Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement By ...

The political in climate change politics

In a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society published in 2010 in which a set of prominent thinkers reflected on climate change, Erik Swyngedouw pointed out an apparent paradox: Though climate change and its consequences have been elevated to key policy issues in the last few years, many analysts claim that social life has become depoliticized in contemporary democracies, that dispute and confrontation have been erased from the public sphere and replaced by technocratic and consensually framed modes of management of public problems. As Swyngedouw noted, scholars such as Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek have offered critiques of this situation, which they have termed postdemocratic or postpolitical (Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 2006; Žižek, 1999).

So what kind of politics is associated with climate change? Swyngedouw argued that through its presentation in apocalyptic terms and its reduction to a problem of CO₂ emissions, climate change itself has given rise to a hegemonic populist proposal that promises solutions within the structures of capitalism and the market economy. The framework of “sustainability” offers what appears to be the only way out and does so without requiring any fundamental social or political change. Swyngedouw maintained that the hegemonic discourse of sustainability threatens to overdetermine the political options:

the sustainability argument has evacuated the politics of the possible, the radical contestation of alternative future socio-environmental possibilities and socio-natural arrangements, and has silenced the antagonisms and conflicts that are constitutive of our socio-natural orders by externalizing conflict.

(Swyngedouw, 2010, p. 228)

Others have previously suggested that the discourse of sustainable development has become hegemonic because it is a consensual language that gets its force—in part, at least—from its ambiguity (Luke, 1995;