In 2019, the German federal government decided to reduce Germany's dependence on fossil fuels. The use of lignite for electricity and heat generation will end by 2038. So far, lignite is comparatively cheaply produced in three German mining districts. It is associated with disproportionally high CO₂ emissions and widespread ruinations of the landscape. Until the termination of the use of lignite, the federal government provides the affected mining districts with 40 billion euros for the necessary transition away from coal. This transition is envisaged to go hand in glove with the larger socio-ecological transformation, which is deemed to be necessary to make contemporary societies more sustainable, innovative, and resilient in the face of multiple challenges and crises (KWSB, 2019). Especially as a contribution to combat human-made climate change, the politically motivated coal phase-out and the transition of lignite-mining districts into non-coal regions favour projects that foster local environments, as well as renewable energy. The three lignite-mining districts should – as the political argument went – serve as an example and “living lab” of how the large-scale socio-ecological transformation can be achieved, following a narrative that if these regions can do it, anyone can do it (KWSB, 2019).

Now, a few years into the reality of the coal phase-out transition in the three regions, the emphasis on being the pioneers of transformation has turned sour, and transition projects funded with public money are increasingly being met with suspicion, hostility, and even resistance. Conducting research in one of the three mining districts (the Central German district of Mitteldeutsches Revier), we find it particularly noteworthy that we are confronted with more and more cases where transition projects cannot materialize due to resistance from local city councils. In the first instance, this feels like an odd situation. Why would anyone not take the large sums that the federal government or other funding agencies provide? After a closer look, we found that socio-ecological transformation projects increasingly encounter forms of resistance within municipal governance settings. In the following, we discuss how this manifests itself and informs practices of municipal decision-making regarding transitions and non-transitions. In doing so, we add to wider debates regarding how transformation-is-inevitable narratives are increasingly challenged (Bosetti et al., 2025), the alleged “transformation fatigue” (Mau, 2019), or the “unbearability of sustainability” (Blühdorn, 2024).

Concepts such as the “Great Transformation” (WBGU, 2011) or the “European Green Deal” launched by the EU in 2019 have invoked holistic change while glossing over deep-rooted societal conflicts (e.g. Brand and Wissen, 2021). Scholars have long argued to treat transformation not as a blueprint but as a terrain of struggle (e.g. Gailing and Moss, 2016; Swyngedouw, 2009). From this perspective, local resistance to transformation is not a failure of implementation but a manifestation of diverging interests, priorities, and competing interpretations of what transformation should entail. We find that these conflicts do not always erupt in overt protest. Rather, they are often embedded in the mundane routines of municipal governance: committee meetings, budget negotiations, or planning documents.

We argue that anti-transformation is a practice that can be witnessed in action. We therefore ask the following: how do municipal actors mobilize procedural, administrative, and political arguments to contest socio-ecological transformation projects? What are the strategies and tactics with which existing local transformation projects are discursively targeted, severely deformed, or even destroyed? Is this only “fatigue” or is there an explicit politics of anti-transformation? Moreover, how and when can we speak of a political geography of anti-transformation?

This intervention develops its argument through an ethnographically informed vignette from the town of Zeitz, which serves as an illustrative entry point into the everyday politics of local transformation governance. This example allows us to reflect on how resistance emerges through institutional practices and procedural decision-making, complicating dominant narratives of socio-ecological transformation and sustainability. The intervention concludes by formulating a set of questions and directions for future research, proposing anti-transformation as a lens for analysing the contested politics of socio-ecological transformations on the local level.

We propose the term anti-transformation to describe a specific mode of opposition emerging around socio-ecological transformation projects. Anti-transformation emerges when transformation agendas become translated into local governance settings, where they encounter competing priorities, different responsibilities, resource constraints, and alternative understandings of political responsibility. Rather than through open confrontation, anti-transformation manifests through rhetorical displacements, procedural delays, and appeals to concerns framed in terms of feasibility, responsibility, and administrative necessity. Since the discourse of socio-ecological transformation itself is shaped by hegemonic forms of knowledge production, governance, and prioritization, anti-transformation does not simply reject ecological crisis narratives as such but contests how transformation is defined, governed, and implemented in specific institutional and spatial contexts. Anti-transformation emerges through the articulation of rhetorical framings. These framings are mobilized within official procedural settings, e.g. committee meetings, budget decisions, approval stages, or administrative reviews, where they can redirect or suspend transformation projects while remaining compatible with the accepted narratives of local governance.

