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Framing Different Energy Futures? Comparing Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion in Germany
Abstract
Combining research on sociotechnical imaginaries and on social movements, this contribution examines how two major actors of the climate justice movement active in Germany – Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion – frame the discourse of climate change and just transition. We focus on narratives of both movements and their justification strategies based on the analysis of frames. Using material produced by the two movements, the paper comparatively analyses the movement’s frames on social, political, economic and epistemic orders. The results suggest that the two groups are part of the same discursive community but emphasize different aspects of just energy futures.
... Whether this influence aligns with the explicit mandate of the intermediary in not necessarily warranted. Social movements research has leveraged the notions of collective action frames and framing processes to explain the action and impact of such movements (Snow et al., 1986;Parks, 2022), raising discussion on whether the frames that they put forward align with or contribute to their stated goals (Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022). To the best of our knowledge, these conceptual tools are yet to be applied to the study of transition intermediaries. ...
... Conceptual framework for the description of discursive frames, illustrated with (Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022, Table 3): this and other authors explore how different entities (here two climate movements) frame issues to achieve impact. In the present paper, frame elements are conceptualized as the result of adopting different perspectives on a number of framing dimensions. ...
... They draw from the goffmanian definition of frames as the basic elements allowing individuals to define and make sense of "social [events] and [their] subjective involvement in them" (Goffman, 1975, p. 10), itself drawing from the original introduction of the concept by Bateson (2000Bateson ( [1972). This conceptualization has opened the way to an exploration of frame taxonomies, for instance distinguishing diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames, or different dimensions of master frames (Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022;Parks, 2022). However, resulting research still largely focusses on the adoption and leveraging of selected frames by distinct entities to achieve their aims. ...
... For example, Ahlers found that both XR and FFF motivational framing utilised a sense of urgency as a means to mobilise action 37 . Smiles and Edward found that XR activists used a motivational frame which argued that action was required in order to protect human lives and wellbeing 31,38 . Motivational frames can also convey group agency by highlighting existing ENGOs resources which may maximise the likelihood of success 29 . ...
... Past success (36) Economic inequality (38) Collaborate, build relationships (34) 2 Governments, politicians (13) Frontline communities (44) Moral responsibility (27) Shared identity (31) Clean energy (31) Increase, prioritise input from others (33) 3 ...
... In general, studies on ENGO collective action framing suggest that ENGOs diagnose capitalist economies to blame, use the motivational frame of individual responsibility to encourage others to take action, and promote civil resistance actions as prognostic solutions 31,37,38 . In contrast, we found that the fossil fuel sector was most commonly held to blame; action was encouraged primarily by highlighting the value of helping and empowering people, and collaborating and movement building were the commonly conveyed action responses. ...
This paper seeks to examine how Australian environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) communicate about and mobilise their supporters for climate justice. ENGOs play an important role in raising awareness and changing values, attitudes and behaviours related to climate justice. However, while many Australian ENGOs have begun incorporating language around climate justice in their communications, it remains unclear how this concept is framed and enacted in practice. Using data collected from 619 ENGO websites and 149 grant applications, we examine how ENGOs describe climate justice and the collective action frames they use to mobilise action. We found that while few ENGOs provided detailed explanations of climate justice on their websites, they primarily framed climate injustice as a procedural and distributive problem. The fossil fuel sector was most commonly identified as the cause of climate injustice, and First Nations communities most commonly affected. ENGOs linked different climate justice dimensions to diverse causes, issues and actions, indicating a nuanced understanding of how climate justice can be enacted in different contexts. However, they primarily proposed incremental tactics involving education, solidarity and allyship behaviours rather than radical actions through which to drive a transformative agenda of social, political or economic change. We conclude the paper with a discussion of applied implications for ENGOs and suggestions for future research.
... Climate change and its consequences are among the issues with the highest mobilization potential across Europe . A new climate movement has emerged and has succeeded in mobilizing the masses and bringing protests and civil disobedience as relevant forms of resistance back into the public space (Ruser 2020, Scherhaufer et al. 2021, Buzogány & Scherhaufer 2022. In 2019, in probably the largest protest event ever, over seven million people took to the streets simultaneously in 185 countries to protest for better climate policies. ...
... Building on various traditions within social movements studies, policy analysis and science and technology studies, the analysis of frames -or: discourses, narratives and imaginaries -produced by climate activists, these studies use official documents and speeches, often complemented by qualitative interviews with activists and experts involved in the movement. While most studies focus on single-case studies and identify different issues of contestation (Daniel et al. 2020, Reichel et al. 2022, Spaiser et al. 2022), a growing number of comparative studies show important differences within the new climate movement (Melchior and Rivera 2021, Buzogány and Scherhaufer 2022, Friberg 2022, Krüger et al. 2022. ...
... While the 'climate justice' frame plays a central role in the meaning-making of the new climate movement, the use of apocalyptic and 'post-apocalyptic' imagery is prevalent (Cassegård and Thörn 2018), there are significant differences that also affect the activities of different parts of the climate movement. According to Buzogány and Scherhaufer (2022), FFF predominantly uses apocalyptic imaginaries of climate change. The responsibility for the success of sustainability transitions is associated with political decision-makers that act quickly and courageously. ...
Public awareness of the climate crisis has reached new heights, eventually leading to the worldwide diffusion of a new type of climate protest by groups such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände, Just Stop Oil or The Last Generation. This article synthesizes the existing knowledge about the new climate movement based on scholarship from social movement studies, policy analysis, political theory, communication studies, and anthropology. We provide an overview of the literature on the emergence, participant profiles, mobilizing frames and organizational structures of the new climate movement. The following section catalogues strategies and tactics, distinguishing between legal and illegal strategies. The third focus is on the consequences of the climate movement participants, discourses, parties, and policies. We sketch a research agenda that integrates the study of the new climate movement with mainstream comparative politics with a focus on parties and voters, with more humanities-focused research on epistemologies of knowledge production and with the literature on democratic experimentation and innovation.
... In climate governance, claims are made for climate justice, both among scholars [15,16,23,192] and social movements [128,129,193,194]. The concept emerged from the merging of the environmental movement and the human rights and social justice movement [16,128,194]. ...
... There are many IGs and networks but no policy entrepreneurs for climate justice and ecological democracy. Many new organizations and networks in the climate justice area, e.g., FFF and XR, but also established ones such as Greenpeace, demand strong and urgent action from politicians, business leaders, and other decision-makers with activistic methods, but rarely offer technical-legal elaborate solutions to the problem [128,129,193,222]. Failing to present viable solutions to the problem, they fall short of institutionalization and neoliberal responsibilitization [299]. ...
The concept of policy entrepreneurs has gained increasing attention in studies of policy change, including climate policy and governance. It foregrounds the role of agency in understanding policy change. However, agency of policy entrepreneurs in the policy process is political and conceals the power that shapes how public problems and policies are framed and defined. Thus, policy entrepreneurs should be confronted with the challenge of generating legitimacy, accountability, and justice in their actions and the implementation of their targeted policy change. Drawing on political–philosophical theories of liberal and deliberative democracy as well as environmental and ecological democracy this paper outlines a conceptual framework for critical analytical as well as normative research on strategies and impacts of policy entrepreneurs on democratic governance, primarily in climate policy but also more generally. Empirical research on the strategies and impacts of policy entrepreneurs in recent policymaking on climate change mitigation in the EU and Sweden identifies several deficits related to the democratic principles of legitimacy, accountability, and justice. It is found that policy entrepreneurs from different social spheres use cultural–institutional entrepreneurship to influence beliefs and perceptions on problems and policies. In addition, it is found that public sector policy entrepreneurs use structural entrepreneurship on ideological grounds to change existing power relations in climate governance. In all, the paper brings ideology and politics into research on policy entrepreneurs. It is suggested that not only the strategies used, but also the ideologies of the actors that use them, are decisive for the impacts of policy entrepreneurs, and thus, whether their advocacy will adhere to democratic norms and facilitate or hamper a just transition to climate neutrality and sustainability. The paper ends with proposals on how policy entrepreneurs can act more democratically, how to deal with populist policy entrepreneurs wanting to erode democracy, and conditions for climate justice movements to take responsibility and act in a more entrepreneurial way.
... In climate governance, claims are made for climate justice, both among scholars (Shepard & Corbin-Mark, 2009;Gardiner, 2011;Schlosberg & Collins, 2014;Newell et al., 2021) and social movements (Cassegård & Thörn, 2017;de Moor et al., 2020;Buzogány & Scherhaufer, 2022;Borkhart, 2023). The concept emerged from the merging of the environmental movement and the human rights and social justice movement (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014;Cassegård & Thörn, 2017;Borkhart, 2023). ...
... Many new organizations and networks in the climate justice area, e.g. FFF and XR, raise the problem of climate change as an emergency and demand strong action from politicians and other decision-makers, but rarely offer technically-legally elaborate solutions to the problem (Berglund & Schmidt, 2020;de Moor et al., 2020;Buzogány & Scherhaufer, 2022). Since they fall short of institutionalization (a process of professionalization and formalization, completed when a movement has become a part of society's organizational structure) and neoliberal responsibilitization (a development involving an increasing emphasis on market mechanisms) (cf. ...
Sweden has long been hailed as a role model in climate policy. But the new right-wing government supported by a far-right populist party is undertaking a paradigm shift in Swedish climate policy and governance. This paper critically analyses this paradigm shift and its impacts on legitimacy, accountability and justice. These are democratic norms important in the analysis of a just transition to climate neutrality. Severe democratic deficits of the policy process and the policies proposed and adopted are identified, suggesting ‘nasty politics’ characterised by populist, divisive, and contentious rhetoric that entrenches polarization and us/them narratives. Climate scientists and the climate justice movement are discriminated in the policy process, the latter also being accused of terrorism and seen as a threat to democracy by the government. The deficits are partly explained by the neo-corporatist political system of Sweden and the dominance of the (neo)liberal discourse of ecological modernization in Swedish environmental policy, but primarily with the ongoing process of autocratization driven by anti-democratic far-right populist parties throughout Europe. The anti-democratic climate policy reforms in Sweden are foreboding an unwelcome development in the EU given the boost of far-right populist parties in the upcoming elections to the European Parliament in June 2024.
... In climate governance, claims are made for climate justice, both among scholars (Shepard & Corbin-Mark, 2009;Gardiner, 2011;Schlosberg & Collins, 2014;Newell et al., 2021) and social movements (Cassegård & Thörn, 2017;de Moor et al., 2020;Buzogány & Scherhaufer, 2022;Borkhart, 2023). The concept emerged from the merging of the environmental movement and the human rights and social justice movement (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014;Cassegård & Thörn, 2017;Borkhart, 2023). ...
