Urban climate politics and the divorce of capitalism from democracy

This paper will explore the missing question of democracy in urban climate politics on the basis of fresh theorizing and preliminary data. 

Although studies of neoliberal austerity are often concerned with the fate of democracy, in studies of national and sub-national climate politics and governance, questions of political and economic democracy are usually ignored or subsumed under vague rubrics of good governance. Instead, the dependent variable is usually emissions reductions and/or participation in international treaties. Marxian critiques of these studies, meanwhile, posit an ontological distinction between unsustainable capitalism and sustainable post-capitalism, which a priori excludes consideration of the real impacts on democracy of new urban climate policies. The result is that we are unable rigorously to connect concerns with social justice to concrete analyses of urban climate politics.

I argue that a theory of urban climate politics must build on on the foundations of Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s interventions, which have showed how global governance regimes, national policy-making, and urban class struggles are intertwined. Building also on Brenner’s and Jessop’s innovations with the regulation approach to governance, I argue that to put urban climate politics “in their place” requires exploring the links between green urban policy advocacy networks and broader patters of inter- and intra-class struggle. This is turn compels us to ask what role middle class environmentalisms are playing in what Zizek has called the potential divorce of capitalism from democracy.

I discuss my preliminary research findings from São Paulo, where I spent some time with middle class environmentalists and poor people’s movements, highlighting the absence of a common agenda, the emergence of a centrist or even anti-political environmentalism, and a set of conflicts between environmentalists and slum-dwellers.