In this thesis I aim to query the Ecological Modernisation vision of green growth by focusing on the emblematic case of desalination technology as the solution to the threat of water scarcity. I focus the study on a drought crisis, which resulted in the adoption of desalination in the Eden District Municipality (EDM) of South Africa. Focusing on the towns of Sedgefield and Knysna, in the Knysna Local Municipality (KLM) of the EDM, I ask the questions of ‘what, how, by whom, why and to what end was desalination adopted?’. This interrogation is characterised by two movements, firstly tracing the process and mechanism through which this consensus was manufactured; and secondly countering this by examining the underlying metabolic relations constituting crisis and solution. The research was carried out over a period of 11 months, from October 2011 to August 2012, during which I undertook 91 semi-structured interviews, extensive document analysis and participant observation. The theoretical strands drawn upon are a blending of post political theory, to inform an analysis of the techno-managerial orientation of consensus manufacture; and a Marxian relational ontology, to examine what is produced and foreclosed by the logic. This project is undertaken in five parts. Firstly, I show that the dominant representation of 'drought crisis' insisted upon the indisputability of drought as a threat posed by an externalised nature. Next, in examining the metabolism of drought I counter this narrative by showing the drought crisis to be a socio-natural assemblage, rather than an externalised threatening nature. This is a vital finding, showing that the support for the adoption of desalination technology as a necessary response to 'nature's crisis', pivoted on the maintenance of an ideological fiction, obscuring the relational 'becoming' of drought. In the third chapter, moving on to an examination of the solution, it emerges that an essential aspect of the solidification of consensus was the employment of exceptional disaster and environmental legislation which had the effect of neutralising drought as 'nature's crisis' and desalinationas the indisputable solution. Enabling the urgent release of disaster funding to ensure water security for economic growth. This chapter also argues that the maintenance of the dominant crisis narrative produced an opportunity for the desalination industry, by treating 'nature' as a direct accumulation strategy. In the remaining two empirical chapters I evaluate the 'promise' of the desalination techno-fix. Through focusing on the conditionality placed on disaster funding and how this impacted on project assembly, resulting in problems and costs emerging out of the desalination solution from the outset. Fundamentally, it is argued that, rather than being external to, these problems are intrinsically connected to the mechanisms and logic through which consensus emerged in the first place. To clarify, through the preceding chapters it was shown that the basis for the 'disaster funding' release was an insistence on 'nature's crisis', as an ideological fiction. These remaining chapters show that this had the effect of placing limitations on what was spent on, when, and how much. Thereby informing project assembly, with these constraints resulting in problems emerging out of the solution. In sum, the thesis concludes that the adopted E.M. logic was a false promise that served to intensify the penetration of nature by capital, resulting in a deeper movement into crisis by moving the problems around as opposed to resolving them.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om utbildningspolitik och syftar till att undersöka hur svenska politiska partier talar om skolan i ett antal debattartiklar och repliker, samt om de är överens i några aspekter och vilka dessa i sådant fall är. Utgångspunkten är att det sker en avpolitisering av politik, där kampen mellan ideologier inte längre existerar på samma sätt som tidigare. Genom diskursanalys har ett antal texter analyserats med ett resultat som visar att det mycket väl verkar stämma att partierna inte längre kämpar ideologier emellan, utan att man är övergripande överens och först och främst förvaltar ett redan existerande system. Den politiska kampen, eller spänningen, är inte särskilt stark då samtliga partier är eniga på flera punkter. Däremot existerar en diskursiv spänning kvar i aspekten av att man ständigt försöker underminera varandras kapacitet att vara i regeringsställning. Alla är överens, och alla vill ha makten. / This essay is about education policy and its purpose is to analyze how Swedish political parties talk about school in a number of debate articles and replies, to see whether they agree in some aspects and if so – what these aspects are. We learn of a depoliticization of politics, where the struggle between ideologies no longer exists the way it used to. Through discourse analysis, a number of texts have been analyzed showing that it seems to be true that parties no longer struggle between ideologies, but that they instead agree widely and that they first and foremost administrate an already existing system. While the political struggle, or tension, is weak – since all parties analyzed are unanimous in several areas – but nonetheless a discursive tension still exists in the aspect of trying to undermine each other’s capacity of governing the state. Everybody agrees, and everybody wants to be in power.

