The Mission (Im)possible of Climate Action through Quixotic Institutional Work

Abstract

The ‘iron cage’ of the (neo-) liberal-capitalist system prioritizes economic returns over climate protection. Formerly powerful nation-states are subordinated to the rule of markets, whereas business elites have been freed from substantial responsibility for social and environmental concerns. While we agree in principle with the Point that a reassertion of state power may facilitate more decided climate action, our Counterpoint adopts a cultural institutionalist perspective that highlights the embeddedness of actors in a broader cultural order. From this perspective, actors enact scripts while often lacking substantive agency towards protecting the natural environment. Cultural change in meanings, myths, practices, and rituals is needed to remodel the currently dominant scripts and templates of modern, liberal-capitalist ‘world society’, including the script of state actorhood. We suggest the notion of ‘quixotic institutional work’ as a way of envisioning and prefiguring alternative cultural templates when both the physical and the social reality start showing cracks due to the climate crisis. Quixotic institutional work follows the logic of appropriateness rather than consequential purposiveness, and thus constitutes a different, often overlooked and mocked, form of agency for systems change relevant in the light of powerful forces towards maintaining an unsustainable world order.