Crowdsourcing infrastructures of green everyday life: how sustainable sharing, swapping and gardening initiatives in Vienna tackle the lack of transformative agency in eco-politics

ABSTRACT

Empirical researchers of environmental alternative action organizations (EAAOs) have called for grounding two eco-political theories: David Schlosberg’s sustainable materialism (SM) and Ingolfur Blühdorn’s simulative politics (SP). In this article, I discuss results of an ethnographic study on a library of things, a cloth swapping initiative, and a community garden in the City of Vienna, Austria. Regarding SM, participants indeed suffer from a lack of substantive eco-political actions by liberal democratic institutions and themselves personally, however they barely convey a new materialist ontology. Regarding SP, participants indeed show an ambivalence towards consumer capitalism and ecological commitments, yet they tend to be highly critical and reflexive on the matter. Both theories are unable to detect that the EAAOs fill an eco-political lacuna in Vienna’s foundational economy: Via positive framing and flexible participation virtually everyone – the crowd – is invited to co-create sustainable routines. As such, they represent rudimentary infrastructures of green everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental alternative action organizations
• sustainable materialism
• simulation
• prefigurative politics
• sustainable consumption
• foundational economy

1. Introduction

In recent years, a particular style of environmental activism has regained popularity in Western societies: organizations that seek to change social structures directly by establishing sustainable everyday practices (Bosi and Zamponi 2015, Kousis and Uba 2021, MacGregor 2021). These environmental alternative action organizations (EAAOs) come in various shapes and forms and include food cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, repair cafés, bike kitchens, upcycling initiatives, libraries of things and co-housing projects, only to name a few (Giugni and Grasso 2018, Butzlaff and Deflorian 2021). Social movement scholars have traced the recent interest in EAAOs – which have been part of the action repertoires of social movements for more than a hundred years – to two conjunctures: the great frustration of the Copenhagen summit among climate activists in 2009 (Schlosberg and Craven 2019, de Moor et al. 2021) and the economic turndown following the financial crisis of the same year (Asara, 2020, Zamponi and Bosi 2018). In the meantime, climate activism has returned to state-centered street protest and the world economy has recovered to a large degree (at least until the breakout of COVID-19), yet EAAOs continue to flourish, and with them, the academic interest in assessing the grievances and strategies behind their actions.

In this journal and elsewhere, this has been done by debating whether these organizations reinvigorate eco-politics with a practice-oriented approach to social change or whether they reflect a post-political constellation with negligible effects for the environment (Schlosberg and Craven 2019, Eckersley 2020, Laage-Thomsen and Blok 2020, Blühdorn and Deflorian 2021, MacGregor 2021, Varvarousis et al. 2021). In the theoretical realm, two interpretations have dominated the discussion so far. With colleagues, David Schlosberg has argued that ‘sustainable materialist movements’ react against an ‘implementation deficit’ in liberal-democratic sustainability politics and seek to replace harmful flows and stocks of energy and matter with ecological ones, by creating everyday institutions that cater to the mundane needs of citizens (Schlosberg and Coles 2016, Schlosberg 2019, Schlosberg and Craven 2019). In contrast, Ingolfur Blühdorn has diagnosed ‘theme parks of self-experience’ (Blühdorn 2006), in which activists that have become complicit with consumer capitalism and ‘the politics of unsustainability’ that maintain it can simulate notions of autonomy and authenticity, while participating in depoliticized forms of eco-governance (Blühdorn 2014, 2017). In the course of this debate, empirical researchers have warned against all to ‘neat framings’ (MacGregor 2021, p. 341) that are more driven by the pursuit of theoretical consistency than by the attempt to grasp the complexities of real-world EAAOs that cannot but operate under intricate conditions. What is needed, Sherilyn MacGregor suggests, are ‘situated descriptions’, with which the actions of EAAOs can be understood in their local context and the theoretical accounts of sustainable materialism (SM) and simulative politics (SP) be sufficiently grounded (MacGregor 2021, p. 334; see also Berglund 2017, Laage-Thomsen and Blok 2020). Only then, it is argued, may robust conclusions about the organizations’ social criticism and strategic offer be drawn.

In the global North, the scholarly community has provided such situated descriptions primarily from countries that have severely suffered from austerity measures and the neoliberal transformation of the welfare state, such as the European South and the Anglophone world. Here, social scientists could generally confirm a new materialist rationality among EAAO organizers, yet also found them occasionally engaging in the top-down government of local sustainability problems, however, with only minor signs of self-deception (Asara, 2020, de Moor et al. 2021, MacGregor 2021, Varvarousis et al. 2021). Researchers have traced this complex character of EAAOs to the ways new public management and austerity politics have created conditions under which EAAOs can develop emancipatory energies, yet also become coopted for the local management of environmental issues or turned into coping mechanisms for dealing with material insecurity (McClintock 2014, Bosi and Zamponi 2015, Russell et al. 2022).

In comparison, the scrutinization of the theoretical debate has remained fragmented in societies that offer more benign welfare conditions, such as the social market economies Germany and Austria. While there has been evidence reported for Schlosberg’s (Schanes and Stagl 2019, Hector and Botero 2021) and Blühdorn’s argument (Kropp 2018), these investigations have been limited to assessing a single argument each and primarily dealt with food-related EAAOs. In this article, I contribute to empirically ground the arguments of SM and SP in this political-economic context by presenting qualitative research on the grievances and strategies of a library of things, a clothing swap initiative, and a community garden in the City of Vienna. The latter appears as a particularly interesting case to investigate: While Austria still maintains many elements of a Fordist welfare state, its capital is famous for a long-standing commitment to social integration and the foundational economy, i.e. the social and technical infrastructures that tend to the everyday needs of city dwellers (Bärnthaler et al. 2020, pp. 8–9, Hamedinger et al. 2019, pp. 3–4).

