Novelty, Strategy, Alternative Futures: The Prefigurative Politics of Environmental Movements and Consumption

This paper explores contemporary environmental politics and consumption using the concept of prefiguration or prefigurative politics. Prefiguration is a loosely defined orientation towards political action, referring to the politics of movement organising itself, or to the organisation of alternative practices and institutions, that partially actualise desired future societies. Environmental protest camps, alternative ‘off-grid’ communities, environmental direct action and critical consumption exhibit features of prefigurative politics. The paper reviews the history of the concept and the movements and tactics it has been used to illuminate, to establish the character of its conceptual or political novelty. It then seeks to evaluate prefigurative political ‘strategy’, broadly assessing its purported uses and rationales, reflecting on assumptions about political planning and social movement success. The third aim is to consider the broader context influencing the trajectory of prefigurative politics from emergence to its increasing contemporary purchase, arguing that its moment, conceptual and empirical, coincides with certain tactics, but also with important rises in ‘ethical’ or ‘critical’ consumption, ‘everyday politics’ and lifestyle environmentalism, cycles of crisis and reconfiguration in the political Left, and increasing scholarly interest in the peripheries of social movements. The argument is that contemporary environmental politics and trends in consumer activism share the political logic/s of prefigurative politics; such that exploring these logics helps distinguish what is particular, new and promising about these trends.