Civic Activism in an Intensifying Climate Crisis

As the impacts of ecological crisis become increasingly severe, activism around the world is responding. The civic dimension of the climate agenda is becoming more consequential, both as a prompt and a possible obstacle to more ambitious policies. As environmental stresses hit increasingly hard, civil society mobilization around the green transition is changing in important ways. This compilation asks how climate activism is evolving to meet this crunch moment for planetary politics.¹

There has been extensive analysis of the politics of climate change over many years. This compilation adds to such work through a very specific remit that applies a global comparative perspective to the current moment of civil society’s emergent strategies and tactics and the rising backlash from both governments and citizens alike. The current juncture invites new analysis of civic activism for several reasons. In the past several years, the impacts of ecological damage and climate change have become far more severe and have consequently come to have much more tangible and far-reaching political spillover effects. Recent scientific reports have suggested that global warming is reaching dangerous tipping points: A World Meteorological Organization forecast from May 2023 predicts the key 1.5-degree Celsius temperature increase will be breached by 2027, a full quarter-century sooner than anticipated. The last two years have witnessed unprecedented floods, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves. On top of this, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had a major impact on the whole global energy context, while escalating conflicts in the Middle East threaten to disrupt the global energy supply. All these events have dramatically sharpened the politics of climate change.

Against this alarming backdrop, climate activism appears to be moving into a higher gear and becoming more extensive. While many forms of this activism have, of course, been prominent for a long time, civic action related to climate change and environmental challenges has been expanding in scale and reach around the world.² More citizens are getting involved in climate activism, and environmental groups are adopting new strategies either to involve more citizens or to exert more direct political leverage.

Debates have also sharpened over the tactics that climate activism should adopt. New forms of civil disobedience are on the rise, as an emerging wave of climate activism is oriented around more disruptive politics. Research on climate activism has already begun to focus on the growing use of disruptive and dangerous dissent.³ Across groups orchestrating acts of sabotage and disruption, activists express frustration with having exhausted mainstream political routes to make change. Yet, at the same time, more regular and formal initiatives like climate assemblies and public consultations have spread, with many arguing that these institutionally structured forms of engagement hold greater promise to spur environmental action.

So, differences have opened between climate activists over the right balance between what might be labeled as “outsider” and “insider” citizen engagement, with important implications for democracy. We define outsider engagement as the use of disruption and sabotage to press for deep, systemic change. Insider engagement, by contrast, refers to efforts to push for change from within formal institutional channels. An increasingly crucial question is how the latest, acute phase of the ecological crisis relates both to political systems and to the balance between democracy and autocracy. Some activists appear drawn to some forms of direct action that may sit uneasily with democratic channels of influence. Others, in contrast, seek to approach environmental challenges through innovative forms of democratic renewal, bringing climate and democracy activism increasingly together.

Meanwhile, as climate commitments begin to take their economic toll, a backlash against climate policies is also gaining momentum and generating civic activism that is more critical of climate action. Movements opposing pro-environment policies have proliferated in tandem with climate activism. Particularly when energy prices increased and many countries suffered economically from ripple effects of the Ukraine invasion, vulnerable populations mobilized to push back against climate action. This type of civic backlash tends to reflect calls for a fairer and more inclusive way of distributing the costs of the societal transitions necessary to offset the worst effects of climate change. In parallel, many governments have moved against climate groups, and concerns have arisen about the growing number of attacks against climate activists—which are typically driven by land inequality, violent conflict, corruption, shrinking civic space, and a culture of corporate impunity.⁴

Equally, the geographic scope of this new wave of activism is of considerable importance. Climate activism has intensified most notably in Europe; indeed, analytic work on climate politics focuses disproportionately on European trends and experiences. A key question is whether this activism is set to become comparably strong and widespread elsewhere in the world, including in countries that are not fully democratic or even fully authoritarian. As the landscape shifts, more analysis is needed to understand these trends from a global comparative perspective.

This compilation takes stock of these vital trends in civic activism related to climate change and the wider ecological crisis around the world. It examines just how widespread climate activism is becoming and how far it is mobilizing larger numbers of citizens. It examines what new forms this activism is adopting, comparing insider and outsider tactics. It assesses the growing backlash against climate activism from both societies and governments. And it explores the extent to which climate activism’s evolution is a global phenomenon and how it varies in different contexts.

The compilation includes a combination of thematic and regional chapters, punctuated by short case studies by members of the Civic Research Network. Oscar Berglund offers a typology of emerging forms of disruptive direct action favored by climate activists in Europe. Amanda Machin provides detail on some particularly evocative recent examples of direct action from different regions of the world. Claire Mellier and Graham Smith dissect how activist groups are increasingly engaging more positively with the current wave of climate assemblies. Moving to the anti-climate action side of the equation, James Patterson unpacks the dynamics of “greenlash” activism, while Javier Garate and Rachel Cox offer a sobering account of attacks against climate activists. The compilation then offers three regional studies of these various trends: one on the Middle East and North Africa, from Maha Yahya and Issam Kayssi; one on Africa, from Tinashe Gumbo; and one on Europe, from Erin Jones and Emily Hardy. Our conclusion draws out common themes and reflects on their policy and analytical implications for both the climate agenda and for democracy.

Notes

Climate activism has been on the rise for some time and has intensified especially in the last five years. The year 2019 is often seen as a watershed for those that follow the politics of climate change. From this point onward, there was a sharp increase in general public concern about climate change.¹ Institutions at different levels and across the world made climate emergency declarations. Many began to feel that climate change was finally being treated as the civilizational threat that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports had long warned about. A wave of climate protests that started in 2018 remained strong until the pandemic restrictions in early 2020 and then regained momentum after the pandemic restrictions ended.

The number of protests, and the number of people involved in protest, overall has increased significantly from 2010 and within that overall increase, climate and environmental protests have occupied a larger share since 2018.² Climate change activism also has increasingly overlapped with other kinds of progressive activism. Particularly in 2023 and 2024, many long-standing climate activists, famously including Greta Thunberg, frequently attended large anti-genocide protests, for example.³ One important aspect of both the global climate movement and progressive protests overall has been their tactical diversity, including traditional marches in great numbers as well as acts of civil disobedience.

This chapter examines the tactics of the contemporary climate movement. It categorizes the tactics used within the climate movement according to different functions that they fulfill and assesses the role of nonviolence and sabotage within the climate movement, as well as the rising criminalization of climate activists.⁴

Contemporary Climate Protests

Much of climate change activism is disruptive in different ways, and some groups have put disruption at the center of what they do. Most climate protests fall under one of three categories of aims: directly stopping environmental harms, seeking media attention, and delegitimizing and increasing costs for polluters and their accomplices. In practice, many protests fall into more than one of these categories, but it is useful to distinguish their different functions in this way.

Directly Stopping Destruction

Directly stopping environmental destruction is the most long-standing and global kind of climate activism. In other parts of this volume, this is termed environmental activism. But in many cases these protests serve both to protect the local environment and to stop emissions or to defend natural carbon sinks, so much of it can also be seen as climate activism. This type of protest represents conflict over the rights and uses of land between, on one hand, often a local population and, on the other, a state, a corporation, and/or another small-scale actor that has come to exploit the natural resources of an area (such as loggers or illegal miners). Because these disputes are about land, who gets to use it, and how, there is often a strong colonial element to these conflicts, whether they take place in the Global South (like the local Indigenous-led defense of the land and lagoons in Conga, Peru, against a mining corporation)⁵ or in the Global North (like the campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States, led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe).⁶

This kind of protest seeks to stop new or further extraction of resources detrimental to the local population and environment. Known as “Blockadia,” a term popularized by Naomi Klein, such protests are often led by or at least have significant involvement of the people directly affected.⁷ These protests generally have a very physical aspect of getting in the way of the state, corporation, or small-scale actor that seeks to extract resources, such as gathering a group to stand in front of a bulldozer. But that physical aspect is often backed up by a coordinated campaign that can involve a range of actors, such as NGOs, labor unions, or political parties, and a range of tactics, such as widely publicizing the case, litigating, and putting pressure on decisionmakers. These protests are highly political; they reveal the power relations at play in the often strong links between the state and corporate actors, especially when police and military are brought in to defend the interests of the corporations against the interests of the local population.

The protests in Sainte-Soline in southern France provide a recent European example of this type of environmental activism. Protesters opposed the construction of a water reservoir that would benefit large agribusiness to the detriment of the local population, small-scale farmers, and nature and wildlife. A number of different groups participated, and they faced violent police repression.⁸ Much of the work of the long-standing German group Ende Gelände also falls into this category as they have set up camps to stop coal mines.⁹ Successful British examples of such a protest include the anti-fracking protests in the 2010s that contributed to the abandonment of fracking in the UK.¹⁰

Seeking Media Attention

The second category of climate protests has received the most attention in Europe in recent years, namely protests that have a primary or sometimes exclusive purpose of achieving media attention. These protests can take different forms. Some disrupt cultural places and events, and some disrupt the general public. The museum vandalism protests that have been frequent across Europe in the past few years fall into this category, as do the disruption of sporting events or theater performances. These protests often contain a symbolic message that has limited meaning and can sometimes be difficult to convey to a target audience. Protesters who throw food at artwork, for example, have repeatedly asked “What is worth more, art or life?”¹¹ The activists who disrupted a Les Misérables performance in London used the desperate stealing of bread in the musical set during the French Revolution to ask what measures people will take if climate change leads to widespread food shortages.¹² However, the symbolic message is often lost in general media reporting, with only the more sympathetic media outlets publishing statements about the symbolism. The main function of such protests is therefore to get a platform in the media, rather than to make a point about art or hunger. Although these protests appear to be the acts of a few committed individuals, these individuals are supported by larger groups and movements that also engage in other tactics, such as giving public talks and campaigning for citizens’ assemblies.

Other protests in this category aim at the general public, including many cases of blocking roads or otherwise stopping traffic. While occasionally protests do target a particular type of traffic, usually it is not important who or what is being disrupted. The people being disrupted by roadblocks often have nothing to do with decisions about restoring wetlands, banning new oil and gas licenses, or retrofitting homes (the demands of groups using these tactics). Instead, it is the ensuing media reporting that allows the protesters to articulate their demands.

Protesters acknowledge that they are causing an inconvenience. Yet the greater aim that they believe justifies the inconvenience is to highlight the climate emergency and the fact that governments and society are not doing much to address it.¹³ Although the protest in itself is of limited value, by capturing media attention it becomes valuable as a platform. The target audience of the protest is not the people visiting the art gallery or the show, or traveling on the road in question, but rather the general public, whom activists reach through the media. This kind of media-attention-seeking protest is successful in the sense that it does often achieve widespread media coverage. For example, Just Stop Oil protests tend to make headlines in major media outlets across the world. However, precisely which acts of disruptive protest will receive the most attention is difficult to predict.

