| 1. |
- Andersson, Daniel, 1989-
(author)
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Gambling with Our Climate Futures : On the Temporal Structure of Negative Emissions
- 2023
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In: Environment and Planning E. - London : Sage Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 6:3, s. 1987-2007
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper considers negative emissions – the deliberate removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by human intervention – as a future-oriented imaginary of connected social and technological order. It does so in order to examine how expectations around the development and use of negative emission technologies are managed with the help of integrated assessment models. By treating this family of models as a case study for drawing out historical associations between the terminology of risk saturating the discourse of net-zero emissions and the modern conception of the future as an unexplored territory to be profitably colonized, the paper argues that integrated assessment modeling, as a praxis of forecast, structure and organize our experience of the future through standards of risk management and utility maximization. It concludes that to consider risk as a means of navigating between possible futures is to engage with practices that are enacted in the name of a particular understanding of how one ought to act in the face of deep uncertainty. Aside from epistemic questions of how to treat various kinds of uncertainties inherent to integrated assessment models, of pressing concern are thus also normative questions of how its representation of environmental hazards in terms of risk are distinctively writing the contours of our contemporary forms of responsibility toward nature, each other, as well as future generations.
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| 2. |
- Arora Jonsson, Seema, et al.
(author)
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Bringing diversity to nature: Politicizing gender, race and class in environmental organizations?
- 2019
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In: Environment and planning E: nature and space. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 2, s. 874-898
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Environmental organizations play an important role in mainstream debates on nature and in shaping our environments. At a time when environmental NGOs are turning to questions of gender-equality and ethnic diversity, we analyze their possibilities to do so. We argue that attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity in environmental organizations cannot be understood without insight into the conceptualizations of nature and the environment that underpin thinking within the organization. Serious attempts at diversity entail confronting some of the core values on nature-cultures driving the organization as well as understanding the dimensions of power such as class, gender, and race that structure its practices. We study what nature means for one such organization, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, and the ways in which thinking about nature dictates organizational practice and sets the boundaries of their work with diversity in their projects on outdoor recreation. We base our analysis on official documents and interviews, analyze how ‘‘diversity’’ and ‘‘gender-equality’’ are represented in the material and reflect on the interconnections as well as the different trajectories taken by the two issues. Our study shows that the organization’s understanding of nature is a central and yet undiscussed determinant of their work with diversity that closes down as much as it opens up the space for greater inclusion of minorities. We argue that for environmental organizations wanting to diversity membership, a discussion of what nature means for people and their relationships to each other and nature is vital to any such efforts.
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| 3. |
- Bergame, Nathalie, et al.
(author)
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Preparing the grounds for emancipation. Explaining commoning as an emancipatory mechanism through dialectical social theory
- 2022
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In: Environment and Planning E. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; , s. 1-20
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- While there is evidence that commons have the potential to counteract socio-spatial injustices unleashed by neoliberal and capitalist forms of urbanisation, less is known about how commons lead to emancipatory change. Anchored in dialectical social theory, this article explains commoning as a mechanism through which people reproduce/transform their structural context and agency, arguing that the potential for emancipation through commoning lies in the commoners’ ability to induce processes of structural/agential transformation. Empirically grounded in interviews with urban community gardeners in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, we show that collective gardening conceptualised as practice of commoning contributes to structural change in that female volunteer labour collectivises the mandate over municipally managed public space, transforming socio-spatial relations. Yet, garden commoning proves to reproduce structural whiteness and middle-class agency in public space, fails to establish autonomy from waged-labour relations, and is unable to abolish the separation from the sources of reproduction and subsistence.
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| 4. |
- Burnett, Scott, 1978
(author)
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‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation
- 2022
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In: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 7:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.
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| 5. |
- Cassegård, Carl, 1971, et al.
(author)
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Toward a postapocalyptic environmentalism? Responses to loss and visions of the future in climate activism
- 2018
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In: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 1:4
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The environmental movement has stood out compared to other movements through its futureoriented 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.
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| 6. |
- Christophers, Brett, 1971-
(author)
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Risk capital: : Urban political ecology and entanglements of financial and environmental risk in Washington, D.C.
- 2018
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In: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 1:1-2, s. 144-164
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- n endeavouring to deal with a longstanding problem of contamination of waterways in Washington, D.C. due to combined sewer overflows, the responsible utility, DC Water, has recently embarked on a two-fold, simultaneous ‘greening’ – firstly of the physical infrastructures being installed to address the overflow problem, and secondly of the financing of this capital investment. This article examines DC Water’s turn to green infrastructure and green bonds in order to consider the question of how environmental and financial processes in general – and environmental and financial risks in particular – co-determine not just one another but the transformation of contemporary urban socioecological landscapes more broadly. In the process, it aims to inject a greater sensibility both to finance and to ‘green capitalism’ into urban political ecology. Through a critical consideration of the interlocking temporal, spatial and monetary dimensions of DC Water’s two-fold greening project, the article shows that this project has served significantly to augment levels of environmental and financial risk, entangling them in significant new ways.
