Partial organization as spatial practice Imagining and building futures in the camps for climate action

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Abstract

From 2006 to 2010 the camp for climate action (CFCA) made headlines news in the UK and beyond.It contested the climate policy of the government by protesting against key infrastructuredevelopments with massive GHG emissions. But climate camps also became places where alternativefutures were imagined and build. In this paper I investigate the CFCA through the lens of itsorganization, the protest camp. In protest camps physical territory is claimed outside the politicalstatus quo. This enables a fundamental challenge to its continuation in favour of alternative futures.Protest camps enable ‘partial organization’, somewhere between network structures and fullorganization through antagonistic spatial practice. In the literature ‘partial organization’ is defined asthe presence of some elements of organization but not all (Ahrne and Burnsson, 2011). This papershows that spatial practice should be included in the understanding of partial organization.The analysis of the development of CFCA from previous camps also indicates that camps can chooseto limit their antagonistic spatial practice, for example to open up their boundaries to newcomers andto forge coalitions with political neighbours. But as a result, elements of organization like hierarchy,rules, bureaucracy may become more visible. This observation allows discussing the potential as wellas the limits of horizontal organization and to expand our critical understanding of the possibilities ofemancipatory social organization.

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Critical Management Studies and Anarchism

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