Most of the media reporting of these protests is negative and focused on the protest tactic as opposed to the protesters’ demands.¹⁴ Some groups have responded to this lack of control over the media narrative by incorporating their demand in the name of the group. This includes Insulate Britain and Dernière Rénovation (Last Renovation), two groups in the UK and France, respectively, who campaign for homes to be retrofitted to be more energy efficient. The Swedish group Återställ Våtmarker (Restore Wetlands), which campaigns for the restoration of wetlands, also uses this tactic. These naming decisions have increased media reporting and public awareness of these important climate change mitigation policies.¹⁵ However, in other cases, most of the public are unaware of the demands of the protesters. For example, opinion polling showed that, in July 2023, the vast majority of the British public knew about and had opinions about the UK group Just Stop Oil, but none of the interviewed members of the British public were able to state that Just Stop Oil’s demand is to ban new licenses for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.¹⁶

Although this kind of protest often succeeds in getting media attention, it is harder to turn that attention into political wins. Media-attention-seeking protest is less explicitly political than the previous category because the targets of the protests lack political meaning. If pictures of police beating up anti-mining protesters show that the state protects corporate interests, police arresting protesters sitting in the road are broadly seen as acting in the interest of the majority of the population. The groups most connected to this kind of protest are notably unpopular: Opinion polling shows that 68 percent of the British population has unfavorable views of Just Stop Oil and only 16 percent has favorable views; similarly, in Germany, 72 percent have unfavorable views of Letzte Generation while only 19 percent have favorable views.¹⁷

Delegitimizing Polluters

The third category of climate protest seeks to delegitimize polluters and their accomplices, and sometimes to increase their costs. In contrast to the previous category, these protests reflect a more political analysis of climate change. As the fossil fuel industry continues to push for delays in phasing out fossil fuels, it is the most logical target for climate activists. However, climate activists understand that the fossil fuel industry is entangled with other political, economic, cultural, and social actors in a way that enables it to maintain a central role despite the widespread knowledge that fossil fuels are incompatible with mitigating climate change. Delegitimizing the fossil fuel industry and its accomplices has therefore become a central concern in the politics of addressing climate change.¹⁸

The aim of protesting the connections between the fossil fuel industry and other societal actors is to weaken these connections. Activists sometimes disrupt fossil fuel companies directly at shareholder meetings and other events. One example was the 2023 protest in London at the site of an oil and gas conference, at which youth climate activist Greta Thunberg was arrested.¹⁹ More commonly, though, activists focus on how other actors give credibility to fossil fuel companies. By tarnishing the public image of both fossil fuel companies and their associates, activists hope to make collaboration with fossil fuel actors so costly that accomplices end their associations. Even when the fossil fuel industry is seemingly targeted directly, the target audience is arguably not the companies themselves. Climate activists have little faith that fossil fuel companies can become a force for good and stop fossil fuel production altogether.²⁰

Several sectors have been targeted by disruptive protests aimed at delegitimizing connections to the fossil fuel industry. Some actors, such as universities, are targeted because they are expected to be committed to science and truth and therefore uninfluenced by fossil fuel interests. Universities carry out the research that discovers what climate change is and how fossil fuels drive it. Yet many universities have close ties with fossil fuel companies. A prominent example in the UK is the University of Exeter, one of the country’s top universities for climate change research, which signed a £14.7 million ($19 million) deal with Shell in November 2022.²¹ As a result, universities have been a key target for fossil fuel divestment campaigners.²²

Museums represent another institution of knowledge production that engages in greenwashing, particularly museums that deal with science and the natural world yet receive sponsorship from fossil fuel companies. A famous example is the London Science Museum, which had a climate exhibition sponsored by Shell a few years ago and now hosts an exhibition called Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery, named after a major operator of coal power stations.²³ The museum has been the site of several recent acts of disruptive protest to oppose and highlight this greenwashing.

Universities and museums are particularly vulnerable to allegations of greenwashing because of their fundamental commitment to knowledge, science, and the betterment of humanity. Sit-ins and occupations have been common tactics in protesting these institutions’ connections with the fossil fuel industry. These types of protests tend to receive less media attention than the type of media-attention-seeking protests set out in the previous section, but optimizing general media attention is also less important for these protesters. The target audience is not necessarily the public at large but the students, visitors, and other stakeholders involved with the relevant university or museum. Repression in these cases is less likely because the institutions know that the protesters are right in principle and that most of their students, academics, staff, and visitors also agree. Indeed, many of these protests have been successful, and many institutions have moved to stop receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry.²⁴

Many large campaigns that do not necessarily have an aspect of physical disruption also fall into this category. One example includes litigation cases against fossil fuel companies.²⁵ In another instance, the group Fossil Free Books is currently carrying out a partially successful boycott campaign to get the book industry to cut ties with the asset management company Baillie Gifford until they divest from the fossil fuel industry (as well as cut ties with arms companies profiting from “Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”).²⁶ These protests, often in the form of boycotts, are highly disruptive for their targets without direct physical disruption.

A greater challenge for climate activists is how to target fossil fuel companies’ connections with financial actors. The high-profile climate activism group Extinction Rebellion has long targeted banks and financial institutions with significant fossil fuel investments. Co-founder Gail Bradbrook, for instance, smashed the windows at a Barclays bank in 2022.²⁷ Extinction Rebellion’s campaign Money Rebellion has singled out Barclays as the High Street bank investing most in fossil fuels.²⁸ But much of fossil fuel companies’ funding filters through financial institutions whose customers are other banks rather than the general population. Those connections are difficult for activists to challenge and even untangle, meaning that it is much harder to identify protest acts that can effectively delegitimize such connections.

Sabotage, Violence, Nonviolence, and Criminalization

The role of nonviolence, violence, and sabotage has long surrounded the climate change movement. The vast majority of contemporary climate activists are committed to nonviolent forms of protest. Extinction Rebellion was founded on the principle of nonviolence,²⁹ as were their various offshoot groups in the A22 Network, including the aforementioned Just Stop Oil, Dernière Rénovation, Letzte Generation, and Återställ Våtmarker. These groups are committed to civil disobedience and refer to their work as nonviolent direct action (NVDA). This commitment to nonviolence is both strategic—drawing on the belief that nonviolent resistance is more likely to succeed than violent resistance—and principled.³⁰ Extinction Rebellion has occasionally engaged in minor sabotage, such as breaking windows at banks. Acts such as spraying orange paint that can be washed off and throwing food products on paintings protected by glass can in turn be seen as a form of proto-sabotage, where it seems like objects are damaged but they are in fact not. In other words, the more prominent practitioners of disruptive climate protests do not engage in serious acts of sabotage.

There are nonetheless climate activists who are more open to the idea of sabotage. They draw on movements from previous decades—including Earth First!, anti-roads protests, and the animal liberation movement—that involved more acts of sabotage than today’s climate protests do.³¹ They may also have been partially inspired by Andreas Malm’s short book How to Blow Up a Pipeline and perhaps the film with the same name.³² For example, the UK group Tyre Extinguishers pursued a particular tactic that Malm promoted: deflating tires of random SUVs in random places. Some observers critique strict adherence to NVDA, saying that the historical record of violence in protest is not clear-cut.³³ Whether sabotage of objects can be seen as violence or not is also open to debate. Still, sabotage plays a much smaller role in today’s climate change activism than it has in the past. That looks unlikely to change, not least because of the significant costs and risks that would be necessary on behalf of activists.

An arguably more important factor that shapes tactics and strategies in the climate movement is the increasing criminalization of climate activists. With new anti-protest laws appearing in relatively democratic countries, including Australia, the United States, and the UK, along with other forms of ramped-up repression, the conditions under which activists plan their actions are ever-changing.³⁴ Criminalization efforts are often driven by discourse that labels activists as antidemocratic at best and ecoterrorist at worst. Yet the organized climate change movement is not even contemplating violence against people, and even sabotage is a fringe idea and practice. Importantly, the unpopularity of some climate activist groups referred to earlier has not translated to public support for criminalization. The same surveys mentioned above showed that only 33 percent of Germans and 29 percent of Britons wanted to see jail terms for nonviolent disruptive protest.³⁵ Since criminalization of climate protest is neither driven by public demand, nor by increased use of violence or sabotage, more research is needed into what the driving forces of this criminalization are.

Conclusion

Directly stopping environmental destruction is the most long-standing and global kind of climate activism. Protests that seek media attention but have little connection between the targets of the protests and the demands have become popular mainly in Europe, through groups like Just Stop Oil and Letzte Generation. These protests are less political than the other two kinds because they do not expose or attack the power structures that drive climate change. Protests that seek to delegitimize polluters take many forms, including disruption, litigation, and boycotts. They call out greenwashing and expose and challenge connections to the fossil fuel and arms industries.

Finally, the line between nonviolence and sabotage has blurred slightly, with very minor acts of sabotage now being considered violent, although government efforts to criminalize climate activists are disproportionate and not driven by the public’s wishes. Criminalization of climate protests is therefore largely unnecessary and may further polarize societies and undermine democratic participation. It is important to stress that disruptive protests do not operate on their own. While they are an important part of the puzzle, such protests are and must be part of longer, sustained campaigns that involve many more people than those who are willing to take the increasing risks that come with physical disruption.

Notes

The climate activism witnessed around the world in recent years has been characterized by a rich and colorful diversity of voices, slogans, and new tactics.¹ One of the most intriguing trends has been the growing use of radical performance as a form of protest. Although only a small number of activists carry out radical performance compared to those participating in marches, such tactics generate a disproportionate amount of attention. Provocative, confrontational, and theatrical performances—which range from stripping naked in banks and supergluing skin to runways to hunger-striking and mouth-sewing—are compelling displays that can be hard to watch and yet difficult to tear one’s gaze away from. These are different from the disruptive tactics discussed in chapter 1 because of the physical toll on the performer who not only labors, but suffers, in order to demonstrate against the prevailing environmental governance regime and lack of ambitious climate policy making. These actions are not about engaging the public and politicians in an informed discussion but aim at drawing attention and shocking audiences.

These types of performative protests raise many questions for members and supporters of the larger climate movement. Should these performances be dismissed as irrational, futile, and likely only to aggravate the very people with the power to implement effective environmental and energy policies? Or are such activities a smart tactic to garner support, build awareness, and demonstrate the passion with which activists believe in their cause? Does such strength of feeling help to build a strong identity in the movement? What are the purported goals of these protests, and how likely is it that these goals are achieved?

This chapter examines various examples of radical performance as an instrument and site of protest around the world. These tactics are becoming an increasingly familiar feature of climate activism and show the importance of emotions and the body in environmental protests and social movements more generally.² Even if it is difficult to pinpoint their impact, they cannot be dismissed as foolish pranks that only distract from rational deliberation. While these protests are unlikely to change the minds of those who are skeptical of stringent climate policy, they mobilize and enliven the climate movement. They confront their audiences with the increasing desperation of those who seek to prevent environmental disaster while also reminding the world not to forget the vulnerability and vitality of the bodies of those who witness the consequences of climate change.