... Many new organizations and networks in the climate justice area, e.g. FFF and XR, raise the problem of climate change as an emergency and demand strong action from politicians and other decision-makers, but rarely offer technically-legally elaborate solutions to the problem (Berglund & Schmidt, 2020;de Moor et al., 2020;Buzogány & Scherhaufer, 2022). Since they fall short of institutionalization (a process of professionalization and formalization, completed when a movement has become a part of society's organizational structure) and neoliberal responsibilitization (a development involving an increasing emphasis on market mechanisms) (cf. ...
Sweden has long been hailed as a role model in climate policy. But the new right-wing government supported by a far-right populist party is undertaking a paradigm shift in Swedish climate policy and governance. This paper critically analyses this paradigm shift from perspectives of legitimacy, accountability and justice. These are democratic norms important in the analysis of a just transition to climate neutrality. Severe democratic deficits of the policy process and the policies proposed and adopted are identified. The deficits are explained by the neo-corporatist political system of Sweden, the dominance of the (neo)liberal discourse of ecological modernization in Swedish environmental policy, and an ongoing process of autocratization driven by anti-democratic far-right populist parties throughout Europe. The paper ends by suggesting how climate policy and governance can be democratized and re-politicized, that also give room for climate justice advocates to take part in policy processes.
... Although studies primarily focus on how race, class, and gender inform climate justice framing, more recent research analyzes bridging or linking similar frames from distinct movements (Benford and Snow 2000). For example, the "Just Transition" frame (Buzogány and Scherhaufer 2022) connects the climate and labor movements by suggesting that transitioning away from the fossil-fuel economy also must be "just," for example, by bringing better and cleaner jobs. However, social scientific studies of queer climate justice-focusing specifically on how LGBTQ+ and climate movements discursively come together-are relatively underdeveloped. ...
Climate justice movements and scholars have established that marginalized communities, including people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, and the Global South, are most vulnerable to climate change. Recently, scholars also have established that the climate crisis places LGBTQ+ communities in precarious positions. Yet, we know little about how LGBTQ+ activists practice climate justice and build political bridges between LGBTQ+ and climate justice movements. By analyzing queer climate activism, I find that bridging the US climate and LGBTQ+ movements share three elements: (1) vulnerability and intersectional analysis, (2) survival and resilience, and (3) play. In bridging the movements, activists “queer” climate justice by spatially shifting on what grounds or issues to fight, prefiguring worlds not yet in existence on a larger scale, and reimagining how to perform climate activism.
... Dabei dominierte die Spannung zwischen der öffentlich wahrgenommenen Dringlichkeit des Klima-Themas einerseits und der Erschöpfung der Massenproteste andererseits. Bereits im Winter 2019 hatte Extinction Rebellion (XR) kurze Zeit eine in Rhetorik und Aktionsform konfrontativere Position neben Fridays for Future besetzt (Buzogány und Scherhaufer 2022;Sauerborn 2022). Extinction Rebellion gelang es aber nicht, in Deutschland in gleicher Weise wie in anderen Ländern Fuß zu fassen. ...
Conflicts about climate action have persisted in Germany despite other crises. Research on this conflict is still emerging and requires constant updates as the situation continues to evolve. Currently, there is a strong focus on the climate movement and individual protest groups. This paper shifts the analytical approach by applying conflict theory to the quarrels over climate action since the rise of Fridays for Future. Analyzing a rich corpus of documents, the paper provides three key contributions: First, it reconstructs the conflict dynamics over time across multiple groups, linking conflict developments to mechanisms of escalation and de-escalation (e.g., organization and exhaustion of solidarity, alliances, and resources). Second, the paper highlights counterescalation dynamics with crucial impact on conflict development. Finally, accounting for counter- and de-escalation dynamics helps to explain the strategic shifts of groups such as Fridays for Future and the Last Generation. Overall, this paper advocates for a broader approach to the struggles about climate action that is grounded in conflict theory. It explores its potential using an extensive document review and outlines new directions for future research. Notably, conflict theory also provides a framework that can bridge research on protests and climate obstruction.
Zusammenfassung
Der Konflikt um die politische Reaktion auf den Klimawandel ist trotz weiterer Krisen präsent geblieben. Da sich das Konfliktgeschehen weiterentwickelt, bedarf die Forschung ständiger Aktualisierungen. Zugleich fokussiert sie sich zurzeit stark auf die Bewegungsseite, oft auf einzelne Protestgruppen. In diesem Artikel wird demgegenüber eine konflikttheoretische Perspektive vorgeschlagen, die die Analyse kategorial ausweitet. Dadurch werden drei maßgebliche Beiträge geleistet: Erstens wird die Entwicklungsdynamik des Konflikts im Zeitverlauf über mehrere Gruppen hinweg rekonstruiert und auf Mechanismen der Eskalation und De-Eskalation zurückgeführt (Organisation und Exhaustion von Solidarität, Allianzen, Ressourcen). Zweitens zeigt der Beitrag eine konflikttheoretisch erwartbare Gegeneskalation auf, die für den Konfliktverlauf entscheidend ist. Vor dem Hintergrund von (Gegen‑)Eskalation und De-Eskalation werden drittens Verhältnis und Strategiewechsel von Gruppierungen wie Fridays for Future und Letzter Generation diskutiert. Insgesamt plädiert der explorative Beitrag für eine breitere Analyse der Konfliktkonstellationen und -dynamiken, exploriert die Entwicklung von 2018 bis zum Jahreswechsel 2023/2024 anhand einer umfänglichen Dokumentensammlung und zeigt neue Forschungsrichtungen auf. Die Konflikttheorie bietet dabei einen Rahmen, der mehrere Ebenen einbezieht und zudem die Forschung zu Protesten und climate obstruction ins Gespräch bringen kann.
... Due to the rapid growth of the FFF movement and the accompanying Friday protests in many European cities, the movement has increasingly become the subject of protest and movement research. In recent years, many qualitative and quantitative research projects have been initiated, resulting in a large number of publications (see, e.g., Wahlström et al. 2019;Sommer et al. 2019;De Moor et al. 2020;Bohl and Daniel 2020;Haunss and Sommer 2020;Bohl et al. 2021;De Moor et al. 2021;Buzogány and Scherhaufer 2022;Noth and Tonzer 2022;Zamponi et al. 2022;Svensson and Wahlström 2023). Anthony Mugeere, Anna Barford, and Paul Magimbi (2021, 360f.) ...
Since 2019, several climate justice movements have emerged in Uganda: Fridays for Future Uganda (FFF Uganda), the Rise Up Movement (Rise Up) and Extinction Rebellion Uganda (XR Uganda). They are fighting the 1.5 degrees target agreed on in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and climate justice. Many young people have joined the movements or responded to calls to take part in mass protests. Despite the movements that have emerged and the protests that are taking place, many Ugandan activists feel that they are not being heard. This article focuses on framing analysis in relation to the identification of causes for the climate crisis, the naming of culprits, the perspectives on solutions, the attribution of responsibility, and the motives for activist commitment.
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... In recent years, direct inaction conflicts have turned genuinely political, with climate movements either demanding more radical actions from established political actors or a disempowerment of the latter in favour of more bottom-up, direct democracy. Existing political elites (and their economic and societal allies) have resisted such demands (Buzogány & Scherhaufer, 2022). Such conflicts usually take place at the national level (addressing national governments) but have a genuinely transnational dimension because of (a) global interlinkages between local climate activists, (b) several demands addressing international actors (like the UN or the EU), and (c) a clear conceptualisation of climate change as a borderless threat (Fisher & Nasrin, 2021). ...
The climate-conflict nexus has attracted significant academic and policy interest, but such discussions are often based on a narrow conception of the phenomenon. This article proposes a broader understanding of climate conflicts, which can be related to (1) the direct impacts of climate inaction (e.g., activism for ambitious climate change mitigation), (2) the direct impacts of climate action (e.g., resistance against fossil fuel subsidy cuts), (3) the indirect impacts of climate inaction (e.g., communal tensions over water in vulnerable locations), and (4) the indirect impacts of climate action (e.g., opposition against mining for renewable energies). After assessing existing evidence on these four types of climate conflicts, I outline the benefits of such a broader understanding: It reveals that climate conflicts are widespread and inevitable, including in the Global North. Such a rethinking enables an integrative analysis of the manifold teleconnections and trade-offs in the climate-conflict nexus, hence highlighting the relevance of conflict sensitivity in climate policy and environmental governance. Finally, this broader understanding of climate conflicts enables productive exchanges across different streams of research, including securitisation, political ecology, and decolonial approaches.
... Recent studies have delved into the profiles (de Moor et al., 2021;Neas et al., 2022), opinions (Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022;Piispa and Kiilakoski, 2022), and media representations (Santos et al., 2023) of young climate activists. Yet, the understanding of what young people deem politically appropriate or preferable in addressing climate change remains scant. ...
Since 2018, there has been a notable increase in recognition of the global youth climate movement. Young activists have come into the spotlight through extensive street demonstrations, school occupations, and engagement in other collective actions with the purpose of promoting alternative visions of the future. Multiple scholars have delved into activists’ profiles, their media representations, and other topics. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of research exploring their political imaginaries. This article aims to contribute to understanding how young activists in Portugal assess the current social and political landscape and construct visions of political futures. After analyzing online texts from four climate groups, we identified four themes that offer insights into the political imaginaries of these groups. The four groups discursively negotiate political imaginaries that correspond to a wide spectrum of perspectives, ranging from collective resistance against the neoliberal capitalist system and proposals of decentralized democracy to strategies based on individual ethics and the prevalent discourses of sustainable development and ecological modernization. The plurality of political imaginaries reflects the diversity of sociopolitical stances within youth-led climate movements in Portugal and their commitment to exploring alternative ways of governing climate change.
... Other studies have shown that new climate activists tend to rely on urgency frames to consolidate and motivate collective action (de Moor et al. 2020). The use of these frames represents a shift in the symbolic construction of climate/ecological action: whereas traditional climate movements combined urgency and optimism, the new climate movement tends to emphasize catastrophe and emergency (Doherty et al. 2020;Buzogány and Scherhaufer 2022). This narrative of urgency brings a 'terrestrial' perspective back in (Knops 2021): the climate crisis is not just the crisis of the modern development model, which can be viewed in a detached way. ...
