There’s a sceptical view that sees ‘real’ power and cultural power as opposites. Sometimes climate politics is seen as fundamentally a contest between ‘organised people’ and ‘organised money’. However, this leaves little room for the role of images and stories, except as a secondary factor.
But if we often have a sense that stories and images matter politically, what lines or connections can be drawn between (1) cultural power and (2) political outcomes? Some thoughts follow below.
Cultural power – how it matters
At its most powerful, cultural power matters because of how it shifts the ‘climate of opinion’ and builds movements in a way that changes the political climate. The result is that new things become politically possible. The graphic below illustrates some of these dynamics:
Real impact – some questions
If the graphic above is accurate, cultural power is central to political change and the work of social movements. Yet the question gets asked: ‘But what does symbolic action – or cultural power – really achieve’?
With an issue like climate change, it is possible to turn this question around:
- Can the climate movement’s goals be achieved WITHOUT using powerful images and narratives that change the picture of climate change in the public imagination?
- Whenever social movements generate strong momentum for achieving political change, what is the place of stories and images in conveying what is at stake and why it matters?
- Isn’t cultural power a key way the that the climate movement’s OPPONENTS use power AGAINST the climate movement? (e.g. images of coal and its place in regional communities).
- Is ‘information politics’ (facts / arguments) alone enough to counter this? What happens if the climate movement does not meet the cultural power of its opponents with powerful stories and images IN RESPONSE, allowing these opponents to dominate the ‘cultural dimension’ of politics?
Three views of symbolic action
Views vary on whether symbolic action matters. For example:
(1) “Symbolic actions are just publicity ‘stunts’: they might get some media attention, but they don’t really change anything.”
(2) “Symbolic action by itself is not enough: it needs to be integrated into a strategic approach that uses leverage to influence outcomes”
(3) “Creative actions that dramatise what is at stake have always been important for social movements. They matter for immediate goals such as gaining media attention and mobilising supporters, however they are also important because a lot of politics is ‘worked out’ at the level of culture: cultural power is crucial for building political will, shifting the political agenda, energising social movements, capturing the public imagination, shifting the politics of reputation and perception, and enabling people to ‘see’ the issues in new ways”.
Stories and images shares the views stated in points (2) and (3) above, while focusing particularly on the role of (3).
‘Where’s the policy impact?’
It is worth looking at point (2) above (“Symbolic action by itself is not enough”) which is articulated in a critique of the 2007 Step It Up campaign by environmental communication scholar, Robert Cox.
Step It Up involved people across the US gathering in more than 1400 iconic locations to declare: “Step It Up Congress: Cut Carbon 80% by 2050.”
Cox argues that Step It Up implicitly assumed that increased awareness would somehow lead to policy change by itself. While Step It Up featured a series of creative and inspiring actions, Cox argues ‘little happened afterwards. [There was] little or no political follow-through at the policy level’ (p. 127).
Cox points a gap between communication that mobilises, and mobilisation that enables a particular end (p. 125). Cox’s focus is on what it takes to achieve systemic change, and he argues that there has been a ‘neglect of the strategic’ (p. 126) in climate communication campaigns. For Cox, political communication needs to be integrated into a strategy where ‘specific communicative efforts are related to expected outcomes or ‘‘effects’’ within a system of power’ (p. 124).
Cox explains his position:
the strategic consists not only of a campaign’s communicative efforts (framing, message construction, etc.) and its mobilization, but also alignment of these efforts with… openings within a system of power, as well as a mode of influence or leverage that enables a campaign to take advantage of such openings to achieve wider outcomes or effects.
As an example of successful strategy, he points to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, designed to close down coal-fired power stations. Beyond Coal’s record is impressive: see Michael Grunwald (2015) on ‘Inside the war on coal’.
However, there is a good answer to Cox’s concern that ‘little happened afterwards’. In fact, 350.org ‘happened’. Now an international movement, it has given new energy and focus to global climate campaigning, placing the role of the fossil fuel industry front and centre.
Cox’s critique of Step It Up is important, however it is not an argument against the importance of cultural power in itself. Elsewhere, Cox himself argues that it matters, writing,
environmental communication [is] a form of symbolic action… it is through different social and symbolic modes that we understand and engage this world, infuse it with significance, and act toward it.
Symbolic action does not bring about changes such as closing down power stations by itself. Neither does any form of political action.
For example, in terms of the 12 forms of power framework described elsewhere on this site, community organising frequently works in tandem with cultural power in shaping the reputation of fossil fuel companies. Beyond Coal brings together other forms of politics as well – leverage politics, information politics, lobbying and legal power.
Cox’s critique of Step It Up certainly is an argument against a focus on cultural power in isolation from an overall strategy for achieving change. It is also an argument against any wishful thinking that cultural power will ‘magically’ change hearts, minds and public consciousness, leading somehow to policy change. There are no historical examples of cultural power having this kind of effect, however there are plenty of examples where cultural power has played an integral role in achieving change, through creating conditions where leverage and other forms of politics can be effective that previously did not exist
As such, it makes sense to think of cultural power as a form of power in its own right.
Some key shifts
It is already clear that the Pacific Warriors have had a significant impact. They have:
- built and energised a movement in the Pacific,
- generated an ongoing cascade of events,
- created a platform for communication,
- generated stories and images that provide a basis for redefining climate politics in the minds of politically-important audiences; and
- created a ‘defining moment’, a turning point that meant that there would now be a ‘fight on for the islands’ that had not previously existed
These are changes in the political climate: they are preconditions for other political goals to be achieved
The Pacific Climate Warriors and and movements of the past
While the Pacific Warriors Newcastle blockade did not feature cultural power on the scale of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches or Gandhi’s Salt March, maybe these are not the best ‘yardsticks’ to apply.
One ‘yardstick’ for the Pacific Warriors is the 1947 ‘Journey of Reconciliation’, where a small group of activists blazed a trail by challenging segregation on interstate bus travel in the US. Their work was a precursor to the 1961Freedom Rides. Events that set a process in motion matter as well as the end result of this process.
Similarly, rather than gauging the political significance of the Newcastle blockade by the standards of
Gandhi’s Salt March, which shook a whole country, it could be compared to the 1906 meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, where members of the Indian community inaugurated the first nonviolent satyagraha campaign, establishing a pattern for Gandhi’s later work.
Whether the Pacific Warriors go on to reach the heights of the Freedom Rides or the Salt March is a question for the future. The comparison of political theatre in the cases of ‘Selma’ and Newcastle’ shows that the Pacific Warriors have many of the ingredients for powerful cultural action
Political change is not just the end point where a change in policy or government occurs, but also a process of changes in political conditions, where new political dynamics make new things politically possible.
The 2014 blockade—an event with real dynam-ism—added dynamics that climate politics needs.