Anti-transformation: the political geography of local resistance to transformation projects in East Germany

In current debates about socio-ecological transformations in Germany, local resistance to transformation projects is frequently interpreted as a problem of acceptance or as an expression of “transformation fatigue”. Such framings treat resistance primarily as an attitudinal or communicative deficit. This intervention offers a different reading by illustrating how socio-ecological transformation is contested within the administrative practices of local governance. Drawing on selective ethnographic insights from the East German town of Zeitz, we examine local conflicts around a federally funded municipal sustainability programme implemented in the context of the coal phase-out and structural change policies. Rather than appearing as open ideological rejection, resistance emerges through procedural interventions framed in terms of administrative responsibility, feasibility, and fiscal constraints. We conceptualize these dynamics as anti-transformation: a mode of contestation that emerges when current socio-ecological transformation agendas become subject to municipal democratic decision-making. In this context, legitimate concerns acquire political force through their articulation at decisive institutional moments. Rather than treating such interventions as examples of post-political or anti-political governance, we argue that they reveal how politics is enacted through administrative procedures themselves. Transformation is therefore not simply implemented or resisted at the municipal level; it is negotiated, redirected, delayed, and sometimes undone through the ordinary practices of local governance. Our intervention concludes by proposing anti-transformation as an analytical perspective and a research agenda for political geography, calling for closer empirical attention to the procedural organization of decision-making in socio-ecological transformation projects.