Local governing of climate change in Denmark: recasting citizens as consumers

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the ways in which Danish municipalities seek to mitigate climate change through a range of governance strategies. Through the analysis of ten municipal climate plans using the framework of Mitchell Dean, as well as extensive ethnographic fieldwork in two municipalities, this paper explores how local climate change mitigation is shaped by particular rationalities and technologies of government, and thus seeks to illustrate how the strategies set out in the plans construe climate change mitigation from a certain perspective, thereby rendering some solutions more likely than others and recasting citizens as passive consumers who are to be guided to consume in more climate-friendly ways in the process.

Keywords:

• governmentality
• climate change mitigation
• local government
• consumption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Energy Cities’, ‘Climate Municipalities’ and ‘Green Cities’ are different voluntary networks through which the municipalities exchange experiences and knowledge regarding their work with climate change mitigation. CIDEA is a research project funded by the strategic research council, working with ways in which municipalities seek to manage and promote certain pro-environmental behaviours among citizens. Both authors are associated with CIDEA.

2. The climate plans will remain as anonymous as possible throughout this paper, as we emphasize the analytical perspective of governmentality, rather than the details relating to the specific municipalities and climate plans. Through the listing of quotations from the various plans, it is of course possible to identify the municipalities, as all the plans are publically available, but we choose to emphasize the content rather than the names. We have assigned each municipality a letter, which will be displayed in brackets after each quotation. All quotations from plans and planners are translated from Danish into English.

3. The concept of governmentality stems from Michel Foucault's lecture “Security, territory and population” from 1978 and his course on “The Birth of Biopolitics” at the Collège de France in 1978–1979.