Starving, Silencing, and Stripping for the Climate

On March 15, 2024, climate activist Sonam Wangchuk announced the tenth day of his hunger strike. He tweeted, “Temperature this morning was -15°C. Some 110 people and I slept in the open in solidarity with our glaciers and fragile nature in high Himalayas and 2000 people are on fast during the day.”³  Camped outdoors in Ladakh (the high-altitude and northernmost territory in India located on the Tibetan plateau), wrapped in blankets to try to protect himself against the subzero temperatures, Wangchuk called on governments around the world to act against climate change, which, he stressed, was having a drastic and visible impact on the plateau. Ladakh sits at the western end of the Himalayan region, which is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.⁴ Wangchuk refused food for twenty-one days, surviving only on salt and water for three weeks. His stated tactic for himself and his co-protesters was to “afflict pain on ourselves so that governments and policymakers notice our pain and act in time.”⁵

Many climate activists have undertaken hunger strikes in recent years. A search of newspaper articles on hunger striking by those protesting inaction on climate change reveals a sharp increase: No articles appeared before 2009, four articles were published between 2009 and 2019, and 121 articles appeared between 2019 and 2021.⁶ This indicates not only that this form of protest is being utilized by environmentalists but also that it is increasingly visible in the media and the public sphere. Since 2019, hunger strikes by climate activists have been staged in countries including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Israel, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and involve numerous organizations and collectives, such as the Sunrise Movement in the United States. Most recently, between March and June 2024, eight activists from an alliance of Scientists Rebellion and Last Generation called for the German government to recognize the threat of climate change and went on hunger strike in Berlin. One activist went without food for ninety-two days.⁷ In 2019 the movement Extinction Rebellion even announced a synchronized global hunger strike involving activists from around the world who refused to eat for a week or more. The activists called this “a last resort tactic” after the failure of decades of more conventional forms of protest to achieve the required response.⁸

Hunger striking is, however, not necessarily the most painful form of radical performance, nor the most dramatic. In 2019, Tim Hewes, a seventy-one-year-old Church of England priest who is affiliated with Christian Climate Action, stood outside the central London offices of News UK, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and, with shaking hands, sewed up his own lips with thick black thread. After wiping the blood off his chin and the sweat from his brow, Hewes sat for two hours holding a placard with the words “Q: Murdoch—the most destructive man in the history of the planet? Discuss.”⁹ In a video recorded prior to the protest Hewes called for “an acknowledgement and an honest discussion about the catastrophic impact Rupert Murdoch and News Corp have had on climate breakdown.”¹⁰ Several years previously, in 2013, activists and locals on Padang Island in Indonesia used the same technique to protest the destruction of peat land, sewing their mouths shut to symbolize the death of social and environmental justice.¹¹ Even more shocking are reported cases of self-immolation by climate activists in New York in 2018 and in Washington, DC in 2022.¹²

Other examples of radical performances in environmental activism involve going naked. For example, two women from Ultima Generazione (the Italian branch of the Last Generation movement) stood topless in front of the Italian Senate in Rome in 2023 and poured mud over their heads to evoke the severe flooding in northern Italy earlier that year.¹³ Their aim was to highlight the dangers of climate change and to protest the continued use of fossil fuels. Several radical performances from Extinction Rebellion have involved naked bodies, such as activists stripping both outside London banks to protest funding fossil fuel companies and at New York fashion shows to highlight the detrimental impact of the fashion industry on the environment.¹⁴ Exposing the naked body might be a provocative ploy for attention, but it resonates with the environmentalist rejection of materialistic consumption. It also demonstrates the common vulnerability of humanity as well as the determination and power of the protester. By using their naked bodies in protest, climate activists are deploying a tactic pioneered by African women. In 2015, for example, a group of elderly women in Uganda stripped naked to protest the loss of land rights.¹⁵ Self-exposure of the African female body has been used to defy patriarchy, reject objectification, resist dominant narratives, and reclaim agency.¹⁶

At one of their naked protests at a store in central London, members of Extinction Rebellion wore signs reading “won’t wear injustice, rather be naked” and superglued their hands to the shop window. Last Generation activists have also become notorious for supergluing themselves to roads, runways, and museum exhibits; the term “climate glue” did not appear before 2019 but now features in news articles, which mainly draw attention to the havoc it wreaks.¹⁷ Although often climate gluing is designed to gain attention by disrupting commuters, tourists, and spectators, it also contains an element of theatrical performance. Many radical performances are disruptive, but some of them rely entirely on the spectacle of vulnerability, suffering, and labor of the body. It is this spectacle that makes these performances so compelling. 

Dimensions of Radical Performance

What exactly does radical performance consist of? Four dimensions of radical performance can be identified, each of which may feature more or less prominently and has distinct implications for climate activism.

Theatricality

Embodied performances—such as hunger striking, mouth sewing, stripping naked, and supergluing parts of the body to artworks or stadiums—are spectacular events that are carefully choreographed and staged in front of an audience, utilizing a range of theatrical props and dramatic gestures. Some of these performances might also be disruptive actions (as detailed in chapter 1), but they are simultaneously theatrical performances that make the activist highly visible to an audience.¹⁸ The theatricality of radical protests in climate activism is key to their effectiveness, allowing them to draw attention on city streets and on social media, challenge dominant narratives, and tell an alternative story through unusual, eye-catching, and shocking actions. The theatricality of performances allows activists to engage their audience and alter their preconceptions and future behavior.¹⁹ While performances are indirect forms of action and are rarely successful in directly influencing policy, theater can be a sort of cultural intervention that aims to bring about broader social change.²⁰ At the same time, however, the very theatricality of these performances is also their weakness; there is a risk that the mainstream media trivializes them and does not discuss the issue of climate change in its coverage.²¹

Embodiment

Supplementing verbal expressions and printed texts, these radical performances highlight the power of material bodies and corporeal actions to engage an audience.²² All the protest performances outlined in the previous section are distinct because the body of the activist moves to the center of attention, as an active agent, a disciplined instrument, and a political site of performance. They are eye-catching, sometimes dangerous and painful, physical performances in which bodies are starving or stuck or hurt or handcuffed or silent or naked. These actions allow protesters to communicate political messages without words while resisting dominant narratives and generating new ones.²³

Embodied protests such as hunger striking and mouth-sewing allow the participation of desperate groups in prisons and detention centers who have been deprived of political voice and struggle to be heard in the formal public sphere. By using their vulnerable bodies in political resistance, these activists exercise a form of political agency.²⁴ Yet in the case of climate activism, most of these performances are not generally undertaken by those most marginalized in society and excluded from political life. Instead they are commonly undertaken by individuals and groups who are, quite on the contrary, free citizens, commonly based in the Global North, whose political efficacy and rights are not in question. Theirs is a different type of desperation, stemming not from the sociopolitical annihilation of the individual behind bars but from the frustrating experience of witnessing the ongoing disregard for the future by political and social elites.

Emotionality

There is an important emotional dimension to embodied radical performances that generally provoke some sort of affective response in their audiences. In the past, emotions have either been dismissed as pathological or simply ignored in social movement scholarship, which has been accused of focusing on the supposedly rational motivations for activism and of assuming that activists’ choice of tactics was made solely through cognitive calculations.²⁵ Yet researchers have become increasingly aware that emotions are present in all social actions and are a pervasive feature of social movements.²⁶ Fear, hope, anger, and guilt, for example, can motivate and sustain climate activism, although in different ways.²⁷ It can therefore be highly rational and strategic to carry out radical and embodied protests; the display and use of emotions does not render protesters irrational.²⁸ On the contrary, the emotionality of protest performances seems to complement rather than contradict activists’ appeal to reason and science.

Emotion helps connect human beings to each other and the world around them.²⁹ The radical and embodied performances of climate activists help create a strong collective identity among activists.³⁰ Emotions also prompt movements to move; they help to mobilize activists in certain directions.³¹ This type of activism is not so much about conveying ideas or convincing others but instead is about consolidating and mobilizing the climate movement. Although there is often dispute over the value of radical performances within a movement, their use can be understood as demonstrating participants’ dedication to the cause. So, while a radical performance is often undertaken by an individual or a small group of activists, it forges a bond across the larger movement and helps to sustain a sense of identity, thereby fostering courage and overcoming fear.³²

Antagonism

While some radical actions might aim to convince or confront their audiences, others intend to challenge and antagonize them.³³ Just as the embodied, emotional, and theatrical performances of climate activists work to bring members of the movement together, they also work to align members against perceived others who oppose or are opposed by the movement.³⁴ Radical performances help “mark out” a “community of protesters.”³⁵ This demarcation almost inevitably involves antagonizing those outside the community; acts of starving, sewing, and stripping for the climate politicizes global warming, challenges the mainstream, and cements a social movement, commonly constructing an “us versus them.” Radical performances are unlikely to convince those who are already skeptical of their goals and may further alienate the mainstream. Still, although antagonism might be seen as problematic for climate activism because of the way it divides and alienates many, it can also be seen as an inherent feature of politics and an essential for challenging dominant discourses in climate politics.³⁶ Radical protests then may consolidate and fortify an “us” but with the risks that come with antagonizing or alienating a “them.”

Conclusion

Radical performance is not unique to climate activism, and numerous social movements have used embodied performances to communicate messages and to enact alternative narratives.³⁷ What is interesting about protest performances is not so much their uniqueness as their conspicuous and expanding appearance in climate activism and, perhaps, their indication of the growing desperation in the global environmental movement. This is particularly so in the Global North, where the impact of a changing climate is likely to be less severe. Many of the activists undertaking radical performances express their frustration at the lack of change they have achieved through more traditional channels.³⁸ It is the manifestation of this desperation through radical, embodied performance more than anything else that helps articulate the new era of climate activism.

This desperation and frustration are often difficult to put into words, which is precisely why the body becomes a signifying instrument for climate activists. Radical performances such as hunger striking and lip sewing are certainly not straightforward mechanisms to convince climate deniers on climate change. They are, on the contrary, high-risk actions that might actually undermine the legitimacy of the climate movement and stymie the progress toward its explicit goals. In staging these kinds of performances, the danger for climate activists is that they may be easily trivialized by the media, that climate change recedes behind the spectacular performance itself, and that they further alienate and antagonize the general public. Nevertheless, while they are painful, unpredictable, and in some ways even counterproductive, this form of protest is also able to able grab attention and to consolidate and animate environmental movements. As climate change activists become more and more frustrated by the apparent lack of requisite action on climate change, this kind of radical performance in the public sphere is unlikely to disappear from the public sphere. 