My analysis of problem-centered interviews with 27 organizers, users and volunteers shows that the vast majority of them are frustrated by the absence of effective regulation on various levels of liberal democratic government (as suggested by Schlosberg), but also by their personal failure at conforming to ecologist ideals in consumer society (as proposed by Blühdorn). However, they do not converge in a new materialist view of the world, nor do they show signs of a simulative engagement in depoliticized eco-governance. Instead, their strategy of empowering virtually everyone to establishing an alternative everyday practice via flexible formats of participation can be traced to specific tactical, organizational and contextual reasons. Concerning the latter, the EAAOs fill a lacuna in the foundational economy of Vienna, which – despite being strong when it comes to fulfilling everyday needs of city dwellers – has been hesitant of providing ways to satisfy these needs in an eco-friendly way. As a consequence, the city authorities make use of the creative energies of the EAAOs by granting them administrative and financial support. Next to delivering a situated discussion of SM and SP in Vienna, this article creates linkages between debates on the limitations of liberal sustainability governance, the renewed interest in personally embodying – prefiguring – social change and the rediscovery of the organizing power of public infrastructures.

In section two, I will flesh out the arguments of SM and SP and summarize their empirical assessments so far. In section three, I will describe my methodological approach and the three EAAOs of my study. In section four, I will work out patterns between the grievances and strategies of the organizations. In section five, I will analyze how plausible sustainable materialism and simulative politics are in making sense of the latter. In section six, I will draw conclusions for future research.

2. Sustainable materialism and simulative politics: between ‘neat framings’ and ‘situated descriptions’

David Schlosberg sets his argument off by portraying the political process in Western societies as inherently defunct and by locating an ‘implementation deficit’ among liberal democracies, when it comes to sustainability: The post-materialist values of citizens are not effectively translated into environmental policies, a grievance that neither green parties nor environmental NGOs have resolved (Schlosberg 2019, pp. 3–5, Schlosberg and Coles 2016, pp. 167–168). This implementation deficit has, Schlosberg resumes, only worsened since the advent of neoliberalism and the turn towards ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004), i.e. the slow hollowing of liberal democratic institutions by private interests and the increasing distrust towards political elites and parliamentary procedures among the general public (Schlosberg 2019, pp. 5–7, Schlosberg and Craven 2019, pp. 29–31).

It is exactly this lingering gap between citizens’ environmental and participatory values on the one hand, and their experience of everyday life and democracy on the other, which has led them to redirect their energies towards EAAOs, Schlosberg claims (Schlosberg and Coles 2016, p. 167, Schlosberg and Craven 2019, p. 35). What is more, the diverse organizations share a new materialist ontology: Participants no longer perceive the world in a modern dualist way, but see it as an interconnected web of matter and energy flows that are continuously reproduced by human and non-human practices and held in motion by established structures of power (Schlosberg 2019, pp. 13–15, Schlosberg and Coles 2016, pp. 171–173). Consequently, EAAOs pursue a unique political approach (Schlosberg and Coles 2016, p. 172): Unsustainable systems of provision and corrupted processes of liberal democracy are to be replaced by a growing network of everyday collectives that transcend individualist consumer attitudes and enact authentic forms of democratic participation (Schlosberg 2019, pp. 10–16, Schlosberg and Craven 2019, pp. 78–84). The key element of this theory of change is prefiguration: the idea of collectively embodying a utopian way of living, creating consistence between personal values and action in the process (Schlosberg 2019, pp. 15–16).

More recently, Schlosberg and Craven have reportedly found evidence that EAAOs are indeed the ‘political embodiment of new materialist ontology’ (Schlosberg 2019, p. 15), after conducting 100 interviews with participants of a non-specified number of EAAOs (Schlosberg and Craven 2019). It is important to note, however, that the authors have confined their interviews to the Anglophone world and to organizers only, which limits the validity of their universal claims (MacGregor 2021, p. 333). Moreover, it has been stated that their analysis remains short on describing the ways in which everyday practices are negotiated under local constraints. Thus, their primary contribution may be a theoretical ideal-type that can act as a sensitizing concept for studying EAAOs in the field (Blok 2021, pp. 2–3).

The backbone of Ingolfur Blühdorn’s argument is a shift in value orientations and cultural preferences that has been induced by several waves of macro-social change, including detraditionalization, individualization, globalization (Giddens 1991, Beck 1992) and, more recently, acceleration, commercialization and flexibilization (Sennett 1999, Bauman 2012). These processes of modernization, he argues, have left the identity norm of the autonomous and consistent subject in a highly precarious state. While the ideal of acting free of the corrupting influence of the market and totally in line with benign social values is still highly attractive in late-modern society – especially among the constituency of new social movements – individuals give in to the pressure of the social changes that liquefy personal subjectivity: Individuals increasingly perceive themselves in entrepreneurial and consumerist terms, adapt to an ever-increasing range of innovations in the work place and the private sphere, always seeking the next opportunity to improve their social position and life satisfaction in the face of rising material inequality and ecological degradation (Blühdorn 2013, pp. 25–26, 2014, pp. 154–157). Under these conditions, the loss of liberal democracies’ steering capacity leads to increasing skepticism towards their procedures, principles and personnel, while the embracement of capitalist notions of the good life results in a softening view on what is environmentally desirable, feasible and problematic. In the domain of eco-politics, Blühdorn has described this shift in subjectivity as the post-ecologist turn (Blühdorn 2014, pp. 155–157, 2017, pp. 52–53).

