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This paper calls for a more critical analysis of implicit social values in time-based projections of transformative change in climate change policy in developing countries. The paper argues that transformative change is a form of socio-technical imaginary, in which contemporary visions of social order influence supposedly technical, and apolitical policies and timelines. To analyse these imaginaries, the paper applies the framework of 'technologies of futuring', or the processes in which projections about the future are imbued with implicit values, to different theories of change used to propose responses to climate change in Nepal. The paper shows that projections of future change are linked to assumptions about physical risks and social agency that reflect different, and contestable, worldviews. This chapter concludes that discussions about transformative change need to make assumptions about risk and society more transparent when proposing urgent deadlines based on assumptions about the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) denialism, (2) individualism, and (3) techno-optimism. These justifications must be identified as strategies to maintain the status-quo and benefit the wealthy few while allowing avoidable human suffering and loss. Adequately addressing climate change and future pandemics requires overcoming these false narratives and transitioning to social conditions that are resilient, healthy, and sustainable – specifically conditions where social and ecological well-being are prioritized over economic growth for the sake of profit maximization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of climate change, social theory has been subject to a surge of new materialist and posthuman approaches that reconfigure ontology and politics beyond the modern nature/culture binary which the Anthropocene has rendered untenable. But their (re-)turn to ontological speculation brackets the socio-epistemic situatedness and productivity of the way we think nature and its relationship to society. This paper reads Niklas Luhmann's systems theory as a posthuman perspective that can address the epistemological blind spot of materialist-ecological thought. Luhmann's ecology aligns with the former on the posthuman framing of shaping power, the productivity of an environmental outside that remains unknown, and the call for political modesty which follows. On the other hand, Luhmann's theory poses a critical challenge to materialist-ecological thought: the society/environment binary is here constitutively necessary, and its mapping onto a nature/culture binary functionally advantageous for subjects and social systems because it offers opportunities for complexity-reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate among climate activists and scholars on the merits of 'climate emergency' frames, which mirrors debates in critical security studies on the benefits and risks of 'securitization'. Climate emergency advocates demonstrate that rapid transformative action beyond 'normal' politics is needed to meet the Paris agreement targets. Critics, on the other hand, highlight the risks of deploying emergency frames to galvanize climate action, which may simply result in failed securitizations or even in emergency suspensions of democratic norms that advance climate action at the expense of climate justice. This paper will engage this debate by exploring the question: could climate emergency mobilizations be compatible with climate justice? I will argue, following Andreas Kalyvas, that the climate emergency can be framed as an opportunity for an 'extraordinary politics' of democratic constituent power, though this would involve risks and trade-offs that must be negotiated in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that contemporary child and youth experiences of globalization call for retheorizing global justice around a new concept of empowered inclusion. The first part of the paper examines three case studies in globalization – child labour movements, child and youth migration, and young people's organization around climate change – and shows how, in each case, young people, through their struggles against injustice, are simultaneously disempowered and empowered by their deep global interdependency. The second part proposes new theoretical advances in global justice that better respond to child and youth experiences through a childist concept of the empowered inclusion of both children and other marginalized groups. And the third part advances some preliminary suggestions about how a more child-responsive conception of global power and justice might be operationalized in practice across global policies, institutions, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the role of climate change as a persistent, systemic, long-term inflationary driver. The inflationary impacts of climate change have been commonly overlooked in the economic literature. As global temperatures rise and extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, the inflationary effects of climate change will only intensify. These effects could be further exacerbated by the considerable pricing power of the corporate sector. As a persistent inflationary driver, climate change poses a serious threat to central banks' ability to maintain price stability mandates. The traditional tools of monetary policy will be ineffective in curbing climate change-induced price pressures. Further, growth-based Green New Deal and related fiscal policies will be ineffective at mitigating climate change and reducing its inflationary impacts. Unless degrowth solutions are sought, climate change and its price effects will only intensify over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous communities have a particular stake in climate and energy developments, and have come to occupy a central role in both the