Notes

When it was launched in October 2018, Extinction Rebellion (XR) felt different from past climate campaigns. It succeeded in mobilizing large numbers of protesters onto the streets of London (and then elsewhere in the world) with three simple demands. First, governments must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency. Second, governments must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. And finally, governments must create and be led by the decisions of citizens’ assemblies on climate and ecological justice.¹

The third demand in particular captured the imagination of many activists and the ire of others. Rather than offering detailed policy prescriptions, XR was arguing for a new democratic space within which everyday citizens would make the hard decisions about how to halt biodiversity loss and achieve net zero by 2025. Citizens’ assemblies bring together a diverse body of people selected by democratic lottery to learn, deliberate, and deliver collective recommendations. With its third demand, XR managed not to take strong stands on particular policies that have traditionally divided the climate movement, while critiquing the failures of existing democratic structures and practices. XR was seeking climate and ecological renewal and democratic renewal.

By 2024, around 200 citizens’ assemblies on climate (or climate assemblies) have taken place across the world, most of them in Western Europe and the vast majority organized by public authorities.² XR’s activities have helped shape this wave of assemblies, but the impacts of this novel form of democratic engagement have so far fallen far short of activists’ ambitions. Interest in democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies can be found beyond Western Europe, even in less democratic or fully authoritarian settings,³ and activists beyond Europe have integrated assemblies into their political strategies.

This chapter aims to make sense of the relationship between climate and ecological activism and the trajectory of climate assemblies. It focuses on activists and organizations that have developed constructive relationships with assemblies, recognizing that not all activists and commentators share the same enthusiasm for this democratic innovation.⁴ This chapter traces the different ways that the climate movement has engaged with assemblies. Assemblies commissioned by governments represent the dominant mode of thinking and practice. Climate activists have played key roles in making the case for assemblies to governments and participating in assemblies, either in governing advisory bodies or as witnesses providing evidence to assemblies.

But this standard operating model of assemblies has been challenged, with a small but growing number of climate assemblies commissioned from within civil society, independent of the state. Why the shift in strategy? To what end?

Why Are Assemblies Attractive to Some Climate Activists?

While some other climate movements such as Fridays for Future have made the case for citizens’ assemblies, XR has arguably been the most influential movement actor, placing assemblies on climate and ecological justice at the core of its rhetoric and actions. In its own words,

We know the world is spinning towards catastrophe. We know it’s time to act. 

If we are going to avoid disaster, we will have to make difficult choices for the long term, collaboratively, in a fair way that isn’t biased towards a powerful or wealthy minority. We need to modernise the political system so that it can deal with the problems of today’s world, and work better for everyday people. To do that it has to include everyday people.

That’s why we need a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate and Ecological Justice to break the deadlock and to put fairness and justice at the centre of decision-making.⁵

A new breed of climate activists has come to believe that without rejuvenating democratic processes, any response to the climate and ecological crisis—and other interconnected crises—will fail. Established, professionalized climate organizations have failed to significantly change the balance of power within climate governance. Corporate interests that wish to sustain the carbon economy dominate, including new and established media empires. Short-term electoral cycles make it near impossible for governments to take the long-term view, even if they were interested.

The attraction of citizens’ assemblies is that, in principle, none of these dynamics are at play. Democratic lottery or sortition ensures a diversity of perspectives from ordinary people, not the homogenous perspectives and interests of the political and economic elite. Lottery obstructs powerful vested interests. The idea of such assemblies is that when ordinary people learn and deliberate together, they will come to recognize the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis and propose radical solutions.

Activism and State-Commissioned Assemblies

The most common way of thinking about climate assemblies is that they are commissioned, financed, and responded to by state institutions. There are two analytically distinct relationships between the climate movement and state-commissioned assemblies. First, climate activists lead the demand for public authorities to commission assemblies. Second, activists engage with assemblies when they are organized.

In the UK, XR has organized several high-profile demonstrations to demand assemblies. In its autumn 2019 rebellion, XR activists occupied Whitehall for over a week with banners and slogans declaring “Citizens’ Assemblies Now.” In another campaign, an XR spoof led many to believe that, on the first day of her premiership on September 7, 2022, UK prime minister Liz Truss had announced a legally binding citizens’ assembly on the cost of living and climate crisis. XR’s elaborate parody consisted of a bus, a mock government website, and press coverage, and for a few moments it had a lot of the country fooled.⁶ One government official explained that the rumor went around the office WhatsApp like wildfire: “We knew it couldn’t be real, but it was the best we’d ever seen.”⁷ The site was down within a couple of hours but had already been shared countless times on social media.

XR’s activism is one of the reasons so many local authorities and national parliaments have declared climate emergencies. In the UK, in particular, some of those local authorities followed their declarations with climate assemblies. Two national-level climate assemblies were organized. The first was the Climate Assembly UK (CAUK), commissioned by six parliamentary select committees in the UK Parliament in 2020.⁸ The second was Scotland’s Climate Assembly, organized by the Scottish government in 2020–2021.⁹ At the time, the conservative government was in power and ignored CAUK’s recommendations, likely in part due to its association of the idea of citizens’ assemblies with the actions of XR.¹⁰

The Climate and Ecology Bill, authored in part by XR activists, confirmed the dominant strategy to call on the UK government to commission any assembly.¹¹ It recognized the sovereignty of Parliament (as any bill must under the UK constitution) but expected the government and Parliament to act on the assembly’s recommendations. Activists continued to use assemblies as a focus of their campaigning, on a couple of occasions managing to organize high-profile protests in the House of Commons itself.¹²

But it has not only been XR making the case for governments to commission assemblies. In France, the idea of a climate convention emerged during the Grand Débat National, the national consultation that President Emmanuel Macron initiated in 2019.¹³ Amid the Yellow Vests protests triggered by the perceived social injustices of a proposed carbon tax, in January 2019 a related group known as the Gilets Citoyens suggested creating a climate assembly.¹⁴ As a result of this activism, in April of that year Macron commissioned the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, to date the highest-profile climate assembly in the world.

In Austria, climate activists made use of the parliamentary citizens’ initiative process. The Klimarat—the Austrian Citizens’ Climate Assembly—was one of the demands of the Klimavolksbegehren, a climate referendum campaign organization that collected over 380,000 signatures (well beyond the required threshold of 100,000 for parliamentary debate) between 2018 and 2020.¹⁵ In March 2021 a parliamentary resolution handed over responsibility for the organization of a climate assembly to the Ministry of Climate Action and Energy. Other assemblies across Europe have been established at least in part because of climate activism.

When public authorities have commissioned assemblies, actors within the climate movement have played various roles, in particular in governance committees and the provision of evidence to the assembly. More mainstream climate movement actors tend to take on these roles. Eva Saldaña, the director of Greenpeace Spain, recounted how she was skeptical of assemblies until she took part in the governance body for the Spanish national climate assembly.¹⁶ It has generally been common for direct experience with the deliberations to turn people into active champions of the process and its proposals.¹⁷

Despite its leadership in campaigning for climate assemblies, XR has faced frustrations engaging with state-commissioned assemblies. XR has had an ambiguous and strategically awkward relationship with the assemblies that have happened in the UK, for instance. Local activists who campaigned for assemblies have felt that what is ultimately delivered does not live up to their expectations.¹⁸ In Scotland, where the government is much more attuned to climate and ecological concerns, XR decided to participate in the Stewarding Group of the national assembly. It helped shape the broad remit of the assembly—how Scotland should change to tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way—and the selection of some of the members of the Evidence Group. Just before the assembly began, it decided to withdraw its support, arguing that the governance of the assembly, its design, and its delivery model had built-in biases that prevented the process from addressing the systemic roots of the climate crisis.¹⁹ However, even with its critique, XR Scotland was generally supportive of the report that emerged from the process and put pressure on the government to act.

Activism and Civil Society–Commissioned Assemblies

While the common practice is for climate assemblies to be organized by the state, the recent emergence of assemblies organized from within civil society is challenging that dominant way of thinking and doing. There are a range of strategies at play. All can be understood as explicit counterpowers to government inaction, but each has a different political orientation toward the state. Strikingly, this emerging practice is happening globally, not primarily in Western Europe as government-commissioned processes have been.

CSO-Commissioned Assemblies Targeting the State

Assemblies commissioned by civil society organizations (CSOs) often pursue the strategy of targeting state policies. The German Citizen’s Assembly on Climate, which took place in 2021, was the first national-level assembly to be commissioned by a coalition of CSOs, led by BürgerBegehren Klimaschutz (Citizens’ Climate Protection Initiative) and Scientists for Future.²⁰ The assembly’s objective was to shape party platforms in the run-up to the federal elections and to influence the governing agenda of the new coalition government.

Other climate assemblies have been commissioned from within civil society in situations where the government has not been willing to act on climate policy, including several outside Western Europe. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Polish Nationwide Citizens’ Assembly on Energy Costs was commissioned by the civil society organization Shipyard Foundation in 2022, and the recent climate assembly in the North Macedonian city of Skopje was organized in 2024 by ZIP Institute.²¹ In the United States, the Washington Climate Assembly was commissioned in 2021 in Washington state by the nonprofit People’s Voice on Climate, in partnership with other civil society actors including the League of Women Voters and Indigenous tribes across the state.²²

In Maldives, three climate assemblies were commissioned in 2023 by the civil society organization Ecocare Maldives with the support of the U.S. National Democratic Institute.²³ The main output was the Citizen Manifesto on the Environment that aimed to influence party platforms and policy outcomes in Maldives. In Lebanon, in 2020, a pilot Citizens’ Assembly on Electricity and Energy Justice was convened in Hamra in Beirut.²⁴ Motivated by the mass protests that had erupted the year before where energy equity emerged as a key demand, a group of academics, feminist activists, and independent energy consultants ran the assembly to rethink energy futures and to show how citizens could play a role in the reconstruction of energy infrastructure.

In all of these cases, the target audience was policymakers—both to influence climate policy and to demonstrate the value of climate assemblies in highly polarized political contexts and/or contexts of endemic political distrust in established political institutions. For some activists, the longer-term ambition is for governments to take on the role of commissioner; for others, it is important to keep assemblies independent of government due to widespread polarization and distrust.

CSO-Commissioned Assemblies with Broader Targets

Three European assemblies go a step further, with a broader impact strategy where the state is only one among many target actors. The People’s Assembly for Nature was commissioned by three conservation organizations in the UK in 2022­–2023: the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and the National Trust.²⁵ These are mainstream civil society organizations that have embraced this deliberative democratic method in recognition of the limitations of their existing advocacy and campaigning strategies. The assembly created the People’s Plan for Nature that set out twenty-six calls for action targeting not just national governments but also local governments, businesses, NGOs, individuals, and communities, as well as the commissioned charities themselves. For the three commissioning bodies, the plan is a different type of intervention into the politics of the nature crisis—a way of opening up and altering the dynamics of political space.

