Description
There is burgeoning environmental politics interest in how ‘storytelling’ opens new modes of being beyond ecocidal, capitalist and colonialist structures. Taking this approach in a new direction, I investigate how businesses apply these tools to serve their interests.
This research is part of a project studying a specific type of non-state actor: ‘corporate environmental pacts’. Pacts are initiatives that encourage business members to ‘take action’ to address environmental crises, certify those actions, market those actions and build virtual communities. Discourse analysis was conducted on interviews with staff from two pacts and a substantial dataset of the pacts’ online content.
Using governmentality theory, I argue that pacts instrumentalise a fundamental impulse of ecotopian environmental politics scholarship: that creative knowledge-sharing through storytelling can shape the ways we conduct ourselves and organise our ecological political economy. Specifically, I examine the discourses used in pact storytelling practices employed in documentaries, social media and blogs. I find that a certain type of human story is told, promoting mentalities of techno-optimism, which shift responsibility onto an abstract ‘humanity’ and recast business as a solutions-finder rather than a climate culprit.
