Post-political Communication and Sustainability

Abstract

This chapter places the concept of sustainability in the context of recent debates about the environment, particularly climate change, as a ‘post-political’ issue. Exploring this concept, especially in relation to contemporary discussions of climate communication, the chapter suggests that the broad acceptance of sustainability can be understood as exemplifying the post-political condition identified by critics as foreclosing debate about possible alternative futures. The chapter argues that at the core of the problem of the post-political is a failure of agency – that the apparent difficulty of imagining large-scale social and political transformation results from a diminished view of the human subject. Ecological perspectives, whether advanced by conservatives or radicals, are hostile to attempts to master or control nature rather than respecting natural limits, and therefore tend to give expression to this anti-humanist viewpoint rather than challenging it.