Rooted in ideology critique, this dissertation studies the construction of democracy in the coverage of Venezuela during the era of President Hugo Chávez. The aim of this endeavor is twofold. First, the dissertation aims to understand the relationship between ideology and the construction of democracy in journalism on foreign political phenomena. Second, it attempts to explore the ways in which the relationship between ideology and democracy in journalism serves to legitimize or delegitimize the struggle for social justice in nations in the global South vis-à-vis the political and economic fundamentals of global capitalism. The dissertation comprises three articles that study the construction of democracy in depictions of the Venezuelan political system and its key political actors. Article I studies the construction of (il)legitimate democracy in relation to the Venezuelan government, Article II explores the construction of difference between Chávez’s supporters and his opponents, and Article III studies the coverage of the coup d’état against Chávez in 2002. All three articles are methodologically rooted in critical discourse analysis and rely on materials from a sample of three elite newspapers: Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), El País (Uruguay), and the New York Times (US). Across the studies, there are four macro-strategies that in different ways serve to ideologically load the notion of democracy. Three of these strategies – the constructs of populism, of power concentration and of difference – serve to define political deviance and to (de)legitimize political actors in relation to democracy. The fourth macro-strategy, relativization, serves to justify actions that contradict established democratic principles but serve greater politico-ideological goals. (De)legitimation in relation to democracy corresponds with the closeness of a group of actors to the dominant political practices and values within global capitalism. Journalistic reporting thus follows a post-political gaze; it is generally in accordance with the political consensus that characterizes the post-Cold War era. Through this gaze, any challenge to the political tenets of global capitalism fails on democratic grounds.

Academics, experts and politicians have come to the conclusion that democracy is in trouble. The contemporary understanding is that new competitive pressures from the outside and unruly publics from the inside have drastically changed the way politics is enacted. Where it was previously provoked by ideological programs it is now engulfed in issues, and where it used to be framed by established democratic institutions it is now characterized by informal governance arrangements. In this environment, it is argued, only the reformed institution can bridge the gap between politics and democracy and restore legitimacy to the decision-making process. In Swedish planning, these reforms have positioned the citizen as the point of departure for democratic politics, manifested in procedural citizen dialogues and in authorities’ relinquishment of political responsibilities. But when unplanned publics do emerge, they are intuitively dismissed as NIMBYs and obstacles to the planning process – preemptively foreclosing opportunities for public democratic enactment. The aim of this paper is to analyze this process by examining the public controversy surrounding the ongoing redevelopment of Slakthusområdet in southern Stockholm. It draws heavily on Noortje Marres’ work. She suggests that politics pursued outside of established institutions could be occasions for democracy since the activity might indicate that issues are finding sites that are hospitable to their articulation as matters of public concern. However, her issue-focused reasoning also positions the citizen as the focal point for democratic politics, meaning that those who fail to accept this role inevitably have themselves to blame. Her work is therefore supplement­ed with Laurent Thévenot’s understanding of how forms, that is, ideals, rules, and procedures, can be just as important as issues in informing the decisions among actors. Through interviews with those involved, this paper highlights the ease in which the city disarticulates the attempts at public democratic enactment, a proficiency largely stemming from its “reformed” management form. Moreover, while the public finally managed to settle their issue at stake, it came with the substantial cost of eroded faith in democracy. Drawing on this, the paper concludes that both issues and forms, publics and the public sector, are crucial in facilitating the enactment of democratic politics.

As we find ourselves in the midst of a planetary trend towards urbanisation, we must acknowledge that urban spaces are linked in a network of metabolic consumption and production that impact not only those recognised as ‘urban dwellers’, but are incorporated into a global structure. Ireland is no exception, with development centred around Dublin, a ‘primate city’ with a vastly larger population than others in the region. Dublin’s Inner City areas have in recent decades been marked by a series of large-scale interventions aimed at reconstituting a new vision of Ireland as a global, modern city home to a tech-savvy workforce. Yet as Dublin explores its post-recession identity as a hub for investment in tech and finance, its urban population continues to grow in ways that are seen to disenfranchise existing Inner City communities. This study explores the perceptions of residents of Inner City Dublin engaged in urban planning processes, in the hopes of making manifest the goals and desires driving participation through various channels, both formal and ‘radical’. A case is made for the city as a site of a post-political condition by questioning the role and efficacy of official consultatory channels, as well as in contrasting held imaginaries presented by interviewees and those presented by official planning documents. Attempts by Dublin City Council to market Dublin as a ‘creative’ city, intent on monetising aspects of cultural identity as a global competitor intent on drawing investment and foreign talent is considered representative of post-politics, contrasted by urban residents’ desires to safeguard the existence of vibrant communities within the Inner City who now risk exclusion.