With the emergence of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, youth climate activism has attracted increasing attention. Climate strikes are part of a long trajectory of mobilizations for climate justice, rooted in global justice and environmental struggles. Although research on social movements has analyzed differences and continuities within these, there have been few systematic comparisons between youth climate strikes and ‘traditional’ climate justice marches. Our paper contributes to fill this gap. We focus on the framing of climate change in two different protest actions that took place in Milan, Italy, during the Pre-COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2021: a climate strike by Fridays for Future, and a ‘traditional’ climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors. Relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, we discuss differences, similarities, and spaces for convergence among activists in these different fora, focusing on the framing of climate change, and on the meanings attached to ‘system change’.
... Climate activists have adopted di erent repertoires of contention, with school strikes and demonstrations emerging as the main vector of mobilisation . Extensive analyses have been conducted on various aspects of this protest, including its social composition (della Porta and Portos, 2021;Lorenzini, Monsch and Rosset, 2021) and its frames (Svensson and Wahlström, 2021;Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022). However, despite a few exceptions (Zamponi et al., 2022;Alexandre et al., 2021) one aspect that remains little explored is the interaction between the collective dimensions of protest and the socioecological practices of protesters. ...
Since its emergence in 2018, following the failure of transnational climate governance, the climate campaign has redirected its attention towards national governments, highlighting the necessity for state intervention to combat global warming. This shift prompts scrutiny of the socio-ecological practices adopted by climate activists in their everyday lives (e.g., dietary changes, waste reduction, and low-emission transportation). This study aims to explore whether and under what conditions climate activists adopt these practices, examining potential di erences among activist segments and specific practices they prioritise. The paper draws on dispositional sociology and social movement studies. In particular, it builds on the radical habitus theory according to which prolonged participation in a movement generates dispositions that influence areas other than activism, such as private life and individual choices. Specifically, it is hypothesised that protest-related dispositions, originating from organisational membership and protest participation, influence climate activists' adoption of social-ecological practices. In methodological terms, the study is based on two protest surveys that were conducted during climate mobilisations in Italy (N=1160) and France (N=932) between 2021 and 2023. A number of socio-ecological practices including boycotting products, reducing purchases, buying secondhand products, giving up flying, changing diet and upcycling objects were included in the study. The results show that the adoption of these socio-ecological practices is driven by dispositions that emerge precisely in the process of militant socialisation and that di erence between a diverse degree of radical habitus emerge in the two cases, Italy and France.
... They identified particular changes, including a return to more a state-centric understanding of climate politics, less focus on global climate justice frames, relatively a-political stances and a focus on science (De Moor et al., 2021;Haunss et al., 2023). So far, only few studies have focused on the understanding and integration of climate science in NCMs discourse (Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022;Soßdorf and Burgi, 2022;Rödder and Pavenstädt, 2023;Thierry, 2023). NCMs would tend towards strengthening the (moral) authority of science, yet they also make selective use of science, and re-frame scientific visions through simplification, dramatization, and emotional or moral appeals. ...
How we have come to think about climate futures has predominantly been shaped by science- and expert-driven assessments. As research turns to the role of future visions as a driver of social change and overcoming political gridlock, political struggles are understood as conflicts over making (alternative) desirable futures socially performative. The recent advent of the new climate movements (NCMs) has given rise to the assumption that they could contribute to a re-politicization of climate politics by introducing alternative future visions. Their names and slogans articulate future expectations, such as futures “worth studying for” (Fridays for Future) or averting extinction (Extinction Rebellion). Yet, research on the politicizing qualities of the NCMs is inconclusive. I use a new framework for examining (de-)politicization dynamics to study public communication of German factions of both movements from 2019 to 2022. The results underscore climate movements’ strong affiliation to science from their inception, yet over time, increasing attempts to adhere to principles of climate justice. However, climate movements still struggle to re-politicize climate futures beyond dominant positive visions of modernization and negative visions of collapse. I argue that this bounded politicization is indicative of the broader discursive dynamics that have weakened the ability to formulate alternative visions and discuss to what extent the centrality of scientific imaginative logics and understandings of the science–policy interface act to inhibit the articulation of alternative visions.
... These movements aim to raise awareness of climate change, demand action from governments, and promote sustainable development (Barnett & Campbell, 2010). For example, the Fridays for Future movement and the Extinction Rebellion movement are examples of new political movements that are working to address climate change outside of the Pacific region (Buzogány, 2022). Many political impacts around the world can be traced back to climate change. ...
... es in deren Kontext zur Entstehung einer gegen-hegemonialen Ideologie gekommen ist.Seit ihrer Entstehung 2018 stößt FfF auf ein breites wissenschaftliches Interesse. International angelegte Studien beschäftigen sich mit der Motivation (deMoor et al. 2021) und den handlungsleitenden Werten(Marquardt 2020) der Bewegung oder setzen sich mit den Forderungen(Ojala 2021), Strategien (della Porta und Portos 2021) und Visionen(Buzogány und Scherhaufer 2022) auseinander. Schließlich stehen die Rezeption von FfF (von Zabern und Tulloch 2021), gesellschaftliche Reaktionen(Kern und Opitz 2021) und politische Auswirkungen(Sloam et al. 2022) im Fokus weiterer Forschungsarbeiten. ...
... 2019), kehadiran sosok ini berpengaruh pada perkembangan gerakan FFF di Jerman (Rueter 2019). FFF yang dikembangkan di Hamburg memunculkan ratusan lokal grup yang dibangun, dengan saling berjejaring, dan berkomunikasi melalui media sosial (Buzogány dan Scherhaufer 2022). Dengan memanfaatkan relasi akar rumput di media sosial, relasi formal FFF hanya dibentuk melalui penamaan kawasan sebagai penanda identitas pengelola grup aktivisme ini berada. ...
Aksi mogok sekolah Greta Thunberg seorang diri di depan kantor parlemen Swedia pada 2018 dikenal dengan “mogok sekolah untuk iklim” berubah menjadi kesadaran baru di kalangan pemuda, remaja, dan anak-anak di banyak negara. Akibat pengaruh media yang semakin masif memberitakan dinamika aksi mogok tersebut, anak-anak hingga remaja di seluruh dunia pun ikut bersolidaritas dalam aksi mogok sekolah Fridays for Future. Fridays for Future hadir sebagai gerakan lingkungan yang secara rutin mengkritik kebijakan pemerintah yang mengabaikan agenda pengurangan emisi karbon. Berdasarkan penelitian etnografi di Kota Freiburg, Jerman Selatan, artikel ini menceritakan pengorganisasian dan partisipasi gerakan Fridays for Future. Praktik aktivisme ini tidak bisa dilepaskan dari pilihan anak-anak muda mengikuti tren Fridays for Future dan menjadi bagian dari rangkaian sejarah dinamika aktivisme lingkungan yang berlangsung di Kota Freiburg sejak 1968. Atas aktivisme ini, saya mengajukan pertanyaan: mengapa Fridays for Future mampu membentuk keterlibatan sosial sebagian anak muda di kota Freiburg? Artikel ini juga melihat latar belakang budaya dan impian anak muda ketika mereka terlibat dalam aktivisme lingkungan. Saya menerapkan apa yang disebut Goffman (1974) sebagai 'pembingkaian', di mana wacana, narasi, dan praktik-praktik budaya masyarakat sering kali terlihat jelas dalam satu bingkai relasi tertentu, namun terdapat aktivitas yang tidak akan terlihat dari terbatasnya bingkai tersebut. Pada artikel ini, saya berargumen bahwa proses aktivisme lingkungan di Freiburg merupakan praktik ekspresi dari dilema sebagian anak muda yang menumbuhkan ruang-ruang sosial baru di tengah stagnansi aksi yang terbentuk sebagai gerakan moral.
... With the exception of the frame by The Guardian, the major mass media outlets in the UK, surprisingly, do not seem to frame the incidents of food -throwing at the iconic paintings through the lens of climate change protest per se. This finding is novel, especially in light of the cornucopia of research studies on climate change activism (Buzogány & Scherhaufer, 2022;Chen et al., 2022b;Kapranov, 2022). ...
Kapranov,O.(2023).Throwing Soup at Van Gogh: The Framing of Art in Climate Change Activism by British Mass Media. Discourses on Culture,19(1) 175-200. https://doi.org/10.2478/doc-2023-0008
Throwing food at famous paintings (e.g., a can of soup thrown at
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers) represents a rather novel form of climate change protest. The study, which is further presented in the article, seeks to unpack the way British mass media cover the food‑throwing incidents that take place in the context of climate change activism. To that end, a corpus of texts was collected on the official websites of the leading British mass media
outlets that describe the instances of throwing food at the world‑known canvases by climate change activists. The corpus was analysed qualitatively in line with the theoretical premises of i) intermedial ecocriticism proposed by Bruhn (2020a, 2020b) and ii) framing methodology developed by Entman
(2007). The results of the corpus analysis indicated that British mass media frame the famous paintings involved in the climate change protest incidents by foregrounding the monetary value of the paintings and the extent of damage done to them concurrently with de‑emphasising the climate change
component. The findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article.
... ▹ FFF and XR in Germany on Twitter (Buzogány and Scherhaufer 2022) ▹ FFF in Barcelona on Twitter (Martí et al. 2020) ▹ FFF in Rome (Belotti et al. 2022 ...
Given that novel approaches to climate change communication, as the value-based approach, remain widely understudied (Fage-Butler, 2022), we propose to link together environmental psychology findings and a communication research methodology. Specifically, we investigate how environmental values can play an important role in defining obstacles to pro-environmental behavior. The research is based on a corpus of 514 images and 165 videos from Instagram and TikTok posts published by the Belgian and French Youth for Climate movements since 2021. By conducting a multimodal content analysis, the research focuses on different elements in Youth for Climate’s messages: (1) the actions proposed to mitigate the effects of climate change, (2) the actors given responsibility for climate change and for climate action, (3) the listed barriers and obstacles to climate change engagement, and (4) the values emerging in the posts linked to those barriers and obstacles. While the first three categories are inductively extracted from the social media posts, the categories of values are adapted from environmental psychology and include biospheric, altruistic, egoistic, and hedonic values (Bouman et al., 2018). As argued by previous research in environmental psychology from survey data, “widespread climate action seems more likely when biospheric values are endorsed strongly throughout society” (Bouman et al., 2021: 103). In this work, we test this hypothesis on social media data and suggest that the analysis of the relationships between actions, actors, and values will provide a deeper understanding of barriers to climate action presented in social media posts. More precisely, we propose a typology of barriers to climate change mitigation in relation to environmental values that appear in the social media posts. The analysis grid can be further replicated by other research on environmental communication.
