What happens when scientists with important climate knowledge are cast as elites in a populist morality play? Lockwood has argued that reaction to climate change policy has become integral to right-wing populism in many countries, because it has become symbolic of the central populist antagonism between “the people” and an “elite”(2018). As a consequence, many advocates of climate action position themselves as anti-populists. Yet because the association of climate experts with a distant, rootless, technocratic elite is politically potent, there can be grave dangers to a defense of climate action as rejection of “ignorance” and a simple endorsement of science and expert knowledge. But what’s the alternative? Can populism’s relation to climate politics expand what counts as relevant knowledge, without rejecting the insights of science? And what are both the dangers and possibilities of a climate populism that might do so? I explore these questions.
I draw from a recent article on “science-related populism” to develop four conceptions of the relation of “the people” to climate expertise (Mede and Schäfer 2020). These tease apart criticisms of power claims and truth claims, in order to broaden what counts as climate populism. I argue that this broader view can be recognized as a demand to pluralize and democratize expertise, rather than reject it. When expertise is distinguished from elitism, we find convergences with counter-expertise that has long been integral to climate- and environmental-justice arguments and activism (Méndez 2020). These diverse ways of knowing have been identified as traditional ecological knowledge, local knowledge, citizen science, or remoteness reduction (e.g., Kimmerer 2015; Ottinger 2013; Plumwood 1998; Stengers 2017). Here, expertise is justified as an engaged and caring relation to the subjects of knowledge rather than as objective and neutral; not as separation from the common world, but as immersion in it.
This is part of a broader project theorizing the relationship of populism with climate politics and climate justice. Other pieces consider conceptions of pluralism, politicization, and cosmopolitanism, all with an aim to more clearly understand the dangers and possibilities of climate populism.
References:
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Lockwood, Matthew. 2018. “Right-Wing Populism and the Climate Change Agenda: Exploring the Linkages.” Environmental Politics 27 (4): 712–32.
Mede, Niels G., and Mike S. Schäfer. 2020. “Science-Related Populism: Conceptualizing Populist Demands toward Science.” Public Understanding of Science 29 (5): 473–91.
Méndez, Michael. 2020. Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ottinger, Gwen. 2013. Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges. NYU Press.
Plumwood, Val. 1998. “Inequality, Ecojustice, and Ecological Rationality.” In Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader, ed. Dryzek and Schlosberg, 559–83. Oxford University Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2017. Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Polity.
