Building a Movement in the Climate Emergency
Discomfort is Our Only Option
Recently I was invited to attend the annual strategy meeting of Climate Action Network International (CAN) in Arusha, Tanzania. CAN is an umbrella group of environmental NGOs mostly active at meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the opening of the meeting I spoke on a panel with the theme ‘What does it mean for civil society to build power in a Climate Emergency?’ Below is a version of my intervention, adapted slightly to be taken as more general input to wider climate movement, of which CAN is only one part. With special thanks to Daniel Voskoboynik for helping in the adaptation.
In the various corners of the global climate movement, the battleground upon which we struggle is rapidly shifting. In the past years we have suffered serious setbacks but have also seen the birth of new possibilities.
Tasneem Essop, the Executive Director of CAN-International, has set out the context of this pivotal moment very clearly.
She has also posed some very big, very difficult questions. Namely:
- What are the game-changing strategic interventions needed over the course of the next decade to address the climate emergency and the catalyse the transformational changes needed?
- How does the climate movement build people power to make these changes; what are the challenges and opportunities for building power; what are the changes we must make to our current approach; and what is the role of CAN in all this?
Right off the top let me say I don’t have neat answers for you. If you’re disappointed by that, get used to it — when it comes to climate change and other violent symptoms of the system crisis, everything we do is going to feel inadequate. Especially if we consider each action, or plan, or idea in isolation. But it would be a mistake to take such a compartmentalized view of the world. Everything about this moment is screaming out for us to think in ways that join the dots, examine whole systems and consider the interconnectedness of the system’s parts.
Naomi Klein’s seminal book This Changes Everything could equally have been titled Everything Must Change. Given the time-scales, we have to do everything all at once.
Where to start?
I help to coordinate the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) — a network of several hundred groups from all around the world. DCJ is similar to CAN in some ways, but very different in others. We formed the network not to follow negotiations but rather, as our platform states, to “build and exercise the power of collective action in different forms at various fronts and arenas, in different levels — local, national & global.”
For us, the 2 ‘areas’ of the system where we most urgently need to intervene are the energy and food systems. This is hardly surprising — movements in various parts of the world have been very active in struggling for transformation of these systems for many years.
It’s obvious that we have got to stop new fossil fuel projects being locked in, and over the coming decade begin to rapidly wind down what already exists.
Many say coal should be targeted as a matter of priority — it’s the dirtiest, lowest hanging fruit, they say. Perhaps, but we don’t have a window of opportunity big enough for us to go one by one through the pollution gradient of fossil fuels. That window already slammed shut in our faces. We have already seen that a singular insistence on shutting down coal can provide the basis of an argument (albeit a disingenuous one) for the oil and gas industries to justify their continued existence. If they’re building gas infrastructure as a “bridge” while we focus on coal, we’re screwed. If they’re offering to turn people’s lights on and we’re saying the rich can have solar and everyone else can sit in the dark, we’re screwed too.
This is not to say we shouldn’t run specific campaigns and wage site battles against both new and existing coal. It is simply to say our efforts must be geared towards transforming the whole energy system, not swapping around some of the sources.
Opportunities to intervene in the energy system take many forms and can be made in many arenas. Amongst other things, we should spend the coming decade removing Big Polluters’ social license, cutting off their finance, exposing their greenwashing, developing our own counter-propaganda, shutting down their sites of production and their distribution systems through direct action, making the case that energy is a public good which should be in public ownership and control, and of course advocating for and building alternative energy systems and models for equitable consumption.
Our best hope to win this fight is for the workers in these industries to turn against their bosses — and the only way this will happen is if the climate movement gets serious about a justice transition. We cannot offer platitudes, nor punishment, nor a mere pittance. We must offer our collaboration to come up with actual plans for how to wind down these industries in a way that fairly shares the cost of transition and which limits negative social impacts.
Similarly, food sovereignty and acro-ecology movements — strong on this continent — will tell you that a transformation is needed in the food and agriculture systems. We need a system that grows food to feed people, that values the people who cultivate, grow, harvest and process food, and that localises decision-making. It will take much more than individuals deciding to go vegan — in fact this is the wrong starting point for the conversation.
