Riskscapes, politics of scaling and climate change: towards the post-carbon society?

Abstract

The concept of riskscapes has so far not embraced the concept of scale in any deeper sense. A conceptual integration of scale is needed, however, when dealing with the diversity of risks involved in opposing economic and environmental rationalities. Drawing on research conducted in a German coal-mining area, the article shows how the risk of regional economic decline and the risk of global climate change are pitted against each other. The article explores this ‘politics of scaling’ that lead to a reconfiguration of the coal riskscape, including a tentative step towards decarbonising German energy production.

Introduction

There is a large boulder with a plaque in the middle of Kerkwitz, a small village of about 300 inhabitants in eastern Germany. The plaque reads Und niemand soll ihn mehr bewegen (And no one shall ever move it). Inaugurated in autumn 2017, the boulder is a monument to the village’s 10-year-long struggle against being devastated by coal-mining. It was only in March 2017 that the Czech mining company EPH—that had bought all lignite mines and power plants in this part of eastern Germany in 2016 from the Swedish company Vattenfall—announced that it would not continue with planning for the Jänschwalde-Nord mine extension. Jänschwalde-Nord would have required the devastation of Kerkwitz and its neighbouring villages Atterwasch and Grabko. Inhabitants of the three villages struggled and fought for a decade to prevent this and eventually succeeded.

What appears to be a very local story, we argue, is actually at the heart of a change in how environmental and economic concerns are articulated and evaluated. The villages’ struggle serves in the following to exemplify the intricate and anything but straightforward steps towards a ‘post-carbon world’ (Mitchell, 2011). What we are intrigued by are the competing scales of environmental and economic concerns that are realigned or pitted against each other and their relation to other concerns such as personal well-being and local identity.

By analysing entangled climate change politics on the ground (for example, villages fighting for survival) rather than from above (for example, climate summits), we do not find that environmental concerns around climate change are now the new post-political consensus that stifles political struggles in the manner that Swyngedouw (2010) warned us against. Instead, climate change appears more and more like a ‘boundary object’ (Blok, 2010, 906; Mahony, 2013), a common reference point for different and conflicting parties, but with different meanings and invoked for different reasons. In local conflicts like the one we analyse here, climate change becomes part of the terrain on which political and social struggles are fought (cf. Wainwright and Mann, 2013). As we will show, politics of scaling are one significant tactic used by conflicting parties to further their cause.

In this article, we focus on the dynamics of the intertwined scales and riskscapes of coal-mining, regional economic development and climate change. We apply the concept of ‘riskscapes’ to provide an understanding of the re-evaluations of economic and environmental concerns, which are currently happening (not only) in the context of German coal-mining. Riskscapes as a concept have proven useful to understand multiple, sometimes contradictory and not necessarily visibly connected understandings of risk and risk practices, highlighting spatial and temporal overlaps (Müller-Mahn et al., 2018). However, scale has not been explicitly considered by riskscape theorists in any greater detail (cf. Aalders, 2018). Within the present article, we seek to demonstrate the conceptual advantages of spelling out the politics of scaling and their re-configuring influence on riskscapes. We thereby also argue that understanding the intricate relationship within and between different riskscapes and practices of scaling not only provides us with an analytical handle for deciphering the complexities of economic and environmental politics, but also points us towards the transformative potential that lies within re-scaling risks.

We start by explaining the concept of riskscapes and how scale interrelates to it. Subsequently, we describe the particular case study of coal-mining in the Lausitz and climate politics, which allows us to conceptualise the re-scaling of risks and its capacity to re-configure riskscapes.

