Engaging the everyday: sustainability, practices, politics

The present ecological crisis is planetary and simultaneously involves our most banal everyday actions, which are thus invested by peculiar and ambivalent forms of politicisation. Neoliberal governmentality has targeted everyday life in the effort of changing individual behaviours and attitudes. Top-down transition projects pushed by governments and big capital reconfigure daily living often without social reflexivity and citizens’ participation. While these styles of governance depoliticise sustainability, everyday life has a strong potential for promoting practices of ecological reparation and radical transformation, “prefiguring” new modes of living for a society to come. This chapter gives a critical overview of these trends, highlighting emerging key issues: the private-collective binary, the role of the market and the state, habits as repetitive and inventive, the meaning of reproduction and new materialism. Key questions and challenges regard everyday life’s transformative capacities, in the production of novel narratives and practices. How to build collective change beyond individual action?