Yet, while ‘liquid identity for liquid life in liquid modernity’ becomes the new normal, Blühdorn argues with reference to Zygmunt Bauman, the modern ideals of autonomy and consistency cannot be discarded completely, as they remain the uncontested points of reference for the construction of personal identities (2017, p. 52). This, in turn, creates the demand for discourses and arenas, in which these idealist notions can still be experienced, at least for a limited time (Blühdorn 2013, p. 28, 2017, pp. 52–57). According to Blühdorn, EAAOs represent exactly this: social practices of ‘simulation’ that allow their participants to experience themselves as radical opponents of liberal consumer capitalism and as authentic bearers of social and ecological justice (Blühdorn 2017, p. 57). He stresses that these practices of simulation are a coping mechanism for dealing with the incommensurability of old-emancipatory and new-liquid values and preferences. Ultimately, these ‘theme parks of self-experience’ (Blühdorn 2006, p. 38) are part of a vast network of simulative arenas and discourses that serve individuals and society as a whole to manage the intensifying order of ‘sustained unsustainability’ (Blühdorn 2014, pp. 161–162, 2017, p. 58). Importantly, Blühdorn understands his thesis of simulative practices as a more nuanced analysis of how civil society operates in the ‘post-political constellation’ (Blühdorn 2014, p. 157). In the field of environmental politics, neo-Marxist scholars have diagnosed a discursive hegemony of techno-managerialism within environmental governance, which privileges solutionist approaches to sustainability problems and discounts contentious claims for eco-social justice, by means of communicative and physical policing (Swyngedouw 2005, Swyngedouw and Wilson 2014).

While acknowledging the diagnostic value of Schlosberg’s and Blühdorn’s conceptualizations, multiple scholars have raised epistemological concerns against them. Assuming that the grievances and strategies of EAAOs can be captured with a single, deductively derived theory, the argument runs, would overlook the complexities and ambiguities that organizations always contain in real life (Deflorian 2021, de Moor et al. 2021, Varvarousis et al. 2021). What is needed, Sherilyn MacGregor argues, is ‘situated research’ (MacGregor 2021, p. 334): investigations that listen closely to the voices of those involved and contextualize their actions in their local environment. This approach allows researchers to provide grounded reasons for why the abstract theoretical frames of SM and SP are (im)plausible to different degrees (see also Berglund 2017, Laage-Thomsen and Blok 2020).

So far, this has been primarily done in welfare states that have experienced a dramatic transformation towards neoliberal principles. In her own ethnographic fieldwork on an alley-greening action group in Moss Side, Manchester, MacGregor found the organization articulating ecological circles between local residents’ residue, public green sites and local wildlife to counter the city council’s cuts in waste management. At the same time, she noticed that the action group was not problematizing the systemic sources of waste itself, while amplifying the austerity government’s narrative of litter pollution being a problem of personal conduct (MacGregor 2021, pp. 338–340). Among a food coop and a retrofitting group in the metropolitan region of Manchester, Joost de Moor and colleagues identified critical ideas behind the attempt to transform unsustainable modes of production and consumption via diffusing alternative practices throughout society. Simultaneously, however, activists were hesitant to publicly express discontent against policies that perpetuate climate change – not because of a post-ecologist subjectivity but because of, inter alia, the fear of losing institutional access, less oppositional participants and existential income from funding bodies (de Moor et al. 2021, pp. 323–324). Visiting numerous EAAOs in the aftermath of the square movements in Barcelona and Athens, Viviana Asara and colleagues reported an upright attempt to proliferate and politicize material commons, such as community gardens, renewable energy cooperatives or barter clubs. While doing so, the researchers could not diagnose arenas for identarian self-deception and the internalization of neoliberal mantras of personal responsibility (Asara, 2020, pp. 19–20, Varvarousis et al. 2021, pp. 304–305).

Notably, while all authors found evidence for a new materialist approach to social change, only MacGregor could confirm an uncritical acceptance of the structural causes of urban waste and a bottom-up engagement in communal austerity programs. She traces this ambivalence to the changing character of agency under neoliberal governance that has the power to render EAAOs’ activities ‘simultaneously coping, contestatory, and coopted’ (MacGregor 2021, p. 334). De Moor et al. and Asara et al. make a different argument but arrive at the same conclusion: From the outside, EAAOs might appear to be chambers of eco-social self-realization that collaborate in merely managing aggravating crises, yet from the inside it is much more complicated. Accordingly, neoliberal public policy has pushed activists towards the promotion of practical alternatives, by either offering participatory programs for civil society organizations, while cutting back welfare allowances that used to sustain radical activists (de Moor et al. 2021, p. 324) – or by dismantling large parts of the welfare state, while letting civil society support citizens that plunged into material crises (Asara, 2020, p. 20). They are not alone with this analysis: Other EAAO scholars noticed that the creative energies of organizations have been channeled towards dealing with local environmental problems and socio-economic insecurities, following the introduction of new public management in the US and the UK (McClintock 2014, Walker 2016, Kneafsey et al. 2017) and austerity governments in the European South during the public debt crisis of the 2010s (Arampatzi 2017, Zamponi and Bosi 2018, Roussos 2019). As such, at least in these regions, Schlosberg’s highly plausible, whereas Blühdorn’s argument looks far less convincing.