movement toward decarbonization of industrial societies and renewable energy transition. Yet they remain underrepresented and excluded from climate policy processes. This paper critically evaluates the case of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to foster inclusive decision-making, with a specific focus on the place of Indigenous peoples in these processes. We demonstrate the ways in which the IPCC provides limited voice for Indigenous peoples in the Panel's deliberations. We argue the IPCC's disregard for Indigenous knowledges - and Indigenous peoples - arises from a configuration of structural problems within the governance of decarbonization and the politics of knowledge production. We conclude the IPCC faces on-going challenges in supporting the democratic functioning of climate decision-making, including in upholding Indigenous peoples' internationally recognized human rights as political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that past research has overlooked how the way problems and solutions are framed contribute to a prevailing gap in the global governance of climate and energy. Empirically, this paper investigates the frames of energy and climate change as expressed in key documents from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and International Energy Agency (IEA). Partly in contrast to past research, this paper finds (1) that there is a growing similarity in how the IPCC and IEA frame climate and energy; (2) that the IEA has gone from ignoring to acknowledging climate change and the transformation to a low-carbon energy system; and (3) that there is a prevailing difference in emphasis, whereas the IPCC only marginally discuss energy, while the IEA is still mainly talking about energy needs and fossil fuels even if climate change and renewables have entered their agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we ask, what is mainstream economics education conveying to its students? Standard mainstream economics textbooks treat the environment as a specialist issue in addition to standard concerns and based on solutions that conform to those standard concerns. When viewed as socialisation for students this is a major problem. To illustrate the problems we set out key aspects of the standard format, and draw attention to the structure and contents from two well-known textbooks. Standard textbooks convey the impression that the 'environmental issue' is appropriately incorporated and exhibit two complacency-creating features. First, fundamental problems (acute global ecological breakdown, biodiversity loss, climate change crisis etc), issues and urgency cannot be adequately conveyed to students within this way of framing economics. Second, specific theory and policy solutions suggest that the problem is well in hand. We illustrate using the theory of negative externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change policy is a contested field, with rival perspectives underpinning radically different policy propositions: from encouraging the market to innovate technical solutions to climate change through to the replacement of a market economy with an eco-socialist model. These differing policy options draw upon a variety of economic concepts and approaches, with significant consequent divergences in their policy recommendations. In this paper, we consider policy as assembled from a wide range of sociomaterial components – some human, others non-human. Using a 'new materialist' toolkit, we explore four contemporary climate change policies to unpack these policy-assemblages, and assess the different uses made of economics in each assemblage. We conclude that none of these contemporary policies is adequate to address climate change. Yet despite the incommensurability between how these disparate policies use economic concepts and theories, we suggest a materialist synthesis based on a comprehensive climate change policy-assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasts by economists of the economic damage from climate change have been notably sanguine, compared to warnings by scientists about damage to the biosphere. This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; using the relationship between temperature and GDP today as a proxy for the impact of global warming over time; and using surveys that diluted extreme warnings from scientists with optimistic expectations from economists. Nordhaus has misrepresented the scientific literature to justify the using a smooth function to describe the damage to GDP from climate change. Correcting for these errors makes it feasible that the economic damages from climate change are at least an order of magnitude worse than forecast by economists, and may be so great as to threaten the survival of human civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 50 years have witnessed a set of changes in the scale of humankind's ecological imagination toward 'thinking globally'. Developments in earth and planetary sciences have elaborated a creation story that dethroned humans from a position of claimed supremacy to a status on a par with other systemic forces that have shaped the planet. So marked is the human imprint that it has earned its own name in the annals of geology, environmental history, and geopolitics: the anthropocene. The scientific refutation of human exceptionalism has not elicited either instant humility or greater self-awareness in the uses of expert knowledge to combat global problems such as climate change. This paper looks at sites of struggle between a persistent human imperialism, expressed through the continued commodification of nature, and more humble ways of knowing and guiding humanity's planetary future from standpoints in ethics, politics and law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the question as to whether humanity is now for, rather than simply in, itself. This issue is of particular