Climate Municipalism: Attempts for Politics and Commons through Energy Municipalization Campaigns in Berlin and Minneapolis

Abstract

This dissertation examines two urban social movements – in Berlin and Minneapolis -that ran campaigns for democratically run, public, municipal scale energy utilities. These movements are early attempts to bring movement-based conceptions of energy democracy into urban political institutions.

The movements demanded public utilities advance just urban energy transitions, but more than that, they demanded grassroots participation in and benefit from those transitions. This instituted a demand for self-determination and social control over publicly owned goods (energy utilities). The movements therefore tried to transform state institutions and change what is thought necessary for sustainable energy transitions. This approach to urban energy transitions is unique in combining democratic demands that attempt to re-make the how of local politics and institutions. This remaking is explained as an attempt to institute practices of “commoning.”

Over recent decades, various social movements have established commoning – a system of collective access to and control over a shared need, guided by principles of self-determination and interrelation through collective action – as a key model for and means of transformation toward alternative socio-ecological relationships. I argue that the two campaigns examined are part of this trend. I develop this argument by showing how these movements undertook a unique strategy that attempted to shift the boundaries of the politically possible and advance specific visions of commoning energy that could extend towards broader socio-ecological and democratic transformation. By conceiving of the state as an open terrain of struggle, it is possible to see practices of commoning in, against, and beyond the state (Cumbers 2015, Angel 2017 and 2019).

Through in-depth participatory case studies and comparative analysis of Berlin and Minneapolis, Climate Municipalism examines how these movements succeeded in creating politics around energy issues and forcing the hand of local governments. It finds that these campaigns succeeded in reworking the terrains of local climate governance and energy systems in selective ways, and in opening up broader discussions of strategies for political transformation, even though they failed to fully install their visions in the respective cities. The dissertation reflects on the outcome of the movements to question how social movements conceptualize their relationship to the state.