584 right to 559 sacred 463–5 women’s struggles 561 ‘land degradation neutrality’ 382 land grabbing 162, 164 Latin America 270–281, 460, 461, 554–63 Latour, B. 99, 300, 569, 572 Laurens, Christophe 46 Lauta, K.C. 239 Laval, C. 210–211, 213 law–disasters relationship 239 law of value 28 laws of nature 320 lay knowledge 257–69 Le Billon, P. 457 Lechón, Inuca 104 Lefebvre, H. 468 Leitner, H. 178 Leonardi, E. 352–3 Lewis, S. 47, 92, 95, 573 liberal climate populism 446 liberal democracy 145–6, 149, 333, 335–8, 343 liberal peace paradigm 416, 425 ‘liberation ecology’ 528 libertarian municipalism 124, 215 Liebig, Justus von 79, 81 ‘liminal commons’ 207 limits to growth 129–40, 408, 485 Linebaugh, P. 206 Lippert, I. 548 Local Agenda 21 146

local–global connections 96–7, 435–6 local knowledge 257–69 ‘local sustainability initiatives’ 437 locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) 494–5 Locke, John 571, 579 Longo, Roxanna 557 Lorimer, J. 94 Lovelock, James 567 low-carbon society 247, 249, 416–30 Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. 459–60 Löwy, M. 77–8 Luhmann, Niklas 146 Luisetti, F. 570, 571, 572 Lukács, György 299 Luke, Timothy 565 LULUs (locally unwanted land uses) 12, 494–5 Luxemburg, Rosa 59, 73 LVC see La Vía Campesina Maathai, Wangari 53, 458–9, 536 MAB (Movement of People Affected by Dams) 460 McCormick, K. 174 McMichael, P. 159 McNeill, J.R. 459 Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) 530–533, 536 Magnusdottir, G.L. 95–6 Maldonado, J.K. 240 Malin, S.A. 397 Malm, Andreas 49, 73, 83–4 Corona 84 Fossil Capital 83, 99 Progress 83 Malthus, Thomas 79, 131, 133–4 Mann, G. 410 Mannoni, O. 444 Mansholt, Sicco 132 March, H. 436 Marcuse, Herbert 27, 30, 31, 33 marginal territories 348–51 Mariategui, Carlos 77–8, 82 market-based instruments 327, 493 market development policies (MDPs) 175–6 market ecosystem services (MES) 584–5 markets nature relationship 172–3, 376 as social construction 174–5 Marquez, Francia 53 Martínez-Alier, Joan 43, 73, 132, 194, 423, 426, 457, 485, 487 Environmentalism 349 Marx, Karl 6, 23, 25, 27, 35, 59, 131, 299–300, 577, 579–81, 583, 585, 589 Capital 75, 79, 81, 300, 588 German Ideology 28

622  Handbook of critical environmental politics Marxism 64, 71–89, 164, 166 aesthetic/religious norms 147 critical approach 24, 31 degrowth approach 123 everyday life and 468 green theory and 72–3 limits to growth 129 post-work 577, 579 Masioli, Etelvina 557 Maslin, M. 47, 92, 573 material and energy flow accounting (MEFA) 298 material political economy 171–3, 176–7 ‘material turn’ 134–5 materialisation of politics 505–19 materialism–activism relationship 472, 509 materialist ecofeminism 60–61, 67 materialist naturalism 75 materialist state theory 409 materiality active/passive forms 570 critique 4–5, 10 matter and 64 Mathaai, Wangari 529 Mathews, J. 364 Mautz, R. 246 maximalist social innovations 596 Mazzocchi, Tony 417, 489 Mbembe, Achille 451 MDPs (market development policies) 175–6 MEAs see multilateral environmental agreements Meerow, S. 186 MEFA (material and energy flow accounting) 298 mega-projects 277–8, 465 Mehta, Jojo 354 Mellor, Mary 66 Melucci, A. 487 Mendes, Chico 347, 529 Merchant, Carolyn 43, 73, 84 Death of Nature 60, 561 Merlau-Ponty, Maurice 571 Merton, R.K. 308 MES (market ecosystem services) 584–5 meta-industrial workers 79–82 metabolic regimes 34, 296, 297 metabolic rift theory 73, 79–82, 160, 297, 299 ‘metabolic turn’ 296 metabolic value of labour 81–2 metacommonality 209, 215 Methmann, C. 234–5 Mêtis 426 Mies, Maria 59–60, 66, 209, 561 Mignolo, Walter 113 migration 362–73, 556, 558, 562 Millennium Development Goals 544 minimalist social innovations 595