There is going to be a massive and rapid transition that will affect every aspect of our lives. That’s not in question. However, as things stand that shift is likely to come too late and be very chaotic. An unjust transition is dangerous. Equity — fairness — is the key to climate ambition. Injustice is its death sentence. We only have to look at the Gilet Jaunes to see how this plays out. People will rightly refuse to clean up somebody else’s mess. The establishment has no authority anymore because people see it as entirely self-serving and corrupt and view any proposals it comes up with in this light. A climate movement that is in bed with the establishment is doomed.
Efforts to mitigate are important, but we know that no matter what miracles we might pull off, the climate emergency is here and it’s going to get a lot worse. We must deal with impacts, or as they should more accurately be termed, climate violence. Any worthwhile climate movement must ready people for 1.5 or even 2C warming in this decade. Ask any expert on resilience, adaptation, and loss and damage, they’ll tell you. Governments are not prepared. Communities are not prepared. We’re living on borrowed time, during which we should be building the infrastructure of care, support and readiness needed for worsening breakdown.
To do any of this requires people power.
There are major challenges to building people power. Principally, our starting point: an NGO-model of campaigning, advocating, and raising funds. This NGO logic — emanating from the global North — is utterly incapable of imagining how to respond to the climate crisis. It has spent a decades and a vast amount of resources on building a climate movement that is for the most-part disconnected from working people, from the global majority, and even from other progressive movements.
The barrier for entry to the “climate movement” is extremely high. Even the most exciting recent developments — the School Strikes and Extinction Rebellion — have relatively high barriers for entry and yet higher for leadership. These are largely middle class and global north, albeit with notable exceptions. This isn’t to say that radical movements do not exist in the global South because they patently do. Rather, they are regularly ignored, dismissed, or undermined by the Northern-dominated climate movement. By and large, our movement is one drawn from the richest 10% of the world. That’s not how we win.
Stopping climate change should be the easiest thing for which to build people power because all the things that stop it would make most people’s lives better. To their credit this is the proposition being made by some of the Green New Deals. Decent work with decent pay and time off, free healthcare, somewhere safe to live, enough good, nutritious food, and on and on. But the climate movement risks blowing that opportunity with a narrow focus on gigatons and international guidelines. Instead, it is the authoritarians of the far right who are offering their own horrible so-called solutions. Build the walls, make them pay. You know the drill.
My view is that building people power is about changing culture.
What are we doing to speak with broader audiences? To get out of our silos and engage with people in all their diversity? How are we working to make climate justice, not greenwashing, part of mainstream culture?
Most importantly, what about ourselves? To what extent does our organizing, movement culture mirror the systems we critique? We might scoff at the way some of the ideas about self-care are put forward, but how is working ourselves to death a good strategy? Does having such a funder-driven approach lead us to make the most strategic decisions? Are we truly collaborating, or are we more often aligning so that we don’t have to compete? Are we creating brands or beliefs? Are our actions eco or ego driven?
I don’t think we build people power by dedicating what limited resources we have to technical policy work at either the national or international level. That work is important, we need wonks to flesh out and translate the demands of the movement. The world always needs nerds, but it needs visionaries more. Systems-thinkers, not silo-thinkers!
Those of us who do work in policy realms should ask: does our advocacy do what we want it to do? Have we confused access to decision-makers with with power to influence them?
More often than not we’re playing somebody else’s game, accepting their terms and waging a defensive fight. Let’s ask: what are our own desires and visions? I don’t know about you but I want to live in a very different world, not a version of this world where everything is the same except the atmospheric concentration of carbon!
There are no shortcuts, no silver bullets, no easy answers. Only these questions and many more.
Everyone — every individual, organisation, network, federation, collective — must ask themselves what is their role in this movement.
Maybe your role is much smaller or peripheral than you think. We often assume that we are the right people for the job when we should be asking who’s already doing it. Are the voices that have been the loudest the longest necessarily the ones we should listen to? If we look at our past efforts in the cold light of day, how do we think they have contributed to mitigating climate change? How have they built power we can now bring to bear? Have our imaginations been too limited? Have the assumptions and theories on which the work is based held true?
Maybe our role should be to follow rather than lead. Maybe it should simply be to expand the realm of what is considered possible, rather than trying to be clever within the realm of what is already considered possible.
It’s up to us all to reflect honestly on these questions. If it makes you uncomfortable, good.
