Climate Justice Movement Research Articles

Just Transition at the Intersection of Labour and Climate Justice Movements: Lessons from the Portuguese Climate Jobs Campaign

In the current context of climate change and its accompanying adverse effects on natural, human and social systems, the imperative of transitioning to low- and preferably post-carbon societies has become a non-negotiable reality if we want to avoid reaching the point of no return in terms of environmental and climate catastrophe. Such a transition requires that the interests and needs of workers and their communities be taken into consideration to make sure they do not bear the heaviest part of the burden in terms of loss of jobs and means of survival, and that they are prepared to face the new, post-carbon labour environment. The concept of Just Transition was coined to describe both the socio-political project put forward by trade unions in response to climate change, and the recognition by climate activists that the livelihoods and security of workers and their communities must be ensured during the transition to a post-carbon society. However, just transition movements are divided between two quite different orientations, which are labelled “affirmative” and “transformative.” On the one hand, affirmative just transition advocates envisage a transition within the current political-economic system. Transformative just transition activists, on the other hand, envisage a post-capitalist transition. This article, drawing upon an extensive case study of the Portuguese climate jobs campaign, goes beyond showing how these orientations shape the positions taken by union and climate activists. The article also analyses how the conflicts and cooperation between these key actors can shed light on the possibilities and/or limitations of just transition as a framework for the collective action needed to achieve rapid, deep decarbonisation of economies in the Global North context.
 KEY WORDS: climate change; just transition; labour environmentalism; climate jobs; climate justice; climate activism

Climate Justice and Sustained Transnational Mobilization

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. This essay provides evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements on the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change create an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization to confront neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models essential to building an enduring international organization representing subaltern groups.

Climate justice and sustained transnational mobilization

ABSTRACTSamir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. Here I review evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements germane for understanding the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change have created an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization for confronting neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models for building an enduring international organization that will represent subaltern groups and have a substantial impact on world politics.

Stratospheric imperialism: Liberalism, (eco)modernization, and ideologies of solar geoengineering research

Once a fringe notion, solar geoengineering via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is gaining traction as a climate management tactic within mainstream institutions and factions of the climate justice movement. Cautious considerations of SAI are driven by the layered realities of climate urgency, political inaction, and the potential for climate impacts to harm the most vulnerable. This narrative is difficult to dispute, yet it originates from leading centers of SAI research—particularly the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP)—that construct the “necessity” of research, experimentation, and potential deployment under ideological pretenses aimed at maintaining the hegemony of liberal-capitalism. Hence, advanced under the auspices of HSGRP, SAI would constitute a form of imperialism rather than a tool for climate justice. I link SAI to theories of capitalist imperialism, and situate HSGRP within Harvard’s legacy shaping U.S. imperialism and position as a nodal point of liberal-capitalist power. In this context, I identify three dominant ideologies undergirding SAI research at Harvard—ecomodernism, Realist International Relations theory, and Keynesianism—that construct a specific narrative whereby established climate solutions (liberal-capitalist ecomodernism) are frustrated by “anarchical” international politics, leaving the poor vulnerable to near-term climate impacts. SAI is thus positioned as a mechanism capable of buying time for market-driven policy and reducing near-term climate risk. HSGRP directly counter poses this approach to radical elements of the climate justice movement that address capitalism as the root cause of both climate change and global poverty.

Climate Justice Movement Building: Values and Cultures of Creation in Santa Barbara, California

This article analyzes how young people in the climate justice movement cultivate a prefigurative culture centered on justice as a response to the threat of climate change. Employing grounded theory and drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 29 youth activists and participant observation in Santa Barbara County, California, the birthplace of both the environmental movement and offshore oil drilling, I argue that four key values—relationships, accessibility, intersectionality, and community—enable movement building, a stated goal of the climate justice movement. These values emerge from interviewees’ words and practices. Drawing on John Foran’s (2014) notion of political cultures of creation, I conceptualize these values and the practices that embody them as constituting a “climate justice culture of creation” that shapes and is shaped by ideas, experiences, social relations, and the reality of a changing atmosphere. These values, and movement building, are about creating alternative futures—cultures that are not dependent on inequality and fossil fuels.

Civil Anarchizing for the Common Good: Culturally Patterned Politics of Legitimacy in the Climate Justice Movement

This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelande (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of “civil anarchizing” (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in relation to both external and internal stakeholders. This CA style was also accompanied by a more individual-centered style that we call personalized politics. We compare both styles and describe the tensions that result from their co-occurrence. In addition, we argue that the CA style might be more viable for politicization due to its emphasis on a collective strategy. Finally, we describe how this CA style shaped the participants’ politics of legitimacy by functioning as a negotiated hybrid of civil and uncivil expectations.

The climate justice movement, trade unions and the working class

22 | International Union Rights | 26/4 FOCUS | CLIMATE CHANGE & TRADE UNIONS Climate change is a public health issue and workers’ rights issue The past three decades are characterised by an unprecedented rise in CO2 emissions as well as the gradual development of a global movement against climate change, which routinely surfaces in the runup to the ‘COP’ conferences.1 As the global community is still far off fulfilling the targets of the 2016 Paris Agreement, new kinds of environmental and climate movements, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, have emerged, using the slogan of ‘climate justice’. Recent school student strikes and large-scale climate change demonstrations are an expression of a deep feeling that large numbers of people in the Global North want to do something about climate change. Many of them are engaging in political action for the first time and understandably look towards the existing structures of climate activism in order to articulate their hopes. Yet, the there are numerous issues that limit the ability of the climate movement to involve a broader spectrum of workers and trade unionists in their movement. Many of these are related to the organising tactics but there are also wider politics at play… The ‘NGO-ization’ of climate politics Since the late 1990s mainstream NGOs have been mobilising their members and subscribers onto the streets before major summits of the G8, World Trade Organisation and the COP talks. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, NGOs took the global stage with a massive presence. Since the mid-1990s, many multinational companies also run their own company-internal environmental campaigns and set their own environmental goals. It has become attractive to sign up to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as environmental and social governance features higher on the agendas of institutional investors. From the Rio Earth Summit onwards, larger NGOs have suceeded in getting a ‘seat at the table’ on policy processes concerning the environment and climate change. Unlike trade unions that are financed by their membership dues, many NGOs are however structured like private business enterprises without any democratic leadership and are dependent either on government funding or large private donations (or both). Thus, they must always be able to showcase their successes and keep their donors satisfied. That offers one possible explanation as to why some NGOs have keenly promoted market-based mechanisms and technological ‘fixes’ currently being promoted by transnational corporations. Such NGOs may argue that without their involvement the climate would be in a far worse situation, but in doing so, they also seek to legitimise their participation in a highly ecologically ineffectual process. A group of critical NGOs formed a loose network under the banner of ‘Climate Justice Now’ when the COP13 in Bali failed in 2007. This network laid the basis for global justice activists and radical environmentalists to come together at the 2009 World Social Forum in Bélém to draft the Declaration for Climate Justice. This enabled various wings of the climate movement to mobilise huge numbers of people into campaigning, protesting, and letter writing. The subsequent 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was a turning point: it did succeed in building a strong foundation for a broad movement with a minimal consensus around the ubiquitous slogan of ‘climate justice’, which continues to inspire today’s school strikers. Nonetheless, the COP15 ended with no binding targets. The breakdown of the COP15 talks made it clear that lobbying and expert work had become obsolete. NGOs were no longer exerting the same influence as they had done for the previous fifteen years. Meanwhile, the radical wing of the climate movement spearheaded by ‘Reclaim Power’ was not able to delegitimise the UNFCCC process as they had hoped for. One possible explanation for this was the absence of trade unions and organised labour from their mobilisations. Indeed, trade unions have not yet realised their potential in exposing companies’ green-washing strategies and regulating capital through their collective agreements from below. Such approaches are more necessary than ever, as it is unlikely that the climate crisis will be solved through the free market. Even to this day policymakers and world leaders are hesitant to use the state to drive through...

The climate justice movement, trade unions and the working class

The climate justice movement, trade unions and the working class

Petro-hegemony and the matrix of resistance: What can Standing Rock’s Water Protectors teach us about organizing for climate justice in the United States?