mining projects 272, 276, 279, 465 Mishan, E.J. 132 Mitchell, T. 172–3 Carbon Democracy 388 mitigation hierarchy 378, 381 MLP see multilevel perspective mobility 362–73, 456–67 modernisation ideology 34 modernity 85–6, 142–3, 145–7, 149, 151–2 crisis of 274 double fracture of 43 human–nature relations 322 human-value positions 319 nature–culture separation 99 terms of 52 Moellendorf, D. 193 Moi, Daniel Arap 459 Mol, A.P.J. 301, 544 monetary valuation 62, 319, 326–7 Montreal Protocol 10, 403 Moore, Jason 43, 73, 84–5, 96, 159–60, 279, 300, 584 Capitalism 83 moral considerability 323–6 morality–ethics connection 319 more-than-social movements 505–19 Moreno, Lenin 111 Morris, William 577 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona 66 Moulaert, F. 594–6 Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) 460 Mujica, Jose 134 Müller, Tadzio 197–8 multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM) 298 multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) 403, 410 multilevel perspective (MLP) 247–8, 253, 437, 470, 595 municipalism 122–4, 215 MuSIASEM (multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism) 298 Myers, Norman 363, 365, 368 Sinking Ark 324 Nagel, T. 3 Naidoo, Kumi 12 Nakate, Vanessa 40, 44, 53 Naredo, J.M. 408 narrative violence 350–351 nation states 409, 410, 419–20 nationalistic capitalism 602 natural limits 135–6 naturalism discourse 4

Index  623 naturalistic materialism 75 nature capitalism in 84 conceptualising 32, 42, 320–323 cultural concepts of 32 culture separation 99 domination 24, 337 environment difference 7 financialisation of 85, 374–87 markets relationship 172–3 mastery of 23–39, 76, 544 neoliberalisation of 172, 375, 380 post-work and 580–583 power over 75 racialised conception of 42 restoration of 381–3 rights of 325–6, 531 society relations 6, 299–300, 318, 447, 506–7 subsumption of 584–5, 589 value of 318–31 women’s relationship 60–61, 554, 559 work of 583–6 Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) 382–3 ‘nature-cultures’ 64 nature-washing 447 Navarro, Mina 560 NBS (Nature-Based Solutions) 382–3 necropolitics 451 negative emission technologies (NETs) 201, 382 ‘negentropic’ potential 477 Negri, Toni 207, 209–14 Commonwealth 506 Nehru, Pandit 461 Nelson, Julie 61 neo-extractivism 270–281 neo-institutionalism 411 neo-Malthusian propositions 47, 54 neoliberal bioeconomy 174–6 neoliberal turn 374 neoliberalisation of nature 172, 375, 380 neoliberalism in everyday life 469 governance of 390, 397, 450 legitimacy of 388 work’s role 580 nescience 310 net zero emissions 381–2, 385 NETs see negative emission technologies network theory 569 neurotic drives 445 Neuteleers, S. 329 ‘new materialisms’ 4, 64, 135 Neyrat, Frédéric 568–70 NGOs see non-governmental organizations

