Towards eco-social politics: a case study of transformative strategies to overcome forms-of-life crises
Richard Bärnthaler
Abstract
This article explores the structural conservatism of mainstream environmental politics, which systematically avoids problematising ‘forms-of-life’ (normative practices and routines), and develops a conceptual alternative: eco-social politics. This concept positions itself in a quest to change the grammar of environmental politics by embedding it in the lived materiality of everyday life, but differs from prefigurative movement-oriented strategies by prioritising the integration of majority populations and by acknowledging the role of political rule-setting, i.e. coercion. Building on a multi-level integral state project, eco-social politics resides in particular strategies, procedures, and institutions to collectively (re)negotiate common sense, with the aim to partially and pragmatically suture social relations to find transformative answers to contemporary eco-social crises. Here, I explore potentials for stronger dialectical links between deliberative and representative democratic institutions.