Strategic and generational changes in social movements against climate change

Resumen

Human activities developed during the Anthropocene are driving the planet into a critical situation that requires urgent collective action. The degradation of living conditions on the planet has given rise to various social movements. The anti-nuclear movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, the alter-global movement, the movement for global justice, can be considered precedents and precursors of the social discourse and mobilization in favor of a change in our lifestyle in accordance with the limitations of the planet, which is the focus of today’s climate mobilization. Three elements stand out in the social mobilization against the climate emergency: 1) the protagonism of the younger generation; 2) the construction of a new collective identity based on a discourse that integrates the role of nature, animal life and the relationships between human and non-human interactions; and 3) the impact on daily life, the political dimension, the governance and the global policies. In any case, there are other previous mobilizations and collective actions related to climate change, such as the movements of resistance to neoliberalism (Almeida and Pérez Martín, 2023), mobilizations against extractivism (Bebbington and Bury, 2013), environmental conflicts (Cuenca et al., 2022), alternative movements around “good living” and the philosophy of life of indigenous communities (Acosta, 2012). All of them can be understood either as part of the same mobilization or they can be separated according to some specificity, although they present numerous points of encounter and intersectionality. In addition, it is of interest movements that claim for the recognition of legal rights to rivers, plants, animals, which will remain in the background of this communication. The objective is twofold: 1) the change in the composition of the activism of the new groups against climate change in generational terms; and 2) to analyze the different strategies, from the most classical mobilization to civil disobedience, deployed by the social organizations that constitute the movement, and the interpretative frameworks of the climate change movement.