Environmental Alternative Action Organizations and COVID-19: How Vienna’s Sustainable Gardening, Sharing and Swapping Initiatives Adapt their Repertoire of Action under Conditions of the Pandemic

In recent years, Environmental Alternative Action Organizations (EAAOs) have received increasing attention, due to their strategic focus on altering the social order directly by mobilizing alternative everyday routines via low-threshold communities of practice (Zamponi & Bosi, Yates). Conceptually, this repertoire of action has produced very diverging interpretations, ranging from a new politics of sustainable materialism (Schlosberg) to post-political exclaves of simulative action (Blühdorn). Empirically, scholars have cautioned against all to ‘neat theories’ (MacGregor) and have called for nuanced analyses of the real-world tactics of EAAOs and their situatedness within geographical space and political-economic environment (De Moor et al., Varvarousis et al.). In this paper, I aim at contributing to this research agenda by studying three EAAOs in the city of Vienna. Unlike most places in which EAAOs have been investigated, Vienna has been untroubled by excessive austerity measures, yet, like virtually the whole world, the city has experienced social distancing and lockdown policies to confine COVID-19. For determining the effects of this context, I conduct theory-driven participant observation and problem-centered interviews with 27 practitioners from a community garden, a library of things and a clothing swap initiative. Preliminary results suggest that even though they do not operate under austerity, organizers avoid politicized framings, as they seek to change everyday routines of as many practitioners as possible. As such, the EAAOs constitute platforms for a myriad of different gardeners, sharers and swappers, yet they remain limited in their strategic scope to the realm of the mundane. Moreover, the pandemic has negative, positive or virtually no effects on the efforts of EAAOs, depending on the urban space in which an alternative everyday practice is being mobilized.