This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. The cultural politics of climate change activism in the UK as public pedagogy (2005-2011) Direct action, relocalisation, and professional activism Callum McGregor Doctor of Philosophy The University of Edinburgh 2013 Declaration I, Callum McGregor, hereby certify that this doctoral thesis has been composed by me, that it is my own work and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signature Date ………………………………………………………………………………………… Abstract This thesis is a study of the cultural politics of environmentalism in an era of climate change and the public curriculum that it generates. Scientists and the policy elite alone are unlikely to solve the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change, even in the unlikely scenario that consensus was reached and concerted international action was forthcoming. Increasingly, it is recognised that institutional learning through technocratic refinements of the status quo are inadequate. Although there is widespread belief that anthropogenic global warming is an urgent problem, political action has not followed scientific knowledge, because we have been slow to recognise the problem’s cultural implications. A range of voices within the environmental movement (broadly conceived) have increasingly challenged technocratic policy framing, with new ways of thinking. By widening the debate these critical voices increase the possibility of learning to react in new ways, which increase the capacity for collective agency. Based on this assessment, the aim of this thesis is to explore the ways in which the cultural politics of particular activist milieus generate public curriculum, through catalyzing the relationship between the cultural politics of civil society and the political culture of the state. From the 1960s onwards, the environmental movement has undergone a process of differentiation and specialisation, such that distinct cultural formations – oriented around direct action, relocalisation, and professional campaigning – emerged. Different ideal typical modes of “climate change communication” – agonistic pluralism, public participation, and social marketing (Carvalho & Peterson, 2012) – can be mapped onto the public pedagogies of these activist cultures. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005, p. 20) uses the term agonistic pluralism to describe a situation where the “adversary” is understood in a productive sense to be “a crucial category for democratic politics”: where this is denied, we/they relations are understood to be “antagonistic” in the sense that conflicting parties do not recognise the legitimacy of one another. This view recognises the power play and affective commitments that determine modes of political association. On the other hand, “public participation” views politics as constituted through non-partisan rational deliberation in legitimate public fora. Finally, “social marketing” approaches discard the notion of people as rational decision makers, but also discard the principle of public participation in favour of the notion that political communication can be improved through expert evidence-based interventions. Cultures of direct climate action tend towards agonistic communicative styles, characterised by contestatory moments and a public pedagogy of “defining the enemy” (Newman, 1994). On the other hand, this approach has been perceived as problematic by movement intellectuals in relocalisation movements, who have argued that the non-politicised experimental practices of local communities, which engage optimistically with a sense of the possible, may in the long run, be more productive of the kind of mass cultural value shift required in order to tackle climate change. More recently, reflecting their own situated organisational structures and actor-networks, knowledge workers in the professional campaigning sector have increasingly applied insights from social psychology, behavioural economics, and cognitive science in order to find ways that engage tacit cultural values and norms in their public pedagogical efforts. In seeking to ascertain the ideal conditions for communication, the ENGO sector aligns most closely with a ‘social marketing approach’ to public pedagogy. Working with the ‘agonistic’ discourse theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, I believe that all cultures of activism necessarily engage in a contingent politics of articulation, at the heart of which lies antagonism and hegemonic struggle. In this thesis, I construct an intertextual research model, capable of exploring the contingent processes of articulation within cultures of climate change activism, between them, and between the movement at large, and the wider public, as they engage (implicitly or explicitly) in hegemonic struggles that provide moments of educative potential to activists, bystanders and politicians. I argue that the public pedagogies of these cultures of activism cohere around the articulation of what Laclau (2005) would call “empty signifiers”, which link particular claims, interests, and identities through creating a frontier separating them from an outside, which partially constitutes the inside’s identity. Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction: climate change, education and the role of p. 1 social movements in widening the debate Introduction p. 1 The epistemic complexity of climate change p. 3 From science to policy? p. 3 The absence of dialogical spaces p. 5 Socio-political complexity p. 9 The carbon economy: calculation as discourse p. 10 The challenge for the cultural politics of climate change p. 16 Cognitive challenges p. 19 Social movement learning in context p. 22 Research questions p. 26 Structure of the thesis p. 27 Chapter 2 – Beyond climate change: the conceptual value of public p. 33 pedagogy as a framing concept Introduction p. 33 The public pedagogy triad: market, state, civil society p. 35 Neoliberal public pedagogy p. 38 Critiques of the concept of neoliberal public pedagogy p. 42 In and against the pedagogical state? p. 48 Conclusion p. 52 Chapter 3 – Social movement theory in context: implications for the p. 54 public pedagogy of climate activism Introduction p. 54 Why culture? P. 56 New Social Movement Theory p. 59 Implications for the public pedagogy of climate activism p. 64 Framing theory p. 71 Implications for the public pedagogy of climate activism p. 73 Discourse theory p. 79 Implications for the public pedagogy of climate activism p. 91 A spatial supplement to discourse theory p. 97 Conclusion p. 104 Chapter 4 – Research methods: deploying discourse theory p. 106 Introduction p. 106 Research approach p. 109 Operationalising intertextuality p. 111 Actors, events and timeframes p. 115 Identifying basic discourses p. 118 Collective actors involved in cognitive praxis. p. 123 Camp for Climate Action (CCA) p. 123 Transition Towns (TT) p. 124 Common Cause (CC) p. 125 Temporal perspective p. 127 Data collection p. 131 Data analysis p. 140 Limitations of the approach p. 145 Production versus process and hidden transcripts p. 145 Network analysis p. 147 Learning from social movements p. 149 Ethical considerations p. 151 Chapter 5 – Direct climate action as public pedagogy: the cultural p. 156 Politics of the Camp for Climate Action Introduction p. 156 Understanding the origins and evolution of direct climate action p. 161 Dislocation and the formation of new subjectivities p. 161 Connecting to the past: articulations of historical equivalence and difference p. 164 Dimensions of the CCA’s public pedagogy p. 169 Defining the enemy p. 170 Post-2008 p. 179 From climate change to meta-protest p. 180 Metamorphosis p. 184 Politics and organisational form p. 187 Shifting frames, shifting scales p. 187 Tensions between the cosmological and the organisational: anarchism, p. 192 anti-capitalism, liberalism, and the valorisation of direct action in the CCA Climate science and politics p. 196 How climate science is used as legitimation for contentious politics p. 197 Armed only with peer-reviewed science? p. 199 Conclusion: towards a more dialectical public pedagogy? Beyond the two p. 204 fetishisms Chapter 6 – Community responses to climate change as public p. 209 pedagogy: the cultural politics of the Transition Towns movement Introduction p. 209 Understanding the origins and evolution of the TT movement p. 211 Overview and antecedents p. 211 Dislocation and the formation of new subjectivities p. 214 Connecting to the past: articulations of historical equivalence and difference p. 218 The discursive evolution of the TT movement p. 223 Dimensions of the TT movement’s public pedagogy p. 230 Sleeping with the enemy as public pedagogy: the strategic suppression of the p. 232 constitutive outside