ALBERT

Description: In den vergangenen sechs Jahrzehnten sind Natur, Umwelt und wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse über den Zusammenhang von Umweltschäden und Klimaveränderungen auf ein wachsendes Interesse der Öffentlichkeit gestoßen. Zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen, die Umweltbewegung, Umweltverbände und zuletzt Fridays for Future mobilisierten mit ihrem Engagement zwar die (internationale) politische Ebene. Doch politische Maßnahmen müssen vielfältigen Interessen gerecht werden und bedürfen möglichst breiter gesellschaftlicher Akzeptanz, um Wirkung zu entfalten.

Description: The Anthropocene thesis makes it necessary for the social sciences to engage with temporality in novel ways. The Anthropocene highlights interconnections between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ non-linear temporal processes. However, accounts of humanity’s Anthropocene history often reproduce linear, progressive narratives of human development. This forecloses the possibilities that thinking with non-linear temporalities would offer to the political sciences. Engaging with the temporal complexity of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture that highlights non-linearity allows to acknowledge more fully the affective impact of living on a disrupted planet. As a discourse about temporal rupture, the Anthropocene is a stocktaking of the already vast insecurities and losses brought about by exploitative relationships with earth and its inhabitants. In this form, the Anthropocene thesis highlights how material and social legacies of inequality and exploitation shape our present and delimit our imaginaries of the future. By including a reckoning of violent pasts into future practices, a productive politics of mourning could take shape.

Description: This paper argues that political representation in transnational civil society networks needs to be investigated as practice with regard to its flexibility, relationality and dialogical agency. Analysis of transnational representation from a practice-theoretical perspective can facilitate a better understanding of the actual representation practices of civil society actors in a transnational setting. The question raised is this: How do representation practices ensue, change or shift within the broader structures in which they are embedded? By focussing on flexibility, relationality and dialogical agency as the key theoretical concepts for representation practice, this study delves deeper into those aspects through empirical analysis of qualitative interviews with activists from two major transnational civil society networks: the Clean Clothes Campaign and Friends of the Earth. The study finds that transnational representation in civil society networks evolves in a non-linear fashion, is characterized by shifting agency, discursive claims and a disembodiment of representation. The paper concludes with a discussion of how future research can pursue such critical engagement without falling back into standard, static notions of political representation.

Description: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process aimed to be more inclusive, transparent, and participatory than prior United Nations processes. This article traces the practices of representation that were performed by civil society actors during the SDG process. In doing so, we advance a performative approach in which the very process of making representation is examined. Its aim is to conceptualize and study representation as an aesthetic and political practice. This leads to the two central research questions of this article: How do civil society organizations in global environmental politics make representative claims by picturing their envisioned future? How are future representations (that is, the representation of futures or future beings) related to actor positions during the SDG process? Special emphasis is given to representations of “the future” as an ever-present frame of reference in environmental politics. Based on a systematic content analysis of the statements of two Major Groups—Children, and Youth and Farmers—we discuss the variety of future representations between the Major Groups and how especially more radical future representations are connected to rather precarious actor positions in representative claims.

Description: Democracy and sustainability are political ideas that have shaped the course of human history and continue to do so today. On a very general level, these ideas have multiple commonalities. Both have strong, universal normative implications (Dobson 1998; Sen 1999). They develop an image of the good society and, thus, also critically refer to a negatively evaluated other. The concept of democracy is oriented toward an equal and free society in which collective problems and conflicts are resolved by a demos consisting of equals in an ordered process of interest articulation and decision-making; it is the counter-model to highly asymmetrical authoritarian forms of rule, in which the suppression of freedom and autonomy of many members of society prevails (Dahl 2000; Saward 2007). Sustainability, on the other hand, refers to the negative consequences of the “unsustainable” (predominantly Western) model of development for the environment and equity of societies around the world (Christen and Schmidt 2012; Dryzek 2013). A sustainable society is imagined as one in which all present and future people have equal opportunities to satisfy their needs or even a good life in the long term (WCED 1987; Jackson 2017). The prerequisite for this is shaping human development in such a way that it remains within planetary boundaries, i.e., below tipping points for potentially sudden and severe environmental change (Meadowcroft 2012; Steffen et al. 2015). Another commonality is that democracy and sustainability are both fundamentally contested and dynamic concepts. This means that they have two levels of meaning: a relatively stable and universal first-level meaning, below which controversial debates about their respective meanings unfold on a second level (Jacobs 1999). Thus, there is general agreement that democracy means rule by the people and that sustainability requires compliance with ecosystem boundaries. However, how exactly the rule of the people and the compliance with ecosystem boundaries are to be realized and organized in concrete terms is subject to an ongoing debate. The empirical implication of this is that both democracy and sustainability do not exist in any kind of pure form but in manifold discursive, institutional, and practical manifestations that are subject to ongoing change (Hopwood, Mellor, and O’Brien 2005; Saward 2007).

Description: Würde Zukunft öfter im Plural gedacht, müsste er für die Städte stehen. Denn dort war Zukunft schon immer divers, wurde zwischen Politik und Bürgerschaft ausgehandelt. Gerade in Extremsituationen, wie sie auch die Corona-Pandemie verursacht, gelang oft Wegweisendes – wenn die Transformation benachteiligte Gruppen mitdachte.