In what follows, we combine insights from the debates on post-politics and anti-politics to analyse transformation conflicts, while recent discussions on transformation fatigue help contextualize the broader societal resonance of such contestations. Socio-ecological transformation is not just a technical process but also a deeply political one, riven with conflicts over priorities, procedures, spatial allocation, and the distribution of risks and benefits (Scoones et al., 2015). Contemporary environmental governance often operates through technocratic and managerial vocabularies that frame socio-ecological transformation as a matter of consensus rather than political contestation (Swyngedouw, 2009). More recent work has highlighted the paradox that widespread acknowledgement of ecological crisis can coexist with persistent political inaction as political disagreement is channelled into governance practices, expert-led processes, and institutional routines (Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2023). Ferguson's (1994) notion of the anti-politics machine helps specify the mechanism through which this occurs. Political disagreements are translated into technical-administrative questions, maintenance obligations, legal competencies, staffing capacities, or budgetary constraints, thereby shifting the terms on which transformation can be contested. While post-political and anti-political perspectives have shown how political disagreement is translated into managerial and administrative forms, our ethnographic material suggests a different reading. Administrative reasoning does not suspend politics. Rather, it becomes one of the principal media through which political contestation is enacted within municipal governance. Appeals to maintenance, staffing capacities, legal competencies, or fiscal responsibility should therefore not simply be understood as instances of depoliticization. They become politically effective because they are articulated at specific institutional moments within municipal decision-making processes. Thus, anti-transformation denotes a mode of political contestation through which legitimate administrative concerns acquire political force within procedural configurations. It mobilizes concerns that are socially resonant while displacing the normative claims of sustainability (see Atkins and Menga, 2022; Beveridge et al., 2024; Dechézelles and Scotti, 2022). Recent German-language debates help contextualize the broader societal conditions under which such contestations emerge. Mau (2019) describes a growing sense of transformation fatigue (Transformationsmüdigkeit), under which the consensus around ecological modernization begins to erode. In this mood, transformation is experienced not as an opportunity but as burden. Blühdorn (2024) argues that sustainability has become unbearable (unhaltbar) not because its goals are rejected but because the normative assumptions underpinning the socio-ecological transformation project have lost their persuasive force in late-modern societies (Blühdorn, 2024:125). Fritz and Eversberg (2024) identify different mentalities across social groups towards socio-ecological transformations. For example, lower-class fractions are more sceptical about transformations (Fritz and Eversberg, 2024:52). We point in a related direction: transformation is not openly denied; rather, it is translated into questions of administrative responsibility, infrastructural decay, and institutional feasibility. Through these shifts, transformative and progressive ambitions are recast into locally grounded claims of procedural realism, allowing resistance to operate within the accepted language of governance. Rather than asking why transformation is rejected, we ask how resistance becomes politically effective within municipal decision-making.

Of course, anti-transformation overlaps with related debates such as climate obstruction or delay (see Ekberg et al., 2022), particularly where transformation agendas are slowed down, redirected, or rendered politically unfeasible through procedural means. However, our focus lies less on ideological obstruction than on the mundane institutional conditions under which ordinary administrative concerns become politically consequential. Anti-transformation highlights how resistance emerges through ordinary routines of municipal decision-making rather than primarily through overt ideological denial or coordinated anti-progressive campaigns.

Rather than expressing a simple preference for continuity, such arguments become politically consequential because they are articulated within particular institutional and procedural configurations, where they reframe socio-ecological transformation as a risk to already fragile local arrangements. This is not to say that these claims are illegitimate. On the contrary, they often reflect real experiences of marginality and overburdened and underfunded local governance. They do work politically in as much as they shape which futures are thinkable and which are not.

