Searching for ‘the political’ in environmental politics

Abstract

Situating the ‘post-ecologist turn’ within the framework of post-politics, we not only investigate why environmental issues are so easily represented in consensual and technocratic terms, but also seek avenues for repoliticisation. We thereby try to avoid the pitfall of a voluntaristic or substantively normative approach to what repoliticisation can mean. By pointing to the subtle polemic on a meta-level which lurks beneath even the most consensual discourse, a potential starting point for repoliticisation is uncovered, which also enables a political rereading of the ‘post-ecologist turn’. Finally, we argue that the same characteristics that make the environmental question liable to depoliticisation can also turn it into a field of politicisation par excellence.

Keywords:

• the political
• post-politics
• post-ecologism
• climate change
• repoliticisation
• hegemony

Notes

1. Of course, the field of discourses on environmental politics has always consisted of a variety of currents, differing, amongst other things, in terms of the extent to which they thought it would be possible to reach environmental progress within the boundaries of the existing form of society. Nevertheless, as Blühdorn (2013) aptly shows, there is a significant difference between discourses on environmental politics that are predominant now and discourses of some decennia ago.

2. We thank Gareth Dale for his inspiring input during a seminar in Leuven on this issue.

3. Erik Swyngedouw strongly warns against the reduction of the political to the social, but at the same time he follows the Rancierian approach to repoliticisation and, as a result, also tends to end up with a form of emancipatory apriorism.

4. Antonio Gramsci (1998, p. 106) has understood such processes as ‘passive revolutions’.

5. Blühdorn (2007a) argues that current self-descriptions of society lead to forms of self-deception. Discourses of change are used in order to retain the unsustainable status quo. However, the very invocation of the need for consensus betrays society’s divided nature, as a result of which self-deception can only be partly successful.