Nichols, K. 92 Nightingale, Andrea 63 Nixon, Rob 350, 526, 528–9 Slow Violence 349 ‘nomadic utopianism’ 120–121 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 52, 404, 406, 461, 528, 542 nonknowledge transfer 308–17 normative frameworks, energy transition 247–8 normative transformations 598 Northern environmentalism 483, 487 Notre-dame-des Landes ZAD 53, 494, 498 Nowotny, H., Re-thinking Science 259 nuclear technology 232, 236, 448–9, 525 ‘nudge’ strategies 470 objective problems–subjective values (OPSV) 487 obsessive neurotic drive 445 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 252 O’Connor, J. 10, 72–3, 76–8 Capitalism 77 Fiscal Crisis 76 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 173–4 Oels, A. 234–5 off-site offsetting 378 ‘offset banks’ 378 offsetting 375, 376, 377–81, 383 O’Hara, S. 61 on-site offsetting 378 O’Neill, J.F. 321 O’Neill, Kate 403 ontics 542 ontological turn 4, 531, 540 ontological uncertainty 355 ontology of coexistence 514 of difference 564 everyday practices as 511–13 of limits 134–5 of operativity 580 politics of 506, 543 of the present 564–5, 568 use of term 510 OPSV (objective problems–subjective values) 487 Orbis spike 93, 101 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 173–4 Ostrom, Elinor 207–8, 213 Ostwald, Wilhelm, Energetic Foundations 245 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid 565–6 Ouma, S. 178 ‘out-of-kind’ offsetting 378

624  Handbook of critical environmental politics Page, E.A. 193 Paine, Thomas 588 Palau, M. 557 Papadopolous, D. 524 Paris Agreement 11, 194, 251 just transition agenda 418 temperature limit goals 118, 199, 383, 408 US relationship with 254 welfare systems 431 participation–deliberation differences 340 participatory democracy 333–5, 339–40 participatory environmental governance 405 participatory organisational models 494 Pascal, Blaise 309 ‘passive nonknowledge’ 310 Paterson, M. 408 patriarchal power 351, 557, 560 Pattberg, P. 403 Paulsson, A. 87 payment ecosystem services (PES) 584–5 peace-making approaches 416, 423, 425 Pellizzoni, Luigi, Ontological Politics 355 Pellow, D.N. 353, 490–491 Pérez Orozco, Amaia 66 Perkins, Ellie 61 permaculture 513–14 Perrow, C. 233 Perry, R.W. 232 persistent organic pollutants (POPs) 349–50 Persson, A. 544 PES (payment ecosystem services) 584–5 petro-states 389, 397 philosophical commons 211 phronesis 130, 228 Pickering, J. 407 Piketty, T., Capital 465 Pinochet, Augusto 566 Piven, F.F. 492 place, politics of 435, 439 ‘place-based globalism’ 435 Plantationcene 94 Plato, Republic 130 Plumwood, Val, Feminism 60 pluriverse 9, 116, 121–2, 532–3 Podobnik, B. 247 Podolinskij, Sergei 73 Poggio, P.P. 489 Polanyi, Karl 77, 174, 601 Great Transformation 599 ‘policy auditing’ 432 policy-based climate justice 195 policy cycle 391 political consumerism 470–472 political ecology 63, 133, 144, 147, 485–6, 488 of development 157, 159, 164

global environmental governance 407 social movements 508 political economy 61, 63, 187, 217–31, 407 politics critical outlook 8 of degrowth 122–4, 423 everyday practices 468–82 geopower and 564–76 of incommensurability 532, 534 innovation as 220–222 of knowledge 531 of place 435, 439 politics of matter 505–19 ‘pollution prevention pays’ 542 pollution rights 376 POPs (persistent organic pollutants) 349–50 populism 148–9, 151, 446–9 ‘positive nonknowledge’ 310, 312 post-colonialism 44, 62, 487 ‘post-democracy’ 340, 342 post-growth planning 423 ‘post-liberal’ green approaches 425 post-materialism 227–8, 477, 487 post-politicisation 443, 448–9 post-truth depoliticisation 446–9 post-work 577–92 Povinelli, Elizabeth 506, 533, 570–571, 572 power/knowledge relations 219–20, 222, 225 Power, Marilyn 61 practice theory 411 ‘practice turn’ 296 pragmatist approaches 228–9, 248–50 preference utilitarianism 321, 325, 328 prefiguration 472–3, 496–7 preparedness 236 preservation/progress balance 599–600 primitive accumulation 59, 79, 164 see also accumulation by dispossession principle theory 98, 101 pro-poor smart agriculture 163–4 ‘problem-solving’ 2, 600–601 ‘problematization’ 5 procedural justice 491 Proctor, Robert 311 production consumption separation 301 material conditions of 78 productivism 119 professionalisation 494 professions, definition 263 profit–rent distinction 584 progress 3, 33, 364, 599–600 Prometheanism 71–3, 76, 79, 319, 580, 588 promissory infrastructure 540–553 prosperity 117, 289

