When climate justice goes wrong: Maladaptation and deep co-production in transformative environmental science and policy

Maladaptation to climate change is often portrayed as arising from the unjust exclusion of vulnerable people. In turn, analysts have proposed knowledge co-production with marginalized groups as a form of transformative climate justice. This paper argues instead that maladaptation arises from a much deeper exclusion based upon the projection of inappropriate understandings of risk and social identity that are treated as unquestioned circumstances of justice. Drawing on social studies of science, the paper argues that the focus on co-production as an intentional act of inclusion needs to be considered alongside “deep” or “reflexive” co-production, which instead refers to the non-cognitive and unavoidable simultaneous generation of knowledge and social order. These processes have linked visions of planetary justice with an understanding of climate risk based on global atmospheric change, and an assumption that community forms an antidote to individualism. The paper uses a discussion of adaptation in western Nepal to illustrate how such deep forms of co-production have significantly reduced understandings of “what” adaptation is for, and “who” is included. Maladaptation, therefore, is not simply unjust implementations of an essentially fair model of adaptation, but also the allocation of exclusionary visions of what and for whom adaptation is for. Debates about transformative climate justice therefore need to understand how their critiques of classical liberal justice generate exclusions of their own, and to engage vulnerable people in reframing, rather than just receiving, circumstances of justice. There is also a need to examine how these circumstances remain unchallenged within environmental science and policy.     

Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.     

Whiteness and Farmers Markets: Performances,Perpetuations … Contestations?

Abstract: Academics and activists highlight the potential for alternative agrifood movements to contribute to the evolving coalescence of justice and sustainability. This potential, however, is constrained by what scholars have identified as the prevalent whiteness of such movements. This paper uses ethnographic research at two northern California farmers markets to investigate how whiteness is performed and perpetuated through the movements’ discourses and practices. We found that many managers, vendors and customers hold notions of what farmers and community members should be that both reflect and inform an affluent, liberal habitus of whiteness. Although whiteness pervades these spaces, we have also witnessed individual discourses and acts of solidarity and anti‐racism, as well as fledgling institutional efforts to contest white cultural dominance. We conclude by discussing the potential of farmers markets to create an anti‐racist politics of food.     

"FIRST FEED THE FACE": ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY FOOD SECURITY

Environmental justice and community food security represent parallel though largely separate movements whose linkage would help establish a new community development, environmental, and empowerment-based discourse. Environmental justice has been limited by its risk discrimination focus, even as environmental justice organizations have shifted to a broader social justice orientation, eclipsing their earlier environmental focus. Community food security advocacy, while offering a concrete example of linked agendas and constituencies, has yet to effectively outreach to environmental justice groups. Coalition building efforts, such as the Community Food Security Empowerment Act, presents that opportunity.     

Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism,the Commons,and Solidarity

Abstract: Articulations of climate justice were central to the diverse mobilisations that opposed the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December 2009. This paper contends that articulations of climate justice pointed to the emergence of three co‐constitutive logics: antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity. Firstly, we argue that climate justice involves an antagonistic framing of climate politics that breaks with attempts to construct climate change as a “post‐political” issue. Secondly, we suggest that climate justice involves the formation of pre‐figurative political activity, expressed through acts of commoning. Thirdly, we contend that climate justice politics generates solidarities between differently located struggles and these solidarities have the potential to shift the terms of debate on climate change. Bringing these logics into conversation can develop the significance of climate justice for political practice and strategy. We conclude by considering what is at stake in different articulations of climate justice and tensions in emerging forms of climate politics.     

Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice

This article introduces a notion of socio‐ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run‐of‐river hydropower plants in Turkey. Framing this particular case as representative of a broader movement for environmental commons, and adopting an action‐theoretical perspective, it translates the emergent justice claims produced by grassroots environmental movements to the conceptual vocabulary of the theory of justice. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non‐human worlds. The notion of socio‐ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non‐human ecologies as a matter of justice.     

