Three ways to navigate the green backlash

“Making the shift to a more sustainable and fair society isn't just about new technology and new policies, it's about how we live, who we are, and how we relate to each other,” says Per Olsson.

Published in Global Sustainability, the study is led by Centre researchers Per Olsson and Michele-Lee Moore, together with Peter Søgaard Jørgensen and Carl Folke. It examines existing evidence about how backlash shapes change efforts and what might be needed to navigate it. The study focuses in particular on a vulnerable stage of transformations: the period when old structures are breaking down or collapsing while new ones are still taking shape and are not yet fully formed.

Different forms of backlash

Backlash can take different forms. Workers whose livelihoods and identities are tied to industries being phased out or who have been excluded from shaping new directions or changes may eventually become attracted to retrograde narratives or promises offered by those leading the backlash. Other groups may actively promote competing political and economic futures, including through disinformation or attacks on institutions and actors attempting to support or enable transformations to sustainability and justice. Powerful incumbents may meanwhile seek to protect the benefits they receive from existing systems by supporting those promoting and building futures that are not aimed at sustainability or justice.

 
Research reviewed in the study also suggests that, in some countries, involving workers and trade unions in shaping energy transitions reduced backlash and increased support for change.

Increasing polarisation, democratic backsliding and even violent narratives, can at times be strategies, and at other times features, of backlash dynamics that can ultimately derail transformations towards sustainability and justice.

Three capacities for navigating backlash

The researchers highlight three capacities that could help societies through this turbulent period:

1. Hope and imagination. People need to be able to imagine a future that addresses their concerns, and have opportunities to help create it. “We suggest that (re)igniting hope for alternatives may also divert people from becoming attracted to retrograde imaginaries,” the researchers write.
2. Hospicing with dignity. Recognising that abandoning an old system can involve grief and loss as well as financial costs is key. Changing jobs, industries or institutions can also mean losing identities, communities and a sense of belonging. Strategies that care for the emotional as well as material experiences are needed.
3. Radical collaboration while holding paradoxes. This refers to the capacity to create spaces where people with deeply different values and interests can continue to engage and (re)humanize the “other” despite conflict and uncertainty. Citizen assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy are examples that hold potential for strengthening such radical forms of collaboration.

Together, the authors argue, these approaches can help create temporary stability in the “in betweenness” of transformative change while societies work through the emotional, relational and political tensions that come with profound change.

“Transformations are complex, and they are relational, political, and emotional”, Michele-Lee Moore concludes.

Read the full article 'Facing backlash and derailment risks: building capacities for navigating transformations to sustainability and justice in turbulent times'»