Consumer Citizens and the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign

Abstract

The Cities for Climate Protection campaign, an effort to lower greenhouse-gas emissions at the city scale, operates within the neoliberal state. Two features characterize the interaction of the state and the public via this campaign: a lack of public involvement, and the construction of the citizen as a passive consumer. The author emphasizes a tension that exists between two readings of the consumer citizen: the pliable figure who listens to neoliberal bottom-line arguments, and the political economic actor who identifies not with consumerism but with political change. Citizens thus cannot be wholly embodied by constructions such as the consumer, and consumerist activism has potential. Citizens, though often interpellated as consumers, can position themselves as reasoning publics who see climate change, their cities, and themselves in relational perspective. The author enlists Foucauldian and deliberative-democracy theory to explore the making of citizens through the Cities for Climate Protection campaign.