ABSTRACT This article asks what scholars of climate justice politics and activists in the climate justice movement can learn from the Standing Rock Sioux’s fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota. It reviews Patricia Hill Collins’ insights on intersectionality and the matrix of domination and suggests that the matrix of domination for which fossil fuel companies are responsible establishes the conditions for the possible emergence of what I call a matrix of resistance, rooted in intersectionality, collective liberation, and negotiating tensions between universalism and particularism. I go on to demonstrate how Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has been applied to understanding the fossil fuel industry’s power. Rereading Gramsci, I suggest that hegemony must combine three relations of power: consent, compliance, and coercion. Applying this to the fossil fuel industry, I introduce the term petro-hegemony. Drawing on preliminary field research, I show how petro-hegemony revealed itself during the struggle against the DAPL and argue that the Indigenous-led uprising provides clues into how the construction of a matrix of resistance might be used to strategically counter petro-hegemony.

Resilient retfærdighed?

This article uses the idea of resilience as a point of departure for analysing some contemporary challenges to the climate justice movement posed by social-ecological sciences. Climate justice activists are increasingly rallying for a system-change, demanding fundamental changes to political bureaucracy and the economy, which would put ecology, biodiversity and climate change first for all future political decisions. Since the concept of resilience has taken up a central role in recent developments in ecological sciences, it has also become part of the activist debate. The article’s main argument is that the scientific framework behind resilience is not politically neutral and that this framework tends to weaken the activist’s demands for a just transition and place more emphasis on technical and bureaucratic processes.

Polycentric struggles: The experience of the global climate justice movement

AbstractWhat is the relationship between social movements and polycentric governance? The concept of polycentricity has been at the center of recent debates in environmental governance. While most of this work has analyzed polycentric arrangements in relation to collaborative and adaptive governance, some have recently focused on how political conflicts shape these arrangements. In this paper we build on this work through Luther Gerlach's forgotten framework of polycentric social movements to undertake the task of politicizing polycentricity. This task entails expanding the analytical focus of institutional analyses of polycentricity and examining the social group politics of social movements. To this end, we present a case study of the climate justice movement and its relation to climate change governance. We analyze whether and to what extent the movement has embodied polycentric arrangements throughout its history, and to what effects. We show that show that, in seeking to address the multiscalar nature of environmental problems and the limits of existing institutional arrangements, climate justice groups are increasingly organized in a polycentric fashion. Climate justice groups mobilize multiple strands of environmental justice movements from the global North and South, as well as from indigenous and peasant rights movements, and it is organized as a decentralized network of semiautonomous, coordinated units. We find that this strategy generates new opportunities and challenges for the movement, and thus has important implications for its effectiveness in achieving these transformations. Lastly, we find that through these polycentric arrangements, movements such as that for climate justice are able to exert simultaneous influence on multiple sites of environmental governance, from the local to the global, furthering increased polycentricity in formal institutional arrangements.

Conceptualizing Learning in the Climate Justice Movement

This article extends Scandrett et al.’s conceptual framework for social movement learning to understand learning and knowledge creation in the climate justice movement. Drawing on radical pluralist theoretical approaches to social movement learning, learning in the climate justice movement is conceptualized at the micro, meso, and macro levels, along two continua of (a) unorganized and organized learning and (b) individual and collective learning. Two critical themes of learning about power and learning about place are used as examples to illustrate learning across the three levels. Article conclusions discuss strengths and limitations of the conceptual framework and directions for further research to better understand adult learning within the climate justice movement.

Reflections on Paris: Thoughts Towards a Critical Approach to Climate Law

This article critically evaluates the 2015 Paris Agreement, highlighting the almost dichotomous responses it received from the mainstream press as compared to the climate justice movement. This article foregrounds that divide in order to ask further questions of the Agreement and the international climate regime, including questions about what voices and perspectives are heard in scholarship on international climate law. The article suggests the need to engage with international climate law in ways that are attentive to the productive effects of international agreements, as well as the need to examine their distributional effects, to interrogate what new social relations they establish and stabilize as well as how power and authority might be reorganized or rearranged by practices authorized by international environmental law.

Decolonizing the Atmosphere: The Climate Justice Movement on Climate Debt

A central concept raised by the climate justice movement is climate debt. Here, the claims and warrants of the movement support for climate debt is identified through an argumentation analysis of their central manifestos. It is found that the climate debt claim is understood as primarily restorative, in the sense that the environmental space of the developing countries must be returned, “decolonized.” The damage caused by climate change also gives rise to a compensatory adaptation debt. The result is compared with an earlier study on ecological debt. Both concepts are framed within an unjust power relation between North and South, but there are differences. Ecological debt is mainly analyzed in terms of an unjust economic exploitation, which is congenial with its use as an argument for cancellation of Southern external debts; climate debt is rather seen as a violation of communal rights and territories, an argument for climate justice.

