The Respectable Politics of Climate Change: The Epistemic Communities and NGOs

Climate change is unusual compared with most environmental issues in the extent to which it has become accepted among orthodox policy institutions and public-and private-sector organizations. The authors explore the conditions that have led to the establishment of an epistemic community that brings together a broad array of actors, including the various NGOs, and the operational dimensions that define the participation of NGOs within the community. An epistemic community does not imply conformity of opinion or approach but allows for differentiation in terms of how its members construct the problem, and their objectives, core beliefs and favoured responses to climate change. Three broad styles of engagement through which NGOs contribute to this debate are identified: developing creative policy solutions, knowledge construction, and lobbying or campaigning. It should be noted that the authors refer primarily to development or environmental NGOs (ENGOs), though they do discuss business NGOs at a few points.     

Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east England

Abstract:  In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.     

The Economics and Politics of Agricultural Trade Liberalization

Fred Sanderson, (Ed.), Agricultural Protectionism in the Industrialized World.
Theodore Cohn, The International Politics of Agricultural Trade.     

The Anti‐Politics of Climate Finance: The Creation and Performativity of the Green Climate Fund

This paper is an empirical case study of the institutional design process of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from December 2011 to May 2014. Powerful countries, corporations and banks have favoured a deepening of neoliberal environmental governance, while civil society actors have argued over retaining movement concepts, won small representational victories, while participating in a process that has subjected them to a deepened practise of advanced liberal governance. The process has thus far produced “non‐outcomes” that fail to meet hopes that the GCF could provide a significant scaling up and paradigm shift in global climate finance. However, civil society engagement appears to be, somewhat inadvertently, exposing the “overflows”, limits and contradictions inherent in advanced liberal governance. The impasse created has prompted alternative governmentalities to emerge, not least of spectacle and (non‐)performativity, which may be generating an anti‐politics in environmental governance.     

The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Development,Tribal Identity Politics and Distributive Justice in India's Jharkhand

This article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.     

The Politics of Carbon Market Design: Rethinking the Techno‐politics and Post‐politics of Climate Change

Carbon markets have provided fertile ground for research on the changing nature of political contestation. MacKenzie locates a “techno‐politics” of carbon markets that creates new possibilities for a “politics of market design”. In contrast, Swyngedouw argues carbon markets are part of a “post‐political” shift that narrows potential pathways through “depoliticisation”. This article engages with these debates by examining three recent attempts to reform the ailing European Union Emissions Trading System: restricting industrial gas offsets, backloading allowance auctions and the 2030 climate and energy package. It conceptualises the respective episodes as contests over the reach, force and priority of value determinations in climate policy, emphasising the contradictory imperatives facing states on each issue. The outcomes of contestation between industry groups and environmental organisations—real but limited reforms and a consolidation of the carbon market over alternatives—demonstrate the constraints facing technocratic campaigning and the ongoing politicisation of climate change.     

Climate,History, and Culture: The Power of Change

Global climate change and its consequences for humankind opens up a research field for exploring the diverse dimensions and forces of change through time. Chief among the objects of inquiry is how climatic shifts impact on ecological and social structures and developments and what human agencies are able to unfold under given conditions. Conclusions from such reciprocities can help to deliver a differentiated approach to the inroads of anthropogenic climate change. Central to this enterprise are such analytic perspectives as the discipline of anthropology can bring to researching the impact of climate change on human societies.     

Environmentalists,Rubber Tappers and Empowerment: The Politics and Economics of Extractive Reserves

Extractive reserves are important initiatives in tropical forest zones which seek to integrate conservation of natural resources with development and human welfare objectives. Increasingly in such initiatives empowerment of local communities is seen as both a means of achieving this integration and as an end in itself. This article presents a theoretically informed analysis of the interactions between rubber tappers and environmental organizations in the establishment and implementation of extractive reserves in Rond? nia, Brazil. It distinguishes two dimensions of empowerment — political and economic — and examines how the alliances between organizations have impacted differentially on the two dimensions. The analysis suggests that these alliances have so far been more successful in enabling political rather than economic empowerment. Advances in political empowerment are shown, in the short‐term at least, not to have resulted in improvements in livelihood conditions of poor forest dwellers.     

Ann-Cathrin Jarl,In Justice: Women and Global Economics

Abstract

The dialectical relationship between religious and political extremism is one of the most powerful forces in the history of the Christian tradition. Two specific moments have seen a combination of the political and the religious in ways that completely transformed the religion, and the contexts in which it grew and transformed: the sixteenth-century Protestant reformation and the twentieth-century women's movement in the United States were simultaneously products and producers of political theology. A focused study of these eras leads to a proposal about two of the leading figures in the movements: Martin Luther and Mary Daly are political theologians. This label allows a comparative study of the two that leads to significant conclusions for scholars of either era, and of either theologian. We find in this unlikely comparison two reformations that shape part of the tradition that they challenge.