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- Convenors:
-
Saša Poljak Istenič
(ZRC SAZU)
Alexandra Schwell (University of Klagenfurt)
Anna Horolets (University of Warsaw)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
We aim to explore how hegemonic framings of climate neutrality politics define urgencies and preclude alternatives. Can unwriting challenge political hegemony and open up new pathways for a just transition? What role do our disciplines play in uncovering the untold aspects of climate neutrality?
Long Abstract:
Climate neutrality policies, such as the European Green Deal, are imbued with a normative stance on priorities and urgencies. These policies produce and sustain hegemonic knowledge that binds together diverse actors, socializing them to use a particular vocabulary to remain relevant in the field. This normative framing writes specific – selective and limiting – meanings into concepts such as climate neutrality and justice. As a result, these policies define certain urgencies while disregarding others, reflecting asymmetries and legacies that exist in society at large.
The proposed panel aims to critically examine the hegemonic knowledge embedded in climate neutrality policies, explore the practices of unwriting in this field, uncover alternative urgencies and pathways to climate justice, and discuss the potential new injustices and inequalities that unwriting might entail. We want to highlight the role of ethnology and public anthropology in the endeavour of unwriting and to stimulate a nuanced discussion that considers both the potential benefits and drawbacks of unwriting in the field of climate neutrality policies.
We invite proposals that:
• examine movements that challenge the dominant narratives on climate neutrality;
• identify urgencies that are overlooked in mainstream policies;
• bring to light the unwritten and untold aspects of climate neutrality;
• scrutinize new ways of inscribing knowledge about climate neutrality;
• develop new and inclusive vocabularies;
• discuss the potential threats inherent in the processes of unwriting;
• reflect on our potentiality and agency in unwriting this field.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
The paper analyses "competing urgencies" in the field of climate justice, highlighting how hegemonic urgencies are prioritised over marginalised groups' needs. Using the EU-Mission 100 as a case, it examines the linkage between urgency claims and legitimacy.
Paper Abstract:
Anthropogenic climate change is a global crisis that calls for urgent action. Yet its urgency stands in, often fierce, opposition to other existing urgencies on the national and local level, such as financial constraints or political cleavages, with each claiming priority of what they deem worthy and needing protection. Politically powerful actors have established hegemonic legitimate urgencies, while others remain invisible and voiceless, mirroring existing social power relations. The urgencies of marginalised and vulnerable social groups, in particular, are being delegitimised, un- and overwritten.
Taking the translation of the concepts of climate neutrality politics and climate justice in the EU-Mission 100 as a point of departure, the paper introduces the concept of “competing urgencies” as a framework for a fruitful analysis of frictions and the negotiation of priorities in a setting characterised by inequalities and power. Analysing competing urgencies and urgency politics from the vantage point of the reference object of urgency allows us to observe how the legitimacy of urgency claims is argued, produced, and justified. Thus, the paper is a theoretical reflection on how competing urgencies potentially unwrite, rewrite, overwrite, and underline legitimacy.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper examines the politics of EU climate policy-making that informs the creation and implementation of climate policy initiatives, such as the EU Mission 100, launched by the European Commission to encourage cities to draft and implement plans to become climate-neutral by 2030. The examination of the politics of EU climate policy-making centers on historicizing the urgency and inevitability written into initiatives of anticipatory governance, such as the Mission 100, by outlining and recasting the EU as one of numerous multilateral polities, institutions, and organizations involved in bringing climate change into policy focus and action. Presenting ongoing research conducted for the project titled ‘Competing Urgencies: Translating Climate Neutrality Policy in the European Union,’ the paper discusses the analytical benefits of exploring the genealogy of EU climate change policies as a means of critically engaging with the claims of urgency, inevitability, legitimacy, and expertise upon which they are based.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the politics of EU climate policy-making that informs the creation and implementation of climate policy initiatives, such as the EU Mission 100, launched by the European Commission to encourage cities to draft and implement plans to become climate-neutral by 2030. In its climate change policies, the EU has identified cities as being crucial sites for climate change policy implementation. While cities take up only 4% of the territory of the EU, they are home to almost three-quarters of all EU citizens. Policymakers estimate that the process of EU urbanization will increase in the future, only augmenting the necessity and urgency attributed to implementing measures to render cities – and their inhabitants – more resilient to the inevitable changes that are to come.