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| 7. |
- Envall, Fredrik, 1990-, et al.
(author)
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Technopolitics of future-making: The ambiguous role of energy communities in shaping energy system change
- 2023
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In: Environment and Planning E. - : Sage Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Implementing the EU Clean Energy Package (CEP) and its provisions for strengthening energy communities – the cooperative production and management of energy at local level by citizens, a concept emphasising citizen participation and empowerment – has opened a new arena for contestations over energy futures in Sweden. An aim of CEP is to contribute to just energy transitions through citizen participation and democratisation by using the potential of energy communities to reconfigure socio-material relations of the energy system. However, different actor constellations claim interpretative privilege about the role and importance of energy communities in a low-carbon future. To better understand political contestations over energy futures, we unpack broader discursive patterns and their socio-material enactments related to legally define and regulate the operation of energy communities in Sweden. Through the analytical lens of socio-technical imaginaries and technopolitics, we explore struggles over energy futures within conduits of institutionalised policymaking and attempts by energy communities to navigate technopolitical barriers in relation to grid infrastructure, power relations, actor constellations, rules and regulations and knowledge claims. We find that energy communities are not easily accommodated to the dominant socio-technical imaginary of Sweden’s energy future. What is at stake in processes related to the transposition of the CEP into national law is essentially different political ideas of how society should be organised.
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| 8. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(author)
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Wasting CO2 and the Clean Development Mechanism : The remarkable success of a climate failure
- 2024
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In: Environment and Planning E. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 7:2, s. 654-680
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political–ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Whilst it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa (and elsewhere) have been an unmitigated failure in terms of climate and socio-economic benefits, we demonstrate that landfillto-gas/energy projects have functioned effectively as geographical–discursive dispositifs through which particular knowledge systems are enrolled, specific ‘solutions’ are projected, and singular imaginaries of what is possible and desirable foregrounded, thereby crowding out alternative possibilities. This not only nurtures the commodification and marketization of non-human matter with an eye towards sustaining capital accumulation but, rather more importantly, successfully installs state-orchestrated private property relations around common resources, thereby deepening the dispossessing socio-ecological relations upon which expanded capitalist reproduction rests. We argue that whilst the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides precisely in how it permitted local and global elites to create administrative and regulatory practices that solidify and naturalize a neoliberal market-based framework to approach the climate crisis.
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| 9. |
- García-Lamarca, Melissa, et al.
(author)
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“Everyone wants this market to grow”: The affective post-politics of municipal green bonds
- 2022
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In: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8494 .- 2514-8486. ; 5:1, s. 207-224
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As more cities seek to address environmental and climate change woes, the issuance of municipal green bonds to finance such initiatives is growing. But how do issuers and investors conceptualise and enact green bonds in relation to building a more sustainable society? What socionatures are produced with these bonds, and for whom? Based on fieldwork in Gothenburg, the first municipality in the world to issue green bonds, we bring together the literature on green finance, post-politics and affect through an urban political ecology lens to unpack the processes, practices and discourses underlying green bonds. We argue that green bonds ultimately serve as a new path to attract and circulate capital within the consensual, non-antagonistic sustainable order, where claims of doing good and building a good conscience are affective mechanisms that play an important, yet underexplored, role. In the conclusion, we reflect on the broader role of green finance and the possibility of harnessing affect and the political towards building more transformative and emancipatory urban socio-environments.
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| 10. |
- González Hidalgo, Marien
(author)
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Industrial dynamics on the commodity frontier: Managing time, space and form in mining, tree plantations and intensive aquaculture
- 2021
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In: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 4, s. 1533-1559
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Research in political ecology and agrarian political economy has shown how commodity frontiers are constituted through the appropriation and transformation of nature. This work identifies two broad processes of socio-metabolism associated with commodity frontiers: the spatial extension of nature appropriation, via expanding territorial claims to the control and use of natural resources and associated acts of dispossession (commodity-widening); and the intensification of appropriation at existing sites, through socio-technical innovation and the growing capitalisation of production (commodity-deepening). While sympathetic, we have reservations about reducing frontier metabolism to either one or the other of these processes. We argue for more grounded examinations of how non-human nature is actively reconstituted at commodity frontiers, attuned to the diverse and specific ways in which socio-ecological processes are harnessed to dynamics of accumulation. To achieve this, we compare strategies of appropriation in three sectors often associated with the commodity frontier: gold mining, tree plantations and intensive aquaculture. In doing so, we bring research on capitalism as an ecological regime into conversation with work on the industrial dynamics of ‘nature-facing’ sectors. By harnessing the analytical categories of time, space and form adopted by research on industrial dynamics, we (i) show how strategies of commodity-widening and commodity-deepening are shaped in significant ways by the biophysical characteristics of these sectors; and (ii) identify a third strategy, beyond commodity-widening and commodity-deepening, that involves the active reconstitution of socio-ecological systems – we term this ‘commodity-transformation’.
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