Rethinking Environmental Citizenship for Grassroots Politics

Dear Colleagues,

In response to climate change, social inequality and environmental degradation, citizens in various countries developed grassroot forms of civic engagement. It appears that civic engagement has turned to the local and the material in order to establish alternative socio-material orders. Community supported agriculture, zero-waste-networks, community gardens, repair cafés, eco-villages, energy cooperatives, upcycling projects, slow food, and green mobility are just a few examples of this development. These phenomena have been studied under conceptual frameworks such as grassroots innovations, real utopias, degrowth, prefigurative politics of sustainable lifestyle, conviviality, and or solidarity economy. They have promoted a turn towards material objects, infrastructures, bodily practices, emotions, and tangible space within research of social-ecological transformation. Most of the studies in this field address questions of how to scale-up related practices or interpret this development as part of movement mobilization, which tries to decrease the dominance of growth economy in everyday life.

In this regard, academia offers a broad range of approaches including sociological accounts of critical subjectivity or social change, and approaches from critical geography, cultural studies, environmental politics and ecological economics. The idea behind this conjunction of the material turn and the political is twofold. On the one hand, bringing the political into the research of the material dimensions of engagement for social-ecological change emphasizes its conflictive and public character. This could shed light on the reappropriation of public space, the provision of material proof regarding contested issues, and the creative politicization of everyday life. On the other hand, bringing the material turn into the research on the political, engaged citizenship and participation could allow us to elucidate these struggles which used to be dismissed as apolitical due to their high reliance on material, emotional, and spatial practices.

Contributions will adopt one of the two aspects and translate them to the related turns towards the material and to practices of the political. The concept of the political refers to a specific way of dealing with irreconcilable conflicts about common affairs in a non-violent, agonistic and public manner. It goes beyond standard distinctions of politics, policy, and polity, but stresses the decisive role of direct participation and public conflict about the rules of coexistence. Environmental citizenship stands for understandings and practices of how individuals or groups can engage as active members of their communities in order to secure planetary co-existence.

Against this backdrop, contributions may address the following questions:

• What are the major drivers (i.e environmental, economic or social justice) for mobilization of grassroots initiatives?
• Which forms of politicization result from grassroots initiatives?
• To what extent should they be recognized as forms of politically engaged citizenship and as drivers for structural change?
• What kind of public and political contestation emerges when civic engagement has turned to the local, the material and the cooperative solutions for sustainability?
• How do grassroots initiatives sustain their environmental practices in the age of populism?

Dr. Mine Islar
Dr. Yang Mundo
Guest Editors

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