Climate crisis, neoliberal environmentalism and the self: the case of ‘inner transition’

This article delves into “inner transition”, a set of subjective changes mobilized by the Transition Network (TN) that emphasize the role of the self to tackle the climate crisis. Its scholarly contribution is twofold: on the one hand, it engages with current literature on neoliberal environmentalism, empirically analyzing how “inner transition” is entwined with the emergence of a specific environmentality through a set of practices, habits, lifestyle changes and webs of associations with non-humans; on the other hand, it contributes to existing research on the TN and in particular to literature on the understudied phenomenon of “inner transition”, presenting it as an emblematic case study to unpack the biopolitics of neoliberal environmentalism. We carried out 20 semi-structured interviews with members of the TN in Portugal, following a post-phenomenological approach that recognizes the deeply mediated character of inner transition. Through the support of interview excerpts, our analysis delves into three main topics: perceptions of inner transition; transition and self-transformation; habits and lifestyle changes. Informed by this data, our paper presents a characterization of a specific environmentality entwined with “inner transition”, exploring how selves are reconfigured in order to address the challenges of climate change and the environmental crisis.