COVID and the German Climate Justice Movement: Interrupted Mobilization Dynamics and New Political and Discursive Opportunities

The capacity of social movements to mobilize and to make claims is strongly dependent on political and discursive opportunities which largely lie outside their immediate control. In September 2019, well before the outbreak of the COVID19 epidemic, the German climate justice movement seems to have reached the apex of their street mobilization potential drawing up to 1.4 million people to demonstrations all over Germany. The Corona crisis and the ensuing lockdowns broke the possibility for social movements to rely on a ‘logic of numbers’ in their protest tactics and forced them to adopt other strategies to make their claims heard. At the same time, an increased reliance on scientific expertise and massive economic changes due to the Corona crisis might also afford political chances for the movement. This paper proposes to investigate how actors in the German climate justice movement have revised their activities during the Corona pandemic: How do social movement activists make sense of the changing political and media context? How can we explain the choices of different social movement actors? Change can be expected in several dimensions. First, protest actors have been forced to adapt their protest repertoires. This includes a shift to digital and hybrid forms of action including ‘online demonstrations’ and public stagings of protest which are intended to be amplified online, an increased reliance on social media and the adaption of Corona safety measures for street protests and direct action (Kowalewski 2020). Second, the Corona crisis as an all-encompassing media event pressures movements to revise their discursive strategies. As exemplary hypotheses, the diagnostic (re)framing of some actors emphasizes an ‘unsustainable economic system’ as shared cause of climate change and pandemics. In the prognostic framing of many actors, the economic stabilization programs have figured prominently with calls for a Green New Deal on the one hand and criticism of subsidies for airlines on the other hand. On a motivational level, the Corona crisis has finally been likened to a dress rehearsal for the much larger economic and social changes needed to combat climate change. Third, the pandemic could have changed the composition and constellation of movement actors. Digital modes of organizing will plausibly influence internal organizational structures and decision-making processes. Perhaps more interesting, new cross-movement coalitions between climate justice groups and other civil society organizations seem to have taken hold during the Corona crisis. Whether this is mere coincidence or a direct outcome of changing political opportunities remains to be seen. Research for this paper forms a part of a larger project on the trajectory and political discourse of the German climate justice movement. Empirical data from news coverage and movement documents will be supplemented with qualitative interview material with social movement organizers in various German climate (justice) groups including Fridays for Future, the radical anti-lignite-mining network Ende Gelände, Extinction Rebellion and others. Including different movement organizations could also allow for a comparative framework along the well-established division between conventional ‘climate protection’ or ‘climate change’ and the more radical ‘climate justice’ wing of the movement.