Controversy Mapping and the Care for Climate Commons: Re-assembling the Danish Climate Movement by Counter-Mapping Digital Network Maps

The general electoral campaign in 2019 saw a unifying culmination of the climate activist movement in Denmark, assembling everything from green think tanks, school children and direct-action protest groups, succeeded in conglomerating a forceful public that was later congratulated by the newly elected PM for turning climate into the paramount political issue of the Danish 2019 election. The government has since signed the “most ambitious Climate Act in the world”, including the public engagement initiative of the Climate Citizen Assembly, a group of randomly selected citizens mandated to give recommendations for the parliament’s green politics, and a series of “Climate Partnerships”, cooperative collaborations developing frameworks for businesses to engage in the green transition. Despite these efforts, the climate movement, alongside several scientific experts, has expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s politics on the green agenda, while the government itself maintains that it is upholding an ambitious climate politics.
This paper is based on nine months of mixed-methods research, using the digital tools Hyphe, Gephi and CorText to map the relations between different public Danish actors (informal civil society groups, NGO’s, businesses etc.) and their “matters of concern” (cf. Latour 2004) in the controversy of the Danish green transition. Inspired by literature on counter-mapping data science (Dalton and Stallmann 2018), the study introduces an interventionist methodological experiment in using network maps made with digital methods tools as props for material participation (Marres & Lezeaun 2011) in a workshop setting. As such, the paper seeks to explore how critical discussions of network maps can become a ‘prototype for mobilization’ (cf. Jimenéz 2014) for mapped subjects and entities to collectively evaluate and re-invent both their position in a controversy and their means, methods, and tactics for obtaining public impact. This methodological experiment is framed through a discussion of the experience of participation (Kelty 2018) and ethical attunement and world-building among activists (Zigon 2018), and argues for the potentials for collaborative methods and interventionist use of digital cartography in the field of controversy mapping in relation to the green transition.