The examination of the politics of EU climate policy-making centers on historicizing the urgency and inevitability written into initiatives of anticipatory governance, such as the Mission 100, by outlining and recasting the EU as one of numerous multilateral polities, institutions, and organizations involved in bringing climate change into policy focus and action. Presenting ongoing research conducted for the project titled ‘Competing Urgencies: Translating Climate Neutrality Policy in the European Union,’ the paper discusses the analytical benefits of exploring the genealogy of EU climate change policies as a means of critically engaging with the claims of urgency, inevitability, legitimacy, and expertise upon which they are based.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores the political processes of making climate neutrality projects valuable. Drawing on ethnographic research and a collaborative community evaluation workshop it examines how hegemonic economic, political and scientific values are assembled, contested solidified in a pilot project.
Paper Abstract:
Pilot projects and the bureaucratic technological fixes they promise are increasingly valued in the design, planning and implementation of climate neutrality policies. Although pilot projects are often promoted as depoliticised initiatives that have ‘intrinsic’ and uncontested value there has been increasing recognition that pilot projects are inherently political and that they help enact and frame what future socio-technical values should matter. Pilot projects can therefore be seen as sites where political, economic and scientific hegemonic values are assembled, contested and potentially reified. Furthermore, STS and anthropological work on valuation processes have highlighted the inherently relational and processual nature of values by showing how valuations are situated in practices that enact and maintain entangled claims of knowledge, objectivity and valuation. This raises the question of how the value of pilot climate neutrality projects is maintained and contested and what implications this has for climate neutrality policies.
This paper seeks to examine the question by exploring the valuation processes of an EU climate change project on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS). Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a collaborative community evaluation workshop the paper illustrates how project members everyday practices enabled the sorting of multiple, diverse and conflicting lived realities into singular written realities that aligned with hegemonic political, economic and scientific orders. Although these valuation processes were largely successful, we will demonstrate that designing collaborative workshops where community members can unwrite and re-evaluate the value of the project can open up spaces for more diverse valuation processes.
Paper Short Abstract:
Facing legislative demands for climate neutrality, the game industry struggles with opaque value chains and distributed planetary costs. This paper explores developers’ local strategies for navigating sustainability frameworks and examines the socio-environmental relations and material complexities of game production beyond climate metrics.
Paper Abstract:
The game industry, as a global phenomenon, significantly contributes to environmental and social harm through extensive value chains, precarious labour practices, and resource-intensive technologies (Abraham 2022; Gordon 2019). Facing legislative pressure for climate neutrality, the industry struggles to generate quantified metrics to establish credibility and urgency (Porter 1995). Intransparent value chains and distributed planetary costs complicate efforts to provide "global numbers" (Pasek et al. 2019). While climate neutrality frameworks often fail to capture these decentralised impacts, localised metrics and smaller-scale interventions offer actionable pathways for sustainability.
This paper examines how developers' local bottom-up strategies enact varying relations of planetary care and global impact. Drawing on empirical research from the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES – Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries (2024–2028), we investigate how climate neutrality is institutionalised, framed, and negotiated within the gaming industry.
We trace how industry practitioners navigate competing sustainability frameworks—from EU-level policies to grassroots movements—revealing conflicting urgencies and priorities. Developers’ efforts to challenge entrenched capitalistic and technocultural logics expose the socio-environmental implications of gaming, which remains rooted in extractivist logic (Cubitt 2016) that perpetuate the decoupling of economic activity from environmental degradation (Parrique et al. 2019).
By analysing the entanglements of hardware production, energy consumption, supply chains, labour practices, and workplace cultures, we conceptualise the materiality of digital technologies as multiple (Mol 2002). To unwrite the hegemonic framings of carbon neutrality, we argue that sustainability in gaming must extend beyond carbon metrics to explore situated socio-environmental relations and the material complexities of digital production.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores how Klagenfurt’s climate neutrality aspirations intersect with hydro-social spaces, highlighting the tensions between urban development, ecological conservation, technology, and human-water interactions and imaginaries to emphasise a more holistic and equitable approach to water governance.