In social market economies¹, which have evaded harsh austerity measures and experienced a softer restructuring of public policy towards individual accountability, the theoretical debate on EAAOs has been scrutinized less comprehensively so far. Studying repair cafés in Berlin and Eastern Germany, Philip Hector and Andrea Botero recognized the attempt to establish a regenerative flow of resources and nascent forms of collaborative governance with local administrations (Hector and Botero 2021, pp. 10–12). Similarly, Karin Schanes and Sigrid Stagl identified the sustainable materialist rationale of establishing a practical alternative to the dominant food system among food savers from across Austria (Schanes and Stagl 2019, p. 1500). Conversely, Cordula Kropp noticed that urban, post-materialist individuals utilize the framing of alternative food networks in Germany to bridge the gap between their moral aspirations and their high-carbon lifestyles (Kropp 2018, p. 423). Given that each of these investigations only take a single argument as point of reference and two of them only deal with food-related EAAOs, additional grounding of both SM and SP among multiple types of EAAOS seems warranted. In the following, I will provide exactly this for three initiatives that operate in the City of Vienna.

3. Methodology and case descriptions

Before moving to Vienna, I was active in a food cooperative and community garden in Uppsala, Sweden, which sensitized me for the grievances and strategies that Viennese EAAOs might display. For choosing suitable case initiatives, I set four criteria: the organizations required to be self-organized (not initiated or run by a governmental or charity organization); to publicly state that they seek to change society towards sustainability (in any sense); to mobilize a unique everyday practice; and to be a salient organization in the city’s EAAO landscape. I evaluated the later criterion by doing field trips to public events of various organizations between 2017 and 2020 and by consulting other researchers that knew the local scene. Based on these criteria, I chose three organizations: the library of things Leila, the community garden Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal and the clothing swap initiative Leiberl-Roulette. Key information about each EAAO can be found in Table 1.

Table 1. Key characteristics of the three EAAOs.

EAAO	Location and Time	Grievances (all participants)	Strategy (organizers only)	Organization	Activities
Leila	A library of things that is located in a salesroom in the multicultural inner-city district of Ottakring. It opens twice a week for three hours for rental services and for occasional neighborhood events on sharing culture. Founded in 2013.	Overuse of natural resources; climate change; inefficient use of consumer goods; cluttering of homes; overconsumption	Objective: the common use of items, ‘which saves (schont) the environment, money and space’ (official website description). The long-term goal is a library of things (irrespective of publicly owned or civil-society-run) in every neighborhood, allowing every city dweller to borrow things in their immediate vicinity. Rationale: diffusing sharing practices via replication by as many as possible.	A team of 9 organizers does shifts at the shop and administers the online rental platform, social media activities, neighborhood events and knowledge exchange with third parties. A changing number of volunteers assists by doing shifts at the shop, promoting Leila at neighborhood events, making photos for the website and repairing items. Leila used to operate on a model according to which every borrower had to take over a task in the library, however due to disappointing numbers of engagement, they switched to the current voluntary model. Leila notes between about 300 and 400 rentals per year.	Running the library that offers more than 200 things, ranging from tools and kitchen equipment to instruments and camping gear; promoting sharing practices (such as cloth swapping or joint repairing) at neighborhood events (some of which are financially supported by the City of Vienna); advising public and private entities in how to set up and run a library of things; exchanging know-how and best practices with other libraries of things through an EU-funded project.
Gemein-schafts-gartenDonaukanal	A community garden located on the Northern bank of the Danube canal, one of the most popular meeting spots in the city center. Accessible 24/7. Founded in 2013.	Gentrification; lack of nature; lack of public space; segregation of urban milieus; lack of community; biodiversity loss; climate change	Objective: stalling the rising number of gastronomic businesses that have been supplanting green space on the canal bank; facilitating dialogue between different urban milieus; promoting sustainable gardening practices. Rationale: by providing the large seating area and maintaining individual garden beds, a ‘second living room’ (Konrad, organizer) for city dwellers is created, which helps pursuing the aforementioned goals.	31 gardeners cultivate 52 raised beds and the seating area, both of which can be publicly accessed. Common garden activities are organized by working groups and coordinated by a monthly plenum. Organizers seek to strengthen collaboration in working groups, as there has been an increasing number of freeriders among them. The garden community holds a lease contract for the garden grounds with the City of Vienna, which only demands a symbolically low annual leasing fee. The city park department provides support in taking care of trees and constructing a fence around the garden’s perimeter.	Individual garden beds are cared for independently, common garden beds, which involve edible plants, are maintained by working groups. Organizers and volunteers periodically organize public debates, literature readings or cinema screenings in the seating area. Especially during the warm months of the year, city dwellers populate the seating area for mingling or having a drink. Occasionally, the garden community hosts organic planting workshops at schools.
Leiberl-Rouleltte	A clothing swap initiative that organizes swapping parties on the terrace of the Don Bosco Haus, a catholic youth-educational center, to which two organizers have personal ties, in the outer-city district of Hietzing. Three to four parties are planned per year but less have taken place due to COVID-19. Founded in 2020.	Working conditions in the global textile industry; resource use of fashion labels; fast fashion; climate change; overconsumption	Objective: ‘Setting an example against throw-away culture and for saving resources and living sustainability’ (official facebook description). Rationale: the more individuals enjoy the quality of clothes, the atmosphere of the outdoor venue and the music and snacks that are offered, the more swappers may join the events and escalate the impact of exchanging second-hand clothes instead of buying new ones.	Three friends are organizing the parties on- site and are supported by eight to ten volunteers during each swapping party. Currently, each event attracts 87 swappers on average, most of which are female. The sum of the entrance fee of 2 € is donated to the Don Bosco Haus’ activities with socially disadvantaged youths in the global South.	Clothing swap parties are announced on Leiberl-Roulette’s facebook page. Swappers often come in groups and combine their exchanging activity with having a cup of coffee or relaxing in the adjacent garden. On the facebook page, Leiberl-Roulette also informs followers about the environmental and ethical consequences of the clothing industry.

