‘How dare you!’: a conceptualization of the eco-shaming discourse in Belgium

ABSTRACT

The rise of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish ‘flygskam’ (flight shame) movement, and school strikes for climate: the context for apprehending environmental affairs changed significantly in 2018, enabling the construction of a new environmental discourse of which practices of eco-shaming and emotions of eco-shame are visible expressions. This paper conceptualizes this ‘eco-shaming’ discourse by exposing the complex set of constituents underpinning it. It demonstrates how the eco-shaming discourse embodies a conception of the environment as public good and how it relies on the idea of shared but differentiated responsibilities in caring for the environment. As such, the paper adds the eco-shaming discourse as an eleventh environmental discourse to the ones famously identified in The Politics of the Earth. The paper then compares the eco-shaming discourse with other environmental discourses and discusses its implications for environmental politics. The paper draws upon a specific methodological application of discourse analysis that gives emotion a place it usually lacks in environmental discourse analysis. The empirical analysis includes text documents (n = 2155) from three societal domains (media, policy, and advocacy) in Belgium. This paper contributes theoretical and empirical knowledge on eco-shaming, environmental discourses, policymaking, as well as methodological insights on how to acquire such knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Eco-shaming
• eco-shame
• green shame
• environmental discourse
• environmental policy
• flight shaming

Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Kimberley Vandenhole is a Research Fellow of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS