Impacts of the Corona crisis on climate activists in Finland and Sweden

While it is clear that the climate movement has been strongly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the actual character of this impact appears somewhat contradictory. Among climate movement intellectuals and organizers, the sometimes drastic actions by governments across the world has been used as a proof that global joint political action against planetary crises is possible. The ‘Corona crisis’ also involved a quotidian disruption – breaking everyday habits, thereby opening up a potential for thoroughgoing societal change. Simultaneously, the global wave of climate protests witnessed during 2019 appears to have been impeded by public measures against the spread of the coronavirus introduced during 2020, including lockdowns and restrictions on protest activities involving the physical presence of others. Moreover, Covid-19 has pushed climate down the political agenda, relative to the poll-position it had from late 2018 to early 2020. Likewise, research shows clearly that in times of economic recession, environmental policy making tends to take a hit. Hence, the Corona crisis may be seen as much as an opportunity as a threat. In an effort to disentangle and clarify these effects on the climate movement, this paper investigates climate activists’ perspectives on strategic and tactical impacts of the Corona crisis: (1) how the corona crisis has affected the prospects for a carbon-free society and the climate movement’s opportunities for mobilization; and (2) the effect on individual choices of protest tactics. Using a panel survey conducted in the fall of 2020 among participants in a previous survey round of climate strike demonstrators in September 2019, we analyze activists’ attitudes to the pandemic’s effects on the movement’s strategies and tactics. The panel design also makes it possible to identify changes in activists’ level of hope in governments being able to address the climate issue. The panel sample includes climate activists from Sweden (N=120) and Finland (N=80), two Nordic societies which used quite different measures for suppressing and/or mitigating the spread of the virus (Finland imposing faster and harder lockdown measures, while Sweden went for less strict approach, mainly based on recommendations to the public). This allows us to investigate whether the different degrees of lockdown (which may have signaled different levels of state capacity, as well as different constraints for activism), as well as the public debates around the measures, have led to different experiences, attitudes and future outlooks among climate activists in these otherwise quite similar countries. We will also investigate individual variation in activism during the Corona lockdown; do individual adjustments depend on factors such as age, education and organizational affiliation? A survey construction including open questions (to which several respondents have written extensive responses) allows for a mixed-methods analysis combining both quantitative and qualitative analytical tools.