For gaining access, I reached out to the organizations through their official communication channels. All organizations readily accepted to be researched. They allowed me to join them as a participant observer during their front side activities, which included watching and listening to interactions between organizers, volunteers and users during garden activities, the opening times of the library of things and during a clothing swap party (the only one that could be held due to COVID-19 regulations). The primary goal of my participant observation was to gain a picture of the overt activities of the organizations and to develop trust for recruiting interview partners. As my analytical focus was on the grievances and strategies that drove the EAAOs’ public actions, I deliberately did not attend intra-group meetings, where organizational issues and tactics were discussed, except during one meeting of Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal, which I attended for meeting potential interview partners. Additionally, I followed the organizations’ social media activities and added relevant posts to my qualitative data material.

Overall, I conducted 27 in-depth interviews with participants from three groups that gather in the EAAOs’ events: organizers (who steer and run the organizations), users (who participate in the services offered by the organizations) and volunteers (who assist organizers in their day-to-day business, without being involved in decision-making). I held interviews with nine participants from each organization and distributed them according to each role’s prominence in the respective EAAO (organizers-users-volunteers): Leila: 3-4-2, Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal: 5-3-1 and Leiberl-Roulette: 2-4-3. Issues of interest included, inter alia, the participants’ motives for joining the organization, the relationship between their engagement and the rest of their everyday lives, the societal problems they seek to address, the perceived impact of the EAAOs and the organizational challenges they see. Interviewee selection was informed by the goal to gain a sample that reflected the differences in activist biography, gender, age and cultural background within each organization. In addition, I held follow-up interviews with two key organizers from each EAAO, for reporting on recent developments and resolving open questions. Through a research grant, I could offer every interviewee a compensation of 30€ for their time, which ranged between 45 and 90 minutes. The interview audio was transcribed by a research assistant. I conducted my fieldwork and interviews between the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021, when COVID-19 regulations allowed gatherings of individuals from separate households in public space. Half of the interviews were held virtually.

As I had a strong interest in scrutinizing existing diagnoses of EAAOs, I chose theory-driven participant observation (Lichterman 2002) and the problem-centered interview (Witzel 2000) to guide the collection, coding and analysis of my qualitative data. Both of these approaches represent an abductive research design (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, p. 28), which entails a continuous, back-and-forth dialogue between existing knowledge (see section two) and newly generated knowledge during the whole research process (writing memos, formulating interview questions, developing derivative and emergent codes, analyzing patterns between codes) (Lichterman 2002, p. 130, Witzel 2000, paragraphs 10–25). This ‘iterative-recursive strategy’ (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, p. 32) ends when a plausible interpretation of the puzzling research phenomenon has been achieved (Lichterman 2002, p. 137, Witzel 2000, paragraph 25).

4. Patterns among the grievances and strategies of the Viennese EAAOs

4.1 An institutional and personal lack of agency in environmental politics

A common theme that I could identify among the grievances of organizers, users and volunteers is a fundamental absence of transformative agency in various domains of eco-politics. Practitioners tend to locate accountability for various sustainability problems among two groups: liberal democratic institutions and themselves personally, as citizens and consumers. Yet, the interviewees complain, neither is the working relationship between the two defined, nor are their respective actions in any way sufficient or successful. Vera, who visited the community garden multiple times, and Annika, a then-user and now-volunteer of Leiberl-Roulette, describe in an exemplary way the condition many participants find themselves in:

‘This daily feeling of ‘I desire to change something, but I do not have the opportunity to do so’ is tiring me A BIT. But, yeah, I am almost used to it. […] The politician cannot change anything, even I cannot change anything.’ (Vera)²

‘Legislation and regulation are necessary, but it’s always the question: is it up to the consumer to achieve them or doesn’t it need to come from above. And it is BOTH, but both do not really happen and that is … They give us a bad time [laughs] when it comes to that.’ (Annika)

Concerning the perceived absence of institutional capability – or willingness – to act, interviewees reported a deep frustration with the ‘mini steps’ (Marlene, Leiberl-Roulette organizer) that governments are making to regulate corporate and consumer actions, accompanied by personal feelings of ‘powerlessness’ (Benjamin, Leila organizer) in the face of this situation. Participating in an EAAO, then, alleviates this feeling. However, the EAAOs are not the only response to this grievance. 92% of the interviewees report that they (almost) always vote in elections on several administrative levels, while 63% at least occasionally participate in public protests, such as Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter or Vienna Pride. Moreover, a single interviewee, Nora, a Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal organizer, acts as a district council member for the Greens, while Martha, a Leila user, is an active member of Extinction Rebellion. Notably, Martha was the only respondent who exhibited a new materialist view of the world, whereas the rest of the interviewees demonstrated various shades of eco-anthropocentricism.