Riskscapes

The concept of risk is a Kippfigur (ambiguous image). Depending on one’s viewpoint, risk can be defined in very different ways (for a comprehensive overview, see Renn, 2008; the long history of the concept of risk is told by Bernstein, 1998). For some, risks are real threats which exist whether people are aware of them or not. Engineers and risk managers learn that risk is a measure of probability of a hazard multiplied by its severity. Within this framework, risk is real. From previous incidents, likelihoods can be calculated and the number of earthquakes, floods or traffic accidents can be identified within a reasonable deviation. For others, risk is the term which refers to a technique raising awareness of unknown dangers or the statistical likelihood of disasters (Amoore and de Goede, 2008; Petersen, 2011). Risk from this point of view is not the danger as such but the tool or the technology used to turn incalculable and unforeseeable dangers and uncertainties into calculable and predictable risks (Aradau et al., 2008). Anything can be turned into a matter of risk as long as someone defines it as risky. Earthquakes or accidents are real, but if these incidents matter as risks and thus in the way a society organises and conceives itself, is dependent on social practices and socially produced meanings. This means, in a world that deems earthquakes as acts of supernatural beings, monitoring subduction or rift zones and establishing earthquake-proof building codes would make little sense. In turn, if earthquakes are seen as calculable risks, monitoring makes sense and it has become a global effort and whole societies have transformed the ways in which they build their houses and infrastructures. As a general insight, Amoore contends that increasingly ‘society has come to understand itself and its problems in terms of risk management’ (Amoore, 2013, 7). The concept of risk is furthermore often used as a prefix that can be attached to virtually anything. For instance, people, practices or places can be rendered as societal or political issues by defining them as risk groups, risky practices or risky territories.

The very different—realist and constructionist—understandings of risk exist in parallel. While risk managers seek to reduce risks by rendering them visible through calculations, many social scientists try to deconstruct particular notions of risk, for example, to do away with unfair stigmatisations (Lupton, 1999). To avoid confusion, risk scholarship tends to be very clear about their respective understandings of risk. The middle ground between realist and constructionist perspectives on risk is perhaps best represented by Beck’s ‘weak constructionism’ (Beck, 1992; Flynn, 2006). It acknowledges society’s involvement in creating the concept of risk but nevertheless treats risk as a signifier for real threats. Following weak constructionism means to hold both extremes of the Kippfigur constantly in view. This is necessary, we argue, when dealing with phenomena that are real enough as threats (such as terrorist threats or climate change) and at the same time only enter our imagination through the vocabularies and practices of those who are making threats known—such as intelligence agencies, climate change scientists or environmental activists.

The introduction of the concept ‘riskscapes’ (Müller-Mahn and Everts, 2013) is an analytical strategy to hold both the real and constructionist nature of risk in view while at the same time pointing out that spatiality and temporality are inherent and inseparable features of risk (Müller-Mahn et al., 2018). The concept of riskscapes starts from the somewhat Giddensian (Giddens, 1984) premises that societies, comprised of their practices and materialities (Schatzki, 2010), develop and work upon specific notions of risk which are in turn changing their practices and materialities. These practices and materialities are not situated in a void but have spatialities, temporalities and networked realities of their own (Müller-Mahn et al., 2018). In this sense, riskscapes are ‘landscapes’—‘risky territories’ to be navigated (November et al., 2010). The riskscapes of climate change, for example, involve coastal areas which are at risk of rising sea levels, storms and floods. What the risks exactly are, to whom and how to deal with them, is a matter defined by many. Scientists calculate the risk, coastal residents experience and articulate it, politicians implement laws on it. In these ways, they all mark out risky territories and define the riskscape of climate change effects on coastal areas.

Risk, as an active awareness of possible dangers and threats, is practice specific (November, 2008). Depending on things such as the everyday life task at hand or professional occupation, different risks emerge. A policewoman, for instance, knows the risk of becoming a victim to crime whereas a firefighter is acutely aware of potential sources of fire. Both professional practices deal with and are to a certain extend defined by their particular awareness and notions of risk. Indeed, the practices and the pertaining ideas of risk could differ to an extent that there is no visible connection between the two. However, both practices may share spatialities and temporalities. They might both, for example, relate to the same urban neighbourhood. This way, different risks do spatially and temporally overlap, and although there might be no obvious connection, they connect through this overlap, creating a variegated and complex riskscape where different risks relate unevenly to each other. Due to this spatial and temporal overlap, risk management strategies may compete against each other (a fire escape might be an entrance for burglars) or relate hierarchically in such a way that one risk trumps the other (for example, more public funds are diverted to the police rather than the firefighters—or vice versa). Just how these hierarchies emerge from social practices and the spatio-temporal relations between different risks and how these hierarchies are struggled over and negotiated is the empirical question that primarily animated the work on riskscapes by Müller-Mahn and Everts (2013) and also the analysis presented in the following.

