Material Participation and the Politics of Sustainable Practice

• In Event: Authenticity and Resistance

Abstract

Many of the articulated motivations for action in recent environmental movements of practice include desires for participation and procedural justice. Strong, participatory processes that involve local people in meaningful and substantial ways have been shown to promote positive beliefs and actions around a number of sustainability policies. For activists in many movements of practice – those involved in local food systems, sustainable fashion, and community energy, for example – participation is at the centre of movement concerns. Crucially, however, such notions of participation are material in nature. Classic notions of political participation or procedural justice are mainly instrumental – we vote for an specific outcome, participate toward an end, or protest to get a message across and change policy. The idea of participation in these movements of everyday practice, however, is articulated as a demand for material participation; activists repeatedly emphasise the importance of increasing community involvement in the production and flow of the basics of everyday life, including energy. This is not only a demand for classic political participation, but an insistence on a sense of material participation, social inclusion in the very flows of food, energy, or other goods and things through bodies, communities, and lives. Material participation is about doing – literally getting one’s hands dirty installing solar or wind, for example, or managing one’s own energy. Such a sense of material participation exists in these movements alongside a more traditional democratic sense of procedural justice. This paper examines this shift toward a more material notion of political participation both theoretically and as articulated by movements. It makes the argument that material participation illustrates a very political implementation of the concept of new materialism – a sustainable materialism. And it explores this notion and practice against the accusations that both new materialism and “lifestyle activism” are apolitical or post-political.

Author

• David Schlosberg, University of Sydney