Building decolonial climate justice movements: Four tensions

Abstract

Prevailing approaches to resolving the climate crisis further entrench and extend the same institutions of racial capitalism and colonial domination which have precipitated this crisis. The need to build transformative movements to fight for climate justice is dire. Yet, transformative movements are inevitably structured by many of the same dynamics they oppose. This presents a risk that such movements may reproduce colonial or otherwise unjust relations in the worlds they seek to bring about. We point to four areas of tension where we see this dilemma playing out within efforts to build decolonial climate justice movements, and briefly discuss some questions that arise for scholars committed to this work.

Introduction

The climate crisis is a crisis of racial colonial capitalism. This is to say that it is produced by political-economic structures that exploit people and environments unevenly in accordance with logics of racialization (Liboiron, 2021; Pulido, 2017; Robinson, 2000; Sultana, 2022; Whyte, 2017). As a deep-seated systemic crisis, the climate emergency demands transformative structural change, yet a challenge for movements striving to create such change is that they are inevitably shaped and limited by the same structural conditions they seek to dismantle. What results is an ever-present risk that transformative movements may themselves reproduce (either deliberately or inadvertently) colonial or otherwise unjust dynamics, even while they work to bring anti-capitalist and decolonial futures into being. In this short commentary, we briefly point to four interrelated tensions where we see this dilemma manifest in climate activism today. In doing so, our intention is not to suggest ways of resolving these tensions. As there is no position of purity from which one can perch, there may not be any straightforward answers to be had (Shotwell, 2016). How each of us relates to and engages with these tensions depends on where we stand in the colonial present. As co-authors, we ourselves are oriented differently to these questions, and we navigate them uniquely in our own scholarship and activism. ¹ Rather than providing uniform prescriptions of how to navigate these tensions, our more modest intention is to offer these as a set of provisional reflections, open-ended questions, and provocations. Although singular solutions may remain elusive, we do see these as generative tensions, which is to say that there is productive value in the practice of reflexively engaging with them, both theoretically and (perhaps even more importantly) in relationships on the frontlines of struggles for climate and environmental justice.

The institutional tension

The first tension we observe is what we will call the ‘institutional tension’. The problem here is that the political-economic institutions that many climate activists call upon to resolve the climate crisis are those same institutions which have precipitated and exacerbated this crisis. From the promises of green tech and carbon markets which expand the frontiers of capitalist accumulation to international summits which place faith in the ability of states and corporate leaders to find viable solutions, it is clear that the predominant approaches to fixing the climate crisis today are those which sustain and extend existing political-economic structures. Perhaps this should come as no surprise given that states of crisis often serve to shore-up existing relations of power and domination. However, when state and corporate leaders repeatedly fail to take adequate action, a typical response among climate activists is to demand that these leaders do better. Even climate-oriented movements which adopt civil disobedience tactics (and are therefore seen as more radical), such as Extinction Rebellion, remain primarily focused on demanding that states and governments take action. Arguably, there is a good reason for this. Mitigating climate change requires rapid and widespread measures, and states are well-positioned to coordinate such action. States can compel people and industries to change their practices in significant ways. However, the problem with relying on the state as the primary actor responsible for resolving the climate crisis is not only that it is an institution which has proven reluctant to take the measures required; it is also a colonial institution responsible for ongoing processes of Indigenous dispossession and racial violence which serves as the vanguard of capitalist extraction and ecocide (Pulido, 2017). Placing responsibility for solving the climate crisis with the state serves to legitimize the colonial state's claims to authority and buttress its power at the cost of undermining decolonial modes of governance. In short, the problem of the state is that one ignores it at their own peril, yet one also engages it at their own peril.

