Joost de Moor: "How do Climate Activists Perceive the Future?"

Question 1: Can you present your background?

My name is Joost de Moor, an interdisciplinary social scientist, combining backgrounds in cultural sciences, anthropology, political science, sociology, and applying that in both fields of urban studies and environmental studies.

So, I combined quite a few disciplines, but there is a clear line running through those fields where I combine an interest in how citizens engaged in politics very broadly speaking, both individually, through individual acts like signing petitions, joining demonstrations, and political consumerism. As well as how citizens engage in politics, more in collectives, which we tend to call social movements.

I did my PhD at the University of Antwerp, where I focused in particular on how this kind of engagement of citizens in politics takes place in the context of political globalization.

So, there's two main ways to understand political globalization.

On the one hand, it means it speaks to the fact that many of our most important problems have become global in nature and the best example to give here is probably climate change, which requires us to address at the global level. No single country can address this problem.

At the same time, our political decision-making processes themselves have become more politically more globalized. So, we're probably a few decades ago, the nation state was still the obvious center of power that citizens would then also turn towards.

State is still important, but alongside the state many other things have become important. Corporations have become more powerful. International organizations have become more powerful and so one of the things that I was particularly interested in is how citizens navigate that more complicated political field when they want to get something done. 
 

Who did it turn to? One of the main changes in political participation and social movement activism that I've focused on in my PhD in response to this changing context, is the emergence of DIY activism or do-it-yourself activism.

One form of that is that citizens start doing politics in their everyday life. So, they start changing their lifestyles, their consumption, either individually or collectively, to directly make an impact on the thing that they worry about, such as the environment.

And the other form of do-it-yourself activism is to take matters into your own hands in terms of stopping things.

So, that is how I turned my attention to environmental politics, which is the topic that I still work on today.    

Question 2: Can you present your current research?

In my second postdoc at Stockholm University, I turned my attention to the question or the observation that in our society today people are becoming increasingly doubtful about whether we can still do something about the most important problems facing us, especially climate change.

So, I compared five European cities and looked at how climate activists in those cities deal with this kind of doubt and fear. And in particular, I looked at how this influences their strategizing.

So, what I found was that across all these five cities, many climate activists indeed shared his doubt. It changes from one moment to the next. Someday they might be more hopeful than the next, but there is definitely this fear as a central element of climate activism today.

The thing that I wanted to understand is how it is possible that at the same time this doesn't seem to have such a big influence on our strategizing.

What I found was that climate activists are actually very good at continuing their activism, continuing campaigning to stop climate change, or at least making sure that dangerous climate change doesn't happen, even though they were very doubtful about the potential success of this campaign.

This fits within a broader research agenda that I'm still pursuing today, namely an agenda that tries to understand how climate activists think about the future.

We are, I think, all facing quite uncertain futures and climate activists have to imagine what futures they are trying to avoid as well as what kind of futures they are trying to achieve.

And what we want to understand in a research project that I'm conducting together with several Swedish research colleagues is: how climate activists make sense of this uncertain future and how the way in which they make sense of this future shapes their activism?

So, how does it shape their strategies? How does it shape their goals and ultimately what we want to understand is how they shape their strategies in response to these doubts as an influence on wider society?

So, on public opinion and ultimately on political decision making and taking this research into the future, what I really want to understand is how in the context of the Anthropocene, where the impact of humans on the planet has taken such a geological proportion.

That it actually undermines some of the original foundations of our modern state and our modern democracies.

In that context, how might democracy and the state be evolving?

I think that looking at climate activism today gives us a window into that future and an opportunity to try and understand what might be coming towards us in terms of how we organize society politically.

Question 3: Why did you choose Sciences Po and more specifically the CEE as your laboratory?

I chose to come to Sciences Po because I think it is one of the most vibrant Centers for social science in Europe. One of the things that I like in particular about Sciences Po is its interdisciplinary nature, which fits very well with my profile. Political scientists, sociologists, economists talking to each other around shared problems like the environment.

And with regards to the Center for European Studies in particular, I think each of these qualities are represented very strongly that the CEE has a very strong environmental profile. It's focused on political science, but at the same time also has a clear interdisciplinary dimension and its research organized along four axes for topical folky that really fit with my own interest and it clearly overlaps with my interest in how we organize environmental challenges as a society.

So, there is the axis to democracy addresses which fits well with my focus on how citizens participate in politics. There is the axis of the city which matches well with my focus on how environmental and climate politics are organized in the city.  And there is the axis on how the state is organized and continuously being reimagined and reinvented in our society, which perfectly fits with my future research agenda to understand how this state and democracy will develop going into the Anthropocene.

It’s, I think, the perfect place for me to develop my career and to develop this image of a distributor and how we can organize environmental politics in the future.

Interview  Myriam Sefraoui, scientific mediation, (CEE)