With respect to climate change and its politics on the ground, we feel that the concept of riskscapes offers an analytical perspective that helps us to distinguish between different environmental and economic concerns and how these reinforce or contradict each other. Thus equipped, we hope to shed light on the interwoven and intricate arguments, tactics and practices of different and conflicting groups involved in struggles over environmental change and (in our case) ultimately climate change. Analysing our case study from such a vantage point will showcase how risks—the future threats that became real enough to be recognised as something to be acted upon in the present—centre on and radiate from single nodal points (here, the coal-mining pits) but are valued entirely differently. The groups involved, their practices and even the development of individual opinion and action over time or across multiple concerns demonstrate the range of risks recognised and acted upon. The risks of losing homes, losing profits, losing jobs or causing climate change have led to intermingled actions and disputes, which have back and forth re-evaluated overlapping risks as being more or less acceptable. We argue here that this re-evaluation crucially involves ‘politics of scaling’ (Brenner, 2001), a practice that challenges or redefines the priority of different scales (the local, the regional, the national, the global). Before we turn to our case study analysing the hesitant reversal of priorities in German coal-mining policies, we introduce the concepts of ‘scale’ and ‘scaling’ as an analytically useful addition to the riskscapes perspective.

The politics of scaling

Many take scales such as the city, the region or the nation for granted. In the 1980s, geographers began scrutinising the concept of scale in more detail. Some were keen to demonstrate the production of particular scales through capitalist modes of social structuring (Herod, 1991; Smith, 1992). Others pointed out that scale is nothing but a heuristic device, employed by the researcher and does not exist in any material sense (Herod, 2011; Marston et al., 2005). Over the years, different conceptualisations of scale emerged and exist in parallel since. Here, again, occupying the middle ground has proven to be a complex task. From our point of view, the concept of politics of scaling represents one such approach for the middle ground, not unlike the concept of riskscapes.

Perhaps best known is Neil Smith’s idea of a politics of scale (Smith, 2008 [1984]), which he derived from his empirical research, for example, on anti-gentrification neighbourhood campaign groups in New York (Smith, 1992). Neighbourhood campaign groups were able to give their cause city-wide momentum through connecting with other such groups in the wider city. This way, they transcended their very local scale of impact and put their agenda on the urban scale of the entire city (a process Smith (1992) also understood as ‘scale jumping’). Similarly, Herod (1991) showed how union groups were able to gather significant force to stand against big industry and employers by uniting with unions from faraway places, propelling their fight on a global scale. However, it is not always the larger scale that trumps the smaller one. Much research has shown how a commitment to the local has been used by both socially progressive and pro-business groups in order to gain support against national or global influences (for a synopsis, see Herod, 2011).

The trouble with the concept of a politics of scale is the tendency to view scale as an externally (even if produced) given, into which various actors can plug into (cf. Herod, 1997). With this problem in mind, Brenner (2001) propagated the concept of a politics of scaling. He acknowledges that actors are employing tactics that involve different spatialities, yet scale is the outcome of practices, not a pre-given spatial order ready to use. This insight is shared by Marston (2000) detecting a shared ‘commitment to a constructionist framework and the rejection of scale as an ontologically given category’ (Marston, 2000, 220) among social theorists. She continues to assert that

the fundamental point being made is that scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world—local, regional, national and global. It is instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents. (Marston, 2000, 220)

Born and Purcell (2006) turn these conceptual considerations and Brenner’s politics of scaling approach into the methodological directive,

that descriptive research on scale should interrogate how the interrelationships among scales are fixed, unfixed and refixed by particular social actors pursuing specific political, social, economic and ecological goals. Normative research should analyze why a particular rescaling (e.g., localization) is better than other scalar strategies (global/national/regional) for achieving specific goals (e.g., democratization, sustainability, quality, etc.). (Born and Purcell, 2006, 198)

Fraser (2010) even introduces the term ‘scalecraft’ to draw ‘attention to the aptitude, skill and experience embedded within (…) scalar practices’ (Fraser, 2010, 333). ‘The idea that scale is produced suggests there might be some craft involved and, indeed, there is evidence to support that claim, given that we can discern places in which scalecraft is practised—the workshops—and in which failures can occur’ (Fraser, 2010, 335–356). Green (2016) argues that scalar practices are ‘inescapably political’ and its ‘power dynamics are unavoidable’ given that ‘implementing a particular framing of reality (…) involves empowering and providing opportunities for some, whilst at the same time disadvantaging others’ (Green, 2016, 97—for an empirical example involving the closure of Belgian coal mines, see Swyngedouw, 1996).

