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The Climate Crisis and Just Transitions - Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives from South Africa and Beyond
Language: English
This is an author meets critic session.
Chair: Heidi Gottfried
Presenters: Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams
Critic: William Carroll
This panel will engage with an edited collection focusing on the climate crisis as a systemic crisis of global capitalism. It steers clear of millenarian catastrophism or millenarian ends of time discourses. Instead it brings together some of the leading international and South African climate just activists, movement voices and scholars. This includes Nnimmo Bassey from Nigeria who won the alternative Nobel prize to Pablo Salon the former climate negotiator for the Bolivian state; the only state that has held a climate justice position in the multi-lateral system.
This volume brings together an analsyis of the failures of multilateral leadership in resolving the climate crisis and the rise of systemic alternatives. Moreover, there is a critical engagement with Anthropocene discourse particularly its official UN version and popular renditions. However, the main focus of this volume is on further elaborating the the notion of just transition and its content. In this regard various systemic alternatives are engaged with, emerging from climate justice and transformative movements to advance a deep just transition. This ranges from the rights of nature, living well (buen vivir), ubuntu, food sovereignty, basic income grants, commoning, solidarity economy, climate jobs to socially owned renewables. Crucial to this volume is a recognition of how these systemic alternatives transform socialism as democratic eco-socialism.