Climate crisis as a business opportunity: Using degrowth to defamiliarize place branding for sustainability

Place branders express a desire for their work to aid in addressing crises such as climate change through sustainable developments that assist with brand positioning, yet little is known about how place branding professionals manage tensions and contradictions that arise between sustainability and investment development. This paper qualitatively explores how place branders talk about ecological sustainability at a place branding conference. We pose the research question, how do place branders communicatively construct the meaning of place branding for sustainability? Our key finding is that place branders reframe ecological crises as an “exclusive” business and brand-building opportunity. Rather than viewing this as “business as usual,” we use defamiliarization as a method of disrupting common sense and presenting the familiar as “strange,” and we employ degrowth ideas as a tool for doing so. We show how place branding for sustainability is constructed as a matter of making a place attractive to businesses that can generate green growth, and how this is done by suppressing aspects that challenge this view. In doing this, we provide a deeper insight into how certain, pro-growth-oriented sustainability practices are communicatively maintained, and into the struggles branders face when tasked with place branding for sustainability.