https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2929-8931
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ABSTRACT
Based on 19 interviews with key activists, the paper discusses different visions of Europe and democracy within the Italian environmental archipelago. A clear dichotomy has emerged. On the one hand, institutional ENGOs conduct lobbying activities, adapting to different multilevel political opportunities: their attempt is to reform the current structure of the EU, which also contributes to institutionalise the innovative perspectives of ‘another Europe' advanced by the Global Justice Movement in the early 2000s. On the other hand, grassroots groups suggest going ‘beyond this Europe’, as they are critical of its current geographical borders and political institutions. They normally do so by adopting contentious actions in a domestic dimension. Furthermore, two divergent democratic paradigms can be identified. I propose to call them ecological democracy and green democracy. The latter stands for a conception of the environmental issues as subordinated to, or at least unthinkable outside, the (Western) representative democracy and the gospel of economic growth. Ecological democracy involves a conception of democracy as effective only if based on ecological perspectives, within a vision which stigmatises capitalist economy and the institutions supporting it. These paradigms resonate with the interpretation of the current (ecological) critical juncture as the Anthropocene or as the Capitalocene.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 As is well-known, in fact, the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro endorses conservative perspectives, also specifically in reference to climate change: this poses some questions that resonate across the entire planet (see for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/02/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-amazon-rainforest-protections). On the other hand, Brazil is not the only country with explicit references to the environment in its Constitution: Ecuador, Bolivia and France, among others, have similar statements.
3 For a review on the definitions of ‘critical junctures’, see Capoccia and Kelemen (Citation2007).
4 An example is the banning of single-use plastic products planned for 2021.
5 Recent examples are the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 and the Farm2Fork Strategy, both approved in May 2020 by EU Commission.
7 The approach based on sustainable ‘green economy’ promoted by the Kyoto Protocol, has been anticipated during the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and then confirmed by the following COPs (Conferences of the Parties) and by the Paris Agreement in 2015. The scientific literature on green economy is vast, interdisciplinary and entangled in market-led neoliberal policies: a detailed critical review is provided by Jutta Kill's ‘Economic valuation of nature’: https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_publikationen/Economic-Valuation-of-Nature.pdf.
8 For a critical discussion of the term NIMBY, see della Porta et al. (Citation2019).
9 Furthermore, the pandemic Covid-19 will further affect environmental activism: this is true at global level but particularly for Italy, a country in which movements such as FFF and XR were emerging with particular strength, interrupting a situation of partial delay with respect to international scenario.
10 A similar path is also visible among other movement areas (see Zamponi in this issue).
15 The #Stop Vivisection campaign has been previously mentioned (see note 9). #Stop TTIP is an international campaign (with national ‘branches’) against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a major trade agreement negotiated between the EU and the US. This is a campaign also based on environmental arguments, but not only; there are, in fact, other important political and economic frames (and actors) involved (Caiani & Graziano, Citation2018). Also an ECI has been conducted against TTIP: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_1872.
16 Famous examples are the opposition to the construction of an airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the ‘Ferme des Bouillons’ close to Rouen or the ‘Barrage de Sivens’ in Occitanie.
18 It is not the objective of this article to review this complex debate, but various scholars – from very different angles – do criticise the current state of affairs without agreeing with the Capitalocene hypothesis (see, for example, the contributions of Steffen, Crutzen, & McNeill, Citation2007 and Morton, Citation2014).