Temporalities of Justice Amongst Loss and Damage – a Sociological Reconfiguration

The loss of habitability and irreparable damage are moving to the center of the debate as adaptation and resilience emerge as dominant strategies within the narrowing horizons of future climate action. The COP27 decision to establish a Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage has the potential to mark a turning point in the global climate justice discourse. We consider the recognition of unevenly distributed vulnerability to irreversible loss and damage – whether economic, cultural or environmental – and the possibility of compensation as a point of contention to explore the temporalities of different practices of ‘loss and damage’. In doing so, we move beyond a linear, anticipatory understanding of time as well as the binary assumption of in/justice, adopting a praxeological perspective to uncover the plural temporalities of three key practices of loss-management: Restoration, Ruins and Memories. These form the temporal counterpoint to a techno-optimistic vision of a sustainable future and enable theoretical interventions into liberal notions of time and justice.

First, we systematize existing critiques of temporalities in climate justice debates (Hunfeld 2020) and reconstruct alternative temporalities and their implications for conceptions of justice from a practice-theoretical perspective (Shove et al. 2012, Southerton 2012, Reckwitz 2016). Drawing on two empirical sites – the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) and anti-nuclear resistances – we examine three specific localized practice complexes in terms of their challenges related to temporality and justice.

Our research is oriented toward decolonial critiques of anticipatory futurism (Barad 2019) and Western modernist notions of time within environmental justice debates (Whyte 2021). Instead, we emphasize the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) and ‘combined and uneven apocalypse’ (Williams 2011) that become articulable within practice complexes, highlighting their potential for a justice that must be framed as ‘always-to-come’ (Barad 2019:536).