Prefiguration versus the “Reformist Drift” in the Camp for Climate Action

Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements

“…Strong advocates of prefiguration, meanwhile, emphasise the first function, although as Wright (2010) argues, it is difficult to imagine the wholesale replacement of important institutions without accompanying confrontation and rupture. I argue that these arguments are best addressed by avoiding the binary language of strategy (see Harding, 2015) and dividing the political purposes attributed to prefiguration into three analytically distinct (but not always empirically distinguishable) categories. These capture the different types of politically relevant social movement activity mentioned in the definition by Ganz (2000) of ‘how we turn what we have into what we need-by translating our resources into the power to achieve purpose’: reproduction (of resources and the movement, understood broadly), mobilisation (tactics, again understood broadly) and coordination (the marshalling or direction of activity towards political goals) ( Remoco ).…”

Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

“…While this literature acknowledges the ambivalences of existing climate activism, this has not led to calls for a substantive transformation (Sealey‐Huggins ). And while there have been numerable articles exploring the tensions within climate activism between “reformist” and “radical” positions (Bomberg ; Harding ; Saunders ; Saunders and Price ), by and large these pieces have focused on the internal organizational dynamics of climate activism, or the social composition of environmental activism as a movement, as the cause of political impasse and tended to conclude that what is required is to fuse or combine the varied modes of political action, often at a greater “scale”, rather than revisit their collective failures (Bergman ; Kenis ; North ; North and Longhurst ; Saunders ). Many conclude that despite the ambivalences and (often undiscussed) failures of climate activism, that it has had a transformative effect either on the forms of oppositional politics or on broader political frameworks within which climate change is discussed (Barry and Quilley ; Bomberg ; Chatterton et al ; Featherstone ; Frenzel ; McGregor ; North ; Plows ; Saunders ; Saunders and Price ).…”