Description
Supralocal forces, such as international treaties on environmental protection or globally circulating scientific discourses, clearly shape the actions of environmentalist actors from the top down. Conversely, in this paper, I approach supralocal relations from the bottom up. Empirically, I focus on urban environmental activists in Belgrade, Serbia, who frequently invoke supralocal places and actors when they explain their own political action. Sometimes, they do it when envisioning ideal approaches to environmentalism. For example, they compare the context of their own work in Serbia with other cities or countries that are imagined as having higher environmental consciousness or better enforcement of rules. These ideas are frequently expressed using common Orientalist and Occidentalist tropes. At other times, activists are forced to reckon with material constraints on their agency. That requires finding ways to cooperate with international actors to access funding or raise visibility. By analyzing these discursive and material practices, I show how grassroots positioning of environmentalists within broader geopolitical constellations shapes political aspects of human-environment relations.
