The politics of sustainability between post-politics, populism and strategy: a cross-national comparison

The current environmental crisis challenges our notion of what nature is. There is a huge distinction between our image of nature as a set of predictable and determined processes that tend toward equilibrium and the often unpredictable, differentiated, and incoherent set of processes that do exist in the real world. Thus, many definitions of nature might be hypothesized, and a consequent scattered, and highly differentiated set of human-nature interactions might be portrayed with a consequent multitude of potential notions of sustainability. Furthermore, interpreting the notion of nature and sustainability means paying attention to the action of a vast apparatus of technocrats and experts who, in turn, contribute to the identification of the so-called “post-politics”. In post-politics, the ideological conflicts are replaced by technocrats who substantially agree on an explicitly universalized vision of a specific political demand. Two are the consequences of post-politics for the politics of sustainability: firstly, those who propose alternatives to experts’ interpretation of natural phenomena and solutions thereof are blamed as radical and illegitimate (e.g.: those rejecting the neo-liberal-capitalist order) Secondly, those who deny expert interpretations are left outside of the political contestation game. Eliminating political contestation from the scene might produce new forms of opposition that nowadays are widely embodied by “populist” actors. Reling on a corpus of social media data and institutional speeches and using both deductive and inductive text analysis techniques (mixed-method research design), this paper proposes a comparative analysis of three populist political actors in Italy, UK and Germany striving to understand how they address the environmental issue and how they treat it: which rhetoric do they use when addressing issues pertaining to the environment? Do they use it strategically? If yes which frames and narratives do they mainly rely on?