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Paper short abstract

This study draws on discourse theory to analyse how politicised social groups articulate their political identities and antagonisms in relation to the climate in the Netherlands.

Paper long abstract

The rise of populist politics in 21st-century Europe is profoundly entangled with the emergence of climate change as a contested political problem. Though populist movements are commonly portrayed as obstacles to climate action, they have been at the forefront of the (re-)politicisation of climate change and of the formation of various polities that contest the meaning and importance of climate change. Simultaneously, they also contribute to an increasingly polarised public sphere with intensifying antagonisms erupting among opposing political groups. The Dutch context is particularly revealing: the nitrogen crisis saw the emergence of farmer protests that contested governmental policy and its purported scientific basis, while concurrent climate movements are demanding more science-driven climate policies.

Despite STS’s insistence on the co-production of climate science and its politics, there are few empirical accounts of how civil political identities take shape around climate science. Yet, the shape of these political identities and how they relate to one another have profound implications for the possibilities of a democratic governance of climate policy and the role climate science is afforded therein. This study draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory to analyse how various social groups in the Netherlands articulate their political identities in relation to the climate and where they locate antagonisms with other identities.

In order to capture the spectrum of polarisation that exists around climate discourse in the Netherlands, the participants were recruited based on their self-identification as climate activists, organic farmers, biodiversity experts, industrial farmers and climate sceptics.