From this point of view, topics or issues are scaled and re-scaled in a series of attempts to structure priorities for action and power relations along personal or societal hierarchies of concern. Depending on the circumstances, the very same issue might be deliberately turned by some into a matter of local concern (including the definition of what the local comprises, for example, one village, one neighbourhood or all settlements along an open pit edge), whereas others lobby for a global perspective (including or excluding the Global North or the Global South, terrestrial or oceanic surfaces). Climate change is a case in point. Since the Rio Earth Summit 1992, there is an ongoing debate whether the ecological crisis has to be solved locally (at the level of cities, for example), regionally (here: through nation states) or globally (with not all states ratifying protocols) (O’Riordan, 2000; Whitehead, 2007). Depending on the viewpoint, prime targets can be, for example, single polluting industries or symbolic factories that activists fight against, national calculations of emissions that state regulations aim at, or global efforts to reach sustainable development goals. The interlinkages and relations of such bottom-up and top-down approaches as well as the feasibility of liberal regulation through the market’s ‘invisible hand’ or political directives, have been core questions of social sciences and economic theories (Mahony and Hulme, 2018; Urry, 2011).

From our point of view, the struggle between scales is connected to realignments of riskscapes. Risks occupy very different spatial expanses. While the risk of losing one’s house and village due to coal-mining is a very local risk not shared by the majority of people on the planet, the risks stemming from climate change appear to be of global reach, regardless that the effects will be felt differently in different places. From an economic point of view, the spatial reference points are usually nation states and the administrative regions within states. Here, risks are seen in rising levels of unemployment and stagnating or falling growth and productivity rates. There are quite different scales involved in those three risk evaluations reaching from a local village at risk of devastation, a region at risk of economic downturn, or a planet at risk of massive ecological disaster. Yet they become intertwined in one riskscape of coal-mining, comprising social struggles for homes, jobs and environmental justice. If, when, how and to what effect different scales overlap in this riskscape, are becoming relevant and eventually realign the risk assessments within this complex riskscape of multiple struggles is what a politics of scaling approach seeks to elucidate.

To gain a better grasp on the practices of scaling and riskscapes that are involved in climate change politics, we discuss below the example of protest against coal-mining in the Lausitz region in Germany. As we will show, a complex politics of scaling intertwined with riskscapes emerged in that region over the last 20 years. In hindsight, the social struggle needs to be contextualised with the recent (2019) decision of the German government to put a stop on coal-mining and coal-fired power plants in Germany until 2038. We argue that re-evaluation of risks leads to a reconfiguration of the coal-mining riskscape. Risks are realigned while the hierarchies of political and societal priorities are shifting. In the following, the local struggle of three villages, trying to impede a coal mine, is analysed through the lens of riskscapes and its scalar aspects.

Fighting coal:environmental politics, coal-mining and climate change

The 10-year-long struggle of the villages of Kerkwitz, Atterwasch and Grabko is nested into Germany’s national agenda of shifting towards renewable energies. This shift, most prominently transformed into national law through the Renewable Energy Law, introducing the so-called Energiewende, is related to the energo-ecological struggle against nuclear power plants. There runs a line from the 1970s movement that frustrated plans for a new nuclear power plant next to the river Rhine (Whyl), to the increasing public apprehension over nuclear power after the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and to the decision to quit the use of nuclear power in 2002, renewed and with added momentum after the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011 (Glaser, 2012). With the target of reducing CO₂-emission levels by 45% by 2030, as compared to 1990 levels, some of the Energiewende’s cornerstones were the privileging of renewable energy production through feed-in tariffs, an exit from nuclear energy (planned for 2022) and an exit from black coal-mining (conducted in 2018).

