kimanh.bsky.social
Assoc. Professor and human-environment geographer @Temple University. Political ecology | environmental justice | water | climate change | infrastructure | borders | Asia | kimberley.thomasresearch.org
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Thanks for reading! Check out the issue here:
www.tandfonline.com/toc/tcld20/1...
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#3 Transformative climate futures require decoupling justice theory from its liberal roots.
“Climate justice otherwise” entails decentering the private market & liberal legal structures and elevating decolonial, relational & non-capitalist systems rooted in local & Indigenous worldviews & practices.
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#2 Context matters
Climate impacts are shaped by local dynamics of social differentiation & uneven dev’t. Liberal climate justice theory can’t fit such context bc it relies on idealized notions of individuals, states & markets. Transformative CJ must recognize and value other knowledges & practices.
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#1 Climate justice may become an empty signifier
By ignoring the liberal roots of justice theory, calls for transformative change will keep falling short bc of the contradictions between the radically diff't lifeworlds that are imagined & the way existing mainstream liberal systems are meant to work
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The premise of liberal conceptions of justice is that to know justice is to know peace. Yet, for those seeking redress for climate harms, there is little evidence to substantiate this position. My co-editor Kevon Rhiney and I offer 3 key takeaways from the special issue. tinyurl.com/2ju5k82x
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Instead, Correia proposes an ‘otherwise’ approach to climate justice in which L&D is reframed “as a transformative, relational process based on Indigenous priorities and worldviews…rather than resorting to liberal notions of commensurability.” tinyurl.com/58t373m9
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…but they also fail to “stem future problems because climate breakdown is not averted.” Thus, the exploitative processes that made reparations necessary in the first place remain unchallenged. tinyurl.com/58t373m9
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Lastly, @joelecorreia.bsky.social links up financial restitution with epistemic justice. He evaluates loss and damage (L&D) through study of 12 Indigenous land restitution cases in Latin America. Not only do restitution and reparations fail to establish commensurability between harms and payments…
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Instead of reactively coping with inevitable financial crisis, central banks should coordinate and initiate an intentional ‘creative disruption’ that reorients the economy toward equitable sustainability. To this end, they offer a monetary policy toolbox for climate justice. tinyurl.com/3js6x9bw
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Financial systems have been implicated in climate change from the start. Yet they’re also central to wealth redistribution and thus to CJ. @jenniecstephens.bsky.social and @martinsokol.bsky.social locate a profound contradiction where central banks aim to stabilize an inherently unstable system.
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Here, Earth system justice means realizing social justice while staying within Earth System Boundaries. This entails integrating biophysical & social targets through harm reduction for vulnerable groups, equitable resource access, and addressing environmental change at its root. tinyurl.com/2trnb37p
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State and intergovernmental institutions often organize around targets like the SDGs & 30x30. Critics claim such goals suffer from poor scope, execution & outcomes. But @laurengifford.bsky.social @dianaliv.bsky.social @lisajac.bsky.social show global targets can also advance transformative change.
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@kgrove80.bsky.social et al. study resilience & CJ in Miami, where language use varies in climate activism. They neither reject the idea of resilience nor try to stabilize it. Instead, they support localized justice struggles by embracing the term’s varied notions and uses. tinyurl.com/y9mmx6wy
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Given all this, what are our options? With respect to epistemic injustice, one is linguistic pluralism...
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FPIC consultations “tend to be seen as the ‘manifestation of contractual freedom between supposedly equal parties.’ In reality, however, state knowledge is often privileged by dictating who is consulted in a process which is organized to prioritise Western science and law.” tinyurl.com/u88uc65n
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The liberal norm of Free, Informed, & Prior Consent (FPIC) also falls short. A conflict in Chile b/w a foreign energy firm & Mapuche-Williche people reveals “an epistemic gap...the difference between western knowledge produced for state institutions and embodied Indigenous knowledge and lifeworlds.”
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Mukul Kumar found that when Adivasi and other marginalized groups protest their displacement, the state demobilizes mass resistance through hollow forms of community engagement. Participation on the state’s terms doesn’t translate into just outcomes for Indigenous communities. tinyurl.com/5au6ckdb
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Even when states pursue energy transitions in earnest, they often pay lip service to liberal principles of inclusion and participation. In India, Indigenous land rights are codified in legislative acts. Yet, the laws don’t protect Indigenous areas from coal and hydropower dev’t… tinyurl.com/5au6ckdb
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L&D payments are supposed to reduce the ecological debt of wealthy states & corporations. Yet, Perry calls post-disaster needs assessments ‘technologies of climate disaster’ bc they subordinate local knowledges, values, and lifeways to hegemonic logics of calculability & profit. tinyurl.com/3m8n4xac
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Loss and Damage (L&D) funding made a huge leap in 2022 at COP27. The breakthrough agreement est’d a fund to cover the costs of climate impacts in hard hit countries. This seems like a clear CJ win, but @radicalcarib.bsky.social raises troubling questions about how losses and damages are assessed.
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@laurakuhl.bsky.social @jamieshinn.bsky.social @jraq.bsky.social @istiakhahmed.bsky.social show that climate finance institutions struggle to realize CJ even when mandated to support transformative change. Project criteria like scalability & efficiency inhibit transformation. tinyurl.com/yeuxm8mb
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Nor does higher education necessarily foster transformation. In the Arabian Peninsula, US schools mobilize liberal tenets while propping up the fossil fuel industry through ‘knowledge transfer’ and funneling disinclined students into petroleum engineering. @dalsaleh.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4ntvzu3k
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@daughterofsahel.bsky.social studied how liberal conservation measures redistribute the costs of CC in Africa. Income & social wage provide material benefits but don’t address structural inequities assoc’d with insecure land tenure, dispossession, & exploitation. So far, so bad. tinyurl.com/yr9p4z2p
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We take up these questions and more in a special issue on Liberalism’s Limits for Climate Justice, out now in Climate and Development. Ten stellar author groups examine the limits of liberalism for climate justice, as well as pathways through and around those limits. tinyurl.com/2r7r4fah
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But is it possible to address climate change (CC) and its uneven impacts within the laws and institutions designed by the same actors that created these problems?
Are there ways of envisioning and enacting climate justice (CJ) outside of classical liberal environmental thought?
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Climate justice efforts like redistributing climate costs and inclusive decision making are framed in terms of rights & freedoms. They’re mediated by institutions like courts, gov’t agencies, NGOs, & dev’t banks. Who else to ensure individual liberties, protect private property, and uphold the law?
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It seems to me that AI, in all its guises, is fundamentally unequipped to tackle issues of power, of which human and ecological insecurity are direct outcomes.
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📌
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This would make a great (and very difficult!) puzzle.