The Swedish Climate Assembly was organized in 2024 by a consortium of researchers led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, an international research center on resilience and sustainability science.²⁶ Unlike purely academic projects, the organizers have the explicit aim for the assembly to contribute to public and political discourse on Sweden’s commitment to and action on the Paris Agreement in a context of perceived government backsliding.

A national assembly in Norway that will take place in 2025 has similar aims of catalyzing public debate and action.²⁷ In this case, the target is Norway’s growing oil and gas wealth during the climate and ecological crisis. The main political parties are committed to continuing fossil fuel extraction and are not questioning the fact that the profits of the sovereign wealth fund have increased significantly because of the war in Ukraine. These profits of extraction help to resource the generous pensions and welfare state enjoyed by Norwegians. For a coalition of humanitarian and other civil society organizations, brought together by the not-for-profit organization SoCentral, these contradictions need to be the subject of public and political debate—hence a climate assembly organized independently of the state.²⁸

CSO-Commissioned Independent Governance Structures

The Global Assembly takes social movement strategy even further.²⁹ Not only did the first iteration of the Global Assembly in 2021 connect global institutions, civil society, and grassroots communities, but also, at least some of its initiators envision the Global Assembly becoming a permanent and independent feature of global governance.³⁰ These ambitions were formalized in 2024 with the launch of the Coalition for a Global Citizens’ Assembly.³¹ Like the CSO-commissioned assemblies in Norway, Sweden, and the UK, the primary aim is not to integrate directly with any particular institution but to be a counterpower to ensure previously absent citizens’ voices are present in global governance.

In both Sri Lanka and the UK, activists have made the case for infrastructure for permanent citizens’ assemblies that are independent of the state. In Sri Lanka, a coalition that included climate activists such as Melani Gunathilaka, co-founder of Climate Action Now Sri Lanka, was involved in the 124-day protest, commenced in March 2022, known as Aragalaya (Struggle).³² Aragalaya succeeded in pushing the president to step down. One of the groups that then emerged has made the case for a people’s council that would be part of new governance structures to monitor future governments. Some (but not all) activists argue this council should be fully or partly selected by sortition. In the UK, Humanity Project is promoting the idea of an independent, permanent citizens’ assembly that links with popular assemblies (called “pops”) around the country.³³

Roger Hallam, one of the co-founders of XR and an initiator of Humanity Project, talks of assemblies as “a revolutionary confrontation with the carbon state.” For him, the “zombie carbon state” will soon collapse as citizens’ assemblies are used by civil society to create their own alternative governance institutions. That is, to undermine rather than prop up the regime.³⁴ Hallam has taken a more radical position on assemblies than most in XR. Back in 2021, he was talking about citizens’ assemblies as part of a revolutionary plan to restructure democratic systems, not simply to advise governments in the way that became mainstream in XR policy.³⁵ In 2024, Hallam influenced the strategy of Just Stop Oil in the UK with the launch of Umbrella, which described itself as “a new hub to coordinate the creation of radical, nonviolent projects alongside Just Stop Oil.”³⁶ It includes the Assemble initiative, which aims to “build a popular mass movement after the election,” with the goal of creating a House of the People to parallel the House of Commons as the first step toward permanent, legally binding citizens’ assemblies.³⁷

Explaining the Shift in Strategy

Activists’ shift in thinking about climate assemblies can be explained by their push for a different kind of political power.³⁸

State-commissioned assemblies can be understood as a means of opening up the previously closed spaces of climate governance where citizens had little or no role. Such assemblies are invited spaces as citizens come into a space that is to a large degree shaped by the interests of the state. While citizens have some ability to reshape agendas within assemblies and come up with progressive proposals, the state’s ability to frame the remit of assemblies and to respond to recommendations translates to a significant degree of power—visible, hidden, and invisible—in the hands of state actors. Activist-led citizens’ assemblies act as claimed/created spaces within civil society that promise to change these power dynamics.

In her advocacy with Humanity Project, Clare Farrell raises the lack of attention to power as the reason why citizens’ assemblies have not had enough impact:

“So, power is the missing component. No structural power [for assemblies] can mean it’s an expensive focus group. Which is why we have to get serious about a way of governing ourselves that won’t end up killing us all, people power is the power that will do that.”³⁹

The limitations of agendas set by state organizers have become more apparent. In the first weekend session, members of the French Convention raised issues about the nature of economic growth, GDP, and the impact of the profit motive as blockages to the transition. These questions did not fit with the more policy-centric approach defined by the convention’s Governance Committee. Systemic issues were sidelined, including “discussion about the political economy and critical societal indicators such as GDP in connection with alternative models of development, oil and gas subsidies, the financial system, or the leverage that banks or pensions schemes have in the climate and ecological crisis.”⁴⁰

The unwillingness of state actors to open agendas and to respond to the recommendations of assemblies in ways that tackle the systemic underpinnings of the climate and ecological crisis has increasingly encouraged climate activists to commission climate assemblies. The German assembly aimed to shift the climate agenda of political parties and the new coalition government. The assemblies in Lebanon, Maldives, North Macedonia, Poland, and Washington state aimed to impact government inaction. The assemblies in Norway, Sweden, and the UK have broader ambitions to shift public discourse and the policies and behaviors of a wider range of social and political actors. Other CSO-led projects, including the Global Assembly, Humanity Project, and the assembly proposed by Sri Lankan activists, aim to create new independent democratic infrastructure. These are all attempts by civil society to reshape the political agenda around climate using the vehicle of citizens’ assemblies. This is a long way removed from the standard operating model of assemblies commissioned by governments.

This shift also complicates research efforts to make sense of strategies toward climate assemblies using traditional analytical categories developed for social movements. The insider/outsider categorization, for example, aims to make sense of strategies of influence ranging from close cooperation with government officials to protest activities. Researchers might distinguish the degree of engagement with government-commissioned assemblies in these terms, as some CSOs are willing to engage in insider strategies such as participating in governance bodies or providing evidence, whereas others remain outside the assembly, often skeptical of government motivations. But the commissioning of assemblies by CSOs themselves is highly significant in cutting across the standard insider/outsider distinction. Some CSOs use typically outsider strategies of commissioning independent assemblies to influence state action, while others focus more on either influencing other stakeholders and publics or looking to build new democratic infrastructure beyond the state. 

Remaining Challenges

CSO-commissioned processes represent a significant shift in the way citizens’ assemblies are conceived. They tend to be much more explicitly political interventions compared to most state-commissioned assemblies (the French Convention perhaps being one exception).⁴¹ CSO-commissioned assemblies, however, do not share a unified approach or philosophy. Visions range from politically reformist to radical or revolutionary. Wherever activists sit on the continuum, the challenges for civil society–organized assemblies are threefold: perceived legitimacy, resources, and impact.

First, to demonstrate integrity, civil society–organized assemblies will need to ensure robust and transparent governance.⁴² As those assemblies increase in numbers, some observers privately argue that they risk undermining the quality standards set by deliberative democracy practitioners and academics over the past few years. Others see a fundamental tension if climate assemblies are used both in formal policy settings and as an oppositional and political tool to drive political change.⁴³ There is a risk that the proliferation of CSO-organized climate assemblies will push decisionmakers not aligned with the activists’ wider demands to dismiss all climate assemblies regardless of the context in which they occur.

Second, it is challenging to organize climate assemblies—especially when the resources of the state are not available. It is not clear yet, for example, whether the philanthropy sector shares the enthusiasm necessary to sustain the financing of CSO-commissioned assemblies, in particular where activists aim to build permanent infrastructure.

Third is the question of impact. The commissioners of the German and UK civil society assemblies have both reflected on the challenges they faced in building and sustaining an effective impact strategy for their assemblies.⁴⁴ Much of their focus had been on resourcing and organizing the assembly, and follow-up did not get the attention it deserved. And unlike state-commissioned processes where the focus is typically on the bureaucratic and political responses of the commissioner, the nature of follow-up for civil society–commissioned assemblies is rarely so clear-cut.

Organizers of the Lebanese assembly have reflected on the particular challenge of applying assemblies “to postcolonial states in the Global South where states suffer severe democratic deficits and under-development” and where “state-expert hegemony” flatly rejects any role for citizens on technical and specialized issues.⁴⁵ Designing and realizing an effective impact strategy in such politically sectarian and fragmented contexts is obviously even more challenging.

Conclusions

Different conceptions of assemblies and different political strategies are at play across the climate movement. The dominant approach is still one in which the standard operating model is state-commissioned assemblies. But the limitations of this strategy have led a growing cohort of activists to develop competing ways of thinking and acting that center civil society as the commissioning agent. Different theories of change are emerging that could significantly shift climate assembly politics and practices, but the assemblies face very real practical challenges of governance, resourcing, and creating and sustaining impact. These theories of change are embryonic, and the activists developing these strategic approaches are scattered across different parts of the globe. It is therefore difficult to make generalizations and reliable predictions about how this emerging set of assembly practices will unfold. 

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors, fellow authors, and Carnegie fellows who attended the Brussels workshop to review the chapters, as well as Alex Lockwood, Clare Farrell, and Nicole Curato for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

In satellite countries of the Soviet Union, heavy industrialization led to devastation of the natural environment. As a result, some dissident movements included its protection into their agenda. One example was the Polish Ecological Club, which became part of the Solidarity movement in 1980–1981.

However, after 1989, activism in Central and Eastern European countries focused predominantly on establishing parliamentary democracies, so issues of environmental protection did not become an important part of the political mainstream. For many dissidents actively engaged in rebuilding democracy in their countries, focusing on ecology was an obstacle to quick democratic transition and economic efficiency.

Green political parties came relatively late to this part of Europe. At that time, many activists believed the new, belatedly formed green parties had been licensed and arranged in a top-down manner. This perception, alongside the absence of environmental politics in the political mainstream shortly after the beginning of democratization in 1989, have contributed to certain divergences between green movements in Eastern and Western EU countries.

First, Central and Eastern European countries see fewer links between political parties and activist movements, as green parties in many instances did not evolve organically from activism.

Second, green movements consist of young people in larger part than their counterparts in the West. Activists from Extinction Rebellion or country-specific iterations of Fridays for Future are predominantly young. Instead of joining existing green parties or established environmental NGOs, they prefer to engage in direct actions or street protests, as they are quite distrustful of formal organizations.

Third, the general public views green movements with a certain degree of suspicion, as the green agenda was initially not part of the democratization package after 1989. Even when there is a clear majority in favor of protecting the natural environment, as in Poland, more abstract postulates about preventing climate change are often discarded as impositions of unclear rules dictated by distant centers of power.

In short, some of the divides noted elsewhere in this compilation remain especially deep in Central and Eastern Europe: between generations, between activists and green party cadres, and between climate and democracy activists.