But this brought about the coal conundrum: an increase of lignite production in the years immediately after the Energiewende, despite its emission-reduction targets (see Goodman et al., 2020; Morton and Müller, 2016). With renewable energy production being in its infancy when the nuclear phase-out started, German coal plants increased production. This increase is furthermore set in a context of regional economic protection, which essentially impedes a straightforward implementation of the energy transition. Just as black coal-mining before—which in Ruhr area was heavily subsidised from the 1970s onwards up to the closure of its last hard coal mine in 2018 to keep the regional economy alive (despite imports being considerably cheaper¹)—the more profitable open-cast brown coal mines were defended against environmental concerns by members from all political parties and on all levels of government for the same reasons. Concerns about job losses and energy security led to politics protecting brown coal-mining despite its local and global environmental consequences. 2017 even saw, with the amendment of the renewable energy laws, a severe push back for the expansion of renewables.²

However, as of 2018, national politics have again taken up the challenge of moving towards the energy transformation through a focus on exiting coal-mining and combustion. With the issue of nuclear power settled, the risk of climate change became a matter of major concern, as it turned out that reducing the risks produced by nuclear power plants was bought at the expense of increasing another risk, that of climate change—following Beck (1992), a typical phenomenon in a risk society, which solves technological risks with technologies that create even bigger risks, thus giving modernity its characteristic momentum. Consequently, in 2018, the German government funded a commission that gave its advice on abandoning all coal-mining and combustion for power production by 2038, subject to huge subsidies (40 billion EUR) being made available to support affected areas during the phasing out of coal-mining. The government transformed the commission’s advice in large parts into national law in late 2019 and early 2020.³

Framing this development in terms of riskscapes, we see here a struggle over prioritising risks; most notably, the economic and socio-political risks of restructuring regional economies reliant on fossil fuel resources, the global risk of a changing climate through continuing with the prevalent energy production and the economic and technological risks of restructuring and possibly decentralising the grid as a national infrastructure. The seesaw of the Energiewende is an indicator of the complexities of intertwined and overlapping risks. The example of environmental risks related to coal-mining illustrates how re-scaling risks reconfigures riskscapes. The case of the Jänschwalde-Nord mine extension reflects that altering riskscapes through re-scaling is not a smooth and linear process, but very much worked through and emergent within contested social practices. The fight in the villages of Atterwasch, Kerkwitz and Grabko⁴ likewise exemplifies the oscillating and winding path of transitioning towards renewable energy production.

In September 2007, the inhabitants (that number around 900) of the three villages found a leaflet in their mailboxes. It informed them of the Jänschwalde-Nord mine extension that the state government of Brandenburg planned in cooperation with the energy company Vattenfall. Essentially, the leaflet said that the villages need to make way for brown coal-mining and that the inhabitants would eventually be resettled. This came for many in the village as a big shock, as Roswitha, a woman of about 60 years, whose family has been living in Kerkwitz for generations, recalls.

And on September 18th [2007] we went on vacation. And in the morning, around 6am, my husband got up. I was still in bed, had the radio turned on and they said in the radio—we heard it from the radio that Kerkwitz has to make way for the new mine Jänschwalde-Nord. From the radio! And we went on vacation this day and while travelling we first only heard of Kerkwitz. In the afternoon of the same day they also said Grabko and Atterwasch. And in the afternoon—we flew to Mallorca—everyone here had a leaflet in their mailboxes that there was to be a residents’ meeting. And this is how we got to know of it. We got it from the press. And this vacation on Mallorca, you can’t imagine how terrible it was. I hardly slept and was always thinking. It always felt like I am standing on a tall mountain and am afraid to fall. That was a very bad time. I mean, today I still sometimes wake up at night dreaming that I’m gathering things and have to go somewhere where I don’t want to go to, anywhere. (Interview Roswitha, 2015, translation from German by the authors)

According to German mining law, national interest in resources (here related to energy security) allows resettlement of people and devastation of villages and private ground against individuals’ wills (see Müller, 2018). Planning, however, cannot be done at will and requires a highly bureaucratised procedure including environmental and social assessments (Müller, 2018). It is feasible to open up new mines when resources, infrastructure and demand are existing, as is the case in the Lausitz, one of the four lignite mining areas of Germany. Historically, the Lausitz has been a mining area for more than 150 years and has seen devastations of more than a hundred villages since the 1920s (Förster, 1968, 1996). However, with the reunification of Germany and the change of the political system in 1990 came also the political promise of no further devastations, prominently put in words in 1998, when the then state prime minister Manfred Stolpe said that Horno ist das letzte Dorf (literally: Horno is the last village [to make way for coal]).⁵ The people of Horno, located only 15 km south of Atterwasch, Kerkwitz and Grabko, left the village in 2004, after some of them resisted devastation and negotiations with the mining company for as long as they could.