Paper Abstract:
The multifaceted role of water in urban climate change mitigation and adaptation is increasingly recognised but remains insufficiently integrated into sustainability policies, revealing not just the vulnerabilities of water systems but also the tensions within hydro-social spaces. Conflicts arise between urban development, ecological conservation, water practices, and the implementation of technological solutions, which could complicate efforts to achieve an equitable and sustainable urban future.
Focusing on the Austrian city of Klagenfurt's ambition to achieve climate neutrality by 2030, I examine how water-related issues are framed and addressed. Through ethnographic research, I explore how water operates as a material, socio-cultural, and institutional reality, considering human and non-human actors, infrastructures, and the co-production of knowledge surrounding water management. With this in mind, I look at how local practices are linked to broader ecological temporalities, social inequalities, and other central urban concerns and priorities.
In the presentation, I shed light on the forces at work between overarching climate change objectives and local water systems and emphasise the need to consider cultural practices, ecological rhythms and social equity in water governance and climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. By elucidating the interconnections between the symbolic, material, socio-cultural, political, economic, ecological, and technological dimensions of water and their intersection with transitions to climate neutrality in Klagenfurt, I reflect on the potential of "unwriting" for an equitable and net-zero urban future.
Paper Short Abstract:
We focus on a climate neutrality project in Warsaw that makes a selected district model for energy transformations. We ask if the project overwrites some of the district’s characteristics and actors, and how; we ask if ethnographic unwriting can be means to more equitable urban energy transitions.
Paper Abstract:
Unlike many other aspects of municipal governance, climate neutrality policies often involve disaggregating global issues first and then casting them onto local economic, social and material realities through the categorizations and measurements that can sit uneasily with the way cities function and municipalities manage them (Knox 2020). The translations of the global goal of CO2 reduction to city policies is a process of writing over the familiar scripts.
In our presentation we focus on Mission 100 initiated by the EU in 2022, within which the municipal administration pledged that Warsaw will become a climate neutral city by 2030. As one of the means to achieve this goal, it selected a city district and made it a basis for modeling energy transformations that would be replicable for other cities and towns.
In our presentation we look at this district ethnographically, treating it as material, socio-cultural and institutional reality. We are interested in the relationships between Mission 100 project and the urban district it is projected upon. Specifically we ask which characteristics of the district have come to be featured in the project, how and why; which local actors get involved in the project; how the temporalities and “everyday ecologies” (Dal Gobbo 2020) of the district compare to those of the project. We inquire if the project overwrites or erases some of the district’s characteristics and actors. Our aim is to see if an exercise of ethnographic unwriting may be among the means to make energy transitions in cities more equitable.
Paper Short Abstract:
Debates over Ljubljana’s planned underground garage in a car-free zone reveal how hegemonic framings of climate neutrality define urgencies and exclude alternatives. Unwriting these narratives exposes challenges to align climate-neutral policies with broader environmental, social, and cultural considerations.
Paper Abstract:
Ljubljana is part of the European Union's Mission 100 to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. When awarded the label of "Climate-neutral and smart city," it announced to have “formally embarked on the path toward decarbonization and improving quality of life.” The label was granted based on a Climate City Contract, designed to collaboratively address barriers to climate neutrality through an action plan and investment strategy.
One key area identified by Ljubljana for achieving climate neutrality is sustainable mobility and transport. However, one of its measures to be implemented on the edge of the car-free city centre is the construction of an underground garage beneath the historically and socially significant city market. A civic initiative opposing the project argues that the municipality has not provided sufficient studies to justify the garage’s necessity. Critics question how a city aiming to reduce traffic and achieve climate neutrality can simultaneously plan infrastructure that encourages increased car access to the centre.
This tension reveals a disconnect between the city’s stated climate goals and its practical measures, prompting reflection on how climate neutrality is understood by different stakeholders. The case invites exploration of how hegemonic policies shape priorities, define urgencies, and exclude alternative perspectives. It also raises the question of whether policies labeled as “climate-neutral” align with broader environmental, social, and cultural considerations—or require “unwriting,” reassessment, and reframing.