Summitry, the official meeting process of political leaders at the highest possible diplomatic level, is increasingly a focus of scholarship in global environmental politics.1,2 This forum argues that counter-summits, which occur alongside official summits, are equally important arenas of global environmental politics.3 In these spaces strategic meetings between social movement leaders occur, grassroots alternatives are advocated, and theatrical resistance is deployed.
Counter-summits have become a nearly ubiquitous feature of contemporary grassroots politics.4 Environmental subjectivities in these fora are strengthened through practices that I term counter-summitry.5 In explicating this concept, the forum focuses on Brazil’s 2012 People’s Summit, which arose in counterpoint to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20. Two recent Global Environmental Politics forums have placed Rio+20 within the global political system, analyzing the conditions that resulted in low expectations for the event and the conference’s subtle effects on the...