Popular Protest Movements, Political Attitudes and Democratic Climate Governance: Exploring the Dynamics in Four Scandinavian Cities

Abstract

In this article, we unpack and compare how differently reactive protest groups and movements respond to climate-related policy implementation and engage with public institutions to raise grievances and change the course of climate action. We argue that as the climate agenda has become integrated into broad-based policies, such as urban densification and transport/road-tolls, a range of contestations emerges that cannot be reduced to anti-elite sentiments and climate scepticism, as often held in studies of populism and climate politics. The article offers an analytical framework to study how such reactive protest movements and their leadership respond to climate-related policy implementation in several distinct areas of contestation. The approach is tested with empirical observations from four case studies of popular protests in four Scandinavian cities. We found that the hostility and grievances of the protesters included a mix of ideological and material/socio-economic concerns not perceived, recognised or responded to by public institutions. Citizen action groups thus actively engaged with a diversity of public agencies and politicians to influence climate-related decisions and actions. We observed that these interactions and resulting effects were highly place-based and context-specific, and dynamic. We suggest that engaging with popular/populist climate politics needs to observe changing contextual circumstances and more firmly distinguish between responsiveness to economic, cultural recognition/identity, anti-elitist and knowledge foundations it is entangled in. This includes aspects related to the procedural functioning of public institutions and officials. Relationships are complex and multilayered. A processual and qualitative multi-case study approach facilitated these observations.