References
Fage-Butler, A. (2022). A values-based approach to knowledge in the public’s representations of climate change on social media. Frontiers in Communication, 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.978670
Bouman, T., Steg, L., & Kiers, H. A. L. (2018). Measuring values in environmental research: A test of an environmental Portrait Value Questionnaire. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(APR). Scopus. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00564
Bouman, T., Van der Werff, E., Perlaviciute, G., & Steg, L. (2021). Environmental values and identities at the personal and group level. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 42, 47–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.02.022
... largest increase in volunteers in Germany between 2014 and 2019 can be seen in the areas of environment, nature conservation or animal welfare(Kausmann, Hagen 2022) [53]. The Global Earth Strike on 20 September 2019, organised by Fridays for Future Germany, attracted over a million people in Germany(Buzogány, Scherhaufer 2022) [54]. Paradoxically, the German energy transition mobilises civic engagement in two opposite directions. ...
Analysis of the PESTEL factors impacting Energy Citizenship in Germany in 2023.
... S ince Greta Thunberg's first school strike for the climate in August 2018, the global social movement 'Fridays for Future' has emerged in which Thunberg has been identified as a leading protagonist (Von Zabern and Tulloch, 2021). In Germany, some of the world's largest and most widespread 'Fridays for Future' protests took place, setting climate change on the political agenda and giving climate protection a special significance in society and political discourse in recent years (Buzogány and Scherhaufer, 2022). Despite Germany being still one of the largest CO 2 emitters in Europe, the then-governing German conservative party still justified coal production for economic reasons. ...
Narratives and stories are important communication tools and as such essential subjects of social geography. This paper analyses the retelling of Greta Thunberg’s sailing trip across the Atlantic to the Climate Action Summit in New York in 2019 in leading German newspapers and magazines and how her intentions are transformed through this reporting into different narratives. The research mainly focuses on examining the influence of space and place, as geographical research has revealed that spatial determinants are crucial in risk communication and knowledge generation on climate change but have yet to be studied considering stories. The paper, therefore, extends the story-based approach from communication sciences by geographical research on the role of space and place in action-based stories. Therefore, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is used to decode the spatial environment in narratives as an active element that shapes the narrative, and the way characters can (inter)act within these settings. The paper further develops the NPF framework through a geographical lens by focusing particularly on the selection options of spaces for social interactions and affective bonds. Thus, it becomes evident how spatial contexts and environments shape the interactions between individuals and crucially influence the types of narratives that emerge.
Do local environmental conflicts have a political dimension? Can the fight for social space be an opportunity for ecological activists to enter the “historical level” and question the fundamental principles of the existing political and economic order? This article aims to answer these questions and—based on the statements of environmental activists obtained during a sociological intervention—reconstruct the threats and socioinstitutional obstacles to sustainable development. It also aims to indicate sets of public actors that can be described—from the perspective of environmental activists—as opponents of the ecological movement in Poland. In this sense, the article attempts to determine what is at stake in the conflicts in which the ecological movement is engaged under the conditions of the crisis of democracy. It also asks about the relationship between local environmental conflicts and the dominant logic of the official state policy.
Le generazioni più giovani sono oggi caratterizzate da forme di engagement particolarmente fluide: le questioni ambientali e la lotta contro forme di razzismo di carattere strutturale sono due dei temi in grado, più di altri, di mobilitarle. Il paper, a partire dai risultati di un questionario somministrato agli studenti delle scuole secondarie sul territorio italiano, che ha portato alla raccolta di 12.658 risposte, si propone di indagare la dimensione della vicinanza ad un movimento ambientalista (Fridays for Future) e ad un movimento volto a contrastare il razzismo (Black Lives Matter) sulla base del background socioeducativo di studenti e studentesse, considerato un possibile predittore di attivismo giovanile. In particolare, il paper si chiede se avere una parti-colare condizione socioeconomica, o aver intrapreso uno specifico percorso educativo, possa condizionare il livello di civic engagement o se, al contrario, l'accesso di massa all'istruzione secondaria abbia offuscato queste possibili differenze. Se le forme di attivismo di studenti e studentesse dipendono dal capitale di cui i giovani sono dotati, quale ruolo hanno le istituzioni educative nell'incoraggiarle o frenarle? Interrogarsi su come la classe sociale e il background educativo-ma anche il genere, l'origine e l'orientamento valoriale-strutturino l'impegno civico individuale risulta fondamentale per indagare la possibile diffusione di tali movimenti tra i più giovani.
The article provides a semiotic interpretation of the Extinction Rebellion movement's (XR) discourse, of its notion of truth, and of the relation between truth and future. First, the article will introduce the XR movement, elucidating its structure and fundamental principles. Then, it will conduct a semiotic analysis centered on the first principle of XR, "tell the truth". In the third section we examine how narratives on climate change narrow future possibilities toward survival. The primary objective is to show how truth, the future, and ecology are correlated in XR's discourse and activism.
The discourse on environmental challenges has evolved significantly in recent years, with climate change emerging as a central global concern. This transformation has been heavily influenced by the last wave of youth-led social movements, notably the Fridays for Future movement, who have mobilized young people at a global scale contributing at a shift in public discourse on the topic of climate action. However, despite the impact of the newly emerged youth-led movements it is still rather unclear if and where has youth gained recognition as a group with special interests within environmental policy and governance. In this study we report on a research were we investigated the positioning of youth in contemporary environmental governance, and propose a theoretical perspective to understand how the subject category of “youth” is constructed in public discourse and its implications for political recognition. We study the progressive emergence of Greta Thunberg as a voice for a generation of youth climate activists and undertake a document analysis of selected material generated in relation to selected international political events. By addressing questions of recognition, discourse structure, and legitimacy, this research aims to shed light on the nuanced dynamics shaping the role of youth in environmental policy and governance.
Research has shown a great distrust among youths toward political representatives, who they demand should “listen to the science.” However, less research has been done on youths’ own trust in science. This study explores and explains how youths who are environmentally active in two different environmental youth organizations relate to science in social media, whether they trust science, and how youths’ relation to science creates a discursive context in which they may develop their identity. The study uses the approach of discourse analysis to examine social media content published on Facebook by Fridays for Future Sweden and Fältbiologerna (the Swedish Field Biologists). The study shows (i) how subject positions for scientists and youth are created in relation to one another based on different expressions of youths’ trust in science and (ii) how environmental youth organizations, by identifying with science, make youths important actors in the discourse on climate change.
The concept of policy entrepreneurs has gained increasing attention in studies of climate policy and governance since it foregrounds the role of agency in understanding policy change. However, agency of policy entrepreneurs in the policy process is largely political and conceals the power that shapes how public problems and policies are framed and defined. Thus, policy entrepreneurs should be confronted with the challenge of generating legitimacy, accountability and justice of their actions and the implementation of their targeted policy change. Drawing on political-philosophical theories of liberal and deliberative democracy this paper outlines a conceptual framework for critical analytical as well as normative research on strategies and impacts of policy entrepreneurs. Empirical research on the strategies and impacts of policy entrepreneurs in recent policymaking on climate policy and governance in the EU and Sweden identifies several democratic deficits. In all, the paper brings ideology and politics into research on policy entrepreneurs. It is suggested that not only the strategies used, but also the ideologies of actors that use them, is the causal mechanism that links the policy entrepreneurs to the outcomes, and thus if their advocacy will facilitate or hamper a just transition to climate neutrality and sustainability.
The urgency, uncertainty and unevenness of the Anthropocene has foregrounded the spatial and temporal multiplicity of co-production between science and society. In this article, we draw together work in geography, science and technology studies and cognate disciplines concerned with ‘co-producing’ knowledge for environmental governance, and with the ‘co-production’ of science and politics. Yet these existing studies and approaches have tended to focus on discrete moments of co-production within bounded time-spaces. Building on work associated with ecologies of participation and geographies of science, we introduce the notion of ‘ecologies of co-production’ as a way to more faithfully attend to multiple co-existing co-productions and the interrelations between them. We define this as diverse interrelating practices and spaces of co-production which intermingle and are co-produced with(in) wider systems and political cultures in which they are situated. We set out how this opens up new ways of thinking about and attending to the spaces and interrelations, diversities and exclusions, histories and constitutions, and responsibilities and affects of co-productions between science and society in the Anthropocene. We suggest that this approach can make a difference in how we do co-production, how we analyse co-production and how we live, act and figure in an Anthropocene world.
his paper brings the narratives of the environmental activist groups Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Fridays for Future into conversation with Critical Anthropocene Theory and Indigenous environmentalism to interrogate pathways for and limits of environmental political action under planetary conditions marked by nonhuman shaping power. Critical Anthropocene Theory, the paper argues, can problematise the simplistic positivism and managerialism of the new ‘extinction activism’. However, the conversation with Indigenous environmental practices, which flexibly manage tensions within human-nonhuman relations and centre radical social impact, reveals the political limitations of both extinction activism and critical Anthropocene thinking. The paper distinguishes the logic of fast change within existing socio-political parameters, which drives extinction activism, from Critical Anthropocene Theory's focus on ontological change as a precondition for a non-exploitative environmental politics, which deprioritises activist practice. Different from both, the paper argues that Indigenous environmental activism is marked by a yet different pragmatic approach, where both modern and non-modern political means are mobilised towards radical change. Indigenous environmentalism is marked by the dynamic co-evolution of cosmology and politics and moves flexibly between modern/nonmodern boundaries, highlighting new pathways for political action in the relational Anthropocene.
This paper proposes the novel concept of ‘temporal activist repertoires’ (TAR) defined as the intentional and meaningful selection and use of temporal elements, such as time frame, timing, tempo, duration, and temporality in collective action’s tactics and frames. Collectives thereby draw on culturally resonant temporal references to interweave the symbolic and strategic choices in making their demands, organising political action and/or sustaining commitment to the political cause. To answer the question of how social movements use TAR and how these are positioned alongside other repertoires of contention, the paper analyses: the global Fridays for the Future and 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, and the Austrian ‘It’s Thursday Again!’. The paper shows that the innovative potential of TAR is linked to the use of technologically advanced media tools for the purposes of coordination, pressure, recruitment, mobilisation and visibility, as well as for the adaptations that these movements require, which include strategies to build on past traditions and/or to connect with currently existing allied movements.
Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement are among the new climate movements that have come into the public spotlight since 2019. While their successes in agenda-setting are undisputed, conclusions vary on whether and how this re-politicizes climate discourses. This article presents a new framework to analyze the dynamics of (de-)politicization along the dimensions of vision, agency and process. Based on a narrative analysis, we compare US movement and media documents from 2019 and identify five key narratives, namely, ‘Evidence First,’ ‘Intergenerational Divide,’ ‘Climate Justice & Intersectionality,’ ‘System Change’ and ‘Political Fight.’ While all movements use politicizing notions, we find that tensions between the dimensions inhibit the articulation of alternative visions of the future. This overall depoliticizing tendency appears to be rooted in process understandings that originate in dominant discursive framings of climate change and of science–policy interfaces – a finding that is informative for climate discourses in general.