Although climate denial and corporate obstruction have been strong for some time, civic activism against climate policy has begun to spread in the past several years as part of a possible wider public and political backlash to the environmental agenda. Backlash refers to “an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a significant number of actors seeking to reverse a policy,” through strong and even hostile forms of criticism and protest.¹ Backlash has occurred against policies seeking to phase out combustion vehicles, increase the use of heat pumps in homes, introduce low-emissions zones in cities, price carbon emissions, restore and protect natural areas, and change agricultural practices, among other environmental efforts. This is challenging climate policies and undermining momentum for climate action.

The risk of backlash grows as climate policy becomes more demanding to meet global and national climate targets.² Oppositional civic activism is emerging in new and consequential ways as climate policies are seen as costly, intrusive, unfair, or ideologically threatening. It has, for example, begun to target regulatory measures aimed at constraining certain economic activities and changing behaviors of citizens and businesses. This raises challenging questions about how ambitious climate action can navigate the threat of public and political backlash from oppositional civic activism.

Experiences of Backlash and the Role of Oppositional Civic Activism

Backlash is taking on different forms. Sometimes civic activism against climate policy arises first—such as from spontaneous protests or groups who mobilize their views publicly—and then politicians join in to amplify these criticisms. Other times, politicians, industry groups, or prominent media figures lead in criticizing climate policy, hoping to cultivate public discontent and oppositional civic activism. Yet in many cases, the roles of civic activists and elites (for example, political, industry, and media figures) are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The eruption of backlash against climate policy can thus occur in different ways.

Several early experiences of backlash to climate policy concerned carbon pricing, with oppositional civic activism playing a central role. Australia introduced a carbon pricing scheme in 2012, yet repealed it less than two years later following fierce criticism from politicians, industry groups, and media figures, in conjunction with heated public protests.³ In Canada, several provincial governments challenged the constitutional validity of a federal carbon pricing scheme in 2019 and dismantled many provincial climate policies.⁴ This again resulted from intense criticism from politicians, industry, and media combined with public protests. In Taiwan, a policy to phase out gasoline cars and scooters was suspended after less than two years due to heavy criticism from industry, including through a public campaign, based on perceived policy unfairness.⁵ Conversely, the Yellow Vests protests in France in 2018–2019 erupted spontaneously among large swaths of civil society, initially sparked by resistance to a fuel tax increase.⁶ This was a tremendous shock to climate policy makers nationally and globally, and still today it remains a landmark event in oppositional civic activism over climate policy, even though its criticisms were against not necessarily climate policy but rather the distribution of its costs.

Sometimes politicians play a more central role in pushback and backlash against climate policy. In the United States, the Donald Trump administration announced in 2017 that it would withdraw from the Paris Agreement (a move later reversed by the Joe Biden administration), and it repealed or undermined many climate and environmental policies and laws.⁷ Several U.S. states have also weakened or repealed previous arrangements supporting renewable energy.⁸ Here, the role of civic activism has sometimes been direct, but more often indirect and linked to wider conservative activism opposing climate policy.

At the local level, there has sometimes been strong citizen pushback against certain policies such as low emissions zones, including in London, Madrid, and Milan.⁹ Criticisms often focus on costs to those who rely on private vehicles for everyday personal travel and work, and are often linked to broader concerns over cost-of-living pressures. This has sometimes fed back into national-level debates over climate policy—such as in the United Kingdom, where a recent controversy over the Ultra-Low Emission Zone expansion in London became a national question indicative of political parties’ stances on climate policy.¹⁰ However, in that case, it did not seem to spark further civic activism against climate policy. Thus, while political elites may sometimes succeed in cultivating backlash against climate policy (such as in the Australian and Canadian cases), they do not always generate this outcome (such as in the UK case).

A string of recent examples in European countries and at the European level has raised major concerns among politicians and commentators about the potential for widespread opposition and backlash to climate and environmental policies. In Germany, a proposed law to drive the uptake of heat pumps experienced strong pushback in 2023.¹¹ At the European level, a 2022 commitment to phase out combustion vehicles by 2035 was weakened in 2023 after several countries (including Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, and Poland) pushed back at a late stage to allow for exemptions for synthetic fuels.¹² Shortly afterward, an increase in European vehicle emissions standards was also delayed.¹³

In wider environmental policy, a major European nature protection and restoration law faced pushback in 2023 from European Parliament politicians who threatened to derail it, as well as from subsequent civic activism in early 2024 by farmers who protested (sometimes violently) against agriculture-related regulations (in multiple European countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, and Romania).¹⁴ The European nature restoration law was initially passed after being softened in various ways in response to such criticism, but subsequent withdrawal of support by some member states threatened its final adoption.¹⁵ The broader farmers’ protests that began in early 2024 directed anger toward European green policies and laws (on issues such as nature restoration, agricultural production, deforestation, and pollution standards), laws that were also linked to claims of low profit margins in the face of import competition.¹⁶ Altogether, these protests led to a weakening of and uncertainty over environmental policies and fueled fear leading up to the European elections in June 2024.¹⁷

These experiences across Europe closely resembled earlier experiences of major protests by farmers against nitrogen management measures in the Netherlands in 2019–2023, which have since led to a stalemate on how to meet legal obligations to reduce nitrogen emissions nationally.¹⁸ Here, sustained civic action among farmers and broader rural communities produced a wave of political support for a new rural political party—not limited to rural voters—in nationwide provincial elections in 2023. It also seems to have inspired subsequent farmers’ protests across Europe, which suggests that oppositional civic activism can spread.

Elsewhere around the world, backlash and civic activism against climate action is gaining traction but has received less attention in international news media and academic literature. Actions such as fuel riots and farmer protests against different forms of government policy are widespread, although they are often motivated by economics rather than environmental concerns. This suggests that similar eruptions could occur against climate policy, especially if policies come to be seen as worsening existing difficulties and disparities in peoples’ lives. Yet, in the case of less-wealthy countries, questions over the distribution of costs of climate action—such as who finances low-carbon transitions and who should be responsible for finding solutions and making difficult changes first—apply not only internally within a society but also externally against other wealthier nations. Hence, another important trend is toward a broader pushback from Global South countries against extractivist pressures and green colonialism from wealthy countries seeking to source minerals, materials, and labor to support their green transitions. While such unease currently seems to be fragmented among the communities most affected, it is conceivable that local discontent in countries subject to adverse impacts could coalesce into a wider pushback against one-way extraction, given the expected enormous future demand for resources by wealthier countries.

Sources and Escalation of Discontent

Experiences of backlash are increasingly creating fears among proponents of climate action, linked to concerns about conservative and right-wing populist opposition more broadly. Right-wing populist political parties recently seem to be gravitating toward anti-climate positions in many places. This has been observed, for instance, in Germany, Finland, and Poland.¹⁹ Right-wing opposition to climate action can also influence conservative governments as the two wings either compete for voters or form shared agendas when in governing coalitions together. In the UK, conservatives sought to make climate policy a wedge issue after a long period of bipartisan support for ambitious action.²⁰ In Sweden, commitments to climate action have been undermined in unprecedented ways by a new governing coalition tacitly involving the nationalist party Sweden Democrats.²¹ More broadly, the prospects of right-wing populist parties gaining power in other countries in coming years raises questions about future climate policy ambition and threats to it.

However, the climate backlash goes well beyond right-wing populism. Right-wing populism may certainly sometimes drive oppositional civic activism, but often, oppositional civic activism is not linked to the far right—such as in the Yellow Vests case, which involved a much deeper set of grievances largely distinct from right-wing populist motivations. And, conversely, sometimes right-wing populist criticism fails to spark wider backlash in society. The resonance and escalation of discontent among citizens more broadly is crucial.

Loose citizen discontent can turn into targeted oppositional activism for several reasons. First, climate policy can be seen as too costly, demanding, or threatening to people’s way of life—particularly when costs or trade-offs lack visibility, are perceived as unfair, or occur within the context of economic insecurity and inequality.²² Second, discontent can emerge when people view climate policy as being out of touch with the concerns of everyday people and/or the national good. If people see climate policy as going against basic values, such as freedom, tradition, or social identity, they tend to find it deeply threatening or undesirable.²³ Third, frustration arises when climate policy either complicates people’s everyday lives (by making work, shopping, education, or leisure more difficult) or requires unfeasible behaviors (such as reducing vehicle use without adequate public transport available or changing a home heating system without sufficient financial support).²⁴ In these kinds of situations, discontent can escalate when criticisms of climate policy resonate with people who are preconditioned in certain ways.²⁵

Yet at the same time, discontent often cannot be easily anticipated. Responding too quickly to a fear of anticipated discontent or backlash might unnecessarily reduce climate action ambition. Such preemptive action risks not only fighting the previous war but also avoiding the immediate question of how to address people’s potential concerns to proactively address discontent and thereby diminish the chances of opposition finding a receptive audience. Some scholars have argued, based on public opinion surveys investigating public support for climate policy, that emerging talk of a backlash against climate and environmental policy across Europe is inaccurate.²⁶ Yet, the reality seems to be somewhere in the middle: Many instances of actual pushback and discontent are indeed apparent, while at the same time much debate is premised on anticipated rather than real outcomes among wider publics in response to new policies. At the same time, political sensitivity to criticisms of climate and environmental policies, especially concerning costs, probably does reflect real anxieties among people, industries, and some politicians, as well as ideological differences. This creates a murky combination of genuine, latent discontent over climate and environmental policies, on the one hand, and action by political elites to stir up the climate backlash, on the other hand.

Implications for Climate Action and Pro-Climate Activism

Although often impactful when it does occur, backlash remains sporadic and difficult to explain. Nonetheless, both recent experiences of backlash as well as the fear of possible future backlash increasingly colors policymakers’ thinking and debate over climate action. While oppositional civic activism against climate action is likely to continue, especially as more demanding changes are pursued toward low-carbon transitions, it is important not to immediately equate such opposition with backlash, as it may be more limited in scope and reach. Yet, it is also important not to dismiss oppositional civic activism too quickly, because it may sometimes reflect genuine concerns that need to be addressed and/or latent discontent within wider society that has potential to erupt later. Analysts and practitioners must ask: What can be done to undermine the resonance of oppositional civic activism and the potential for discontent?

Sometimes oppositional civic activism might constitute normal discontent and expressions of dissent in democratic society. Even if opposing activists’ messages are disagreeable to climate action proponents, cases of oppositional activism may nonetheless fall within the realm and breadth of democratic free expression. Yet, at other times, such activism may constitute something more objectionable, especially if it contributes to undermining democratic rights and free expression of others, such as when anti-climate/environmental messages become fused with far-right efforts to undermine democratic processes or impose illiberal values (such as anti-equality). This challenges pro-climate civic activism to consider difficult questions about when, how, and to what extent to take on board concerns of oppositional civic activism, how to assess the threat of oppositional civic activism to climate action, and how to respond to competition from oppositional civic activism over climate action.