The same was to become the agenda for the three villages. After a first moment of shock, people formed action groups, trying to figure out means for fighting the decision. One way deemed appropriate was direct democracy. In 2008, people started to collect signatures for a Volksinitiative that would require state parliament to make the mine extension and the devastation of the villages part of their discussion agenda. The mine opponents managed to collect the required 20,000 signatures within the set time frame, but the subsequent parliamentary discussion of the topic did little to change the situation. When aiming at the next state of direct democracy, the Volksbegehren—a referendum on the issue—the villagers failed to gather the 80,000 supportive signatures. The issue seemed to be too much a local problem to make waves beyond the Lausitz and too much a sacrifice that could be made. In a region that identifies with mining, the risk of the decline of coal-mining and the related, already diminishing economic and social advantages, seemed for many local people too large a risk compared to the financially well-remunerated relocation of a few hundred villagers. In other words, the Lausitz already went through a decline in employment in the aftermath of the reunification, when several industries were shut down and the number of people working in mining fell from 90,000 to 8000. The prospect of threatening the remaining jobs in a sector that the region builds its self-conception on made only few local people sign the petition for a Volksbegehren and a predominantly economically focussed risk thinking held sway.

What also comes to the fore through the failed Volksbegehren is that mining is embedded in a scalar system that distributes gains and burden unequally. Brown coal still accounts for 146 TWh or 22% of German gross electricity generation,⁶ which is exported as well as consumed nationally in individual households and industries. As a resource, lignite is produced locally in the Lausitz (as well as the three other mining areas), and the impact is felt here economically and ecologically. People ‘at the coalface’ have to bear the burden of environmental impacts of mining, be it exhaust fumes, dust and noise development, deforestation, or the lowering of the water table. Local population is also the one to make room for open-cut mines if demanded. On the other hand, they also profit economically as being directly or indirectly employed in the industry. However, a very strong argument—which is also legally fixed—is that the nation profits from mining in as far as it is needed for energy security. Historically, it is literally mining in the Lausitz that made glittering Berlin possible, illuminating it and enabling its industrial growth (Moss, 2013). However, in the capital seems to be hardly any consciousness or concern of the costs in smaller cities and villages. In other words, the metropolitan electricity needs and the places bearing the burden of mining are not consciously connected as to cover the 100 km distance between Berlin and the Lausitz.

It was clear from the start that the decision-making power regarding the mine of Jänschwalde-Nord lies with the state or national government and the mining company. The failed Volksbegehren also made clear that local people weighed the risks—and many concluded in favour of employment and economic income in a structurally weak region and against the much localised risk of losing Heimat. Losing Heimat is a central argument in the conflict. Heimat, somewhat inadequately translated as ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, is an area were people feel a sense of belonging, an emotional bond, an affinity and familiarity with landscape, space and social relationships (Applegate, 1990; Türcke, 2006). It becomes present in moments of threat and potential loss and hence is a very present narrative for the villagers on the brink of relocation. Relocation implies the demolition of houses, the devastation of cultural and natural environment, possibly the relocation of the church and human remains. It comprises the loss of landmarks and mnemonic points of references, of familiar surroundings in total.

This risk of social and economic stress and hardship is to some extent absorbed by a promised and comparatively high compensation that the mining company pays. It is also cushioned by a narrative that miners evoke. In what could be understood as an attempt to neutralise the villagers’ worries and complains, Heimat developed into a popular trope for miners, too. They argue that a stop in mining—of which the discontinuation with new mines would be an indicator—leads to their loss of Heimat. They constitute Heimat less as a local phenomenon at the village level, but at the scale of the Lausitz, the regional level. Exit from coal-mining means unemployment in the region and the only option for highly qualified engineers and mine workers is to search for new employment elsewhere. They would lose the Lausitz as Heimat, lose their familiar surroundings and lose their social embeddedness.