significance at this time for two major reasons. First, there is the problem of climate change and its potentially disastrous consequences. Second, there is the matter of the coronavirus Covid-19 that is presently sweeping dangerously across the world. In this overall discussion the themes of glocalization as well as global history as they stand in relation to global studies are given attention with regard to climate change and the present pandemic. The concluding part of this contribution is principally occupied with a brief discussion of the significance of the travels of Alexander von Humboldt. The work of von Humboldt is regarded here as a missing element in the new book by Steger and James, as well as having considerable relevance to the general themes of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With fires, storms, social protests, and climate strikes sweeping the world, 2019 should have been a tipping point in how the world responds to global heating. This was the backdrop to the COP25 climate change summit which took place in Madrid in December 2019. This paper assesses the outcomes of the meeting and the path towards the critically important meeting in Glasgow at the end of 2020. It analyses and explains the key points of contention over levels of ambition, the rules which should govern global carbon markets and sensitive issues such as loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change. The analysis is situated within a broader geopolitical and economic context of right-wing populism, deepening forms of marketization and financialization of responses to climate change and against a background of a world increasingly feeling the effects of the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will lay out some useful conceptual/theoretical markets that will help us to understand, and resolve, significant political challenges to 'action' on climate change migration. Thus, while this paper is concerned with climate change and migration responses, it is also concerned with understanding how we understand migration in the context of climate change, and how climate change forces a radical shift in such understandings. To do so, I pick up on the work of Robert W. Cox and push it in a different direction. In particular, I am interested in his work on civilizations, and how this civilizational account of world politics opens up space for thinking about climate change broadly, and climate change migration specifically. I argue that Cox's account of 'intercivilizational' politics helps us to solve a pressing analytical problem: how to rethink the coordinates of contemporary cosmopolitics in the 'Anthropocene', and reconsider the frames of analysis that we adopt to understand and respond to climate change migration. I demonstrate this by considering two distinctly different 'civilizational' accounts of migration and mobility in the Asia-Pacific/Oceania region (one territorial and the other maritime), and consider how these might reveal an important source of future change. By sketching out this approach, my intention is to mobilize the resources offered by Cox in order to further his project of envisaging alternative world orders, and post-hegemonic political relations therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the liberal optimism of the long 1990s has faded into a world of growing inequality and resurging nationalism, there is less certainty about the prospects of economic convergence and global integration. Beyond the formidable human cost of maintaining a divided world, the possibility of incomplete globalisation also gives rise to a number of environmental risks. While environmental political theory generally sees strength in localism, history rather shows that a robust world trade system is crucial to offset local resource scarcities and that cosmopolitan norms of solidarity are essential for helping communities to rebuild after environmental catastrophe. In relation to climate change, statist thinking has led to a focus on non-scalable technologies and a silent acceptance of chronic poverty abroad as a way of avoiding a climate emergency. Contrary to such views, this paper argues that accelerating the transition to a fully integrated high-energy planet may more effectively mitigate Anthropocene risks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I set out some of the key aspects of the Paris COP 21 Climate Change Agreement. The Paris Agreement was initially reported as a major success. However, this was in so far as many thought any kind of agreement at all was unlikely, and because the Agreement includes Article 2: an aspiration to maintain average global temperature increases to significantly less than 2°C. I then ask the question: if the Paris Agreement is a success of sorts, has anything fundamental changed in order to translate the conditional success of achieving an agreement into an actual success that will realise the goals of the Agreement? I address this in terms of early assessment of trends and the Nationally Determined Contributions, how responsibility is positioned in the Agreement, and the political economy context, which has called forth the need for an agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a historical overview of the role of North–South differences in expectation and priorities in determining how international negotiations about global warming have been framed and implemented. Our analysis looks at two themes: the problem of technology transfer and knowledge inequity and the persistence of the G-77 as the point of departure for Southern action within the context of environmental negotiations. Our argument is that the North and South remain divided on the consequences of linking environment and development for future policy on conserving the global commons. In particular, the problem of accepting the burden of readjustment appears to be politically unacceptable to