Concerning the lack of personal agency in eco-politics, practitioners reliably described a disillusionment with their performance in acting responsibly in the context of pressing sustainability crises. They tend to trace this situation to the cultural power of capitalism. The latter, interviewees complain, offers them highly enjoyable products, while denying a true price for consumer products, and demands numerous hours of (un)paid labor, while withholding the necessary income and time for a sustainable everyday conduct. A particular attitude follows from this experience: a very pragmatic form of prefiguration, which usually entails the aspiration to fully align one’s everyday behavior with one’s vision of an ideal society. While practitioners accept that they cannot – or do not even want to – act ecologically in every life situation, they do not give up and try better in the future (see also Deflorian 2021). ‘Two steps forward, one step backward, it’s a lifelong journey’ as Martha words it.

It is this double lack of transformative agency – the perceived absence of substantive regulative action and the experienced limits of methodological individualism – that makes the development of and the engagement in EAAOs so meaningful to participants. They cherish that it allows them to move beyond a narrow sense of green consumerism and become part of tangible collective action, bringing forth an alternative way of organizing everyday life that also sends a demonstrative ‘signal’ (Jan, Leila organizer; Kathi, Leiberl-Roulette organizers) to the public (see also Eckersley 2020). Plus, and this should not be underestimated, participants acknowledge that they can connect with like-minded peers and satisfy very mundane needs: food, clothing, or, at least for some, an ice cream machine. In several interviews, practitioners mentioned a particular joy they experience within EAAOs that resembles a ‘double dividend’ (Marlene, Leiberl-Roulette organizer): recovering a sense of agency related to problems of sustainability and taking something home that directly adds to their life satisfaction.

4.2 Crowdsourcing infrastructures of green everyday life

Leila, Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal and Leiberl-Roulette achieve this experience thanks to a particular strategic approach: They establish themselves as easily accessible infrastructures that let virtually anyone participate in a certain alternative everyday practice (see also Asara, 2020, Hector and Botero 2021, Varvarousis et al. 2021). As Ella and Lea, organizers of Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal and Leila respectively, put it:

‘It is very IMPORTANT to us to establish a consumption-free meeting place at exactly this place, the DANUBE CANAL, which is being increasingly commercialized. This is our contribution, our offer to the public space, which we also take care of and cultivate, not only for us but for ALL.’ (Ella)

‘What I found very nice and what I could very strongly identify with is this ‘Allowing as many PEOPLE as possible ACCESS to as many things as possible’, this ‘We see ourselves in the role of enablers.” (Lea)

In other words, the EAAOs seek to crowdsource green everyday life: Everyone – irrespective of their particular motifs or commitments – is welcome to articulate a sustainable everyday practice so that it becomes a stable routine in their personal everyday lives and, consequently, society as a whole. This corresponds to a very utilitarian idea: The more practitioners swap clothes, borrow things or cultivate a garden, the more its impact will be in constituting eco-political agency and propelling replication. This strategic choice has far-reaching effects on how the EAAOs are organized: They emphasize positive impact over negative critique in their framing, they prefer cooperation rather than contention with institutional players, and they produce an atmosphere of convenience and joy rather than discomfort and indignation. Through my interviews I could identify three reasons for this strategic choice.

The first one was tactical: Addressing the crowd with a positive alternative is considered more effective and inclusive than criticizing certain actors and ‘indoctrinating’ individuals with certain worldviews (Marlene) (see also de Moor et al. 2021, Varvarousis et al. 2021). It is important to note that, despite their intention to be accessible to everyone, the EAAOs remain mostly backed by white, middle-class, post-materialist milieus, a fact that not only became visible through my interviews and socio-demographic survey but that was openly discussed by organizers as an operational problem they grapple with.

Second, addressing the crowd is functional in attracting individuals and keeping them involved as users and volunteers beyond one-time engagements. The organizations have deliberately lowered normative expectations and created flexible formats of participation. By doing so, they broke down the boundaries between those who are part of the activist group and those who are not: Community and crowd coalesce within the three EAAOs. This makes it much easier for users and volunteers to join, who cherish the combination of little participatory obligations and welcoming community atmosphere (see also Berglund 2017). The downside of this approach is that almost all of the labor, responsibility and commitment of grassroots organizing remains concentrated among the small number of organizers, with many of them working at the absolute limits of their energy and time resources.

The third reason for the crowdsourcing strategy can be traced to the local political economic context of the three EAAOs. Their rationale of providing low-threshold infrastructures for all city dwellers, so they can fulfill their everyday needs without engaging in the market, strikingly resembles the foundational economy approach of the Viennese city government since the rise of the Social Democrats to power in 1919. From affordable social housing and free swimming baths for children to adult educational centers and generously funded cultural events: Urban life in Vienna is strongly structured by the public infrastructures provided by the municipality (Essletzbichler 2022, p. 13, Hamedinger et al. 2019, p. 11, Novy et al. 2019, p. 16). Notably however, the city government, which remains dominated by the Social Democrats, continues to pursue a Fordist conception of the good life and has been hesitant to extend its strong municipal role to the domain of environment-friendly living (Novy et al. 2019, p. 20). Beyond the introduction of an annual ticket for public transport for 365€ (which was spearheaded by the former Green coalition partner) in 2012 and the sluggish construction of bike lanes, the city government has focused on maintaining existing technical and social infrastructures (such as communal housing) and protecting them against (intern)national pressures to privatize them (Bärnthaler et al. 2020, pp. 15–16). Additionally, the city government has focused on subsidizing private businesses and civil society initiatives that enable city dwellers to adopt sustainable everyday practices. This includes vouchers for repairments or the acquisition of cargo bikes, next to administrative and financial assistance for civil-society groups that foster low-carbon community life (Exner and Schützenberger 2018, p. 191) – such as Leila and Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal who benefit from these programs.