In the struggle against Jänschwalde-Nord, the failure of the Volksbegehren was a setback, but not yet the end of the fight. People in Atterwasch, Kerkwitz and Grabko were not ready to give up yet. In the following, they time and again showed up and staged event-driven protests on occasions of political discussions and decision making as well as on a regular basis with the Sternmarsch and the Dorffest. The Sternmarsch is a protest march taking place each year in early January and the Dorffest a village fête with a sermon, speeches, food, drink and exchange on 31 October. Both public protest forms have been drawing local and regional media attention as well as regional support from environmental NGOs and befriended action groups and individuals.

An important step to make the protest heard beyond the immediate surroundings came with the Lausitzcamp, a climate camp set up for the first time in 2011. A climate camp tries to educate and network people, as well as put its environmental and moral standards for the time of the camp into practice (see Feigenbaum et al., 2013). The Lausitzcamp cooperated closely with local farmers and landowners for literally setting up the camp and drew local people as well as those from further away to the camp grounds. One of the most important achievements of the Lausitzcamp is that it brought attention to the interrelatedness of local and global issues and struggles. It did so in two ways, through form and content.

First, the Lausitzcamp stressed through workshops, podium discussions and public events that the locally extracted and burned coal has an impact on the climate. It is fairly well-known that the CO₂ emissions from burning coal and gas contribute to global warming; however, the impact of coal was for a long time only felt locally through dust, noise and light pollution emitted from open-cut mines and—historically—from briquetting plants. Global effects were distanced from the local level, filled with Lusatian mining traditions and identities reaching back over 150 years. The focus—if on side effects at all—was on local environmental impacts, which mining companies targeted since the 1990s at the latest. The installation of filters or of underground water barriers and noise barriers, for example, led to a continuous improvement of local living conditions. Attention to flora, fauna and water quality increased and was communicated by the mining company’s marketing team. With such a ‘presencing’ of local issues, the ‘absencing’ of global ones was hardly necessary (on presencing/absencing risks, see Bickerstaff and Simmons, 2009). The Lausitzcamp tackled this issue by literally getting the risks of the greenhouse effect and global warming on local stages. Discussions and protest actions raised attention to the effects of coal-mining on climate and sea levels. The Lausitzcamp presenced the global interrelatedness of the local energy production.

Second, the Lausitzcamp itself brought international and global ties to the Lausitz, which resemble very much the politics of scaling by unions described by Herod (1991; for tactics of scale jumping in protests against coal-mining in the UK and Indonesia, see Brown and Spiegel, 2017). To give only few examples: in 2014, with support of international environmental NGOs, a human chain was formed across the river Neisse, connecting the mining areas of Poland with the German ones. The chain was made up of local, national and international supporters of the cause, with people coming from as far as India or Australia. The podium of the Lausitzcamp saw national and international politicians and activists speak and this effect rubbed off on the Dorffest; in 2015, Melwin Purzuelo, an environmental activist from the Philippines and Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a climate expert from Chad—who both spoke at COP21 in Paris—took the stage as representatives of climate-affected countries and addressed the local audience in front of the Atterwasch church. The year 2016 saw the cooperation of the Lausitzcamp with the initiative ‘Ende Gelände’ that staged civil disobedience in form of 4000 people blocking and occupying coal trains and diggers in the Welzow mine, located a few kilometres south of the proposed Jänschwalde-Nord mine. While people in Atterwasch, Kerkwitz and Grabko did not greet the civil disobedience with undivided support and praise, it ultimately connected the local struggle to a global scale. It saw extensive media coverage, was supported and co-organised by numerous international NGOs and was an integral part of the world wide #BreakFree2016⁷ campaign. It related local mine opponents and civil society initiatives in their protests to global climate thinking and action. They re-scaled their risk thinking in relation to coal production, no longer a local threat only, but a danger of global dimensions.