Index  625 ‘protest businesses’ 493 protest cycles 495 Protestant work ethic 579, 580 provisioning systems 603–4 prudence 130–131 psychoanalysis 29 public inclusion 265–6 Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 512, 513 Puleo, A.H. 554 Pulido, L. 43 Quarantelli, E.L. 234 queer ecofeminism 60 queer ecologies 66, 67 Quijano, Aníbal 78, 113 R&D (research and development) practices 476 R&I see research and innovation racial injustice 192, 457 racism 40, 49 Rambaldo, E. 484, 494 Rancière, Jacques 212, 215, 449, 532 Ratzel, F. 363 Rawls, J. 322 realism critical 605 degrowth approach 224 regime theory and 403 transformative 600 realist, use of term 228–9 realist ontology 134–5 reality principle 33 rebound effect 185, 544 recovery phase, disasters 237–8 refugees 364, 365, 367 regime complexes 405–6 regime theory 403, 405 regulation 260 regulatory capture 397 regulatory limits 135–6 Reid, H.J. 507 relational values 328–9 religion 147, 282–94 renewable energies 247, 249, 251–2 rent 397, 584, 585, 588 repoliticisation 121–2 reproductive labour 66, 237, 477 ‘reproductivity’ 61 research and development (R&D) practices 476 research and innovation (R&I) 175, 217–31 resilience 181–2, 185–7, 235–6, 239 resocialisation of economy 435 resource limits 131–2 responsibility 432, 469, 474, 493 responsible innovation (RI) 223, 226

responsible stagnation (RS) 218, 223–7 Revet, S. 234, 236 RI see responsible innovation Ribault, T. 236 Ricardo, David 79, 131, 583 rights-based approaches 322–6 rights of nature approach 325–6, 531 Rio Conference 143, 145–6, 147–8, 493 risk assessments 309, 312, 313, 395 risk communication 311–13 risk governance approach 260 risk-hazard approach 234 Rivera Cusicanqui, S. 78 Robbins, P. 135 Roberts, N. 45 Robinson, C.J. 45 Robinson, Mary 421 Robinson, Peter 423 Rocheleau, Dianne 63 Rolston, H. 42 Roosevelt, President 565 Rosemberg, Anabella 418 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48 Rêverie 41 Routley, R. 322 Roy, Arundhati 462 RS see responsible stagnation Ruffin, K.N. 42 Ruzzenenti, M. 489 Sachs, W. 14 sacred lands 463–5 Sadowski, J. 545 Said, Edward 3, 529 Saito, Kohei 79–81 Marx’s Ecosocialism 81 Salleh, Ariel 73, 79 Santos, B.S. 262 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 528 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 52, 528 Sauer, Carl 526 scarcity 131, 133–4, 136 Scheidel, A. 488 Schlosberg, D. 487, 490–491 Schmidt, A. 299 Concept of Nature 75 Schuller, M. 240 Schumpeter, J.A. 594, 605 science framing processes 262–3 in politics 147, 150 specialisation of 259 science and technology studies (STS) 220, 223–5, 540–542, 546 scientific expertise 257–69

626  Handbook of critical environmental politics scientific knowledge 35 scientific rationality 25 SD see sustainable development SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals Seaford, Richard 131 securitisation 369, 375, 384 self-limitation 32 Sen, A. 194 separate–distinct confusion 320 Serres, Michel 45, 505 Sharifi, A. 187 Sheppard, E. 178 Shiva, Vandana 53, 60, 62, 65, 561 Shove, E. 248 Shue, Henry 193, 196 Silesia Declaration 417–19, 421–2 Silverman, V. 424 Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics 325 slavery 41, 45, 49, 572 slow violence 348–51, 528–9 small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) 275 smart cities 181–91, 239, 541, 544, 550 SMEs (small and medium-sized companies) 275 Smith, A. 583, 596 Smith, K.K. 42 Smith, Neil 29, 31, 447 Smithson, M. 308 SNR see society–nature relations social construction of limits 134–5 social contract 571 social dialogue 420–424 social-ecological research 31 social-ecological transformations 34–5, 593 ‘social–environmental cost theory’ 72 social inequalities 348–51 social innovations 594–7 social inventiveness 475–6 social justice 119, 192, 249, 489–90, 523, 534 social limits to growth 129 social metabolism 295–307 social movements climate justice 196 commons and 211 decolonisation and 529 disaster research 240 eco-modernist turn 424 more-than-social movements 508, 509–10, 514 sustainability paradigm 151 theories of 486–7 social networks 303 social power asymmetry 303–4 social practice–metabolism link 296 social practice theory (SPT) 248–9, 253, 470 ‘social provisioning’ 61

