Between Normative Ascription and Self-Conception: On the Transformative Thrust of Bottom-Up, Local Experiments for More Democratic and Sustainable Futures

For a long time, proponents of a shift towards greater sustainability trusted in the transformative thrust of national and transnational political institutions. Yet the limited headway made so far and the lingering crisis of liberal democracies has chipped away at this trust. Scholars in environmental politics seem to be increasingly focusing on everyday practices. Bottom-up local experiments in socio-ecological change, such as food co‐ops, repair cafés, eco-housing, are regarded as promising actors who shift everyday practices towards more sustainable and democratic futures by their local, experimental, hands-on and participatory character. In this paper, we take issue with the readiness with which some scholars frame the current turn towards environmental localism as a transformative one, framings that tend to be disengaged with the heterogeneity of the bottom-up initiatives, their self-conceptions; and the societal functions they may serve in contemporary liberal democracies, beyond the ascribed function of transforming liberal democratic societies into more sustainable ones. To substantiate our issue-taking, we review the various strands of the academic literature that engage with the turn towards local experimentalism, and delineate three common ideal-typical framings of bottom-up LESECs: “grassroots innovations”; “concrete utopia”; and “resilience pioneers”. The “grassroots innovation”-framing depicts LESECs as niche actors that provide innovative and up-scalable systems of provision through experimentation. The “concrete utopia”-framing foregrounds LESECs as potential spaces for new imaginaries, democratic struggle and sites of prefiguration of sustainable nature-society relations. The “resilience pioneers”-framing conceptualizes local experiments as meaningful preparation for the time after the environmental apocalypse. LESECs, it is argued from this latter perspective, demonstrate the possibility of resource-extensive ways of living that are currently lacking of democratic support. Our excavation of dominant normative ascriptions of academics to LESECs, will be followed by an account of the self-conceptions in various initiatives. We carried out empirical research on six bottom-up local experiments in Vienna: a food co‐op, an urban gardening initiative, a repair café, an eco-housing project, a tools library, and a collective bicycle rental. In focus group discussions, we let participants deliver their own accounts of “why they do what they do” and found out that the self-understandings on the ground differ, in part, considerably from the functions ascribed to them in the academic literature. The paper shows, among others, that transforming unsustainable nature-society relations that also underpin everyday practices, is often less important than the experience of community, self-exploration, and -optimization. We also found that politicizing and democratizing unsustainable practices as well as upscaling more democratic and more sustainable ones was often less important than the creation of mere niches that allow those who want to live and consume more sustainably to do so. To be clear, our goal is neither to devalue bottom-up engagements, nor do we seek to call into question normative approaches to the empirical world tout court. We do, however, seek to call into question the readiness with which some academic discourses frame LESECs as signs of hope, since this readiness runs the risk of blocking a deeper understanding of the current resilience of unsustainability.