Since the establishment of Scotland’s Climate Change Act, principles of just transition have been statutory and guiding the implementation of several policies on the area. Such policies have laid the foundation for collaborative governance efforts, that invites state and non-state partners to engage on the political arena. Critiques towards such collective governance approaches argue that it promotes a post-political condition, guided by values of consensus and cohesion, that moves democratic issues to the periphery of political inquiry. By analysing key just transition policies within Scotland, and conducting interviews with non-state actors with different relations to the Scottish policy process, I seek to gain greater understanding of how the discursive positioning of agents of change could be understood through post-politics. Thus, this thesis explores how agents of change, and their agency, is made sense of, and how this sense-making reflects contradictory and challenging dynamics such as power struggles, conflicts of interest, and collective action problems, within just transition. I identify four key agents of change – workers, communities, industries, and the government – and discover that the policy material and my interviewees position these agents differently in relation to the problems of just transition. Further, I also identify challenging dynamics within sense-making of agents of change, such as contradictory transition narratives, tensions regarding how the relationship between labour and nature is made sense of, as well context-bound relationships between the change agents. I conclude that the strive for social consensus within the collaborative sphere neglects these challenging and contradictory dynamics, and fails to reflect the democratic pluralism of how agents of change are made sense of in the Scottish context.

In the 1950s, scholars in Europe and the United States announced the end of political ideology in the West. With the rise of affluent welfare states, they argued, ideological movements which sought to overthrow prevailing liberal democracy would disappear. While these arguments were questioned in the 1960s, similar ideas were presented after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scholars now claimed that the end of the Cold War meant the end of mankind’s “ideological development,” that globalization would undermine the left/right distinction and that politics would be shaped by cultural affiliations rather than ideological alignments. The purpose of No alternatives is to compare the end of ideology discussion of the 1950s with some of the post-Cold War theories launched at the time of, or in the years following, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Juxtaposing monographs, essays and papers between 1950 and 2000, the dissertation focuses on three aspects of these theories. First, it analyzes their concepts of history, demonstrating that they tended to portray the existing society as an order which had resolved the conflicts and antagonisms of earlier history. Second, the investigation scrutinizes the processes of post-politicization at work in these theories, showing how they sought to transcend, contain or externalize social conflict, and at times dismiss politics altogether. Third, it demonstrates how the theories can be understood as legitimizing or mobilizing narratives which aimed to defend Western liberal democracy and to rally its citizens against internal threats and external enemies. As the title of the dissertation implies, the end of ideology discussion of the 1950s and the post-Cold War theories of the 1990s sought to highlight the historical or political impossibility of any alternatives to the present society.

Over the past decades, a widespread consensus has emerged regarding the anthropogenic causes and negative impacts of climate change. For instance, the environmental pollution reaches alarming dimensions on a global level implying immanent dangers to the future of humankind and nature. The need to take action in order to maintain the integrity of human and environmental systems has long been recognised by most political elites, business leaders, activists and the scientific community. Yet, it seems that political and economic institutions do not move on fast enough from words to actions. At the same time, a depoliticisation of the public sphere is observed repressing a radical critical discourse. Several political theorists and philosophers debate about the emergence of a post-political and postdemocratic condition, implying a state of politics of consensus. The thesis at hand aimed to investigate the post-political condition of climate change activism in the online realm by means of the case of a rather recent trend of environmental activism, the zero waste movement. A quantitative content analysis was conducted studying 500 #zerowaste tweets that were posted in April 2018. The content characteristics of the Twitter postings were analysed and a coding system developed to measure the post-political condition of communication practices in the environmental pollution debate on Twitter.  The study finds that in particular civic actors (citizen and public personalities), commercial and nonprofit organisations engaged in the zero waste debate distributing informative content mobilising the public to make certain lifestyle decisions. It is furthermore revealed that the #zerowaste debate on Twitter is evidently depoliticised. The communication practices on the social media platform incorporated in many ways discursive strategies such as universalisation and externalisation resulting in a rationalised and moralised representation of the problem of environmental pollution.

