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More spectacularly than ever before, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Fifteenth Session of the Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP15) summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 exposed the limitations of established approaches to, and institutional arrangements for, international climate and environmental politics. It illustrated the paradoxical simultaneity of, on one hand, the wide acceptance that to mitigate climate change and achieve sustainability rich consumer societies, in particular, need to radically change their established values, lifestyles, and social practices, and on the other, a profound inability and unwillingness to implement such change. Conceptualising the form of ecopolitics on display (not only) in Copenhagen as the “politics of unsustainability,” this article looks for explanations for the apparent impasse in contemporary ecopolitics and explores the practices that help advanced modern consumer societies to cope with the paradox of wanting to sustain the unsustainable. Adopting a social—theoretical approach rooted in the European tradition, the article focuses on one particular explanatory factor that in the prevalent context of environmental depoliticisation is receiving too little attention: the sociocultural norms underpinning all ecopolitics.

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As a road map for a structural transformation of socially and ecologically self-destructive consumer societies, the paradigm of sustainability is increasingly regarded as a spent force. Yet, its exhaustion seems to coincide with the rebirth of several ideas reminiscent of earlier, more radical currents of eco-political thought: liberation from capitalism, consumerism and the logic of growth. May the exhaustion of the sustainability paradigm finally re-open the intellectual and political space for the big push beyond the established socio-economic order? Looking from the perspective of social and eco-political theory, this article argues that the new narratives (and social practices) of postcapitalism, degrowth and post-consumerism cannot plausibly be read as signalling a new eco-political departure. It suggests that beyond the exhaustion of the sustainability paradigm, we are witnessing, more than anything, the further advancement of the politics of unsustainability -and that in this politics the new narratives of hope may themselves be playing a crucial role.