Re-evaluating the changing geographies of climate activism and the state in the post-climate emergency era in the build-up to COP26

A key aim of much climate activism is to enhance climate ambition and hold local and national governments, as well as global governance forums like the United Nations (UN), to account for the ways in which they implement and monitor climate policy across society to reverse long-term climate change. In recent years new local forms of climate activism, particularly at the urban scale, have taken a more prominent role in this. Although place-based, such local forms of climate activism are at the same time multi-scalar in orientation and strategic focus. This is particularly true in the UK where climate activism has prompted a number of local councils to declare climate emergencies, providing a mechanism by which they can become locally accountable in the delivery of their climate action plans, whilst at the same time holding national government to prior and future commitments to global climate governance. Using interview data with experts working on climate emergency declarations research across the UK, we critically discuss four key themes that have underpinned and catalysed the changing geographies of civil-state relationships within the climate emergency and what this may mean for future global climate governance under the UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COP). We argue that decision-makers at COP26 need to take greater heed of the significance of this new broader urban climate activism and its role in geopolitically mobilising more equitable, democratic and inclusive forms of climate governance which give citizens and civil society more credence within global climate policy decision-making processes that have been up to now, dominated by national state discourses

The Geographies of Protest and Public Space in Mid-nineteenth-century London: The Hyde Park Railings Affair

On 23 July 1866, a protest took place in Hyde Park, London, which provides a lens through which to analyse historical struggles over access to, and control of, public space. What began as a protest in favour of manhood suffrage became a conflict over the character and purpose of the park. It sparked public debates about which groups of people could access Hyde Park, and what activities were acceptable within it. These debates raise questions about who was entitled to make such decisions and the impact of these decisions on London's radical culture

Stuck up, peeled off, covered up, shared and scribbled out: Doing ordinary politics with political stickers

Stickers are pervasive, if often small and subtle, tools of political activism. Despite their enduring popularity, stickers do not fit into popular models of political action that presume either a spectacle of protest or formal institutions and debate. In this paper, we argue that stickers enable and facilitate public interchange as a process of sociomaterial claims-making. However, in order to recognise how stickers are used to do politics, there is a need to shift from semiotic interpretations of stickers as representational signs in favour of an action-oriented, pragmatist approach that examine stickers in action in people’s lives and shared worlds. Connecting with recent calls in geography to reconceptualise political and communicative action as lively, emergent, and materially-mediated, we tour through the sticky, peeling, covered, shared, and scribbled geographies of stickers in everyday, ordinary political action