Panic activism or crisis solidarity? Reworking crisis narratives in climate activism through the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Crisis narratives have long been a prominent feature of the climate movement to spur system change. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the complexities of navigating climate action through the overlapping crises of the Anthropocene. While crisis is seen to offer possibilities for transformational change, it also threatens to prioritise urgency over justice. It is therefore important to understand how climate activists, in practice, are mobilising different narratives of crisis. To this end, we empirically examine climate activists' reflections on crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand through their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify a narrative of ‘panic-activism’ that uses crisis to demonstrate the severity of the climate threat to enable drastic action. Such narratives are often underpinned by a ‘hierarchy of crisis’ that positions climate change as the most imminent existential crisis. We caution that this crisis narrative is troubling for climate justice, particularly as it positions one crisis as more urgent than others. However, in contrast to panic-activism, our study suggests climate activists in Aotearoa tended to approach crisis cautiously and with reluctant necessity, rather than as something to be actively catalysed or capitalised on. Instead, activists cultivated a narrative of ‘crisis solidarity’ that highlights the networks of reciprocity and vulnerability across and within communities for more intersectional social movement organising.