Building decolonial climate justice movements - Four tensions

Identifes 4 tensions decolonial climate justice movements need to grapple with - how coloniality shows up in different ways in climate justice movements

Paper provides 4 tensions climate justice movements are grappling with arguing that even though no singular resolution is possible engaging with these tensions is generative

1. 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.  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. 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.

2. Scalar tensions - 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).

3. The incommensurability tension - Climate justice movements are not immune to colonial dynamics. Questions that arise: or 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?

4. The temporal tension - 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