We contend that anti-transformation is both an empirical phenomenon observable in contemporary local politics and an analytical lens for examining how socio-ecological transformation policies become contested, redirected, or delayed through procedural practices of everyday local governance. In this sense, it is not simply a specific mechanism of opposition to transformation but foregrounds the specific ways through which such opposition becomes politically effective: through institutional timing, administrative reasoning, scalar tensions, and the ordinary procedures of municipal decision-making. Anti-transformation, as we propose it here, offers a way to understand how resistance to ecological change is embedded in the logics of local governance. We explore these logics in the following section with some empirical illustrations from the town of Zeitz, located in the Central German mining district.

The town of Zeitz, located in southern Saxony–Anhalt, lies at the heart of the Central German lignite-mining district. Like many medium-sized towns in East Germany, Zeitz has undergone profound demographic, economic, and political change since the early 1990s (Görmar and Kinossian, 2022). Following the closure of large industrial plants and the decline in mining-related employment, the city has faced long-term population loss, fiscal constraints, and infrastructural decay. The current phase of transformation is shaped by the federal decision to phase out the combustion and thereby mining of lignite, by the regional development programmes associated with the Just Transition agendas of the German state, and by the European Union (Everts and Pampus, 2025).

Since 2020, Zeitz has been awarded a number of projects funded by the federal government and the EU and related to just and sustainable transitions. Many of these projects face increasing local hostility. Our example for the following is the federal funding programme “Municipal Model Projects for Implementing Ecological Sustainability Goals in Structural Change Regions” (Kommunale Modellvorhaben zur Umsetzung der ökologischen Nachhaltigkeitsziele in Strukturwandelregionen, KoMoNa). The programme is financed at the federal level by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV; today the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, BMUKN). It is administered through the federal project agency ZUG and is implemented by municipal administrations within the broader governance framework of the respective coal transition regions. It supports local projects but requires municipal co-financing and post-funding maintenance. Within this context, the city administration of Zeitz initiated the development of a municipal sustainability strategy, which aims to integrate ecological, social, and economic goals into local governance and to promote participatory forms of planning.

The first successful funding period included small-scale, symbolically charged projects such as the creation of tiny forests, orchard meadows, and a health-themed walking trail. While modest in scope, these projects have, on the one hand, fallen on fertile ground, with many people participating in local events. On the other hand, they sparked some public debate within Zeitz, particularly during city council meetings. Like with other projects of this kind, discussions revolve around issues of responsibility, cost, and implementation priorities, revealing broader tensions over the meaning and ownership of “sustainability” in the local context of structural change.

Recent electoral results point to the politically charged environment in which these debates unfold. Support for the far-right party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) has risen across Germany; it is even more pronounced in the state of Saxony–Anhalt. Results from the 2025 federal election show strong support for the AfD across Saxony–Anhalt, with nearly 39 % at state level; more than 44 % in its most southern county, Burgenlandkreis; and nearly 46 % in the town of Zeitz, located in the far south of that county (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2025; Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt, 2025). Established democratic parties operate under conditions of organizational strain, shaped by long-term membership decline and comparatively weak recruitment capacities in East Germany (Niedermayer, 2024). Against this backdrop, the local controversies around Zeitz' sustainability strategy can be read not merely as disputes within local administration but as expressions of deeper conflicts over participation, recognition, and the perceived legitimacy of socio-ecological transformations in post-industrial regions.

In 2024, the Zeitz city council debated a proposal to implement a second package of measures funded by the aforementioned programme in order to implement sustainability goals on the local level. Despite having passed through the necessary committees and having received approval through the main funding agency, the project faced strong pushback in the final municipal council meeting, which has the last word on publicly funded projects on the municipal level in Germany. Council members questioned the programme's relevance, feasibility, and future costs. Some argued that the town had more pressing needs, such as broken sidewalks, unkempt parks, and a lack of resources. Others doubted that “the citizens” wanted such projects at all. In the end, the strategy passed narrowly. However, months later, the local administration of Zeitz was forced to return 1 million euros in funding after failing to provide the required co-financing (usually 10 % of the full sum), leading to the cancellation of the whole project, a decision approved by the main committee (Andräs, 2025).