both North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores continuities and changes in the damming of rivers in the global South. By the 2000s, the infrastructural promises of large dams seemed exhausted. Yet, currently dams are making a strong comeback with new justifications highlighting their capacity to produce low-carbon energy and climate-proofed waterscapes, while the harms they generate are being presented as fixable. Through cases from the Mekong (Laos and Cambodia), and the Grijalva (Mexico) River Basins, we problematize these claims. Despite changes in the aspirations and agencies that foster damming, obdurate dam materialities and the new profit-maximizing operation modes provoke violent continuities of infrastructural harms and hinder the repurposing of dams to serve climate combat. Neoliberalised dams even augment climate vulnerabilities, as the more volatile rivers increasingly exceed their ordering capacities. We also show how the new dam assemblages continue dispossessing riverine residents while divergently strengthening corporate and state powers and obscuring relations of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fossil fuel resources continue to play a significant role in the strategies and policies of Arctic states, despite the accelerating global climate crisis. This is especially the case in the context of the Arctic coastal states of Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada, and the United States, whose waters are expected to hide a significant share of the world's remaining oil and gas reserves. In contrast with existing literature on political strategy documents, we approach the Arctic strategies of these five states with an interest in their understudied affective dimension. Relying on conceptually informed thematic content analysis, we demonstrate how resource affects—mainly desire, hope, pride, and denial—are created, circulated and utilized in the establishment of the states' Arctic resource policies. Furthermore, our analysis draws attention to the central role that affects play in legitimizing ongoing and future hydrocarbon activity in the rapidly warming circumpolar North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arctic is often cast as a site where natural resources can be extracted with processes eased by retreating sea ice. This article argues that Arctic resource euphoria is misplaced – at least partly – due to the worsening climatic, ecological, and social crises that increase the costs and risks of extraction. Permafrost melt is making mineral and fossil fuel extraction riskier and more difficult, as extractive infrastructures – built with great sunk costs – are deteriorating. The climate catastrophe can already be observed, first-hand, in the Arctic. This can give insights into what kinds of dynamics can be expected globally. The deterioration of extractive infrastructures caused by the climate crisis is likely to dampen the forecasts for expanding extractivism. This article identifies interdisciplinary research gaps and needs, while offering new prognoses for the future in and through the Arctic at the interface of climate crises, global climate tipping points, and resource extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists and world leaders increasingly call for bold climate action. Yet proposals remain far from the transformative systemic changes required. While many remain in denial that system change is necessary, others who call for system change fail to articulate what that change would entail. It is critical that the climate movement identifies and promotes specific strategies for change. Identifying synergistic proposals associated with ecosocialism and degrowth, we describe a set of policies, programs, and strategies that have the potential to justly minimize warming and that could become key demands of climate movement organizations attempting to influence governments in the Global North. While there are stigmas associated with ecosocialism and degrowth, the described strategies can be promoted without using these terms. Articulating specific strategies for system change is necessary to challenge the powerful actors and interests that continue to maintain the status quo and our current climate trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay elaborates the terms of our central argument about the current intensification of global disjunctures. We introduce a crucial dimension of our engaged theory of globalization that can usefully be brought to the fore to understand these cleavages and tensions. The essay scrutinizes two key conjunctures, comparing the current Global Covid Crisis with the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. It concludes that massive disjunctures in the way we live locally and globally have had incongruous effects on the global-local nexus, but without leading to positive transformation. Rather, they are both expressions of a longer-term transformation we have been calling the Great Unsettling. Without reflexive counter-practices, the most likely mid-term prognosis for the world is an intensification of tensions and disjunctures that are leading to a further thickening of this complex dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed grave structural faults in our global institutional architecture. We argue that political energies should now be focused on three main areas where transformative reorganizations are realistically achievable. In global health, we propose that monopoly patents be complemented by health impact rewards as an optional alternative incentive for developing and supplying innovative pharmaceuticals. To slow global warming, we propose a common glide path for reducing per-capita emissions, with the option to compensate for temporary excess emissions by financing the achievement of additional emission reductions in poorer countries. For the global financial sector, we propose