Exclusionary environments of the emerging energy and political transitions

Exclusionary environments of the emerging energy and political transitions (EXEMPT) looks at the underpinning exclusions evident in different ideological varieties of environmentalism and environmental policies.

Through an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach, building on insights from environmental sociology, politics, psychology, anthropology and economics, EXEMPT will examine the understudied contexts of Serbia and Montenegro, as epistemic semi-peripheries in which a wide array of environmental concerns has only recently become recognized at a larger scale.

The fundamental aim of EXEMPT is thus to examine the environmental imaginaries and their related ideological underpinnings in light of the explicit and implicit exclusions in the emerging contexts of environmental activism and policy.

To reach this aim, EXEMPT builds on three fundamental building blocks - objectives: the first is to conceptualize ""exclusionary environmentalisms"" by explaining how different imaginaries and ideologies underpin exclusion, developing an ""environmental imaginaries scale"" in the process, a tool that could be used in future quantitative or mixed-methods inquiries.

The second objective is to explore, through the use of digital ethnography and qualitative interviews, how ""microfascism"" - silent exclusion and tacit elimination of the ""unwanted"" elements in an imaginary, occurs in the everyday environmental activism and policy.

Much as exclusion is a constitutive part of identity building, hence of politics, the third and final objective of EXEMPT is also to explore and test the communicative ways in which exclusion can be mitigated in an attempt to 'open' environmentalism to different imaginaries, experiences and geographies.

As such, this project points to both theoretical and practical ways of identifying, examining and addressing activist and policy exclusion.