Disorderly Deliberation? Generative Dynamics of Global Climate Justice

James Goodman

doi:10.5130/portal.v8i3.1756

Abstract

Theorisations of global governance invariably conceive of it as bringing order to disorder, whether by increasing the ‘density’ of interstate society, or by expressing the leverage of global civil society. This paper seeks to invert the frame, and to take seriously the active disordering of governance, as a generative challenge, that creates new justice claims, and opens-up new fields of public deliberation. Global climate governance is a particularly powerful context in which to track these dynamics. Climate change imposes its own pace of policy reform, forcing new imperatives; it also imposes its own remarkable scope, in terms of global reach and all-encompassing depth. The paper seeks-out generative disjunctures, where existing justice principles that underpin climate governance are challenged, disestablished, and reordered. The paper explores these themes as a way of mapping contending and conflicting trajectories in the development of climate justice as a principle of governance. The disordering effects of climate governance, the social and political forces that arise out of them and their roles in producing contender principles and practices are highlighted. We may then arrive at a conceptualization of climate governance as a necessarily disorderly process, which addresses cumulative and unanticipated challenges of climate change through successive reorientations in its modus operandi. As such, climate governance may be enabled to proceed through and beyond immediate accommodations, to offer new possibilities grounded in new rules of the game that widen realms of engagement and more effectively apprehend the challenges posed.

Highlights

Associated implications for justice, these principles must be subject to disordering challenges, and to reordering
There, the confrontation between communism and capitalism was a systemic confrontation, reflecting global-scale social contradictions, which posed the possibility of planetary annihilation, in this case through a ‘nuclear winter.’
There is no negotiating with climate change: there is no ‘hot line’ to manage eco-social relations

Summary

Disorderly Deliberation?

Associated implications for justice, these principles must be subject to disordering challenges, and to reordering. In a development not unlike the linkage between global justice protesters and Southern states at the Seattle WTO in 1999, Southern states blocked Northern efforts to dissolve the UNFCCC model of climate justice and staged a walk-out, with many official representations joining unofficial protesters on the ‘outside.’ But perhaps more important for the long-term development of climate justice principles, inside the negotiating hall some 100 states joined with the Alliance of Small Island States in calling for emissions reductions that would prevent average temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, breaking with the prevailing consensus that a rise of 2 degrees was acceptable, despite its impacts With these developments we have seen the centre of gravity for unofficial climate governance passing from a transnational climate advocacy network focused on the interstate process (expressed in the international Climate Action Network), to a heterogeneous climate justice movement that challenges climate governance through a transnational collective consciousness and capacity to mobilize (see Keck & Sikkink 1998).

Conclusions

Findings

Reference List