What is notable is not just the resistance to the local sustainability project, largely financed by the federal government, but the form resistance took. In the process, socio-ecological transformation was not opposed as such. Rather, it was recoded into ostensibly non-political concerns: who will maintain the trees after the funding ends? How does this serve our elderly population? Why prioritize new projects over existing problems? These questions reflect valid concerns, but we argue that they also served as strategic devices to displace the normative claims of transformation. The Zeitz sustainability debate serves as an example of how anti-transformation takes shape through the ordinary practices of municipal governance. While this intervention focuses on Zeitz, it is through our long-term ethnographic engagement with municipalities across the Central German mining district since 2020.

In the following, we present a more detailed account of how anti-transformation is articulated through discursive and procedural strategies. We are drawing on publicly accessible materials such as video recordings and minutes of city council and committee meetings, as well as local media coverage. Selected debates were transcribed and analysed through a process of close reading and thick description. In the following empirical examples, we aim to trace how anti-transformation is practised through language, administrative procedures, and spatial claims concerning the distribution of resources and representation between urban and rural parts of the municipality. We paid particular attention to the how, where, and when of political speech and not merely the what in order to identify the subtle shifts, procedural manoeuvres, and tones through which anti-transformation logics become naturalized.

June 2024, Hauptausschuss

The Hauptausschuss functions as the main executive and coordinating committee of the city council. It prepares major policy decisions, advises the mayor, and may take binding decisions on behalf of the council in delegated matters.

A council member opens with a pointed question:

We want more greenery in the city centre. I do not understand where. Are we going to tear down any buildings?

Another raises the issue of maintenance:

Our paths are dilapidated. Why should we build new ones?

Who will take care of the trees later? When the project is over, it will be left to us.

The mood shifts towards opposition cloaked in fiscal caution:

It is not about whether it is a nice idea – we simply do not have the money for something like this.

The debate also reveals tensions around representation and resource allocation within the municipality. A representative of a peripheral district makes the following complaint:

I just have to emphasize this: what you have shown us now was 99 % city centre. You have completely left out the surrounding neighbourhoods and villages again.

After all, a fifth of the population of Zeitz comes from the surrounding villages – measures need to be taken there too.

Project staff try to clarify:

If there were projects in the other neighbourhoods that fit into the programme and where we really felt that it was a viable idea and that there were people who would take care of it, such as in your case in Theißen, then it was included.

But the scepticism remains. Another voice is heard from the council:

We talk a lot, we have many concepts, but nothing happens in practice.

And again, there is the central refrain:

In the end, the city [council and administration] will be the one who gets stuck with it.

None of these objections challenged the goals of sustainability directly. Instead, they accumulated around questions of maintenance, responsibility, and local priorities. Individually, each intervention appeared to be reasonable. Collectively, however, they transformed the terms of the debate. In anti-political fashion, normative disagreements over socio-ecological futures were translated into apparently technical questions of upkeep, responsibility, and institutional capacity. The political force of these interventions derived precisely from their appearance as pragmatic administrative concerns rather than ideological opposition.

The debate in Zeitz illustrates that conflicts over socio-ecological transformation are not simply conflicts over environmental policy. Rather, they concern questions of political authority, representation, and responsibility within municipal governance. While sustainability projects were formally justified through national transformation agendas and federal funding programmes, their local legitimacy became contested through claims about maintenance obligations, distributive fairness, and democratic accountability. Our observations in Zeitz show how anti-transformation operates through forms of justification that appear to be responsible, necessary, and institutionally grounded. The Zeitz debate suggests that administrative reasoning should not simply be understood as evidence of post-political or anti-political governance. Rather, it demonstrates how politics is enacted through administrative procedures themselves. In this sense, managerial justifications did not depoliticize conflict but became resources in a broader struggle over political authority, democratic representation, and the appropriate scale of decision-making. The political force of anti-transformation resides less in the content of particular arguments than in the procedural conditions through which otherwise legitimate administrative concerns acquire authority and become politically effective. Crucially, these objections were raised in a formal council setting governed by procedural speaking rules, where project staff and administrative actors who had previously addressed these concerns were not able to respond on equal terms as they were not granted the right to speak. Under these procedural conditions, arguments that had previously been addressed in earlier planning and consultation processes re-entered the debate with renewed political force. Because opportunities for immediate rebuttal were limited, elected representatives were able to reframe the discussion around maintenance, responsibility, and local priorities at a decisive moment in the decision-making process.