The scalar tension

This points to a second tension, which we will call the ‘scalar tension’, between competing sites of climate action. The planetary scale of the climate crisis suggests that a global response is required. Indeed, ensuring that earthly conditions remain hospitable to human and more-than-human life is a species-level concern, presumably shared by all of humanity regardless of difference. And because carbon emitted in any one part of the world impacts all others, the pursuit of decarbonization exceeds the territorial jurisdiction of individual peoples, suggesting that international collective action is needed. Nevertheless, it is well-known that neither the cause, effects, nor responses to climate change are distributed evenly. A relatively small number of people from the Global North have derived the lion's share of the benefits from global carbon emissions, while the negative impacts of those emissions are felt more acutely by people of the Global South. Moreover, when climate impacts displace people from their homelands, they often encounter bordering regimes or other carceral geographies that confine and restrict their mobility (Walia, 2021). Any singular global response to the climate crisis will most certainly mobilize existing global inequalities along axes of race, class, gender, and citizenship in ways that insulate the beneficiaries of racial colonial capitalism from the most harmful impacts of the climate catastrophe while sacrificing others (Rice et al., 2022; Sultana, 2022). A tension therefore exists between the urgent need for coordinated action and the tendency of such global-scale actions to forsake local struggles and perpetrate epistemic violence against forms of Indigenous knowledge which offer crucial insights at this time of rapid ecological change (Whyte, 2017).

The incommensurability tension

A third tension lies within efforts to build broad-based and inclusive climate justice coalitions. Environmental movements of generations past (particularly those based in the Global North) have been rightly called out for adhering to colonial and white supremacist ideologies of nature which efface the Indigenous presence, obfuscate colonial histories, and blatantly disregard how environmental harms and benefits are unequally distributed along axes of race, class, and gender (Braun, 2002; Bullard, 1990). Environmental and climate justice movements have responded to these critiques by centring issues of environmental racism and colonial dispossession in their struggles for more just and abundant futures. Nevertheless, if racial capitalism structures the colonial present, climate justice movements are not immune to reproducing these dynamics. This raises a series of crucial questions with which these movements must seriously grapple. For instance, whose futurities and imaginaries do movements centre and fight for? Can those who are structural beneficiaries of racial and colonial injustices engage in climate justice movements without imposing their own visions of a climatically just future? Is it possible to build a climate movement that is hospitable to a ‘pluriverse’ of environmental imaginaries (Collard et al., 2015)? How are incommensurabilities within such movements navigated, and what power relations are enacted in so doing (see Tuck and Yang, 2012)? How can relationships of accountability be built into climate justice organizing? And to whom should activists be accountable? The underlying problem that we wish to call attention to here is the very real risk that collective mobilizations may themselves manifest forms of racial, colonial, or gender injustice or violence in ways that may not be immediately apparent to all those involved.

The temporal tension

A fourth tension is concerned with competing temporalities of action. The escalating sense of urgency for climate action is reflected in the changing language used to describe the current climate juncture, which in a fairly short time lapse has shifted from being labelled ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ to a ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate emergency’. Given the catastrophic consequences that failure to take immediate action entails, framing this situation as an emergency seems warranted. Yet, it is also worth asking what work this language of ‘emergency’ does, and which actors it authorizes. In contrast to the haste demanded by an emergency, scholars of decolonization tend to emphasize the slow and patient work of building trusting relationships of accountability over time (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). Building accountable relationships of care and solidarity is work that is best done in advance of crisis moments, and when these relationships endure long after. Rushed attempts at inclusion, or performative acts of ‘recognition’ (Coulthard, 2014), are liable to cause harm and deepen colonial relations. A question for those committed to decolonial climate action to wrestle with is how to reconcile the careful work of undoing colonial systems and building new structures of care with the need to take urgent action to avoid further loss and suffering across human and non-human worlds.

Re-imagining the futures of geographical thought and praxis

These four sets of tensions also raise crucial questions for scholars of climate and environmental justice. For instance, given that academia itself is a colonial institution, how do scholars with decolonial commitments navigate such institutional demands when they stand in tension with the interests of the frontline communities with whom they work? How do the demands of publishing or other institutional timelines conflict with the much more patient and present work of building relationships of trust and accountability? What sites and scales of action does academic work privilege? Is it possible to do this work without imposing one's own visions of a decolonial future upon the frontline communities one seeks to support? In the language of this special issue, we might ask who is authorized to do the ‘re-imagining of the futures of geographical thought’, and to whom scholars are accountable in pursuit of radical geographical ‘praxis’?