Im Zentrum des Beitrages von Aline Steger „Transformative Lernprozesse im Hochschulkontext – Erstsemesterakademie BaWü zukunftsfähig als
transformatives Lernsetting?“ stehen Reflexionen bezüglich der Initiierung
bzw. der didaktischen Gestaltung von Lernsettings, um das Potenzial informeller Lernsettings für transformatives Lernen zu heben. Hier sind also
individuelle Umbrüche im Mittelpunkt der Erkenntnis. Ihre Überlegungen
entfaltet sie unter der Bezugnahme auf von Studierenden initiierte Veranstaltungen zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung und fragt so nach deren Bildungs- und
Lernpotenzial für die sozial-ökologische Transformation.
Open Access: https://shop.budrich.de/produkt/bildung-fuer-eine-nachhaltige-entwicklung-im-umbruch/
Esta investigación analiza el tratamiento informativo que los diarios El País, La Vanguardia, ABC, elDiario.es, Público y El Confidencial realizan de Extinction Rebellion (XR), un colectivo que lleva a cabo acciones no violentas con la intención de presionar a los gobiernos para que tomen medidas dirigidas a disminuir los efectos de la crisis ecológica. Mediante una metodología mixta, se estudian titulares y párrafos que aluden a XR desde su creación en 2018 hasta junio de 2022, a través de cuatro indicadores concretos: desobediencia civil y/o no violenta, medidas de seguridad adoptadas, participación ciudadana y estereotipos, prejuicios sociales o palabras peyorativas. Los resultados revelan que aproximadamente el 10% de las publicaciones recurren a estereotipos o prejuicios, más del 50% de las informaciones hacen referencia a la desobediencia civil, y más del 20% de las noticias relacionan las medidas de seguridad con la participación ciudadana.
Klimakonferenzen sind seit jeher ein zentraler Mobilisierungspunkt für die Klimabewegung und auch die Geschichte von Fridays for Future (FfF), die vor allem durch nationale Proteste bekannt geworden sind, ist eng mit der Conference of the Parties (COP) verzahnt. Der vorliegende Feldbericht zeichnet auf Basis einer globalen Event-Ethnographie auf der COP26 die spezifische Rolle von FfF im Kontext der Breite der Klimabewegung nach. Es zeigt sich, dass FfF medienwirksame und symbolträchtige Aktionsformen innerhalb und außerhalb der Konferenzhallen nutzt und damit versucht, marginalisierte Akteur:innen nach vorne zu stellen. Zwar vermieden die Aktivist:innen die Teilnahme an offiziellen Events wie Panels, dennoch distanzierte sich die Bewegung nicht vollends von der internationalen Klimapolitik. Kritik richtet sich insbesondere gegenüber empfundenen leeren Versprechungen und Greenwashing. Medienlogik und die Organisation der Konferenz, aber auch die eigene Positionierung stellen indes Hindernisse für FfF dar, eine kommunikative Umformung hin zu einem Klimagerechtigkeits-Narrativ vollends zu vollziehen. Es zeigen sich allgemeine Dilemmata für Bewegungsakteur:innen, wenn diese versuchen, die Klimakonferenzen für eine Gegen-Öffentlichkeit und die Darstellung eigener Visionen zu nutzen.
Seit den ersten Klima-Schulstreiks im August 2018 in Stockholm hat sich Fridays for Future zu einer weltweit aktiven und vernetzten Massenbewegung entwickelt. Über einen relativ kurzen Zeitraum hat sich die Bewegung dabei nicht nur im Sinne ihrer Organisations-und Kommunikationsformen gewandelt, sondern auch eine immer ausdifferenziertere politische Agenda formuliert. Während der Fokus anfangs auf Apellen zur Überparteilichkeit und Forderungen zur Umsetzung klimawissenschaftlicher Fakten in entsprechende Gesetze lag, wurden im weiteren Verlauf explizit gesellschaftspolitische Ziele wie Klimagerechtigkeit, die Unterstützung marginalisierter Gruppen oder die Kritik an kapitalistischen Wirkungslogiken mit den Forderungen der Bewegung verknüpft. Dieser Beitrag zeichnet die vielschichtige Ent-wicklung dieser Ausdifferenzierung und potenziellen Politisierung von Fridays for Future nach. Beantwortet werden dabei zwei zentrale Fragen: Erstens, inwieweit werden explizit politische Ziele mit den Forderungen von Fridays for Future verknüpft? Zweitens, welche Bedeutung ergibt sich daraus für das Verständnis von Fridays for Future als politische Bewegung?
Objective:
This article aims to understand young Australians' perspectives of climate justice protests as a mechanism for climate change advocacy and action.
Method:
A qualitatively led online survey was conducted with n=511 young Australians (15-24 years). Open-text questions prompted for young people's perceptions of the appeal, accessibility, and effectiveness of climate justice protests in climate change action. A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted to construct themes from the data.
Results:
Participants perceived that protests were an important mechanism for young people to draw attention to the need for climate action. However, they also stated that the clear messages that were sent to governments via protests did not necessarily lead to government action. Young people perceived that there were some structural issues that prevented them from taking part in these types of activities, including living far away from protests, not being accessible for young people with disabilities, and limited support from family members and/or friends to participate.
Conclusions and implications for public health:
Climate justice activities engage young people and give them hope. The public health community has a role to play in supporting access to these activities and championing young people as genuine political actors in addressing the climate crisis.
This research uses a participatory method to develop exploratory future energy scenarios for an ecological intentional community in the north of Scotland, Findhorn Ecovillage. These futures serve several purposes: They can be used as decision support by the community, provide insights about the challenges for further decarbonisation in places where the environmental impact from activities has already been reduced, and insights into the implications for meeting the net zero emissions target for the UK on a community spatial scale. The energy futures for Findhorn Ecovillage were based on discussions at a facilitated online stakeholder workshop. The participants were led through a series of steps to create a 2 × 2 matrix based on democratically selected drivers for change, and in developing a pathway through time for each of the resulting four scenarios. The exploratory futures method adopted also enabled participants to consider interactions with wider society including central and devolved government, the wider economy, and the environment. The findings highlight that while intentional communities are to some degree withdrawn from the mainstream, they are embedded within and depend upon the wider society and economy. This could inhibit or accelerate further decarbonisation and could present a risk of undermining the community’s lifestyle principles.
Mit Fridays for Future haben die Klimaproteste eine zuvor nie erreichte gesellschaftliche Breite und politische Aufmerksamkeit erlangt. Doch wer beteiligt sich eigentlich an dieser sozialen Bewegung, was motiviert die Menschen zu protestieren und welche Einstellungen haben die Beteiligten? Mehrere Umfragen unter Protestierenden aus dem Jahr 2019 bilden den Ausgangspunkt der Analyse von Sebastian Haunss, Moritz Sommer und 26 weiteren Autor*innen dieses Buchs. In zwölf Kapiteln geben sie Einblicke in Entscheidungs- und Mobilisierungsstrukturen lokaler Fridays for Future-Gruppen, analysieren die Reaktionen auf die Proteste in Medien, Politik und Gesellschaft und untersuchen die Einstellungen von Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen zu Themen des Klimawandels. Die einzelnen Kapitel sind so geschrieben, dass sie einem breiteren Publikum einen Zugang zu den ersten Forschungsergebnissen zu Fridays for Future bieten.
Mit Fridays for Future haben die Klimaproteste eine zuvor nie erreichte gesellschaftliche Breite und politische Aufmerksamkeit erlangt. Doch wer beteiligt sich eigentlich an dieser sozialen Bewegung, was motiviert die Menschen zu protestieren und welche Einstellungen haben die Beteiligten? Mehrere Umfragen unter Protestierenden aus dem Jahr 2019 bilden den Ausgangspunkt der Analyse von Sebastian Haunss, Moritz Sommer und 26 weiteren Autor*innen dieses Buchs. In zwölf Kapiteln geben sie Einblicke in Entscheidungs- und Mobilisierungsstrukturen lokaler Fridays for Future-Gruppen, analysieren die Reaktionen auf die Proteste in Medien, Politik und Gesellschaft und untersuchen die Einstellungen von Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen zu Themen des Klimawandels. Die einzelnen Kapitel sind so geschrieben, dass sie einem breiteren Publikum einen Zugang zu den ersten Forschungsergebnissen zu Fridays for Future bieten.
As climate movements are growing around the world, so too is a postapocalyptic form of environmentalism. While apocalyptic environmentalism warns of future catastrophe in case of inaction, its postapocalyptic sibling assumes that catastrophe is already here or unavoidable. Here I explore the overlooked strategic implications of postapocalyptic narratives in climate change movements. I present data from a qualitative study of climate activism in five European cities: Malmö, Hamburg, Antwerp, Bristol, and Manchester, based on ethnographic observations and 46 qualitative interviews. I argue that postapocalyptic narratives are indeed widely present but are, following the logics of appropriateness, habit and affect, kept out of strategizing; in turn, this enables a continued focus on climate mitigation. Debates about the need for strategies to adapt to present or unavoidable climate disruptions tend to be foreclosed, though exceptions like the co-creation of local adaptation measures are discussed.
The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement is a major climate movement on a global scale, calling for systemic change and demanding politicians act on their responsibilities. In this paper, we present and analyze original findings from a case study on the FFF movement in Finland, at a watershed moment for young climate activism. We explore the representations of young people’s environmental citizenship within the framings of the FFF movement, using an environ-mental citizenship framework analysis of the Finnish news media and Twitter discussions. We identified three frames within the media debate on the school strikes: the sustainable lifestyle frame, which focuses on the individual aspects of environmental citizenship, the active youth frame, which focuses on justifications of youth participation in politics, and the school attendance frame, which is concerned about the young people’s strike action. Our results explore the many aspects of environmental citizenship that young people express in the FFF movement. We reflect on the dominance of adult voices in the framing of this historic movement of young people for action on climate change. Our analysis contributes to a step change in the study of this important global movement, which is shaping the emergence of young people as active citizens in Finland and around the world. We argue that the FFF movement is shaping young people’s perceptions of active citizenship, and we advocate a youth-centred focus on the collective action and justice demands of young people.