eliminating fossil-fuel subsidies, reintroducing Glass–Stegall, protecting the fair value of international natural-resource sales, and instituting an alternative minimum tax on corporations, financial transactions taxes and progressive taxes on internationally operating digital businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances Rodrik's political trilemma of the world economy by using insights from Polanyi's The Great Transformation, which helps to grasp the interwoven dynamics of long-term transformations due to climate change and geopolitical reordering on one hand, and on the other short-term political ruptures due to countermovements. Rodrik's globalization trilemma shows the incompatibility of hyperglobalization with the need for an enlarged democratic policy space. Its nodes (globalization, nation state and democracy), however, have to be redefined to grasp contemporary dynamics of deglobalization. Based on a modified political trilemma of contemporary social-ecological transformation, I discuss and compare three visions and the resultant strategies: (1) Liberal globalism, focusing on hyperglobalization and individualism, (2) nationalistic capitalism, stressing national sovereignty and authoritarian governance, and (3) foundational economy based on planetary coexistence which combines selective economic deglobalization with a strengthening of a place-based foundational economy, and their respective social-ecological infrastructural configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land is a key input in economic production and production-waste sink. This links land to the causes of and responses to climate change. The dominant climate action ideas are based on the concept of 'land tenure security' which, in a global context marked by land-based inequities, means ratifying what already exists. This reinforces undemocratic social structures and institutions that themselves contribute to climate change. A restructuring of global land politics is called for, without which any analyses of and responses to climate change are at best superficial, and at worst, flawed and self-defeating. What is needed is to acknowledge the pervasive land-based social inequities in the world, and to end such inequities by pursuing a redistribution of a range of access to a range of land and resources in ways that categorically benefit the working people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial postscript, we return to a primary theme of this special issue on Economics and Climate Emergency. We elaborate on some aspects of, and reasons why we need, urgent and radical transformative change. We briefly update the trends affecting climate change and ecological breakdown, assess the need for an end to the 'war on nature', which resists a dichotomy between our species and nature and make some comments on the COP process and ways forward which resist 'trasformismo', while embracing the need for just transitions, degrowth and practices rooted in such concepts as 'transversalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay we provide introductory comment for the collection of solicited essays on Economics and Climate Emergency. In the first section we suggest that recent critique of the climate movement has broader systemic significance and this is indicative of issues that bear on the collected essays. In the following section we rehearse some of the standard arguments leading to complacency and delay to action on climate change and ecological breakdown. In the last section we set out the broad themes of the essays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Feedback' from climate change into the economy is critical. But what kind of 'feedback'? Given capitalist structures and inter-state rivalry in the global economy, there is little in the way of overall planning, and certainly no effective power to act for capitalism 'in general'. The fossil fuel bloc is deeply embedded in the economy, and is not afraid to press its advantage; the emerging renewable economy is gaining strength, but remains subordinate. Yet intensifying climate change and failing climate policy are creating new political pressures. This article addresses efforts to target fossil fuel corporates through divestment campaigns and argues the main 'feedback' to date is socio-political. It tracks how the threat of climate policy translates into 'transition risk' for investment strategy, and produces a growing loss of confidence in fossil capital. In this, we argue the climate contradictions of capitalist society have destructive effects but offer transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the underlying transformation produced by social ecological crisis– a transformation in the time scales for human agency. First, we trace how authors who conjunct readings on the question of climate change and time open up the space to question the race-based temporal technologies and their entanglement with racial planetary-capital regimes. Second, we engage with transition and adaptation. Transition and adaptation are colonial and accumulation temporal enabling conditions for the emergence, development and transmutation of the incommensurate to capitalization of the planetary. Finally, we conclude by arguing that, instead of focusing on capital's attempts to make its most 'fatal leap' between its assumed logical topologies and 'historical' cartographies by reanimating 'dead' critiques, we follow Fanon and attempt to introduce 'invention into existence,' the reactivation of living energies, their flux, and their improvisations for the conditions for a planetary as a decolonial project, not as an accomplished fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernist capitalist iterations of time of linear and messianic teleologies/eschatologies are co-produced with the nation-state and the global ecological capitalist order. This article contests racial