Is it sustainable consumption or performative environmentalism?

Abstract

What are the cultural politics of what becomes recognised as sustainable consumption and consequently good environmental citizenship? And how does this contour who is able to participate in urban environmental politics? In this article, I draw on Bourdieusian theories of distinction to explore the links between (sustainable) consumption, moral authority and participation in environmental politics in Bangalore, India. I re-theorise the term performative environmentalism to argue that when the new middle classes successfully claim cultural authority over sustainable consumption, it obscures the daily environmental practices of the poor in a manner that further disenfranchises their already tenuous right to the city and its environments. This analysis connects the study of consumption practices to scholarship on just sustainabilities by exploring the relational poverty and class politics of sustainable consumption. By focusing on how sustainability and poverty discourses articulate with each other, I show that performative environmentalism exacerbates the exclusion of the working poor from participation in environmental politics by reinforcing class inequalities, restigmatising poverty and monopolising ecological legitimacy for higher status groups. Doing so, I connect cultural and practice-based studies of green consumption to broader questions about how inequality is reproduced in neoliberalising cities through everyday practices.