During the last two decades the shore protection law [strandskyddslagen] in Sweden has undergone changes to make it easier for municipalities to infringe on protected areas. This paper offers a contribution to the understanding of the interplay between common environmental theory perspectives and the environmentality discourse, something that has been missing from the academic field. Earlier research has been dedicated to show how certain types of environmentality tend subjects to internalize certain norms that legitimizes a neoliberal order. This order fosters a development norm that stands in conflict with an ecocentric perspective.  Using a modified version of Bacchi and Evelines WPR-method, we found that the discourse among Swedish municipalities, Stockholm being an exception, interpret the part of the shore protection law which purpose is to protect animals and vegetation as a hindrance to development. This highlights the problematic relationship between environmental protection and economic growth.  By applying an ideal-type analysis on overview plans and consultation responses of ten Swedish municipalities we were able to identify a shallow, neoliberal perspective on nature which enables a neoliberal environmentality. The interplay between shallow perspectives on nature and neoliberal environmentality creates a hegemonic structure in which critical voices tend to be marginalized, resulting in a post-politization of beach protection discourse.

Global initiatives regarding environmental change have increasingly become part of political agendas and of our collective imagination. In order to form sustainable societies, education is considered crucial by organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. But how is the notion of sustainability imagined and formed in educational practices? What does sustainability make possible, and whom does it involve? These critical questions are not often asked in educational research on sustainability. This study suggests that the absence of critical questions in sustainability education is part of a contemporary post-political framing of environmental issues. In order to re-politicize sustainability in education, this study critically explores how education—as an institution and a practice that is supposed to foster humans—responds to environmental change. The aim is to explore how sustainability is formed in education, and to discuss how these formations relate to ideas of what education is, and whom it is for. This interdisciplinary study uses theories and concepts from cultural studies, feminist theory, political theory, and philosophy of education to study imaginaries of the unknown, nonhuman world in the context of education. The focus of the empirical investigation is on teacher education in Sweden, and more precisely on those responsible for teaching the future generations of teachers – the teacher instructors. With help from empirical findings from focus groups, the study asks questions about the ontological, political, and ethical potential and risk of bringing the unknown Other into education. / Utbildning har globalt fått en central roll i strävanden efter att skapa hållbar utveckling. Initiativ tagna av såväl Förenta Nationerna som Europeiska Unionen, där utbildning och hållbarhet kopplas samman, vittnar om att frågor som rör miljöförändringar har blivit allt viktigare både på de politiska agendorna och i våra kollektiva, kulturella föreställningsvärldar. Men hur formas begreppet hållbar utveckling när det ska göras undervisningsbart? Vilka framtider möjliggör hållbar utveckling i utbildningssammanhang och vem inkluderas i begreppet? Frågor av kritisk karaktär är ofta frånvarande i tidigare utbildningsforskning som rör hållbar utveckling. Denna avhandling tar sin utgångspunkt i att frånvaron av kritiska frågor kan ses som del i en samtida postpolitisk inramning av miljöfrågor i såväl utbildningssammanhang som i samhället i stort. Studien undersöker hur utbildningsväsendet, som är en central institution i fostrandet av framtidens medborgare, tar sig an frågor som rör miljöförändringar. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur hållbar utveckling formas genom utbildning samt att diskutera hur dessa formationer relateras till idéer om vad utbildning är och vem som ska utbildas. På så vis söker studien också efter sätt att re-politisera hållbar utveckling i utbildningssammanhang. Avhandlingen är tvärvetenskaplig och använder teorier och begrepp från kulturstudier, feministisk teori, politisk teori och utbildningsfilosofi för att studera vad utbildning som relaterar till natur- och miljöfrågor möjliggör. Empiriskt undersöks svenska lärarutbildare, som ansvarar för att utbilda framtidens lärare. Studien ställer frågor om ontologiska, politiska och etiska aspekter av att öppna upp utbildningen för det som ligger bortom mänsklig kontroll och kunskap. / Sustainable development as an area of knowledge