Political Consumerism in Greece at Times of Economic Crisis: Environmental Awareness or a Way to Deal with the Effects of the Crisis?

The current economic crisis was a turning, for the worse, point in the everyday reality of a great part of the Greek people. The austerity-stricken Greece is characterized by the collapse of the welfare state and by increasingly uncovered basic human needs. The answer to this humanitarian problem was given by thousands formal and informal initiatives and organizations who organized solidarity actions, such as barter networks, food banks, consumer – producer networks, soup kitchens, new cooperatives, social economy enterprises, free legal advice etc. Despite those organizations’ role in covering needs there are also signs that they make claims for social or political change. Under this light, these actions might also be seen as political consumerism. According to the recent literature, the emergence of political consumerism (e.g. Fair trade, community supported agriculture, zero miles etc.) is probably connected to a concern about the environment and is related to environmental activism. This paper aims to test how this hypothesis works in Greece during the economic crisis, in order to unravel whether and to what extent there is an environmental awareness dimension in the political consumerism initiatives in Greece. It will investigate their socio-political profile, their actions and practices, their beneficiaries, the type of rights and needs they address, and the values under which they act. More than that, this paper tries to answer whether such initiatives make claims for social change, and if they do, to which extent can those actions be classified as a social movement. The method applied here is the Alternative Action Organization Analysis (AAOA), an innovative content analysis approach deriving from protest event and political claims analysis, created for the needs of the EC research project LIVEWHAT*, (WP6, Alternative Forms of Resilience), which uses online media sources. *EC FP7, http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/