Defending hegemony: From climate change mitigation to adaptation on the Great Barrier Reef

Abstract

The catastrophic consequences of climate change are now evident with extreme weather events impacting communities and ecosystems. Against calls within civil society for dramatic decarbonisation, the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry is constructed by governments and business as ‘common sense’. By analysing the political process surrounding the 2016 and 2017 coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, we show how a fossil fuel hegemony has been upheld against the counter-hegemonic forces of environmental critique and the catastrophic bleaching events. By distinguishing between politics (i.e. strategies, practices and discourses) and the political (i.e. the antagonism constitutive of societies), we explain what different hegemonic practices achieve in the process of establishing and defending hegemony. In our case, this resulted in downplaying emissions mitigation and emphasising local climate change adaptation. Through the political process, business solutions and self-regulation were presented as the logical response to the climate crisis.