"A movement that is not reported on does not take place." (Raschke 1985: 343). This statement illustrates how essential public resonance and mass media attention are for social movements. Only with the help of public reporting can social movements achieve visibility, increase their mobilization potential and thus exert pressure on political decision-makers to implement their demands. This requires the approval of at least parts of the mass media public, which in turn decisively shapes public discourse and opinion (Rucht 1994: 348). For the protest movement Fridays for Future, too, public perception plays a central role in pushing through its demands. For its goal of a consistent climate protection policy, it needs backing and broad support in society. In order to be successful, FFF relies on certain media and mobilization strategies such as regular school strikes, the 'hype' around Greta Thunberg, the presentation of their own concern ("Our Future") and direct cooperation with scientists. Movements like Fridays for Future have an ambivalent relationship with the media: while visibility is essential for the success of the movement, the media, by marginalizing certain aspects of the protests and amplifying others, can gain power over the public image of the movement, which could ultimately influence politics. Moreover, in addition to activists, other actors such as politicians or entrepreneurs try to strategically assert their representation in the public discourse and thus influence the attitudes and opinions of recipients on the issues addressed. This results in a competition for interpretive power, which will be the topic of this chapter.
The concept of the future is re-emerging as an urgent topic on the academic agenda. In this article, we focus on the ‘politics of the future’: the social processes and practices that allow particular imagined futures to become socially performative. Acknowledging that the performativity of such imagined futures is well-understood, we argue that how particular visions come about and why they become performative is underexplained. Drawing on constructivist sociological theory, this article aims to fill (part of) this gap by exploring the question ‘how do imagined futures become socially performative’? In doing so, the article has three aims to (1) identify the leading social–theoretical work on the future; (2) conceptualize the relationship of the imagination of the future with social practices and the performance of reality; (3) provide a theoretical framework explaining how images of the future become performative, using the concepts ‘techniques of futuring’ and ‘dramaturgical regime’.
This article focuses on the Fridays for Future movement (FFF) and its attempt to gain interpretative sovereignty over the complex phenomenon of climate change, its effects and adaptation measures. By means of a framing analysis, the aim is to capture the goals and mobilization possibilities of the FFF. The identification of interpretative frameworks is central to investigate, which societal problems are taken up by the social movement and how they are used strategically. The article combines a qualitative analysis of movement texts from the FFF webpage and also of press releases, with data from two protest surveys conducted in March and September 2019. The framing analysis shows how FFF organizes protest and resistance and which specific interpretations of the climate crisis are used as a strategic tool to implement the climate policy as it is being preferred by the movement.
Im Mittelpunkt des Artikels stehen die Fridays for Future-Bewegung (FFF) und ihr Versuch, Deutungshoheit über das komplexe Phänomen des Klimawandels, dessen Auswirkungen und die notwendigen
Maßnahmen zu erlangen. Der Artikel erfasste mittels einer Framing-Analyse die Ziele und Mobilisierungsmöglichkeiten der FFF. Die Identifizierung von Deutungsrahmen ist zentral, um zu sehen, welche gesellschaftlichen Probleme von einer sozialen Bewegung zugegriffen und wie diese strategisch genutzt werden. Der Artikel kombiniert eine qualitative Analyse von Texten der Webseite und Presseaussendungen der Bewegung mit Daten von zwei Befragungen von Protest-Teilnehmer*innen im März und September 2019. Die Framing-Analyse zeigt, wie FFF Protest und Widerständigkeit organisiert und welche spezifischen Interpretationen der Klimakrise als strategisches Mittel eingesetzt werden, um die von der Bewegung präferierte Klimapolitik durchzusetzen.
The misuse of academic research can lead social movements to engage in strategies that may be inefficient or misguided. Extinction Rebellion argues, based on research by Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), that once 3.5% of the population of a state is mobilised in sustained protest, that success is guaranteed. But the data this research is drawn from consists of campaigns against autocratic regimes and occupying military forces, rather than the liberal democratic contexts that Extinction Rebellion is engaged in. I argue that Extinction Rebellion is misusing this research, and therefore focusing upon mass, sustained disruption in capital cities, rather than alternative, possibly more effective strategies. Through an exploration of how one social movement misuses research by applying it to a context to which the data does not apply, I argue for closer engagement between academics and the social movements that they study. This engagement will improve our understanding of the work of social change, provide social movements with insights to make them more effective, and facilitate the accurate interpretation of academic research in order to prevent its misuse.
Since late 2018, a global wave of mobilization under the banners of Fridays For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) has injected new energy into global climate politics. FFF and XR took the world by storm, but have now been forced into (partial) latency as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We believe this moment presents an opportunity for reflection. In particular, FFF and XR have been depicted as ‘new’ forms of climate activism. However, we argue that the extent to which these campaigns represent ‘new’ forms of climate activism is really a matter for closer investigation. In this Profile, we therefore reflect on the distinctiveness of the ‘new climate activism’ as compared to previous climate campaigns. Reviewing previous studies and our own research, we find that there are both elements of change and continuity in who participates and how, and that the main change appears to be the use of a more politically ‘neutral’ framing of climate change that is directed more strongly at state than non-state actors.
How do radical movements seeking fundamental social change engage with nearer-term policy dilemmas? Disciplinary boundaries and practical obstacles have limited research into protester policy engagement. Using a hybrid method combining participant-observation and expert-led focus groups, we document activist attitudes concerning controversial climate policy options. Data gathered at ‘Climate Camps’ in six national contexts are presented alongside evidence from similar ‘participant-instigator’ events at Green Party conferences. We find activists engaged in direct action outside the established political system had policy knowledge and agendas comparable to or surpassing those active within the system. Support for radical change appears correlated with – rather than opposed to – knowledge and interest in policy agendas. As climate protests escalate it is important to understand ‘protester policy engagement’ – the processing, production and communication of changes proposed from a position outside the established political system and to theorise this with, rather than in contradistinction to, social movement identity.
As activism including climate strikes have become a common occurrence around the world, it is important to consider the growth in climate change‐focused activism and participation in social movements as a specific type of civic engagement. Although studies have analyzed climate activism and the climate movement, there is limited research that integrates it into the broader literature on civic engagement and which considers how these forms of engagement are related to specific climate outcomes. Here, we take a first step in understanding the material outcomes of these efforts. Specifically, we provide an overview of climate‐related activism as a form of civic engagement, paying particular attention to the targets of this activism and its environmental outcomes in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Then, we focus on one of the most common tactics to gain momentum in recent years: the school strike, which has mobilized a growing number of participants around the world. We discuss how the Coronavirus pandemic has changed the climate movement with much activism moving online. We conclude by discussing the overall state of the knowledge about the outcomes of climate activism, as well as highlighting the need for careful research to measure its effects across scale.
This article is categorized under
• Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate Change
• The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Social Movements
Abstract
International Growth in Climate Strikes by Countries Participating and Individual Participants (Source: Fridays for Future, https://fridaysforfuture.org/statistics/list-countries).
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe limitations on the freedom of assembly, if not an outright lockdown, in many cases complemented by restrictions on further civil and political rights. Although restrictions were generally considered necessary to save lives and protect health care systems from overburdening, they also pose the risk of government overreach, that is, governments may use the pandemic as a convenient opportunity and justification to impose restrictions for political purposes. In this sense, COVID-19 may give yet another substantial boost to a global trend that has been unfolding since the early 2000s: the shrinking of civic spaces, which is characterized by an increase in government restrictions that target civil society actors and limit their freedoms of assembly, association, and expression. The aim of the paper is to assess civic space restrictions that have been imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a view to exploring their immediate consequences as well as their potential mid-term implications for civil society organizations in general and contentious civic activism in particular. We do so by, first, providing evidence from multiple data sources about the global spread of COVID-19-related restrictions over time and across countries. Second, we identify key dynamics at work in order to assess the immediate consequences and the potential mid-term implications of these restrictions. These dynamics are illustrated by looking at experiences from individual countries (including Cambodia, Germany, Hungary, and Lebanon).
The first encompasing study of Fridays for Future in Germany
In December 2015, political leaders celebrated the Paris Agreement as a milestone in the global fight against climate change. Three years later, Greta Thunberg's school strike outside the Swedish parliament inspired thousands of students around the world to protest against their political leaders' inability to adequately respond to climate change. Envisioning livable climate futures for generations to come, the emerging “Fridays for Future” (FFF) movement urges governments to take more radical action on climate change. While FFF has sparked discussions about climate change around the world, the movement's effects on broader societal change remain unclear. We, therefore, explore how FFF has triggered debates beyond the necessity to tackle climate change and offer a framework to reflect upon the broader socio-political implications of the school strikes. We illustrate the contestation between different ideas of social life and political order encapsulated within and attached to FFF by analyzing the movement's self-understanding and the media discourse around these protests in Germany. Although the German government portrays the country as a pioneer in moving an industry-based economy toward decarbonization, the school strikes have quickly emerged and stabilized. We explore if and how the FFF protestors express not only the need for climate action but also call for deeper societal transformation. To do so, our study draws upon a discourse analysis based on news articles, official documents, and speeches, complemented by qualitative interviews with youth representatives and experts involved in the movement to identify competing imaginaries and themes of contestation. We study the tensions between competing student-led visions of the future through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries, which allows us to illuminate and juxtapose moderate and radical approaches. In conclusion, current school protests are not only about climate action but reflect more fundamental political struggles about competing visions of a future society in times of climate change. Yet, the protestors' strong focus on science-driven politics risks to overshadow these broader societal debates, potentially stabilizing the techno-centric, apolitical and market-driven rationale behind climate action.
The climate change problem is one of the global challenges faced by global society today. These problems certainly need to be adress in serious manners, especially at the global level. However, for some people, especially at the grassroots, consider global governance related to climate change today is not serious enough to deal with these problems. That is because the nature of the global climate regime is somehow voluntary and non-binding. In this case, civil society can provide the opportunities for the people to contribute to global governance related to climate change. Civil society here can be interpreted as a political space, where association of people can work towards the formation of social and legal rules through non-formal political channels. Extinction Rebellion is one of the civil societies that involves themselves in global discourse related to climate change in international politics arena. This article discusses the form of Extinction Rebellion's involvement in the global climate regime and what dimensions could potentially affected by the movement. This article uses descriptive-qualitative methods with library research data collection techniques. This article found that Extinction Rebellion’s involvement in global governance is an indirect involvement with resistance as their mode of participation, which is indicated by the emergence of mass protest in various cities around the world. In addition, Extinction Rebellion initiate discourse on climate change emergencies to illustrate how important climate problems must be handled seriously at the global level.
