The Political Consequences of Mediatized Social Innovations

Beyond existing forms of social movements and organic farming, green social innovations try to integrate heterogeneous actor coalitions in order to yield direct ecological effects by means of lifestyle politics. This paper analyses four examples: foodsharing, unpacked stores, community supported agriculture and urban gardens. These projects have in common that they intervene in the commodity chain in order to establish an ecological agriculture and food culture. They build coalitions of political activists, consumers, producers and retailers. Internet applications such as coordinative platforms, geo-map or mail-lists integrate scattered crowds of citizens which participate with different intensity from diverse locations and at different times. While lifestyle-politics is often criticized to build apolitical cocoons and commercialized forms of green activism, this paper emphasizes three significant political consequences of green social innovations beyond their obvious contributions to the environment. First, they establish mediated publics for specific practices beyond “preeching to the converted” and have yielded major public awareness and wide media resonance. Second, they have – to different degrees – built up intermediary political organizations which protest and lobby against given agricultural and food policies and, which are highly networked with social movements and older actors of green agriculture. Third, some of them, e.g. specific urban gardens have become a part of local participatory governance. This line of argument is based on interviews, participant observation and netnography. It leads to a critical reflection of mediatized green social innovations which takes their inner contradictions into account and points out some problematic tendencies of “retreating to the private” within these initiatives.