Towards justice in planning: A reappraisal

The concept of justice is central to a political activity such as planning. This is reflected in the initial influence of consequentialism, particularly utilitarian conceptualizations, in planning thought and more recently in the application of Rawls' notion of “justice as fairness” and Habermas' “discourse ethics”. However, contemporary normative planning theory has been vigorously criticized by studies which take as their starting point the material realities of planning practices. In this paper it is argued that notwithstanding the crucial contributions of Habermas and Rawls to political philosophy their constitutional level conceptualizations were never intended to be applied to the task of situated judgement associated with the highly contested decisions at the heart of the planning activity. Consequently, the issue for the planning community is not so much can the concepts of justice embodied in Rawls' “justice as fairness” or Habermas' “discourse ethics” be found in practice but could they ever. More generally it has been argued that the inevitable abstraction in liberal theories of justice comes so close to idealization that their ability to help individuals and societies to address the question of “what is to be done?” is seriously called in to doubt. This in turn has led to concern that an adequate account of justice should be able to link abstract principles to context sensitive judgement of particular cases. The paper explores some implications of these debates for the future development of theory and practice in planning.     

Divergent desires for the just transition in South Africa: An assemblage analysis

In this paper I establish a ‘just transition assemblage’ as a theoretical and empirical case-study to explore the plurality of justice in South Africa's energy transition. The coal phase-out is complicated by the legacies of apartheid, poverty, inequality, unemployment and structural crisis in the state-owned power utility. This transition is loaded with expectation but there is no consensus on what would qualify it as ‘just’. This assemblage analysis clusters desires around two distinct post-carbon imaginaries. The first is an ordering of desires for justice in a diffuse, distributional sense, targeting greenhouse gas emission reductions and looking to smooth the negative impacts of the transition. I label this approach ‘net justice’. This targets more justice overall in defined political spaces, and contrasts with the second orientation around recognising, reconciling, and addressing specific injustices. These desires are distinguished by a contrasting purpose of renewable energy and differing attitudes to its appropriateness or fit. There are incoherent spatial effects, where net justice is shown to be a territorialising project whilst specific injustices need to be de-territorialised. Emphasising desire shows how material and history are enrolled and enlivened, contributing to post-carbon imaginaries. This approach enables injustice and net justice to be understood as conceptually distinct, despite seeming unified calls for a just transition. The primary contribution of this paper is to show how in some cases, popular uses of the terms justice and injustice refer to different things. It forces attention on the question of: ‘justice for whom?’     

From interdisciplinary to inter‐epistemological approaches: Confronting the challenges of integrated climate change research

Spurred by the literature on climate change and its calls for undertaking holistic research that more fully integrates the work of biophysical and social scientists, this article responds to the question: To what extent has climate change research in Canada embraced and been guided by the theories and tenets associated with interdisciplinarity and to what extent have integrated approaches been sensitive to cross‐cultural perspectives? It provides an overview of some of the epistemological issues raised in the interdisciplinarity literature that particularly impact research development and design. Furthermore, since much of the climate change literature that claims to be integrated or interdisciplinary draws from Indigenous Knowledge (IK), additional insights are provided from this perspective. The article develops a framework that can be used to undertake and/or evaluate research in a way that acknowledges “upstream” epistemological issues. The framework is then used to evaluate a comprehensive database (n = 282) of Canadian climate change articles. It is argued that an interdisciplinary approach adds a critical voice to the literature on integrated climate change research and is valuable because of its focus on epistemology and methodology. The article advocates the creation of a space for inter‐epistemological acknowledgement in which the academy develops an ethos of self‐reflection, while simultaneously respecting and integrating parallel knowledge frameworks, such as IK.     

Space,Social Relations,and Contestation: Transformative Peacebuilding and World Social Forum Climate Spaces

The 2013 and 2015 World Social Forums in Tunis, Tunisia hosted thematic “climate spaces” for the first time. This article examines the extent to which these spaces are constitutive of a form of “transformative peacebuilding” aiming to transform social relations and eliminate the structural violence of the world capitalist economy. Both the theoretical and practical activities of civil society at the climate spaces are shown to be transformative but only to the extent that they contest broad processes of trasformismo which transcend differences and obscure the lived realities of governance and resistance. In this sense, civil society groups and movements at the climate spaces are shown to engage with global capitalism to potentially produce new global understanding and action. This generates new understandings of civil society as constitutive of directly resistant modes of social relation that push for radically different visions of climate justice and governance.     