Für einen labour turn in der Umweltbewegung

Oliver Pye: For a labour turn in the environmental justice movement. Struggles over the social relations of nature and strategies for social-ecological transformation. This article discusses struggles in the social relations of nature and how these relate to strategies of socialecological transformation and calls for a labour turn in the environmental and climate justice movement. Taking the rapid changes to the social-ecological landscape of the Kapuas River in Indonesia as a starting point, it shows how this “accumulation by dispossession” is connected to a “corporate food regime” that is embedded within global “postfordist relations of nature”. I then argue that the global production networks linking appropriation to exploitation should themselves be viewed as alienated steps in the social metabolism with nature. Struggles against accumulation by dispossession need to connect to the labour movement, which holds the key to overcome the alienated work that lies at the heart of society’s alienation with nature.

Introduction: critical development studies—critique and radical praxis

Introduction: critical development studies—critique and radical praxis

Way Beyond the Lifeboat: An Indigenous Allegory of Climate Justice

In my experiences, most Indigenous peoples have complicated stories to tell about anthropogenic climate change that often start with their being harmed by fossil fuel industries. The stories continue on to discuss how current laws and policies render them more vulnerable to climate change impacts. Climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is insidious, as it involves years of coupled colonial and capitalist domination. Is there a succinct way to convey an Indigenous perspective on climate justice that makes the connections between capitalism and industrialization and colonialism? This short essay uses a story of vessels, in allegorical form, to describe the complexity of Indigenous climate justice. The allegory seeks to convey how in the absence of a concern for addressing colonialism, climate justice advocates do not really propose solutions to climate change that are that much better for Indigenous well-being than the proposed inaction of even the most strident climate change deniers. Decolonization and anti-colonialism, understood in senses appropriate to the allegory, cannot be disaggregated from climate justice for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous climate justice movements are distinct in their putting the nexus of colonialism, capitalism and industrialization at the vanguard of their aspirations.

Building a Climate Movement Through Relational Organizing

Community organizing is a process for achieving social change through the mobilization of resources and the formation of collective identity. Relational community organizing is a particular approach to developing new leaders and building organizational capacity for sustaining a powerful movement, and is especially relevant in the climate justice movement because relationships serve to bring actors from isolation and despair toward communal identity and hopeful action. Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light (MNIPL) is a community organization that is using relational organizing to activate faith communities to take action on climate change. This paper describes the design and first phase of evaluation of MNIPL’s Movement Builder Program, a networked distributed leadership model that uses peer mentors to increase the efficacy of new organizers. Can a peer-to-peer network increase the leverage of organizers? Will supportive relationships move people to increased action and to develop the leadership of others? We provide an introduction to this inquiry as well as the foundational frameworks and historical context of this new approach.

A Climate for Justice? Faith-based Advocacy on Climate Change at the United Nations

Climate justice is an important issue for civil society advocacy at the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the climate justice movement has received increasing scholarly attention, the contribution of faith-based actors (FBAs) to justice debates at the UNFCCC has been largely overlooked. This article examines the contribution of FBAs to the debate on climate justice and their relation to and difference from the climate justice movement. Based on a constructivist assumption that the meaning of climate change can be interpreted differently, this article understands action on climate change as an effect of its discursive construction. This article argues that FBAs are part of these discourses and that their religious and spiritual practices are constituted and constitutive of climate justice practices. Therefore, the aim of this article is to understand FBAs’ climate justice practices and critically reflect on their contribution to global climate change politics.

Is it Colonial DDJJ Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice

Indigenous peoples are among the most audible voices in the global climate justice movement. Yet, as I will show in this chapter, climate injustice is a recent episode of a cyclical history of colonialism inflicting anthropogenic (human-caused) environmental change on Indigenous peoples (Wildcat). Indigenous peoples face climate risks largely because of how colonialism, in conjunction with capitalist economics, shapes the geographic spaces they live in and their socio-economic conditions. In the North American settler colonial context, which I focus on in this chapter, U.S. settler colonial laws, policies and programs are ‘both’ a significant factor in opening up Indigenous territories for carbon-intensive economic activities and, at the same time, a significant factor in why Indigenous peoples face heightened climate risks. Climate injustice, for Indigenous peoples, is less about the spectre of a new future and more like the experience of deja vu.