Between divine and social justice: emerging climate-justice narratives in Latin American socio-environmental struggles

Abstract

Abstract. This exploratory study traces the emergence of climate justice claims linked to narratives of Latin American social movements for the defence of life and territory. I argue that in post-colonial settings, religious and historical injustices and socio-cultural factors act as constitutive elements of environmental and climate justice understandings which are grounded in territories immersed in neo-extractivism conflicts. Environmental and climate justice conceptualizations have overlooked the religious fact present in many Latin American socio-environmental movements. As a result, the intertwined notions of divine justice and social justice are unacknowledged. To illustrate this claim, I examine socio-environmental and climate justice claims in a cross-border region between Guatemala and Chiapas. This region has a common ethnic background but divergent historical trajectories across the border. Diverse nuances and intensities adopted by environmental and climate justice practices and narratives on both sides of the border are examined. The case study reveals the importance of religion as a force for collective action and as a channel for the promotion of place-based notions of climate justice. The text calls for the examination of the religious factor, in its multiple expressions, in the theories of climate and environmental justice.

Introduction to the special issue “Climate and marine justice – debates and critical perspectives”

“…Knowledge and power asymmetries, as many of the contributions to this SI show (cf. Alba et al, 2020;Mendes Barbosa and Walker, 2020;Fünfgeld and Schmid, 2020;Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020), are deeply intertwined with epistemic and ontological injustices in environmental and climate governance. Finally, the articles of this SI and avenues for future research are presented.…”

“…In the USA, the concept became well known after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which drastically illustrated aspects of racial discrimination in extreme weather events (Schlosberg and Collins, 2014). In the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN-FCCC), justice has always been a controversial and contested element (Okereke and Coventry, 2016;Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020). Even the initial foundation of the convention can be considered as an outcome of attempts by developing countries to increase the procedural justice of the emerging climate regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Okereke and Coventry, 2016).…”

“…Recent studies on Latin America (e.g. Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020;Weißermel and Chaves, 2020), Turkey (Yaka, 2020), Australia (Barcan, 2020), and New Zealand (Winter, 2020) show the importance of recognizing the "ontological nature" (Blaser, 2009; Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020) of environmental injustices. Some environmental injustices cannot be explained by unravelling dissents on knowledge production, the power asymmetries, and the political economy at play as they are ultimately rooted in "multiple realities" or, in Blaser's (2013:547) Drawing inspiration from a "scholarship of presence" (Kaika, 2018(Kaika, :1714, an active presence or involvement in local and global socio-ecological struggles helps to understand multiple ontologies and to achieve epistemic justice.…”

“…We embrace the various ways in which people with different (knowledge) backgrounds are producing and defending their environments across the world. This situated and, at the same time, relational approach challenges the "coloniality of knowledge" (Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020;Fünfgeld and Schmid, 2020;Alba et al, 2020) and takes different forms of knowledge and various modes of being in the world seriously. We want to encourage our social scientist colleagues to respond to these thoughts and movements and to become more involved in the discussion about a restructuring of sci-ence within society and not leaving the debate on the societal effects of climate change and the ecological crisis to our natural science colleagues.…”