social relations 509–10 social reproduction 73–4, 296 social sciences 92, 94, 194–5, 245–6, 267 social systems 208–9, 212, 232–3 social transformation 266–7 society–nature relations (SNR) 6, 23–4, 26–8, 30–32, 298–300, 318, 447, 506–7, 598 alternative forms 497 crises of 26 dialectical approach 24, 27–31 socio-ecologies 295–7, 478–9 socio-energetics 245–6 socio-environmental conflicts 276, 461, 561 socio-environmental movements 483, 489–92 socio-environmental transformation 187–8 socio-technical processes 219, 222, 247, 475–6 sociology of flows 301–3 Socrates 308 ‘soft’ policies 469 Southern environmentalism 483, 487 Spaargaren, G. 301 spatial abstraction 585 ‘specified ignorance’ 308, 312 Spencer, Herbert, Principles of Sociology 245 Spinoza, Baruch 207 spirituality 283–4, 286–8, 289 Spivak, G. 566 SPT see social practice theory Srnicek, N. 544 Staffas, L. 174 stagnation as responsibility 223 state environmental governance 402–15 internationalisation of 409 state theory 409 state–grassroots tension 124 state–industry relations 388–401 Stavrides, Stavros 208, 211–12 Steen, R. 312–13 Steffen, W. 92–3 Stengers, I. 508 Stevenson, H. 422 Stirling, A. 596 Stoermer, E.F. 92 Stoppani, Antonio 92 Storey, D.E. 194 strategic, use of term 228 strategic-ethical approach 218–19, 225 strategic learning process 227–8 STRN see Sustainability Transitions Research Network Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 528 structural violence 348, 353 STS see science and technology studies Stumpp, E.M. 186

Index  627 subsistence approach 59 subsumption 585, 589 Suchman, L. 542 Sukdev, Pavan 326 ‘surveillance capitalism’ 214 sustainability 141–55 democracy and 335, 343 digitalization for 540–553 energy transition 250 everyday practices 468–82 immuno-biopolitics 449 success assessment 147–51 urban areas 433–5 sustainability transitions 289, 423, 437, 470, 594–7 Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN) 595, 605 sustainable cities 181–91 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 116, 118, 122, 148, 181, 185, 338, 544, 598 sustainable development (SD) 10–11, 150, 338–9 eco-politics 141, 143–4 economic downturns 148 globalising policies 530 hegemony 147 limits to growth 408 policy principle 132–3 promissory infrastructure 540–553 urban planning 434 sustainable welfare 431–41 Sweeney, S. 422 Swyngedouw, Erik 351, 434–5, 585 systemic resilience 239 systems changes 197–8 commons as 212 metabolic dynamics 301 reproduction 297 Taboada, Edmundo 526 Taylor, D.E. 42, 43, 286, 507 technocracy 351, 448 technological determinism 183, 543–4 technological fixes 143–4, 308–17, 569 technological innovation 239, 594, 597 technology of power/knowledge 220 problematizing 5 smart cities 182–5 work and 577 temporality–unknowns relation 310 theological commons 211 third modernity 152–3 Third World concept 523, 527–31 Thomas-Slaytern, Barbara 63

