Questions of justice in the transition to a green economy have been raised by various social forces. Very few proposals, however, have been as focused and developed as the “just transition” strategy proposed by global labour unions. Yet, labour unions are remarkably absent from discussions of the transition towards a green economy. This is surprising as labour unions are arguably the largest organizations in the world fighting for basic rights and more just social relations. This paper tries to advance the potential contribution of labour unions in this arena by asking: what is the full scope of “just transition” today and how have labour unions developed and refined it over the years to render the move towards a green economy both environmentally and socially sustainable? The concept of just transition is hotly debated within labour unions and has different interpretations, and hence different strategies. The last section assesses these interpretations by means of a normative framework, which seeks to fuse political economy and political ecology. Empirically, we add to the growing literature on labour environmentalism, as well as transitions more generally. Analytically, our goal is to place the various approaches to a “just transition” within a heuristic framework of environmental justice that is explicit about power relations when demanding justice, two themes central to this special issue
Neoliberalising adaptation to environmental change: foresight or foreclosure? The UK's Government Office for Science has recently released an important report, produced by its internal think tank Foresight. Over seventy peer-reviewed studies have been commissioned and some 350 experts and`stakeholders' have been involved in creating Migration and Global Environmental Change (Foresight, 2011). Its lead authors have recently published a summary of the main conclusions in the leading scientific journal Nature (Black et al, 2011), and the report has already received extensive media coverage. By virtue of its scope and authorship, the report can be considered a milestone in the scientific and practitioner fields related to environment and migration.It is targeted at a wide readership, both in academia and in policy-making circles. (1) An attached`action plan' suggests that the report's findings and recommendations are already being disseminated widely within international organisations and governance networks worldwide.We take the opportunity of its publication to consider critically the messages the report communicates. Of course, one cannot predict how its findings and recommendations will`travel' and be`translated' in different policy-making contexts: policy transfer and mobility studies have taught us to be careful in considering the relations between`global' recommendations and their differentiated uptake at the national or subnational levels. However, in our view, the report's language, logic, and take-home lessons are consistent withöindeed symptomatic oföthe wider diffusion of neoliberal views in contemporary environmental governance circles. This is despite the fact that some scholars and commentators have talked of a possible`post-neoliberal' moment coincident with the global financial crisis and its aftermath. However cautiously optimistic such talk may be, we would point to neoliberalism's zombie-like survival in spite of ongoing economic and social turmoil (Fine, 2009;Peck, 2010). Neoliberal thinking has penetrated so deeply into all aspects of social life [especially here in Britain (cf Hall 2011)] ö and into much social science discourse too (often surreptitiously) ö that it would be surprising not to find neoliberal ideas animating a policy document sponsored by any UK government department.Our commentary is not a complete assessment of the report but, rather, an attempt to highlight its philosophical basis, especially the precepts of the concept`migration as adaptation'. This concept features most prominently in the report's eighth chapter (pages 173^187), but is evident elsewhere. It can plausibly be interpreted as an extension of the neoliberal mind-set prevalent in other areas of environmental policy. It might, in the long run, help precipitate yet another`neoliberal environmental fix' (Castree, 2008, pages 146^149), in this case one focused on producing`adaptable' human subjects: that is, people able to respond tactically to anthropogenic alterations of the biophysical world while becoming ever...
As environmental degradation becomes a growing concern, this article argues that the development of international law on climate change expresses the deep social contradictions between accumulation and reproduction under capitalism. These contradictions are translated into the creation of a form of public property over the right to emit greenhouse gases (and not the ‘privatisation' of the atmosphere). This public property is unequally distributed amongst states in an imperialist manner. The distribution of these rights at the domestic level amounts to the distribution of rights to climate rent. Contrary to popular accounts of the ‘commodification' of nature, I argue that emission rights are not ‘commodities', and emissions trading and carbon markets are not ‘accumulation strategies'. These are merely depoliticised forms in which climate rent is extracted and circulates to preclude political debates about the goals of production
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