In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008/9 social movements reminiscent of eco-emancipatory movements of the 1980s powerfully repoliticised the post-political order of neoliberalism. Additionally, and more recently, right-wing populist movements, Fridays for Future or political mobilisations related to the COVID-19 pandemic have substantially refashioned both the understanding of post-politics and the patterns of its repoliticisation. This article introduces a special issue on Movements and Activism beyond Post-politics. In light of these recent shifts we revisit the notion of post-politics, identify key characteristics of contemporary forms of repoliticisation, zoom in on academic debates about prefigurative and transformative politics and – following a preview of the contributions collated in the special issue – explore what the ongoing reconfiguration of public discourse may imply for further research into social movement activism beyond post-politics.

In modern democratic consumer societies, decentralized, participative, and consensus-oriented forms of multi-stakeholder governance are supplementing, and often replacing, conventional forms of state-centered environmental government. The engagement in all phases of the policy process of diverse social actors has become a hallmark of environmental good governance. This does not mean to say, however, that these modes of policy-making have proved particularly successful in resolving the widely debated multiple sustainability crisis. In fact, they have been found wanting in terms of their ability to respond to democratic needs and their capacity to resolve environmental problems. So why have these participatory forms of environmental governance become so prominent? What exactly is their appeal? What do they deliver? Exploring these questions from the perspective of eco-political and sociological theory, this article suggests that these forms of environmental governance represent a performative kind of eco-politics that helps liberal consumer societies to manage their inability and unwillingness to achieve the socio-ecological transformation that scientists and environmental activists say is urgently required. This reading of the prevailing policy approaches as the collaborative management of sustained unsustainability adds an important dimension to the understanding of environmental governance and contemporary eco-politics more generally.

Collective alternative everyday practices (CAEPs), such as community gardens, clothing swaps or repair cafés, have become a prominent sight in the critical-creative milieus. So far, CAEPs have been mostly conceptualized in terms of prefigurative politics, i.e. as the strategy to change society through an everyday conduct that fully reflects idealized notions of the Self and society. However, there is increasing evidence of practitioners who engage in rather irregular, spontaneous ways and remain bound to an unsustainable consumer lifestyle. Scholars have identified such volatile participation as a problem for mobilization, but have not answered a) how the lack of continuous embodiment can be understood from a social movement perspective, and b) what the political quality of this behaviour might be. In this article, I address these research questions by drawing on theories of the late-modern subject and existing qualitative studies. Late-Modern Subject Theory assumes that individuals increasingly construct themselves through the market and in a multi-faceted way, due to processes such as commercialization, flexibilization and acceleration. From that perspective, volatile participants attempt to mobilize an idealized Self but are unable to do so persistently, due to the structural constraints (such as lack of time resources) and personal liberties (such as excess of consumer options) that define everyday life in late-modern society. The result are figurations of utopia that are bound to fail, but repeated ever again. These ‘refigurations’ maintain a political element through conveying a critique of and an alternative to the status quo, if only for a moment.

Currently proliferating alternative action organizations, such as food cooperatives, solidary agriculture, repair cafés, or DIY initiatives, pursue social transformation at a deliberate distance from party politics. Instead, they concentrate on changing society directly by altering everyday routines and thereby prefiguring an alternative society. Local and experimental movements promise to pioneer social alternatives, which traditional organizations appear to be unable to accomplish. This indicates a remarkable shift, since in the past, social mobilizations often pursued direct social action and party politics simultaneously. The current literature conceptualizes movements and parties primarily as cross-fertilizing allies or even potential hybrids (movement parties) yet struggles to explain why alternative action organizations in countries that have not experienced post-crisis austerity measures have largely abandoned the parliamentary arena. Addressing this gap, we compare contemporary understandings of direct social action in Germany with past understandings: that of the 1920s labour movement and the 1970s new social movements. Applying sociological theories of modernization, we demonstrate that processes of individualization and flexibilization have increased the demand for immediate experiences of social change and decreased the attractiveness of formal organization. Since this makes strategic alliances between movements and political parties increasingly unlikely, societies’ capacity to organize long-term social struggles might be impaired.

Empirical researchers of environmental alternative action organizations (EAAOs) have called for grounding two eco-political theories: David Schlosberg’s sustainable materialism (SM) and Ingolfur Blühdorn’s simulative politics (SP). In this article, I discuss results of an ethnographic study on a library of things, a cloth swapping initiative, and a community garden in the City of Vienna, Austria. Regarding SM, participants indeed suffer from a lack of substantive eco-political actions by liberal democratic institutions and themselves personally, however they barely convey a new materialist ontology. Regarding SP, participants indeed show an ambivalence towards consumer capitalism and ecological commitments, yet they tend to be highly critical and reflexive on the matter. Both theories are unable to detect that the EAAOs fill an eco-political lacuna in Vienna’s foundational economy: Via positive framing and flexible participation virtually everyone – the crowd – is invited to co-create sustainable routines. As such, they represent rudimentary infrastructures of green everyday life.

In contemporary city planning, self-organized collaborative forms of housing are flourishing. However, in the literature, the increasing incorporation of citizens in housing and planning has been interpreted in very different ways. The research on urban planning has understood the proliferation of co-housing groups as indicating changing participatory demands of citizens on one hand, and as an effort to organize social change on an everyday level on the other. In contrast, critical social researchers have interpreted the rise of collaborative housing not as a democratization, but as a shift of urban governance towards the responsibilization of citizens. In this article, we use these two theoretical perspectives for making sense of the political values that are present in the contemporary proliferation of co-housing groups in Viennese urban planning. The empirical base of our endeavor is a series of qualitative interviews with different stakeholders (city planners, administrators, architects, developers, and neighbors) and members of co-housing groups in the city development area Wildgarten in the South of the city. We conclude that in the Wildgarten, the self-empowerment of citizens goes hand-in-hand with an increasing top-down steering by a neoliberal entrepreneurial city. Furthermore, we found that the co-housing groups tend to willingly accept the hierarchy between planning bodies and themselves, which contradicts the political marketing strategies of social transformation and democratization attached to Wildgarten. Simultaneously, possibly as a consequence from top-down citizen responsibilization, our findings show that co-housing groups often focus more on a democratized group interior than on transforming society at large.