The first key issue for pro-climate activism is to engage with the evolving politics of costly policy action. Dealing with the costs of climate action has always been a central challenge. However, the politics of costly action now come to the fore in new ways when considering concrete transitions in energy production and distribution systems. These costs are likely to be central in ongoing political debates (for example, debates regarding heat pumps in Germany, nitrogen management in the Netherlands, and combustion vehicle phaseout and nature protection in the EU). Transition support and compensation is likely to be crucial, but many remaining costs cannot be simply dismissed without creating opportunities for oppositional civic activism that has the potential to resonate with wider publics.

The second, related key issue for pro-climate activism is to engage with the cultural dimensions of green transitions.²⁷ For example, this could include the changing social identities, visions, and meanings of people and communities affected by proposed climate policies, along with their self-image and value within wider society, so that they do not feel left behind or left out. This goes far beyond simply reframing climate policy and instead poses complex questions about how people make sense of change and how climate policy takes on meaning, positively or negatively. Social and cultural solidarity is needed between different groups in society who could easily become antagonists (such as between urban and nonurban communities). Scholars have begun to explore how to bridge climate action with the experiences and dispositions of groups at risk of aversion to it, such as men working in manual labor jobs who might otherwise be attracted to right-wing parties.²⁸

The third key issue for pro-climate activism is to engage with the diverse circumstances of people’s lives in how climate policy is thought about and pursued. Climate policy is sometimes at risk of being seen (whether accurately or not) as treating policy recipients in homogenous ways. However, people can be affected in complex ways by climate policy, which could impose different costs or conflicts with cultures, social identities, and everyday practices. This is no doubt challenging, and perhaps in tension with the core message of the need for ambitious, sweeping, and urgent climate action. But nonetheless, a concern for the diverse circumstances of people’s lives also aligns with the underlying impetus of most climate and social justice activism to create a more equitable and fairer world where diversity is respected. Doing so is important for creating more people-centered, pro-climate activism that can engage and resonate with wider publics. 

The grievances expressed in the emerging backlash show that climate policy needs to become more attuned to the diverse circumstances of different people’s lives. Pro-climate activism could focus on understanding and advocating for what climate policy should look like from a recipient- or user-centered perspective. This could help to reveal problems or risks in how climate policy might be received before it is implemented and provide novel ways of thinking about how to make it beneficial by standing in the shoes of different people. Pro-climate activism has not focused much on understanding how to appropriately navigate major tensions that will increasingly arise between the material construction involved in the low-carbon transition (such as building infrastructure and sourcing materials) and the inevitable environmental and societal impacts (such as whose interests are prioritized; the degree, forms, and limits of participation; impacts on property rights; and forms and locations of environmental impacts). This is an important yet complex set of challenges inherent to advancing rapid climate action, one in which pro-climate activism could play an extremely important role in helping to navigate with attention to justice and diversity from multiple angles.

Conclusion

Despite growing experiences of oppositional civic activism and backlash, the picture of climate policy progress is mixed and rapidly evolving. Major new climate policy developments that have occurred in places such as the European Union and the United States take on board lessons from previous oppositional civic activism and backlash. Yet, the potential for backlash persists, as seen in Europe, where major policy initiatives continue to be questioned and even weakened. At the same time, the fear of backlash is now itself threatening climate policy by making policymakers reluctant to develop and advocate for ambitious climate and environmental agendas. While policymakers should be cognizant of the risk of backlash and work to mitigate it, they should not make climate policy unambitious or put it on the back burner.

Thinking about oppositional civic activism and backlash only through the lens of right-wing populism can obscure policymakers’ understanding of why backlash occurs and opportunities to respond to it. A central challenge is to understand why and under which conditions discontent resonates and escalates among wider publics to generate backlash. This challenges pro-climate activism to consider the concerns raised, perhaps only indirectly, by oppositional civic activism; to find ways to undermine its appeal among the broader public; and, at the same time, work toward more equitable and just climate policy. Avoiding backlash is not about watering down climate policy but about finding ways to win over more general audiences on terms that they can understand and participate in, rather than too quickly dividing stakeholders into supporters or opponents or assuming everyone will see things in the same way. While no doubt challenging, this starting point offers opportunities to rethink climate policy from a people-centered perspective, which will likely continue to be necessary given the complex and demanding changes ahead as climate policy increasingly moves from committing to doing.

Pro-climate activism is unlikely to be directly comparable to oppositional civic activism in this case. While some forms of oppositional civic activism are enduring, some are largely reactive to specific policies and not necessarily strongly tied to longer-term, organized climate denial and corporate obstruction. Oppositional civic activism linked to backlash is more ad hoc and probably more strongly linked to generalized societal polarization, political discontent, and economic and cultural anxiety than a long-term, organized, anti-climate activity. This means not only that some of it may be relatively ephemeral—erupting and dissipating—but also that it can be surprising and powerful when it does occur.

Complex, deep-seated, underlying conditions in society allow oppositional civic activism to resonate and escalate into wider backlash. Pro-climate activism should take a broader view that considers the large, moderate swath of society to try to nudge this part toward climate action rather than disengaging from difficult debate and giving an opportunity for oppositional messages to take root. While oppositional civic activism may seem to be a setback from democratic climate action, pro-climate activism should take this as a challenge to reengage and reinvent itself by reaching out proactively to those who could tilt decisively either way on the scale of support for climate action at crucial moments of policy action.

Notes

Since the early 2000s, Türkiye has emphasized renewable energy as its main climate mitigation strategy. In 2005, it enacted the Renewable Energy Law. Then the 2013 introduction of the Renewable Energy Resources Support Mechanism spurred a significant increase in renewable energy projects in the decade since.¹

However, shortly after these projects began, a backlash emerged. A coalition of local and national environmental organizations, agricultural chambers, medical chambers, and bar associations mobilized in opposition. They held protests, press conferences, and workshops; launched petition campaigns; and visited Parliament. They were supported by members of Parliament, municipalities, residents, and villagers in the areas where the projects were implemented. Civic actors filed lawsuits to require the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change to conduct environmental impact assessments when the initial decision deems such assessments unnecessary or to turn the existing positive assessments into negative ones. They also closely monitored the legal process. While opposition to geothermal energy is widespread, there is also notable resistance to wind energy and, to a lesser extent, solar energy.

Recently, more and more villagers have been resisting these efforts. In Türkiye, villagers have a long history of environmental mobilization, including opposing thermal power plants in the 1980s and resisting gold mining during the 1990s. However, their mobilization has become more frequent and coordinated in recent years, with villagers now often joining demonstrations and actions against renewable energy projects. Several factors have likely facilitated this change. The long-standing efforts of environmental organizations, such as opposing mining activities in villages, have played a crucial role, and villagers have also learned from mobilizations in neighboring villages. Seeing positive outcomes from peripheral resistance has likely had an influence. Furthermore, the mobilization of villagers has started to become more organized, with the formation of associations that make it easier to engage in legal actions. Having a legal personality also allows these groups to conduct fundraising activities, such as charity sales, to cover the costs of expensive legal processes. This organizational shift enables villagers to intervene more effectively in environmental disputes and advocate for their rights.

Researchers have argued that the backlash against renewable energy projects is driven by the threat these initiatives pose to the livelihoods and living spaces of villagers.² Projects tend to be constructed on or near farmland and thus significantly impede agricultural production. This damage also impacts living spaces in many villages. In some cases, the state has even transferred publicly owned lands used by locals to geothermal companies.³ Villagers who farm or live on these lands face displacement, which intensifies the fears that undergird backlash.

Finally, scholars show that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has promoted a friendly business class to maintain its dominance and has used lucrative public contracts, in particular in the energy sector, for this purpose.⁴ As a result, villagers negatively affected by renewable energy projects perceive these initiatives not as efforts toward decarbonization but as means to create new capital for companies close to the AKP, which further fuels public distrust and backlash.⁵

Notes

Land and environmental defenders are increasingly mobilizing to protect their land and the environment from elite interests and destructive projects. Their activism is often rooted in wider community opposition to government- and business-led pursuits that threaten human rights and the natural world. Many live in communities whose land, health, and livelihoods are negatively impacted by extractive industries. But their speaking out comes with increasing risk: Global Witness, a nongovernmental organization exposing human rights and environmental harms linked to the climate crisis, where the authors work, documented at least 2,106 murders of land and environmental defenders globally between 2012 and 2023.¹

Land and environmental defenders have been increasingly involved in activism related to climate issues.² Climate activists and land and environmental defenders, with their common goals of preserving the environment and mitigating the harms of climate change, often share opposition to broader economic and sociopolitical practices that drive destructive industries. Together, they form a powerful alliance that not only combats environmental degradation but also champions social justice, recognizing that the fight for a sustainable future is also a fight for the rights and livelihoods of marginalized communities disproportionately affected by environmental destruction and climate change.

Concern for the climate has risen over the past decade, sparking an increase in global environmental activism—and a more active, outspoken, and visible role for defenders.³ The escalating climate crisis has accentuated the importance of safeguarding defenders who advocate for the protection of natural resources, ecosystems, and the rights of local communities.⁴ The rise in attacks against land and environmental defenders is undermining efforts to address climate change.

Trends in Attacks Against Land and Environmental Defenders

Global Witness documented the murder of 196 land and environmental defenders in 2023.⁵ The majority of these attacks occurred in Latin America, with 70 percent concentrated in four countries: Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, and Mexico. This trend has been consistently reported for over a decade.⁶

Colombia has the highest number of documented killings, with seventy-nine defenders murdered in 2023, or 40 percent of all reported cases. The high rate of attacks in communities involved in land conflicts echoes patterns of documented violence against human rights defenders and social justice leaders more generally.⁷ Illegal activities, such as drug trafficking and illegal mining, have deepened inequalities and intensified conflict, with communities often placed in the cross fire.⁸ Widespread impunity and limited access to justice increases vulnerability to violence—particularly for Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities, who made up nearly 30 percent of the victims of the documented attacks in Colombia in 2023.⁹

Similar trends have been recorded in Mexico, where over 70 percent of environmental defenders murdered in 2023 were Indigenous.¹⁰ While murders continue to be among the most brutal form of reprisal against communities, another documented, chilling trend is enforced disappearances, a tactic also used in other countries.¹¹ In Mexico, the mountainous state of Michoacán is a notable hot spot for violence, with at least twenty-one land and environmental defenders forcibly disappeared or murdered there between 2012 and 2023.¹² Most of these attacks targeted communities caught between business ventures and criminal activities competing for the region’s natural resources.¹³

Those behind the disappearances or killings of defenders are very rarely brought to justice, often due to state failures to properly investigate or prosecute crimes. In Mexico, over 94 percent of crimes against human rights defenders are inadequately reported, and less than 1 percent are resolved.¹⁴ Authorities are often accused of turning a blind eye or actively impeding investigations, and presumed “collusion between corporate and state interests” also sometimes underlies the violence defenders face. Furthermore, potential perpetrators may anticipate “impunity for threats and attacks” when there is a permissive environment.¹⁵ Higinio Trinidad de la Cruz was among the victims of these attacks. A prominent anti-mining advocate and Indigenous Ayotitlán activist, Higinio had denounced one of Mexico’s leading iron-mining operations—the Peña Colorada Mine—and its impact on the Ayotitlán Indigenous peoples.¹⁶ He reported receiving threats linked to his activism and was granted protection measures by the Mexican government before his murder.¹⁷

Land and environmental defenders in Asia are also suffering high levels of violent repression. Between 2012 and 2023, at least 468 defenders were killed in Asia, with 64 percent of these deaths occurring in the Philippines (298). Murders were also documented in India (86), Indonesia (20), and Thailand (13).¹⁸

Behind the Killings: Repressive Tactics and Responses

The number of defenders killed and forcibly disappeared yearly is alarming, but murder is often the last resort. States and companies employ a variety of techniques to interfere with the ability of land and environmental defenders to exercise their rights to free association, assembly, and expression.¹⁹ The criminalization of activists has become a powerful trend in recent years.

