Performative environmentalism and the everyday legitimation of climate coloniality

Abstract

If climate summits are the public theaters of climate coloniality where diversion, co-optation, and performativity without substance is repeated, what are its more everyday and intimate registers? In this paper, I relate climate coloniality to a “green” imperial mode of living (Brand and Weissen 2021) through a reflection on the ethics and politics of so-called green consumption. I re-theorise the term performative environmentalism to argue that when so-called green consumption practices as performed by high-cultural capital consumers become the dominant means of establishing ecological legitimacy in the city, working-class groups who do not embody the same “feel for the game” are denied moral authority in environmental debates. By focusing on how sustainability and poverty discourses articulate with each other, I show that performative environmentalism exacerbates the exclusion of the working poor from participation in environmental politics by reinforcing class inequalities, restigmatising poverty and monopolising ecological legitimacy for higher status groups. Performative environmentalism is the everyday expression and legitimating structure of a form of neoliberal, colonial sustainability, providing a sense of purpose and progress to well-meaning elite environmentalists, all while reproducing a hierarchal social order and perpetuating Band-Aid solutions to structural problems.