Captured by the sun? Solarpunk, environmental, social, and governance criteria, and the pragmatics of green justification

Abstract

This article examines how sustainability is rendered publicly legitimate in the current phase of green capitalism. Rather than treating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) as mere ideology or Solarpunk as external critique, it approaches both as modalities of public testing within a shared moral field. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot's sociology of justification, it argues that ecological legitimacy today is structured by a dominant normative test embedded in ESG discourse and a subordinate yet consequential sensible test, in which sustainability must also appear credible within shared perceptual horizons. To conceptualize this second dimension, the article introduces the notion of épreuve de sensibilité : a public test of rightness operating on the affective and aesthetic plane. Through a comparative analysis of European ESG regulatory texts (2019–2025) and a multilingual corpus of Solarpunk narratives (2012–2024), it shows how ecological morality is stabilized as procedural coherence in governance and staged as perceptual consonance in cultural imaginaries