Mobilization for Climate Justice: When South Fights North

From the nineties on, when the risks of global warming were acknowledged by the United Nations, climate change has become one of the most important themes in the international agenda. Two decades later, however, the responses given both by governments around the world and international agencies are perceived to be clearly insufficient. In this context, Bolivian President Evo Morales, proposed in January 2010 the creation of a Climate Justice Tribunal in the United Nations, as part of the Movimiento Mundial de los Pueblos por la Madre Tierra. In April, President Morales helped to organize the First World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in the city of Cochabamba, a kind of a counter summit to the Climate Change Conference of the United Nations held in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009. Whereas this later conference proved a debacle, Cochabamba represented a milestone in social mobilization. This paper examines the movement for climate justice in Latin America, with special emphasis on the Mexican case. Theoretically it aims at exploring the re-politicization and particularly the judiciarisation of social mobilization, and its implications for democracy. I will examine the various conceptions of justice and legality underpinning the Movimiento and will try to understand the implications of the judiciarisation of social mobilization in terms of Cohen and Arato´s politics (politics of inclusion, influence, identity, and reform). Although in studies and discussions on justice, more and more attention is being paid to the phenomenon of judiciarisation, that is, the growing recourse of social actors to the courts, in the field of contentious politics we still need to investigate more.