Experiments of authoritarian sustainability: Völkisch settlers and far-right prefiguration of a climate behemoth

Despite the possibility of unintended side effects, experiments in civil society like urban gardens, sustainable housing projects, ecovillages, and so forth are associated with transformative capacities in light of an increasingly serious social-ecological crisis. The tide of the political far right, however, demonstrates that outcomes of civil society engagement undermining emancipatory sustainability are hardly just unintended effects. Therefore, I analyze the role of experimental ecopolitics for the far right by means of the example of völkisch settlers in Germany, which are diverse far-right actors practicing a strategy of rural community building. After discussing whether these practices can be understood as ecopolitical experimentation, I reflect on its tensions with far-right climate-change denialism and its relevance for future scenarios of climate politics. I suggest that despite ideological differences, far-right environmentalism of everyday corresponds with characteristic elements of experimental practices of non-far-right experimentation. Representing far-right politics beyond anti-environmentalism and denial, far-right experimentation might provide bridge building and enable potential cooptation of non-far-right experiments and participatory sustainability governance. Further, it represents an agenda of exclusive authoritarian sustainability and ethno-securitization of climate change that—as recent COVID-19 protests have indicated—has a potential for social resonance far beyond the organized far right.