Governments and other powerful political and economic actors increasingly subject environmental defenders to smear campaigns, disinformation, legal harassment, surveillance, and sexual and gender-based violence.²⁰ The range of attacks does not end in the physical space. Harassment via cyber bullying, cyber attacks, hacking, and online smearing are designed to tarnish the reputations of individuals or organizations.²¹ Defamatory accusations—including labels such as “extremist,” “militant,” “antidevelopment,” and “terrorist”—are often followed by “arrests, imprisonment, or violence.”²²

Companies are increasingly initiating what are called “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPPs) to curtail and intimidate activists.²³ Over 400 SLAPP-like lawsuits involving business actors were documented over an eight-year period by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.²⁴ In Canada, Indigenous communities and climate activists have been raising concerns about another legal challenge: injunctions used to protect corporations affected by direct action blockades. For example, in December 2018, following opposition by Wet’suwet’en Indigenous communities to the construction of a pipeline without consent on their territory, the British Columbia Supreme Court granted an interim injunction preventing land defenders from disrupting the operations of TC Energy Coastal GasLink.²⁵

Around the world, governments have been managing protests with an increasingly militarized response.²⁶ Military personnel, courts, and tactics are sometimes co-opted to prosecute peaceful protesters, and experts are warning of a possible “escalation of violence and tensions, human rights abuses, and increased impunity in the context of peaceful protests.”²⁷

In the Philippines, for instance, many suspect military involvement in the abduction of two defenders, Jhed Tamano and Jonila Castro, who were held captive for seventeen days. According to Global Witness, “both women are known for their opposition to massive land reclamation projects in Manila Bay, including the construction of the $15 billion New Manila International Airport.”²⁸ Similar cases were reported in Indonesia, including the June 2024 abduction of Muhriono, a farmer from Pakel, East Java.²⁹ These incidents reflect broader efforts by powerful elites to “suppress dissent and maintain control over land and resources” and suggest that perpetrators are “targeting individuals who challenge powerful interests, particularly those linked to land rights and environmental protection.”³⁰ 

Online surveillance of environmental groups represents another significant concern, as it is difficult to detect and challenge legally before it occurs. Cyber crime legislation, often passed under the guise of counterterrorism, upholds the threat of sophisticated digital surveillance of defenders by states and their collaborators.³¹ The use of such tactics to repress, intimidate, and silence land and environmental defenders and climate activists often leaves them with limited options for redress.

Climate activists have adopted various strategies against such repression and attacks. Many have used online tools in what experts call “distributed digital activism,” where a shared central goal is filtered through local movements or chapters who develop their own “messages and tactics most relevant to their local contexts.” This inclusive structure allows the participation of nearly anyone anywhere.³² 

Activists and defenders are also turning to climate litigation. Such court cases against governments and companies often combine environmental and human rights issues.³³ In one illustrative example, in September 2020 six Portuguese youth brought a case to the European Court of Human Rights against thirty-three state parties. According to the Council of Europe’s Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, they argued that “forest fires caused by global warming have negatively impacted their living conditions and health, show[ing] the potential of linking climate litigation with human rights.”³⁴

Criminalizing Climate Protest

As the profile of the climate movement grows and its tactics become more impactful in challenging the centers of power, it will likely face increased repression mirroring what land and environmental defenders have been facing for decades. The environmental defenders’ movement has become adept at combining movement building with the use of legal tools and international human rights mechanisms. The climate movement could benefit from further developing similar strategies.

Nearly all European governments have imposed tighter restrictions on protests. In one example, the UK’s recent Conservative government imposed significant limits on the right to protest, prompting UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders Michel Forst to describe the situation in the country as “terrifying.”³⁵ The introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act in 2022 empowered the police to curtail disruptive protests.³⁶ Data from the Metropolitan Police reveal that in the past five years, more than 7,000 climate protesters have been arrested in the UK. After it was made an explicit offence in April 2023, nearly 900 people have been arrested for “slow marching.”³⁷ 

Force is becoming a more prominent response to climate protests and land and environmental defense alike. In the United States, for instance, the Indigenous Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and community activists protested the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,134-mile underground crude oil pipeline that directly threatened the tribe’s ancient burial grounds and cultural sites, as well as the region’s water. The protesters faced violent backlash from authorities in 2016 as a result of their activism.³⁸

Addressing Global Reprisal Trends

Defenders have managed to combine experience on the ground with technical knowledge, leveraging international tools, policies, and mechanisms to propel human rights debates into policy spaces that include governments and business. Land and environmental defenders have been integral to the success of global policies, legislation, and initiatives established to protect against environmental, climate, and human rights abuses. At the international level, governments have made some progress in addressing harms to rights and the environment, including through several UN initiative and resolutions.³⁹

Businesses are also growing more aware of the threats that defenders face, and at least thirty businesses have reported voluntary policies on protecting human rights defenders and civic freedoms.⁴⁰ A recently passed EU directive on corporate sustainability due diligence benefited from direct input from defenders.⁴¹ The directive will be integrated into existing European frameworks such as the Lieferkettengesetz (Supply Chain Act) in Germany and the Loi de la Vigilance (Duty of Vigilance Law) in France.⁴² It will require the private sector to undertake due diligence in cooperation with environmental defenders and allows local communities to seek legal redress against companies for environmental damages.

Long-standing efforts to establish regional binding mechanisms, including provisions on environmental defenders, have seen some success. The so-called Aarhus Convention requires governments to offer protections to environmental activists.⁴³ In the Americas, the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean (also known as the Escazú Agreement) took effect in April 2021.⁴⁴ It is the first legally binding treaty in this region that, according to Global Witness, provides the “right to access environmental information and participate in environmental decision-making” and “requires states to prevent and investigate attacks against environmental defenders.”⁴⁵ Inspired by this agreement, civil society organizations in African and Southeast Asian countries are working to develop similar pacts.⁴⁶

The impact of these efforts on the funding landscape is mixed, with both signs of growth and significant underresourcing. Financial support for human rights defenders increased 158 percent, from $9.3 million in 2011 to $24 million in 2019—pointing to growing recognition among funders of the critical role activists play in the struggle to protect and promote human rights.⁴⁷ However, philanthropic support remains relatively limited for communities on the front lines of human rights issues.⁴⁸

One of the reasons for this underfunding is that the intersectional work undertaken by human rights defenders through climate activism tends to fall between philanthropists’ funding siloes. Human rights defenders are at the forefront of movements for gender justice, LGBTQ rights, and the defense of land and the environment, among other critical human rights struggles. Yet, according to the Human Rights Funders Network, the percent of funding “earmarked for [wider rights movements that] also mentions human rights defenders” ranges between only 0.5 and 2.2 percent.⁴⁹ While human rights funders have known about human rights defenders for years, environmental funders are not aware of their work. Furthermore, much of the climate funding landscape is focused on technical solutions to the ecological crisis, with work related to environmental justice receiving much less attention.⁵⁰ Indeed, many risk-averse donors remain hesitant to support direct action and civil disobedience within the climate and human rights movement.⁵¹  

 Conclusion  

The climate emergency cannot be effectively addressed without tackling reprisals against the people, communities, and movements opposing the erosion of their rights and the planet. As these actors mobilize against environmental damage and climate change, they have suffered increasingly severe reprisals. These reprisals are becoming more dramatic and more varied as powerful actors deploy multiple tactics against activists. Communities across the world are organizing and resisting the climate crisis: From the Ayotitlán Indigenous peoples’ movements to global activists’ growing climate litigation, a global reaction is mobilizing positive change but also negative consequences as reprisals increase. Climate activists and land and environmental defenders should continue learning from each other’s movements and building alliances across them, which will be critical to achieving greater success in the fight to save the planet.

Notes

The United States is not immune to the rising tide of oppression against climate activists. Chapter 7 mentions violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement during the early phases of construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. Similarly, an instance of police brutality at Cop City in Georgia resulted in the death of a land defender. Both of these cases are emblematic of the growing sense among climate justice activists in the United States that law enforcement and corporations are colluding to silence them.

For example, when activists led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe organized to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the corporation developing the pipeline, Energy Transfer, hired the company TigerSwan to upgrade its security strategy. Staffed with former personnel from military special operations units and pursuing an approach informed by fighting terrorism abroad, TigerSwan saw quelling the resistance to resource exploitation as a business opportunity.¹ The security firm profited from its heavily militarized strategy—of questionable legality—surveilling and infiltrating the Indigenous activists and environmental groups trying to protect the land.²

At Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia, militarized police forces similarly treated peaceful protesters as terrorists and criminals. Activists defending the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta have been charged with domestic terrorism, despite the fact that, according to the Intercept, “none of the arrest warrants tie any of the defendants directly to any illegal acts.”³ Multinational corporations including Bank of America and Coca-Cola have provided funding to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which helped finance the police training facility that the Stop Cop City movement strove to halt.⁴ In the United States, ties between policing and major corporate polluters run deep, with many oil and gas companies funding and sitting on the boards of police foundations.⁵ An investigation by the Guardian found that “lobbyists working for major North American oil and gas companies were key architects of anti-protest laws” that have undergirded the recent crackdown on civil disobedience across the United States.⁶

Climate activists in the United States, like in other places, have displayed surprising resilience in the face of these mounting obstacles. But the threat of unregulated corporate pursuit of profit that incentivizes the suppression of those fighting to protect the planet remains an urgent concern. Many climate organizations in the United States have experienced financial setbacks due to funding reductions, and activists are suffering from fatigue and despair as those with vested interests in the continued dependence on fossil fuel have shifted from climate change denial to outright repression. In the context of U.S. legislative gridlock, the normalization of a high degree of political violence, and deepening polarization, the continued innovation and mobilization of U.S. climate activists should serve as yet another emblem of humanity’s immutable determination