Beyond Climate Emergency: Between the Search for "Another Possible End of the World" and "a Just Transition". a Comparison of Activist Circles in France and Canada (Quebec and British Columbia)

The climate emergency, as a constructed horizon, has different repercussions on social movements, their strategies, their alliances and their demands. While most of the work makes the link between this specific temporality and climate movements, the issue of the climate "tipping point" affects all activists, regardless of their preferred sectors. Based on an ongoing research that compares union, student and territorial defense activist circles in France and Canada (Quebec and British Columbia), this paper proposes to explore the different ways in which activists (and their organizations) appropriate this temporality. Based on more than a hundred interviews, we will see that militant times are not necessarily compatible with the perceived need to act in an emergency: collective actions in alliance with other sectors require time to build and get to know each other. This lived conflict of temporality can result, in particular, in militant exhaustion or militant paralysis. It can also be a driving force for action for people who are looking for "another possible end of the world", already considering themselves beyond the climate emergency, as well as for organizations, which then talk about just climate transition and the search for alternatives. These differentiated appropriations vary from one society to another (and sometimes by sector), but also within the same organization, by generation. The multiplicity of possible comparisons will allow us to better understand the influence of national contexts, but also of specific contexts, on the ways of living and imagining these upheaval militant times.