Another important dimension of the Zeitz case concerned questions of representation and perceived fairness. Representatives from outlying districts of the town criticized the strategy for privileging the urban core: “We in the villages are being forgotten again,” one council member claimed. While inaccurate, as several measures did target outer districts, the claim resonated because it mobilized an established narrative of spatial injustice, in which transformation became a zero-sum decision between urban greening vs. rural neglect. In this way, the debate shifted from questions of ecological necessity to questions of distributive legitimacy. The example illustrates how locally embedded experiences, expectations, and historical grievances shape how transformation policies are received and evaluated. Rather than serving merely as the implementation level of national programmes, municipal arenas become sites where the meaning and legitimacy of transformation are actively negotiated.

The municipal administration in Zeitz found itself in a contradictory position. On the one hand, it was tasked with delivering transformative policies, mainly designed and funded by the federal state. On the other, it was blamed for both overreach and inaction. Some accused the administration of pushing projects “over the heads” of residents. Others lamented its failure to address existing problems. This ambivalence reflects a broader structural tension: local administrations are increasingly expected to act as engines of transformation while operating under austerity conditions and fragmented competencies. In that sense, bureaucratic routines, scalar mismatches, and resource constraints decisively shape the local politics of transformation. The ambivalence of the local state is not a bug but a feature of contemporary governance. While the Zeitz case offers a situated example, we believe its dynamics are indicative of broader patterns in local transformation governance.

What happens when socio-ecological transformation is politically endorsed, financially supported, and publicly framed as necessary and yet its local projects fail to materialize? If local resistance is primarily articulated not through open denial or ideological rejection but through procedural interventions that appear to be reasonable and responsible, how should such dynamics be conceptualized? The Zeitz example indicates that transformation may be reshaped, delayed, or blocked not through open opposition but through the strategic mobilization of legitimate concerns at decisive institutional moments. The political effect lies less in what is said than in when and where the objections are articulated. In this sense, anti-transformation emerges through the strategic mobilization of procedural opportunities, responsibilities, temporalities, and institutional authority within local governance.

Since socio-ecological transformation unfolds through multi-level governance including municipal decision-making, the everyday practices of committees, city councils, and local administrations are crucial arenas of political struggle. In which ways are transformation projects slowed or redirected not by outright rejection but by procedural re-staging of already negotiated concerns? How do temporal conflicts between the urgency of transformation agendas and the anticipated long-term obligations of maintenance shape political outcomes? And how does the ambivalent position of the local state enable both transformation and its obstruction?

The perspective of anti-transformation proposed here draws attention to how socio-ecological transformation is contested through procedural and administrative forms at the local level. This calls for closer empirical attention to the local institutional settings in which transformation is debated, delayed, and sometimes undone. By examining the micro-politics of decision-making – its terminology, institutional framing, and procedural conditions – we can contribute to a more precise understanding of how socio-ecological change is contested in practice. Anti-transformation therefore shifts our analytical attention to the everyday political practices through which the legitimacy, scale, and direction of transformation are negotiated. The Zeitz case demonstrates that socio-ecological transformation is contested not only through competing visions of the future but also through struggles over who has the authority to define local priorities, evaluate expert knowledge, and make binding decisions. The fate of transformation may thus be shaped not only in national political conflicts but also in the ordinary procedures, temporalities, and institutional settings of municipal administration.