Thus, the EAAOs pursue this strategic approach, inter alia, because there exists a veritable eco-political gap in the foundational economy of the City of Vienna and because the latter motivates them to fill it. Similar to EAAOs in strongly neoliberalized societies, this relationship can be read as the co-optation of grassroots organizations to alleviate local environmental problems. Indeed, permitting Gemeinschaftsgarten Donaukanal to take care of public land allows the municipal park department to relieve its budget and receive a creative contribution to Vienna’s reputation as the most livable city in the world. Moreover, after Leila was advising a district library to set up a library of things section, politicians began to falsely claim that the 15^th district government opened the first library of things in Austria, not mentioning Leila’s existence or involvement in the process. At the same time, however, the community gardeners held the park department in high esteem for their continuous support, while Leila organizers acknowledged a very fair treatment when receiving municipal subsidies for their neighborhood events. Moreover, there were no signs that practitioners engage with EAAOs out of existential need, nor was municipal assistance coupled to relieving the latter. Institutional empowerment and co-optation seem to be in balance in these two cases. In addition, while it does not have any relations with the city authorities, Leiberl-Roulette concurs with the other two EAAOs on the view that they are social innovators: Any adoption of their model by whichever entity is welcome – as long as credit is given to them for the original organizational design.

5. Discussion

How plausible are sustainable materialism and simulative politics in understanding the EAAOs’ grievances and strategies? Clearly, the perceived lack of eco-political agency among liberal-democratic institutions corresponds to the ‘implementation deficit’ that David Schlosberg assumes as the root grievance of EAAOs. The agentic paralysis as individual green consumers also vividly figures in the accounts of practitioners, from organizers to volunteers to users. Yet, the participants do not hold such a fundamental mistrust against representative democracy that they consider them hollowed out in a post-democratic sense. Nor do they predominantly share a new materialist view of the world or the belief that the lifeworld is now the sphere where change towards sustainability should be organized. Moreover, while participants clearly subscribe to the idea of embodying a utopian way of living, they are far more pessimistic and pragmatic when it comes to attaining full consistency between their values and actions – too much do they feel entangled between the freedoms and constraints of consumer capitalism. Thus, only Schlosberg’s description of a collective frustration with the limitations of both liberal-democratic government and consumer individualism in bringing about sociatal change towards sustainability is helpful in deciphering the grievances of the Viennese cases – however, in a very instructive way.

Turning to Blühdorn’s thesis of a modernization-induced fracture of personal identities that requires simulative practices to bridge contradicting eco-political attitudes: Indeed, most respondents display the late-modern predicament of enjoying the vast consumer options and flexible relationships of contemporary capitalism and belonging to strong social collectives within a safe natural environment. The EAAOs make use of this identarian problem by providing infrastructures of environmental everyday practices that create a sense of community, yet without any requirements concerning political ideology or degree of engagement – without ‘portend[ing] constraint on their freedom to pursue what they see fit for each separately’ (Bauman 2012, p. 36). In the terminology of Bauman, on which Blühdorn draws from theoretically, we may describe these ephemeral collectives as liquid communities of sustainable practice. However, it cannot be said that the organizations are self-deceptively participating in depoliticized forms of sustainability governance. First, practitioners are far more reflexive about their personal entanglement in consumer capitalism than Blühdorn assumes, by showing an awareness about their ambivalent values and by displaying a pragmatic approach to prefiguration. Second, while the city administration may make use of the creative energies of Leila and Gemeinschaftsgarten Donauakanal, they receive considerable financial and practical support from it, and consider it a benvolent relationship. To conclude, only Blühdorn’s assumption of a late-modern identity crisis is useful in understanding the grievances, and partially the strategies of the EAAOs – but, here as well, in a very convincing way.

The reasons for the implausible aspects of both theories have already been alluded to in the empirical debate: Schlosberg and Blühdorn project the tectonic changes in Western democracy and culture they are describing straight into the minds of participants – without considering that in the lifeworlds of individuals, these shifts – if they are indeed happening – play out in unexpected ways, as they are subject to many different system dynamics at the same time (Deflorian 2021, p. 356, MacGregor 2021, p. 333). Notably, the plausible aspects of both SM and SP allude to key eco-political and socio-cultural aspects of liberal democratic societies that are enveloped in a capitalist political economy. Political theorists have traced the bad environmental performance of these societies to the reluctance of governing institutions to introduce decisive regulations on corporations and the tendency to offload responsibility to individuals instead (Swyngedouw 2005, Hausknost 2014, Eckersley 2020). Moreover, sociologists have diagnosed the crumbling of strong collective identities and the commercialization of lifeworlds as a consequence of liberalizing both culture and markets, which began in the last quarter of the 20^th century (Giddens 1991, Sennett 1999, Bauman 2012).

Thus, it is worth speculating: The fact that the EAAOs react against these effects by establishing rudimentary versions of a green foundational economy could reflect collective responses to ‘overdynamization crises’ (Reckwitz 2019, p. 286) that Western societies are experiencing at the moment. According to Andreas Reckwitz, the dynamization of economic and social life that began in the 1970s has led to massive problems – from social inequality to cultural disintegration to ecological devastation – with which the liberal paradigm cannot deal with anymore. As a consequence societies may now enter a phase of stronger institutional regulation of economic and social activities again (Reckwitz 2019, pp. 293–304). The increasing academic and political interest in the foundational economy, would be a sign for that, as it has the unique power to structure human behavior and collectivize individual actions (Essletzbichler 2022, pp. 7–9, Hamedinger et al. 2019, p. 8, Reckwitz 2019, pp. 296–297).