In this paper, the domination of the youth climate movement by the use of derogatory ageist language in German newspapers is uncovered. We find that German newspapers use different ageist media images, including ‘pupils’, ‘absentees’ and ‘dreamers’, to de-legitimize the FridaysForFuture movement. Greta Thunberg is presented as a ‘young hero’, who is held responsible for youngsters’ absenteeism. FAZ and taz present a paternalist discourse in which the central narrative is that the young climate activists are pupils who are ignorant and still need to learn; and who are obliged by law to go to school. We argue that German newspapers align with the exclusive hegemony of an established environmental governance regime that struggles with the problematic phasing out of coal in Germany. Instead, a common practice of reluctancy and skepticism appears inherited in conservative discussions on climate action led by FAZ and the so-called coal commission.
[Available open access at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629619301896.] The lack of progress on greenhouse-gas reduction at the global level has drawn attention to the need to strengthen support for energy-transition policies. One crucial component of such support is a better understanding of the political strategy of coalitions that support such policies. Based on a comprehensive review of research in the energy and social science field, this study covers three main units of political strategy: the targets of action (government, public opinion, and businesses), the repertoires of action (both institutional and extra institutional), and the agents of action (coalition building and composition). The review articulates political strategy as an area of theoretical and empirical research with results that are relevant for political actors. For example, coalition building includes policy sequencing, modifications to accommodate incumbents, goals that enroll low- and middle-income organizations, the recruitment of countervailing industrial power, and policy selection for conservatives. Future research topics are also identified.
The successful implementation of the Paris Agreement requires substantial energy policy change on the national level. In national energy policy-making, climate change mitigation goals have to be balanced with arguments on other national energy policy goals, namely limiting cost and increasing energy security. Thus far, very little is known about the relative importance of these goals and how they are related to political partisanship. In order to address this gap, we focus on parliamentary discourse around low-carbon energy futures in Germany over the past three decades and analyze the relative importance of, and partisanship around, energy policy goals. We find that the political discourse revolves around four, rather than three, goals as conventionally assumed; improving the competitiveness of the national energy technology industry is not only an additional energy policy goal, it is also highly important in the political discourse. In general, the relative importance of these goals is rather stable over time and partisanship around them is limited. Yet, a sub-analysis of the discourse on renewable energy technologies reveals a high level of partisanship, albeit decreasing over time. Particularly, the energy industry goal’s importance increases while its partisanship vanishes. We discuss how these findings can inform future energy policy research and provide a potential inroad for more ambitious national energy policies.
Key policy insights
• In addition to the three classic goals of energy policy (limiting cost, securing access and reducing the environmental burden) we identify a fourth policy goal: strengthening the national energy technology industry
• Conformity between the three classical energy and the industrial policy goals is a key driver explaining policy change
• For renewable energy technologies, partisanship around this fourth goal is lower than around other goals and decreases over time as innovation allows these technologies to increasingly correspond to policy-makers’ high-level goals
• Extant research underestimates the importance of industry policy goals, but overestimates environmental co-benefits of low-carbon energy options
• Paradigmatic policy change in Germany did not depend on top-down shifts in high-level policy goals but was driven by lower-level technology-specific goals
The distinction between input-oriented legitimacy and output-oriented legitimacy (Scharpf, Fritz W, 1997. Economic Integration, Democracy and the Welfare State. Journal of European Public Policy, 4, 18–36) has been one of the most influential distinctions in political science. In this article I introduce a third arrangement supporting the legitimacy of political processes which I call promise-oriented legitimacy or, simply, promissory legitimacy. This term refers to the support political authority can gain from the credibility of promises political leaders make regarding future states of the world when justifying decisions and persuading others to follow them in their proposed course of action. Decisions gain support through claims about future development. Legitimacy crises arise if promises that were found credible become discredited and fail to motivate. I develop the concept of promissory legitimacy based on a discussion of what can be considered the most far-reaching political promissory regime of the last forty years: neoliberalism.
An important but sometimes overlooked dimension of the study of energy, democracy, and governance is the role of social movements. Industrial transition movements (ITMs) emerge when there is resistance from incumbent organizations, such as large utility companies in the electricity industry, to grassroots efforts to change the industry. A classification of ITM goals is developed based on two types of sociotechnical transition goals (developing alternative technologies and ending existing technologies) and two types of societal change goals (the democratization of industrial organizations and political processes and the equitable access to jobs and industrial products). The study of processes and outcomes of ITMs also has implications for social movement theory, which are outlined. This approach enables a comprehensive analysis of the relations among the state, industry, civil society, and social movements that can identify causal mechanisms in the effects of social movements on industrial transitions and energy democracy.
This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelände (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of ‘civil anarchizing’ (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in relation to both external and internal stakeholders. This CA style was also accompanied by a more individual-centered style that we call personalized politics (PP). We compare both styles and describe the tensions that result from their co-occurrence. In addition, we argue that the CA style might be more viable for politicization due to its emphasis on a collective strategy. Finally, we describe how this CA style shaped the participants’ politics of legitimacy by functioning as a negotiated hybrid of civil and uncivil expectations.
This study develops research on social movements, political coalitions, and sustainability transitions with a multi-coalition perspective. The perspective begins with a typology of coalitions based on two pairs of goals—general societal change versus the sociotechnical transition of an industry or technological system, and sunrising versus sunsetting of systems and structures. Mapping the diversity of energy-transition coalitions makes it possible not only to identify the various wings of a broader industrial transition movement in a specified time and place but also to show the dynamics of how coalitions interact and change over time. Drawing on case studies of four energy-transition coalitions in New York State that approximate the four ideal types, the study shows differences in the goals, strategies, organizational composition, and frames of the coalitions. The study then shows the mechanisms that enable integration across coalitions, including the role of bridge brokers and new frames. As the networks of the energy-transition coalitions become more connected, the organizations make use of a wider set of frames, including the newer frame of energy democracy. Thus, the study develops an approach to the study of energy democracy that shows how it can serve as a frame that bridge brokers use to integrate coalitions.
OPEN ACCESS: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351047999 Anticipation is a fundamental building block of this universe. It is a key to turning complexity from a liability into an asset. Yet few have thought about the anticipatory systems and processes that not only surround us but are critical ingredients of the actions everyone, from a baby to a general, take constantly. Today humanity is Futures Illiterate and it is costing us. From poverty of the imagination to colonisation of tomorrow, a cognitive dissonance is ripping apart the fabric of current conceptions of human agency. Without Futures Literacy providing the capacity to ‘use-the-future’ for different reasons, in different ways, depending on specific contexts, the only constant, change, becomes toxic. Instead of being a source of hope the rich source of our existence, complex emergence, eludes our comprehension leaving only the bitter taste of certain disappointment when we waste our will on the search for certainty. Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century presents findings on the theory and practice of Futures Literacy, including 14 case studies.
Purpose
Starting from the assumption that knowledge becomes all the most important for movements in times of crisis, as old structures are challenged and new are to be envisaged and proved feasible, in this theoretical article we suggest ways to expand the toolkit of social movement studies in order to empirically address knowledge practices as a meaningful part of contemporary progressive activism.
Design/methodology/approach
We start from arguing that, in their effort to pursue or resist social and political changes, contemporary progressive social movements form collective spaces of knowledge production that are true laboratories of innovation. For this reason, we begin by making a case for accounting more explicitly for knowledge production within social movement studies not as a substitution for but, rather, as a necessary complement to current cultural approaches. Building on extant literature on the nexus between movements and knowledge, we then outline the peculiarities of movement knowledge.
Findings
On these bases, we outline the core components of what we call repertoires of knowledge practices - that is, the set of organizational practices that foster the coordination of disconnected, local, and highly personal experiences and rationalities within a shared cognitive system able to provide movements and their supporters with a common orientation for making claims and acting collectively to produce social, political, and cultural changes.
Originality/value
We conclude by identifying some promising avenues of research to further develop our understanding of movement practices of knowledge production and transmissions.
In den 1970er Jahren artikulierten Umweltbewegungen ökologische Probleme als Symptom einer generellen gesellschaftlichen Krise. Im Kontext dieses Konfliktfelds trieben verschiedene Akteur/innen das Hegemonieprojekt der ökologischen Modernisierung voran. Dabei integrierten sie die Forderungen der Umweltbewegungen. Allerdings wurden in diesen strategisch-selektiven Aneignungen die gesellschaftskritischen Elemente gekappt. Mit dieser Schließung des Diskurshorizonts wurden antagonistische Artikulationen, die strukturverändernde Lösungen vorschlagen, marginalisiert. Als Konsequenz ist in den aktuellen Auseinandersetzungen um die ökologische Krise eine Kluft zwischen dramatisierenden Problemanalysen und inkrementellen Lösungsansätzen zu beobachten.
To complement a recent flush of research on transnational environmental justice movements, we sought a deeper organizational history of what we understand as the contemporary environmental justice movement in the United States. We thus conducted in-depth interviews with 31 prominent environmental justice activists, scholars, and community leaders across the US. Today’s environmental justice groups have transitioned from specific local efforts to broader national and global mandates, and more sophisticated political, technological, and activist strategies. One of the most significant transformations has been the number of groups adopting formal legal status, and emerging as registered environmental justice organizations (REJOs) within complex partnerships. This article focuses on the emergence of REJOs, and describes the respondents’ views about the implications of this for more local grassroots groups. It reveals a central irony animating work across groups in today’s movement: legal formalization of many environmental justice organizations has made the movement increasingly internally differentiated, dynamic, and networked, even as the passage of actual national laws on environmental justice has proven elusive.
Energy infrastructure conflicts often reflect fundamental disagreements which cannot be resolved by merely designing better governance processes. They pose complex systemic questions related to justice and do so often with a global reach. This article discusses how social movements using civil disobedience challenge democratic procedures related to energy transitions. We concentrate on justifications of civil disobedience through a case study of Ende Gelände – a climate justice alliance operating mainly in Germany – and its contestation of coal mining. The results reflect the tension between the right to resistance, the demands of liberal democracy and other aspects of democratic legitimation.
Zusammenfassung
Seit dem ersten „skolestreik for klimaet“ im Jahr 2018 hat sich die Fridays for Future-Bewegung zu einem globalen, medial beachteten Phänomen entwickelt. Gleichzeitig finden spektakuläre Aktionen wie die Besetzung des Hambacher Forsts durch Umweltaktivist*innen eine breite Öffentlichkeit. Die mediale und politische Aufmerksamkeit, welche neuen Umweltbewegungen zu Teil wird, erweckt nicht nur den Eindruck einer neuen Dringlichkeit klimapolitischer Fragen, sondern auch einer neuen Radikalität von Umweltaktivismus. In diesem Beitrag soll untersucht werden, inwiefern die Zuschreibung von Radikalität zutreffend ist.