Thoreau, Henry David 48 Walden 41 thresholds 136 Thunberg, Greta 1, 10, 13, 33, 65, 427, 443, 496 tipping points 134 Tokar, B. 194 Toledo, Victor 279 Tönnies, F. 431, 433, 438 top-down processes 233, 235, 425, 469, 475, 478, 598 town–countryside relationship 80 tradable emissions market 376 trade unions 417–21 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement 408–9 transformations analytical/normative 598 long-term/short-term 599 transition relation 605 transformative agency 602 transformative innovation 593–609 transformative realism 600 transformative social innovation 595–6 Transforming our World document 148 transitions governance of 469–70 transformation relation 605 ‘trapped population’ concept 366 Treat, J. 422 tree-planting projects 458 Trencher, G. 187 TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) agreement 408–9 Trouillot, M. 45 Trump, Donald 13 truth denial of 446 temporal index of 24–7 Tsing, A.L. 96–7 Tuck, E. 523, 534–5 UBI (unconditional basic income) 581 UN see United Nations uncertainty 309, 313, 355 unconditional basic income (UBI) 581 UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) 123, 384 UNFCCC see United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Unger, R.M. 595 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 123, 384 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 10, 13, 18, 193, 250, 417, 496

628  Handbook of critical environmental politics United Nations (UN) food security 158, 530 Local Agenda 21 146 Rio Conference 143, 145–8 urban resilience 185 see also COP system; Sustainable Development Goals universalism 3, 4, 45–6, 532 universals 96–7, 99 university, discourse of 446 unknowns, knowledge of 310 ‘urban commons’ 206–7 urban–environment relations 546–7 urban-level transformational action 431–41 urban management 183–4 urban metabolism 298 urban planning 239–40, 353, 434 urban political ecology 181 urban resilience 181–2, 185–8 urban sustainability 181–91 urban technocracy 351 Urry, J. 301 Uruguay Round 159 use values 327, 579 utilitarianism 321–2, 324–7 utility and rights 323–6 utility theory of value 583 value in capitalism 229, 322–3, 471 conceptualising 320–323 of environment 7 labour theory of 80–82, 585 law of 28 of nature 318–31 utility theory of 583 van den Berg, K. 65 Veldman, R.G. 287 Velicu, I. 491 Vernadsky, Vladimir 92 Verran, H. 543 Villanueva, J. 238 violence 347–61, 492, 528–9, 531, 558 virtue ethics 322 Viteri, Alfredo 106 Viteri, Carlos 107 Viteri Gualinga, C. 107–9 Viteri, Rosa Vacacela de 107 Viveiros de Castro, E. 7 von Carlowitz, H.C. 542 Von Werlhof, Claudia 59 vulnerability approach 232–5, 237, 369 Wainwright, J. 410 Walker, G. 248–9, 584

Wallace, R. 74 Wallerstein, I. 78 Walzer, M. 6 Wang, J. 82 Wangari, Esther 63 Waring, Marilyn 66 Washington Consensus 528 water metabolism 303–4 Waterton, C. 311 Watney, S. 513 Weber, Max 29, 578 WED (Women Environment and Development) approach 62 Weeks, K. 582 welfare 240, 431–41 welfarist approach 325 well-being 120, 431, 439 Westing, A. 364 Whatmore, S., Political Matter 506 White, Leslie 289 Science of Culture 245–6 Whitefield, Patrick 514 whiteness 41–7, 48 Whyte, K. 533 Widerberg, O. 403 wilderness cult 42, 49, 485, 524 Williams, Raymond 7, 45, 544, 578 women in climate politics 96 decolonisation and 525 ecological struggles 555–8 labour/autonomy 476–7 nature relationship 60–61, 554, 559 vulnerability approach 234–5 Women Environment and Development (WED) approach 62 women’s organisations 557–8 Woods, C. 238 work ecology and 577–92 labour distinction 578–9 modernity and 578–80 technology and 577 worth of 583 work ethic 578–9, 580 ‘working-class ecology’ 350 working-class environmentalism 488–9, 498 world ecology 84 ‘world risk society’ 234, 236 World Trade Organization (WTO) 159, 271 ‘worlding’ 536 Worldwatch Institute 565 worth of work 583 WTO see World Trade Organization Wynne, B. 311

Index  629 Wynter, S. 523, 572

Yusoff, Kathryn 46, 570, 572

XR see Extinction Rebellion

zeitkern der wahrheit 24–7 Zimmerer, J. 351 Zuboff, S. 214 Zupanĉiĉ, A. 452

Yang, K.Y. 523, 534–5 Youth4Climate 1