From that perspective, the three EAAOs are situated right between paradigms of dynamization and regulation. The organizations respond to the lack of decisive state policies and the atomization of responsibility in the domain of eco-politics by creating platforms that collect the fractured agency of individuals for establishing an alternative everyday practice among the daily routines of the latter. Yet importantly, for remaining attractive they have to offer highly flexible formats of engagement, through which they are not able to determine the behavior of participants in a consistent way (see also Deflorian 2021, p. 358). They lack the organizing power to ‘interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions’ (Bauman 2012, p. 6), which only larger infrastructural configurations have (Bärnthaler et al. 2020, p. 16).

However, there are signs that the EAAOs can inspire institutional actors to take up the thread. As mentioned above, the government of the 15th city district has collaborated with Leila in setting up a library of things as part of its local library. In addition, the establishment of Gemeinschaftsgaten Donaukanal and similar community gardens has led the City of Vienna to fund Gartenpolylog, an NGO that advises urban gardening initiatives and provides a network for them (Exner and Schützenberger 2018, p. 191). Moreover, the City has very recently incorporated repair cafés into their social policy programs to revive community life on the neighborhood level. Expanding such civic-public partnerships that establish grassroots innovations on a larger scale would have two advantages. First, it would allow EAAOs to ‘take the step beyond being small prefigurative lifeboats of “otherness”, and instead orientate themselves as part of a self-expansive dynamic capable of coalescing into the kind of broader project of transformation’ (Russell et al. 2022, p. 9.). Second, it would support the city in creating ‘socio-ecological infrastructure configurations’ that are simultaneously accessible, affordable and sustainable (Bärnthaler et al. 2020, p. 2). Upscaled in that way and combined with a sincere regulation of harmful routines, crowdsourcing utopian everyday practices might actually be successful in crowding out dominant consumer practices.

6. Conclusion

The study presented here has empirically scrutinized the arguments of sustainable materialism and simulative politics in a social market economy by analyzing the grievances and strategies of three EAAOs in the City of Vienna. While the organizations indeed respond to an implementation deficit in environmental governance, they do not try to cure a ‘fatigue with traditional political and policy action’ with a materialist political ontology (Schlosberg and Craven 2019, p. 129). And while practitioners indeed suffer from the precarious state of ecologist ideals, their actions are not aimed at abdicating ‘the particular norms of subjectivity and identity which, for a long time, had underpinned the emancipatory agenda’ (Blühdorn 2017, p. 51). Instead, the EAAOs’ strategy can be traced to the positive mobilization effects of non-contentious framing and low-threshold involvement. Moreover, they are nudged into filling an eco-political lacuna in the Fordist-oriented foundational economy of Vienna. If the latter would be willing to exchange its ‘timid reformism’ towards public infrastructures (Bärnthaler et al. 2020, p. 14) with more ‘experimental governance’ (Hamedinger et al. 2019, p. 7), much more splintered agency would be crowdsourced, enabling a more sustainable everyday life for those who use them.

This situated analysis of SM and SP has partially supported existing ones and partially reached different conclusions. Similar to studies from the UK (de Moor et al. 2021), Spain (Asara, 2020) and Greece (Varvarousis et al. 2021), I could not find evidence for a self-deceptive engagement in a depoliticized management of sustainability problems, as the EAAOs show a high degree of reflexiveness about their complex entanglement in urban governance structures. Unlike other studies in Austria (Schanes and Stagl 2019) and Germany (Hector and Botero 2021), I could only find a very minor presence of a new materialist ontology among EAAO practitioners. This discrepancy might be due to different degrees of sensitivity in scrutinizing Schlosberg’ theory. One might consider it already confirmed if activists focus on changing a material aspect of their everyday life. However, considering Schlosberg’s emphasis on the presence of a distinct political ontology (Schlosberg 2019, p. 15), a stricter assessment of his argument seems apposite. The evidence of a late-modern identity problem in this study and another one conducted in Germany (Kropp 2018) might reflect the benign socio-economic conditions of social market economies and might thus also be present in other Western societies that have undergone a softer neoliberal restructuring. Late-modern scholars may also argue that the predicament of fractured eco-political identities is currently only submerged under more material concerns in those societies that currently have to fight the consequences of drastic austerity policies (Butzlaff and Deflorian 2021, p. 16). Finally, this study has shown the need for more conceptual research on the intersections between EAAOs and the foundational economy (Russell et al. 2022) and for more empirical investigations into how EAAOs and their design principles are being incorporated into public policy making (Exner and Schützenberger 2018).

Acknowledgments

My gratitutde goes to all interview partners, especially the EAAO organizers, for sharing their experiences and perspectives. They have proven to be invaluable for this project. As did Nina Lobnig's diligent transcriptions of the interview audio, dank dir! Moreover, I would like to thank Lorenzo Zamponi, Joost de Moor, Mikko Laamanen, Ingolfur Blühdorn, Andreas Novy, Stephan Lessenich, Brian Doherty, Richard Bärnthaler, two anonymous reviewers and Graeme Hayes for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vienna University of Economics and Business, through a Small Scale Project by WU Junior Faculty [11000545].

Notes

1. For evidence of sustainable materialist attitudes in another more benign welfare state, see (Laage-Thomsen and Blok 2020).

2. Emphasis in capital letters was put by the interviewees. Translation from German into English was done by me. All interviewees were given pseudonyms.