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Abstract
Global financial and ecological crises have fueled the diffusion of ideas and discourses that challenge US hegemony and global capitalism and support the expansion of counter-hegemonic alliances between states and social movements. Social movements are calling for rights for Mother Earth and for the development of new measures of well-being, putting forward increasingly credible alternatives to the state-led, market-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper traces the social movement processes that have advanced ecological and social justice critiques of capitalist development. It explores how regional and global networks of states and movements have contributed to the growing political salience of new claims and discourses that respond to the ecological threats posed by global warming. These observations reveal how social movement challenges contribute to an expanding realm of global politics that transgresses the traditional boundaries of the inter-state arena, calling for adaptations to our theoretical frameworks for understanding global social change.
Notes
1. For dramatic visual evidence of global warming seen in time-lapse photography, see http://www.chasingice.com/.
2. The recommended 50–85% emissions reductions, if achieved by 2050, would produce the lowest anticipated change in average temperature of 2.0–2.4 degrees Centigrade. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, November 2007, 67).
3. For instance, the Climate Justice Alignment helped sponsor a ‘Climate Justice Space’ at the 2013 World Social Forum which reflects an innovation in the use of the WSFs to encourage groups to develop concrete strategies and projects to address the urgent threats of climate change. Their call to participation stresses the aim of generating concerted action to address climate change, asking ‘how do we go beyond our usual strategies and see how we can win concrete victories on the ground by working together, across sectors, across movements, old and new, linking social struggles with environmental struggles?’ For details, see: http://climatespace2013.wordpress.com/.
4. My discussions of the World Social Forum process draw extensively from my observant participation in the WSF process at several world-level forums as well as regional, local and national level forums in Europe and North America. Much of this work has been done in my role as a delegate to and organizer in the US Social Forum’s National Planning Committee, where I have served since the spring of 2008.
7. Significantly, the Move to Amend Coalition is also a US Social Forum National Planning Committee member.
8. For instance, groups participating in Move to Amend’s work in Pittsburgh hosted a workshop with CELDF to discuss strategies for strengthening community influence on decisions regarding land use and regulation of the fracking industry (http://environmentaljusticetmc.blogspot.com/2013/02/new-2nd-community-rights-workshop-march.html; http://www.celdf.org/section.php?id=220).
10. A general web search of buen vivir yielded 390,800 hits where a publication date could be determined, and 21,800 (5.6%) of those were prior to 2008. ‘Rights of nature’ generated 35,650 hits, 10.2% of which were from prior to 2008. ‘Rights of Mother Earth’ saw significantly fewer mentions but the same pattern of 2.7% of mentions before 2008. Virtually all mentions of these terms were movement sources. The Belem Social Forum took place in January of 2009, and we included 2008 in our search for these terms, since the planning of this social forum is expected to have begun to generate increased use of these ideas/terms.
11. Wong’s (Citation2012) research reinforces this idea that social movement strategies are shifting towards more pro-active, agenda-promoting activities aimed at defining new international norms and strengthening movement capacities for holding states accountable to these norms.
12. Counter-hegemony refers to challenges to the dominance of US hegemony in the current world-system, but it does not necessarily require a shift to a new type of world-system. New hegemonic forces can emerge within the existing capitalist system. Anti-systemic forces, in contrast, advance a completely different world-system that is not based on the logic of accumulation that drives the capitalist world-system.
13. The numbers grew from 874 to 1318 organizations in this time period (Hadden Citation2011, 11).
14. http://www.climate-justice-now.org/about-cjn/history/. Accessed 31 October 2012.
15. In its 2007/2008 Human Development Report, the UN Development Programme argued that the existing calls for 50% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten years if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
16. Morales is widely respected among transnational activists for his leadership on global climate change, despite the fact that as a head of state, he has backed national policies that are inconsistent with his international environmental leadership (see, e.g., Aguirre and Cooper Citation2010). His positions in regard to the rights of Mother Earth shifted from his earlier position in internal political debates with political rival, Felipe Quishpe’s MIP movement, which had advanced such rights as part of its platform against Morales’s party (Martin and Wilmer Citation2008). This suggests that movements both within and outside Bolivia are influential in advancing this idea.
17. The reference to this meeting as a ‘summit’ is significant, since in the United Nations such a reference designates that heads of state will be in attendance, indicating the meeting’s salience on government agendas. While states may choose to send a lower-level delegate to a summit, they do so at the risk of offending other states whose delegates outrank theirs.
18. Such legal notions have been increasingly challenged by globalization. For instance, the UN’s recognition of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ explicitly authorizes the international community to intervene in states’ domestic affairs in situations where major human rights violations are present.
19. A report of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund outlines the strategy of the campaign, which seeks to use legal mechanisms and precedents to ‘reproduce this concept virally though the world, invading systems of thought and juridical systems. The Global Alliance will definitely become a key actor to promote actions and help the implementation of Rights for Nature in Ecuador and other countries around the world that follow this good example’ (http://www.celdf.org/global-alliance-for-rights-of-nature-formed-from-historic-international-gathering-in-ecuador-1, emphasis added) (Community Environmenatal Legal Defense Fund Citation2010).
20. Turner makes a similar argument, and sees the Cochabamba Agreement’s radicalism in its; (1) a class analysis of climate change, (2) successful direct action against its corporate perpetrators, and (3) burgeoning global organization from below’ (2010, 20).