Climate Leviathan

Abstract: While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well‐being and social justice. We posit a basic framework by which to understand the range of political possibilities, in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The framework also suggests some possible means through which these responses might be thwarted, and political stakes in that construction of a new hegemony—which, to avoid suggesting we know or can yet determine the form it will take, we call “climate X”.     

Agricultural Justice,Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem

A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade's longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy. Drawing on the two organizations’ experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the global North identify who counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. This debate underscores that social justice in global agriculture is fundamentally multiple—in Nancy Fraser's terms, “abnormal”. The seeming intractability of this debate shows that while the agricultural justice movement has attended to questions of economic distribution and cultural recognition, it must do more to address problems of political representation at national and international scales.     

The unequal geographies of climate finance: Climate injustice and dependency in the world system

Central to climate justice is the question of who will pay for the mitigation and adaptation efforts needed as the climate crisis worsens, particularly in countries that bear little responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions. Climate finance is a complex set of mechanisms intended to address this concern. World-systems theory has long understood international development assistance as a tool that reproduces spatial dependency between states. In this paper, we ask whether climate finance follows the expectations of world-systems theory and reproduces relationships of dependency, or if it instead advances climate justice and challenges spatial dependency in the world-system. Through this analysis, we consider the implications of climate finance for world-systems theory. We use recent empirical data to ask whether climate finance follows or challenges world-systems theory expectations, focusing on five areas: (1) spatial flows of climate finance between the core, semi-periphery, and periphery; (2) the governance of climate finance institutions; (3) the types of projects supported by climate finance; (4) the relationship of projects to dominant systems of extraction, production, and consumption; and (5) the agency of peripheral state and non-state actors in shaping climate finance in relation to their interests. Taken together, we argue that climate finance in many ways reproduces relationships of dependency, though potential avenues exist for contesting this unequal balance of power and for advocating for climate justice. This case illustrates the need to approach analyses of dependency in a nuanced way, interrogating specific processes through which dependency is produced and contested across scales.     

Blueing business as usual in the ocean: Blue economies,oil, and climate justice

Oceans are increasingly looked toward for their contribution to addressing climate change. These so-called ocean-based climate “solutions” often fall under the umbrella of the “blue economy,” a term used to refer to new ways of organizing ocean economies to provide equitable economic and environmental benefits. Yet, thus far the literature exploring blue economies and blue economy governance has largely overlooked or downplayed its equity and justice roots and implications, including how blue economies are embedded in multiple scales of environmental injustices. This is particularly important when blue economies include offshore oil production. The purpose of this paper is to both emphasize the need and provide an approach to incorporate justice and equity—specifically climate justice—into blue economy planning and scholarship. We build on conceptualizations of blue economies as assemblages to draw attention to the global reach of climate impacts associated with oil that are often overlooked or ignored at sites of production and through regional governance. We argue that greenhouse gas emissions from the life cycle of oil should be included in policies and planning (including blue economy planning) at sites of production, but that this must also incorporate underlying power structures that lead to uneven impacts and climate injustice. We look at environmental assessments as a regional governance tool that could be used to shape opportunities and openings to organize blue economies differently. To illustrate these points, we look at how environmental assessments are playing (and could play) a role in enacting and shaping Newfoundland and Labrador's blue economy.     

When all seemed lost. A social network analysis of the waste-related environmental movement in Campania,Italy

The Italian region of Campania and its capital Naples have epitomized waste management failure in Europe since 2008 when international media covered extensively the waste crisis occurring there. In response to the crisis, the Italian national government took an authoritarian turn in waste policies and criminalized citizens' grievances and mobilizations against waste-facility siting in Campania. The state authorities' intervention gained popular consent and obscured the multifaceted and unjust geographies of waste management in the region. It was a serious blow for the waste-related justice movement in Campania. However, just when waste management seemed under control the movement re-emerged stronger and more effective than it had been prior to the 2008 crisis. Activists created a new counter narrative and liberated themselves from the constraints imposed by the repressive measures of the national government. They built a new frame around the unhealthy space, whose expansion, they maintained, was caused by the waste-related contamination. Yet the strength of the movement and its transformation following 2008 can only be fully understood when the structural property and the components of the EJ activists’ networks are also considered. We apply a Social Network Analysis to show how an effective environmental justice movement requires a cohesive and robust network as well as a comprehensive narrative. The waste-related movement in Campania went from being an archipelago of isolated clusters of organizations with a plural but fragmented claims (before 2008), to a tightly interconnected network supporting a unified political platform (after 2008). We link together the reframing of the movement around health issues with the reconfiguration of activist networks. We use the Campania case to show how environmental justice movements might overcome repression and criminalization and progress toward social justice and ecologically sound transformations.     

