Voices of the flight-free visionary : an overview of the ‘staying on the ground’ narratives and their position in relation to (neoliberal) mobility hegemony

Sammanfattning: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is encouraging profound and rapid transformation in every economic sector to mitigate escalating climate change. In this context, a public and political debate about aviation as a high-carbon source has emerged in Sweden with growing numbers of people declaring that they are “staying on the ground”. Despite increased research that explores the motivations behind individual choices to reduce their flight consumption, there is still a need to find out how ‘change agents’ are articulating the ‘flight-free’ vision in the process of convincing others. Using a combination of focus groups and semi-structured interviews, I explored the arguments of Swedish flight-free change agents. The analysis uncovered twelve ‘flight-free narratives’ that criticised (neoliberal) Mobility Hegemony from three angles. The first group encompassed narratives similar to: “the train is more time-efficient than the aeroplane (on short distance travel)” which accepts the fundamental assumption from Mobility Hegemony such as efficiency maximisation. The second level critique consisted of counter-hegemonic claims functioning as: “tourism is not happening out of solidarity” which dispute the basic assumptions of Mobility Hegemony, in this case, the claim that (more) mobility increases social sustainability. The third and final category renounced the ideological components of Mobility Hegemony by neither agreeing or disagreeing to them as in: “it is more meaningful to engage locally than to travel”. The literature review on transformation theories suggested that although all three bodies of arguments had strategic advantages, the third-level narratives had a transformative advantage. The study provides an innovative method to categorise (and theorise about) transformative language and gives an overview of the arguments used by the Swedish flight-free movement as well as a model to develop new transformative narratives which may eventually bring about transformative system change in favour of (more) sustainability.