Struggles for Climate Justice by Brandon Barclay Derman

Author:Brandon Barclay Derman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030279653
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Like those surrounding REDD, debates on the “outside” over the rights of nature illustrate difficulties in transnational mobilization that extend from the diversity among potential climate justice constituencies and their socio-spatially and historically specific political concerns. In both instances, organizers sought to develop solidarities that could supersede the “militant particularisms” that often motivate such groups within national contexts, in order to facilitate broader alignment and mobilization.77 The relevance of context takes on political significance of a different order, though, when it lies at the core of differing theories of change.

As organizers debriefed civil society involvement following the Durban COP, they exposed stark differences of orientation toward local contexts and global audiences within the wide range of groups who had planned and participated in the Day of Action march and other events during the negotiations. Some saw those differences, among others, as having limited the impact of civil society as a whole. Sociologist and commentator Ashwin Desai criticized tactics deployed by international NGOs less attuned to local realities, in their complex and socially constitutive particularity78:If people parachute in, do their little stunt, and leave, or get deported [as did several Greenpeace activists attempting a banner hang on a nearby hotel roof] for example, then what do they understand about Durban? What do they understand about the real difficulties of organizing around climate justice? There are real tensions and challenges that people face here, as a stitch between a kind of crony capitalism and African nationalism, but also a kind of rank modernization theory; a “why the fuck shouldn’t we have these things?”; “who tells us we shouldn’t have cars and TV sets?”

A hundred people were taken to the hospital after the explosion of the Engen refinery [in South Durban], but large swathes of that community are employed by the refineries, so they can’t make the move to ask for their closure. And then the climate justice movement asks for them to be closed. What does it mean that people have arrived here, marched and never been to the South Basin? There are 150 smoke stacks. Cancer is everywhere. Nearly every kid carries an asthma pump.

By parachuting in and substituting yourself for local struggles, you won’t have a sense of any of that. The way the international NGOs conduct themselves is to adopt the same tactics and strategies everywhere. They have flattened the world and in the process our histories and traditions and our subjectivities.

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