The Micropolitics of Indigenous Environmental Movements in the Philippines

Indigenous movements face what Stuart Kirsch has called the ‘risks of counterglobalization’, which can distort their objectives into an all‐or‐nothing position with respect to development. In this contribution, I explore a case from the Philippines, where a movement originally conceived in terms of indigenous rights grew to include a more diverse mix of constituents and claims. This trajectory has made the movement vulnerable to charges of inauthenticity, particularly since the corporation it opposes has sponsored a parallel indigenous group and fashioned itself as the noble custodian of a threatened marine ecosystem. Nevertheless, the movement's constituents do not evaluate their activities exclusively in terms of its formal objectives or identity politics. For them, organized protest is entangled with the ‘serious games’ of everyday life, including, for example, local elections, struggles to achieve upward social mobility and efforts to redefine ethnic identity. As a result, some constituents see their involvement primarily as a claim to socioeconomic parity and others as a pursuit of the exceptional rights that indigeneity confers. Without attention to such local‐level variation, we risk obscuring some of the most important motives and outcomes of indigenous movements — and, as a result, we may overlook the alternative visions of socio‐environmental justice that emerge from their day‐to‐day struggles for livelihood, dignity and empowerment.     

Lincoln,Race, and the Spirit of ’76

Abstract

This essay examines how Lincoln dealt with race, slavery, and emancipation in antebellum America. It argues that despite a few controversial statements and policies regarding black Americans, Lincoln sought to preserve the American union and its system of self-government by reclaiming the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who exploited white bigotry in his promotion of local “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the slavery controversy, Lincoln highlighted the natural rights of blacks as a way to prevent the spread of slavery and thereby save what he would later call “the last best hope of earth.”     

Police unions and use-of-force reforms in American cities

Following the murder of George Floyd, there was widespread debate about the policies that govern the use of force by police, but municipal leaders suggested that police unions kept many of the proposed changes from being adopted. Although there is anecdotal and scholarly evidence that unions frequently oppose policing reform, the limited literature in this area actually offers somewhat mixed conclusions about the relationship between union strength and the success of previous reform efforts. In this study, we draw on Halpin's theory of interest groups as politically adaptive organizations to develop expectations about the behavior of police unions in police governance subsystems. We hypothesize that union attempts to influence policy will correlate positively with reform adoption when the political environment is conducive to victory on that front or makes the cost of opposition too high and negatively when the opposite conditions hold. Analyses of the impact of union campaign contributions on the adoption of use-of-force policies in the 100 largest U.S. cities demonstrate that the nature and direction of union influence are moderated by the political climate of the jurisdiction in which they operate.     

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.     

Principled pragmatism in climate policy? The EU and changing practices of climate justice

Climate change constitutes one of the most pressing political problems of our time and has profound implications for global justice. However, despite the recent progress of the international negotiations embodied in the Paris Agreement, most scientists and activists agree that the adopted measures are not adequate or ‘just’ considering the magnitude of the problem. Thus, there is a pressing need for political forerunners that could push the regime towards a more just handling of the problem. The European Union for most of the time has presented itself as a strong advocate for progressive climate action and has been called a climate vanguard or ‘green normative power’. This paper critically assesses the EU's role concerning climate change from a perspective of global political justice, which builds on a tripartite theoretical conception, consisting of ‘non-domination’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘mutual recognition’. It inquires to which conceptions of justice the EU's climate strategy and approach to the international negotiations have corresponded, how and why changes have come about, and whether the EU was able to influence the international regime. The paper finds that while the EU started out from a focus on political measures linked to impartiality, after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 it has become more open towards policies and instruments in line with mutual recognition and non-domination. Thus, the emphasis moved away from top-down, legally binding measures, towards voluntary bottom-up procedures, a recognition of difference and diplomatic outreach activities. While this shift was necessary to reinstate the EU's influence and secure the Paris Agreement, it could hamper the quest for robust climate abatement measures and global climate justice.