Conclusions: re-scaling risks and re-configuring riskscapes

Eventually, in March 2017, the Czech mining company EPH—that had bought all lignite mines and power plants in the Lusatian part of eastern Germany in 2016 from the Swedish company Vattenfall—announced that it would not continue with the mine planning for Jänschwalde-Nord. EPH was quick to declare that this decision was made purely on economic grounds, but the villagers celebrated it as winning a fight, in which protest and endurance had paid off, taking Atterwasch, Kerkwitz and Grabko off the mining and devastation map.

The risks of coal-mining were realigned. Re-scaling the struggle and the environmental concerns increased public and media attention. Awareness of risks stemming from coal-mining grew. It informed the decision making on the state level and found its expression in legislation and executive authoriy (dealing with Ende Gelände as civil disobedience, for example). Formerly, the anxiety predominated that abandoning coal-mining would destabilise regional economies with detrimental effects that could reverberate through all of the country. Additionally—and similar to the exit from nuclear power—claims were made that the national energy supply was at stake. In our case study, these two risks of disruptions in energy supply and of collapsing regional economies, however, were overruled by entrepreneurial, but crucially environmental and local risk thinking. The complex riskscape of coal-mining, where risk assessments overlap and intertwine, shifted in its composition. Civil society’s continuous emphasis on the local as well as the global environmental risks of open-cast mining and burning of fossil fuel was a re-scaling that altered the riskscape of coal-mining and eventually influenced the decision making of powerful economic and political stakeholders. The environmental and local protest did not lead straightforwardly to abandoning coal-mining in general or the Jänschwalde-Nord mine in particular. However, the re-scaling of environmental risks, mainly through inserting global climate change into the equation, fundamentally reconfigured the riskscape of German coal-mining.

‘And no one shall ever move it…’—it is difficult to say for how long that boulder in Kerkwitz will be left in peace. Within the Anthropocene, stones are seldom left unturned for long and as a popular Lusatian proverb goes, ‘God created the Lausitz, but the devil put coal underneath it’—indicating also that coal retains its potential as an asset. However, the boulder is a contemporary monument to a significant political change directed towards the vision of a post-carbon society. No one can foresee how far the climate protests travel and for how long the political arena responds to its pleas. And yet, significant change has already happened. The local impacts of coal-mining have become re-scaled and are now viewed in respect to the global scale of climate change. Concerns about global environmental risks have at least this once outcompeted concerns over regional economic risks. Politics of scaling are thus one important driver for the dynamic reconfiguration of riskscapes.

It remains an open question whether this dynamic also gains traction in other places. For now, much of the German environmental policies can be seen as a strategy aimed at reducing the CO₂ emissions within the country at the expense of other places. Reducing and eventually shutting down hard coal-mining, for example, has come at the cost of importing it from other parts of the world, where working conditions and environmental protection are often less strictly monitored. Another strategy to reach climate protection targets involves the outsourcing and recalculation of emissions through relocating the production of goods and electricity outside the country. This way, Germany may reach its emission-reduction targets while at the same time increasing electricity and other consumption, thus increasingly contributing to the greenhouse effect despite its official calculation. Within the country, the German exit from coal-mining and combustion—and from nuclear power—is questioned. The closure of mines and plants in Germany seem paradoxically related to mines and power plants across the border (for example, in the Polish parts of the Lausitz or in France or Belgium) that keep on operating or are newly opened. This critique points to the different scales of riskscapes that continue to play a role here and also hints towards newly emerging relational issues between regions and countries.

The reconfiguration of riskscapes through inserting global climate change does not go without question. It is scrutinised for its locally felt impact (that is, the risk of unemployment when shutting down industries), for the continuous regional costs (that is, the cross-border industry’s risks for adjunct residents’ health and the environment) and for the insufficiency for tackling the global risk of climate change. Exiting coal is beneficial for some residents and aims at reducing emissions. However, this is a contested strategy and its unfolding and reverberations need further analysis. Nevertheless, we interpret the reconfigurations of the coal riskscape through the alignment of local concerns with those of global climate change as a step towards the post-carbon society.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Gregory Hooks, Anna Davis, Janelle Knox-Hayes and Raoul S. Liévanos for including us into this exciting Special Issue and for their comments. We also wish to express our sincerest thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. The empirical research was part of ‘The Coal Rush and Beyond’ research project that received funding from the Australian Research Council, 2014-2017, DP140102606.

References

Footnotes