Performative Environmentalism and the Everyday Legitimation of Climate Coloniality
Talk by Manisha Anantharaman, Sciences Po
If global summits are the public theatres of climate coloniality where diversion, co-optation, and performativity without substance are repeated, what are its more everyday and intimate registers? In this talk, I relate climate coloniality to an “imperial mode of living”, a concept from Brand and Wissen, through a reflection on the politics of greening consumption and everyday life.
How over-consumption in the minority world is engaged in climate action, beyond problematically individualizing responsibility and commodifying activism, is based on and reproduces a colonial ontology that divides the world into those who are implicitly considered deserving of resource-intensive lifestyles, and thus lauded for taking steps to mitigate the climate impacts of their consumption, versus those whose claims to decent living standards are now contingent on the generosity of the well-off to “make space” for their survival and their ability to demonstrate themselves as the “worthy poor.”
The “growth-prosperity” pact around affluent and mass consumption is the basis of the social contract between the state and the “working classes” in the Global North and emerging “new middle classes” of the Global South, serving as a serious impediment to the essential structural transformations needed in the political economy to enact climate justice. Yet, prominent schools of ecological thought, including the eco-socialist and degrowth traditions, rarely consider the cultural and political valence of consumption, as well as how everyday elite environmentalism serves as a terrain of meaning-making and legitimation that reinscribes colonial relations.
Drawing on a cross-scalar analysis, I argue that performative environmentalism is the everyday expression and legitimating structure of climate coloniality, providing a sense of purpose and progress to well-meaning elite environmentalists while reproducing a hierarchical local-to-global order. Achieving climate justice then, requires an approach that considers these global histories of inequality, as well as the relations of mutual precarity and vulnerability that connect different localities through metabolic relations
After the talk, Charlotte Jensen, senior consultant at CONCITO, will join Manisha for a panel conversation moderated by Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, head of the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking.
Charlotte Jensen works on enabling sustainable everyday lives, societies and futures, through quantitative as well as qualitative approaches to systems-configuration and systems change. She particularly focuses on how to reduce consumption-based emissions by enabling good lives within planetary boundaries.
After the event, there will be a reception with drinks and snacks.
The event begins on time – if you are late, please ring the bell and reception will let you in.
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