This study investigates the representation of the Fridays for Future strikes in the German online newspapers Bild.de, Zeit Online and FAZ.net. Through a qualitative and quantitative content analysis over the time period August 2018 to March 2019, eight frames have been identified. Whereas Zeit Online shows a framing towards intergenerational justice, the coverage of FAZ.net and Bild.de strongly adheres to the protest paradigm. The majority of all articles guarantees protesters a voice, but this voice is often reduced to apolitical testimonies and the protesters’ self-agency is undermined through disparagement. German media coverage thus tends to reproduce existing power structures by marginalizing and depoliticizing the political agenda of a system critical protest. Although this framing feeds into the shift of the climate change discourse towards adaptation, the study shows that the idea of climate change as an issue of intergenerational justice and children’s rights has become part of the media’s agenda.
This book summarises and critiques Extinction Rebellion (XR) as a social movement organisation, engaging with key issues surrounding its analysis, strategy and tactics. The authors suggest that XR have an underdeveloped and apolitical view of the kind of change necessary to address climate change, and suggest that while this enables the building of broad movements, it is also an obstacle to achieving the systemic change that they are aiming for.
The book analyses different forms of protest and the role of civil disobedience in their respective success or failure; democratic demands and practices; and activist engagement with the political economy of climate change. It engages with a range of theoretical perspectives that address law-breaking in protest and participatory forms of democracy including liberal political theory; anarchism and forms of historical materialism, and will be of interest to students and scholars across politics, international relations, sociology, policy studies and geography, as well as those interested in climate change politics and activism.
Oscar Berglund is Lecturer in International Public and Social Policy at the University of Bristol, UK.
Daniel Schmidt is a MSc graduate in Public Policy from the University of Bristol, UK.
In this chapter, we systematically review our knowledge about climate governance capacities, capacity gaps, lock-ins and opportunities, and link this to the state-of-the art of climate science and climate governance. We formulate a forward-looking research agenda that signposts key themes to advance the transformation of climate governance. The research agenda turns attention to the governance institutions, modes, processes, skills and networks that need to be better understood and strengthened to facilitate transformative climate governance. The main challenge will be to formalise the new governance capacities by strengthening those institutional, organisational and knowledge conditions that will allow to decisively prioritise long-term and integrated planning, align budgeting practices and procedures, mobilise broad alliances and partnerships for behavioural change, and to continuously learn and adapt to new knowledge and experimentation. We conclude by discussing future applications of the capacities framework to guide and evaluate transformative climate governance.
That policymakers adopt technoscientific viewpoints and lack reflexivity is a common criticism of scientific decision-making, particularly in response to moves to democratise science. Drawing on interviews with UK-based national policymakers, I argue that an elite sociotechnical imaginary of ‘science to the rescue’ shapes how public perspectives are heard and distinguishes what is considered to be legitimate expertise. The machinery of policy-making has become shaped around this imaginary – particularly its focus on science as a problem-solver and on social and ethical issues as ‘nothing to do with the science’ – and this gives this viewpoint its power, persistence and endurance. With this imaginary at the heart of policy-making machinery, regardless of the perspectives of the policymakers, alternative views of science are either forced to take the form of the elite imaginary in order to be processed, or they simply cannot be accounted for within the policy-making processes. In this way, the elite sociotechnical imaginary (and technoscientific viewpoint) is enacted, but also elicited and perpetuated, without the need for policymakers to engage with or even be aware of the imaginary underpinning their actions.
The students striking for action on climate change admirably display civic engagement on a pressing issue. Nevertheless, their movement’s message focuses far too heavily on the need to ‘listen to science’, which is at most a point of departure for answering the ethical and political questions central to climate action.
Social movements frequently fail to achieve the policy changes they seek, despite impressive demonstrations of widespread support. Yet movement participation has become increasingly popular as a form of political action. The authors seek to resolve this dilemma by distinguishing between three arenas of movement success: Changing policy, gaining participation in the policy process, and changing social values. It is suggested that gaining access to the policy process is the most effective path for movement organizations to have an impact on policy outcomes, because authorities are often more willing to offer inclusion in the process than they are to accept movement demands for policy change. The authors’ hypotheses are examined in light of the experience of the nuclear freeze movement, which sought and failed to achieve policy change, and the movement to control hazardous wastes, in which environmentalists are having an impact on policy by gaining participation in regulatory and implementation decisions.
This article argues that social movement research must be renewed by a historical-materialist perspective to be able to understand the emergence and effects of the relatively new climate justice movement in Germany. The previous research on NGOs and social movements in climate politics is presented and the recent development of the climate justice movement in Germany is illustrated. In a final step two cases of climate movement campaigns are explained by means of the historical-materialist movementanalysis proposed by the author.
The environmental movement has stood out compared to other movements through its future-oriented pessimism: dreams of a better or utopian future have been less important as a mobilizing tool than fear of future catastrophes. Apocalyptic images of future catastrophes still dominate much of environmentalist discourse. Melting polar caps, draughts, hurricanes, floods, and growing chaos are regularly invoked by activists as well as establishment figures. This apocalyptic discourse has, however, also been challenged—not only by a future-oriented optimism gaining ground among established environmental organizations, but also by the rise of what we call a postapocalyptic environmentalism based on the experience of irreversible or unavoidable loss. This discourse, often referring to the Global South, where communities are destroyed and populations displaced because of environmental destruction, is neither nourished by a strong sense of hope, nor of a future disaster, but a sense that the catastrophe is already ongoing. Taking our point of departure in the “environmentalist classics” by Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, we delineate the contours of apocalyptic discourses in environmentalism and discuss how disillusionment with the institutions of climate governance has fed into increasing criticism of the apocalyptic imagery. We then turn to exploring the notion of postapocalyptic politics by focusing on how postapocalyptic narratives—including the utopias they bring into play, their relation to time–space, and how they construct collective identity—are deployed in political mobilizations. We focus on two cases of climate activism—the Dark Mountain project and the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature—and argue that mobilizations based on accepting loss are possible through what we call the paradox of hope and the paradox of justice.
In many places, the electricity sector is transitioning towards greater share of renewable energy technologies. In the initial phase of the transition, a primary concern for research and policy was to establish renewables as technically and economically viable options. Today, the situation is different: renewables are diffusing rapidly in many electricity grids, thereby generating major changes for existing technologies, organizations and infrastructures. In this new phase of the energy transition, we do not just witness an acceleration of earlier transition dynamics, but also qualitatively new phenomena. These include a complex interaction of multiple technologies, the decline of established business models and technologies, intensified economic and political struggles of key actors such as utility companies and industry associations, and major challenges for the overall functioning and performance of the electricity sector (for example, when integrating renewables). Drawing on a transition studies perspective, this paper compares the two phases and discusses implications for research and policymaking.
The term “master frame” was originally conceptualized in order to account for the empirical observation that cycles of protest occasionally emerge in the absence of a favorable political opportunity structure (POS). Given that POS had been theorized as the engine driving cycles of protest, an alternative explanation was sought from the social movement framing perspective to account for those instances when a number of movements clustered together during a period even though the structural conditions did not appear conducive for widespread mobilization. Under such conditions a cycle of protest could be attributed in part to the development of a resonant master frame. A master frame refers to a generic type of collective action frame that is wider in scope and influence than run-of-the-mill social movement frames (Snow & Benford 1992). Whereas most collective action frames are context specific (e.g., drunk driver frame, cold war frame, exploited worker frame, environmental justice frame, etc.), a master frame's articulations and attributions are sufficiently elastic, flexible, and inclusive enough so that any number of other social movements can successfully adopt and deploy it in their campaigns. Typically, once a social movement fashions and espouses a highly resonant frame that is broad in interpretive scope, other social movements within a cycle of protest will modify that frame and apply it to their own cause. For example, once the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s experienced a number of successes based on an equal rights and opportunities frame, several other movements, including the American Indian, women's, gay and lesbian, Chicano/a, and Gray Panthers, adopted and proffered a similar frame to their specific movement campaigns.
In recent years climate change has emerged as an issue of central political importance while the EU has become a major player in international climate change politics. How can a ‘leaderless Europe’ offer leadership in international climate change politics - even in the wake of the UK’s Brexit decision? This book, which has been written by leading experts, offers a critical analysis of the EU leadership role in international climate change politics. It focuses on the main EU institutions, core EU member states and central societal actors (businesses and environmental NGOs). It also contains an external perspective of the EU’s climate change leadership role with chapters on China, India and the USA as well as Norway. Four core themes addressed in the book are: leadership, multilevel and polycentric governance, policy instruments, and the green and low carbon economy. Fundamentally, it asks why we have EU institutional actors, why certain member states and particular societal actors tried to take on a leadership role in climate change politics and how, if at all, have they managed to achieve this? This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in EU studies and politics, international relations, comparative politics and environmental politics. © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Rüdiger K.W. Wurzel, James Connelly and Duncan Liefferink.
In this paper we describe energy policy discourses and their story-lines in German parliamentary debates, and trace their evolution over the past decades. Through content analysis and coding with MAXQDA, changes in the discourses and in the use of story-lines by different political parties are analyzed. Our study shows that while the concept of a transition towards a nuclear-free, renewables-based energy system became hegemonic within three decades, the discourse itself underwent major changes. Energy Transition was de-radicalized and became part of a discourse of Ecological Modernization, thus aligning with mainstream economic logic. There are still considerable differences in the story-lines narrated by parliamentarians about pathways to Energy Transition and its effects. Discursive struggles into the meaning and the means of the transition project continue, suggesting that discourse structuration is far from complete.
The concepts of power and democracy have been extensively studied at the global, national and local levels and within institutions including states, international organizations and political parties. However, the interplay of those concepts within social movements is given far less attention. Studies have so far mainly focused on their protest activities rather than the internal practices of deliberation and democratic decision-making. Meeting Democracy presents empirical research that examines in detail how power is distributed and how consensus is reached in twelve global justice movement organizations, with detailed observations of how they operate in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Written by leading political scientists and sociologists, this work contributes significantly to the wider literature on power and deliberative democracy within political science and sociology.
When government and industry elites respond to or anticipate public acceptance issues having to do with industrial innovation, they construct models of the public that have variously been described as imaginaries, discourses, and frames. Because publics are sometimes mobilized in opposition to new technologies, opportunities emerge for bridging science and technology studies and social movement studies. Methodological and conceptual challenges for such syntheses are discussed. First, it is important to disaggregate categories of the public, industrial and political elites, and imaginaries (e.g. as threats, sources of innovation, or legitimate concerns). One solution is to use flexible typologies of the relations, such as industrial opposition movements, justice movements, alternative industrial movements, and regime preservation movements. Second, there is sometimes a tendency for the cultural analysis of imaginaries or discourses to utilize all-encompassing cultural logics and culturalism and to reject nomothetic inquiry, and alternatives are discussed.