Building a Tax Justice Movement in Times of Climate Crisis

The tax justice movement has slowly emerged as a significant social movement actor in the context of a growing climate crisis. This paper explores the history of the tax justice movement from the perspective of an insider and an activist, who has been an actor in this field. The paper explores the initial motivations to build a movement to close tax havens, tax the wealthy and large corporates in times of a "race to the bottom" in terms of tax rates, and progressivity of taxation. Social movements confronted this by linking tax justice to pressing social concerns in different contexts from developent financing, climate financing in the Global South, to fighting kleptocracy or State capture in the Global North and especially in tax havens that facilitate this race to the bottom and effectively sell their sovereigty to enablers such as lawyers, bankers, accountants, real estate agents and other professionals who help the wealthy and large corporates hide their money and profits. This allows for the rich and powerful to effectively make an exit from their social obligations and duties towards other citizens in the form of taxation.. We explore here the growth of the tax justice movement from 2002 onwards to 2024 through participant observation, and key informant interviews to map out how the movement has responded to various challenges including the Climate Crisis, Global Financial Crisis, Covid-19 and built through these crisis an ever wider narrative of why we need to close down tax havens, and work towards progressive taxation. This paper looks at potential turning points of the movement from initial focus on development financing, to shifting to climate financing and climate repated topics, as well as creating a more holistic understanding of human rights and gender responsiveness in taxation over the two decades.