A Climate for Change: The ‘Climate Justice Movement' and the Rise of Green Capitalism

Since global warming first burst onto the global political agenda in the 1980s, a new global movement has also emerged: Environmentalists, indigenous peoples, women’s, labor, other social movements, working in uneasy, coalitions with governments from the South, have come to constitute a “global climate justice movement.” Straddling and negotiating North-South, inter-state, and intra-state divisions, this movement has pushed for more radical globally-coordinated measures to address the ecological crises, pressed for far-reaching changes to how the international community is governed, and offered alternative visions for how the earth’s commons should be shared. They have demanded not only drastic greenhouse-gas emission reductions from Northern states, they have also called for more punitive measures, such as penalties and reparations, to counter the industrialized states’ and corporations’ insistence on more voluntary, incentives-oriented market-based approaches to global environmental problems. Critical theories of nature-society relations which seek to explain the emergence of a neoliberalized “green capitalism” over the last two decades, however, have largely overlooked the significance of this movement or see its impact merely in terms of its effects on capitalisms “crisis of accumulation.” Drawing from archival research on, and interviews with people involved in, the international climate change negotiations, I argue that this movement has mounted a counter-hegemonic challenge to the North and that the North’s attempts to contain or absorb this challenge can better account for capitalism’s turn to market-based environmentalism. In making this argument, I seek to contribute to reconstructing theories of global politics and nature-society relations.