A typology of the climate activist

Abstract

As the climate crisis escalates and citizens increasingly come to understand the existential consequences of political inaction on our civilisation, they are demanding radical action. Although people are mobilising as climate activists in ever more creative and imaginative ways, our understandings about the variety of inside and outside climate activism lack conceptual clarity. Every year there are new accounts from different academic literatures about climate activists and their role in the vital politics of climate change. This paper argues that now is an appropriate time to draw together these accounts and begin a process of articulating a clearer sense of the contemporary climate activist. This paper offers an initial contribution to the endeavour by synthesising across literature a unified conception of the climate activist typologised in terms of their focal orientations and the theories of change they operate under. Utilising a matrix approach, it is argued that the climate activist seeks change relative to a specific endogenous or exogenous focus. Further, that climate activists orientate around collaborative or confrontational theories of change leading to 16 theorised-proposed mutually inclusive types of climate activists.