ecological capitalism by focusing on its language of time for two dominant structures: first, the linear, that is, the flow of a determined sequence of separable measurable units in one direction and capitalist ecology and second, retrojection, that is, the conjuring up of the moment of enclosure and capture as the 'origin' of racial ecological capitalism which supposedly testifies to its necessity. I draw on the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and work by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway to register the co-production of the temporal with the ecological. In conversation with Octavia Butler, I argue that grappling with these two time approaches and ecology allows for a structural engagement with the emergence of and generation of the possible conditions for a decolonial planetary relations as acts of invention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how 'the Anthropocene' is conceptualized within discourses on security, politics, and ethics, and is narrated as a global-collective experience for all of humanity with an identifiable beginning, common horizon, and shared fate. However, this space–time framing assumes knowledge and experience not actually shared. Even critical engagements with the Anthropocene frequently invoke cosmopolitan space–time referents when seeking to intervene or call for action. Instead, we turn to the metaphor of the palimpsest and its discussion by Jacques Derrida alongside the 'worldism' and 'multiple worlds' of Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling to propose the heterogeneity of space–time. Doing so de-centres monolithic portrayals of climate change as 'the Anthropocene' and enables 'Multiple Anthropocenes', or the multiplicity of experiences of extinction and visions of political and ethical response. We conclude by discussing some insights from indigenous and queer space–time perspectives that narrate various climate change experiences that are evaded and written-over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex relationship between climate knowledge production and political action has long been discussed. Critical and post-colonial analyses have looked at how models, used to produce scientific projections of climatic shifts, produce novel concepts of territory by the nation-state. The production of novel political temporalities has largely been ignored, however. This chapter critically analyses and compares two climate reports produced by the Indian Government. These reports, the first climatology reports developed in India, represent two significant shifts in the State's temporal imaginary of climate change and climate politics. First, the State, through these reports, temporally orients itself to the future (models of potential climates-to-be), rather than the past (attribution of historical responsibility to Northern states) as it had during the first half of international climate negotiations at the United Nations. Second, by focusing on the development of regional-specific models, the Indian government subtly continues to resist the imposition of a synchronized, global time of climate change, albeit through a nationalist framework. If the meaning of climate change is ultimately derived from a clash of competing temporalities between Global South and North, as well as between humanity and Nature, it speaks to the necessity of post-colonial scholars to engage directly with the meanings of the future in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a significant deficit of 'ecological integrity' in contemporary climate change governance, defined as explicit recognition of the mismatch between rhetoric, intentions and actions. This deficit is not unique to climate governance: we live in an age of bullshit (indifference to the truth). Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (On bullshit, 2005, Princeton University Press) identifies this as 'one of the most salient features of our culture'. In this article, I argue that the concept captures the inconsistencies we observe in global climate governance. I begin by conceptualizing it and identifying the various forms it can take. I then provide an overview of the past three decades of global climate governance, before analysing illustrative examples of bullshit. I conclude by proposing reforms to the climate regime's accountability arrangements to enhance the integrity and limit the harmful effects of bullshit in global climate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The developmental state is an important concept within critical development studies. This article examines two questions. The first is how the developmental state has been impacted by globalization processes. This is traced for five globalization processes: the globalization of finance, of production, and of trade, global climate change and global class structures. The second issue examined is how, through the prism of the developmental state, critical development studies intersects, fuses, and diverges from globalization studies. The answers to both questions are shown to be complex and difficult but not without interesting insights and possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Editorial on the Climate Emergency makes the case that although we are living in the time of Global Climate Emergency we are not yet acting as if we are in an imminent crisis. The authors review key aspects of the institutional response and climate science over the past several decades and the role of the economic system in perpetuating inertia on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Humanity is now the primary influence on the planet, and events in and around COP24 are the latest reminder that we live in a pathological system. A political economy has rendered the UNFCCC process as yet a successful failure. Fundamental change is urgently required. The conclusions contain recommendations and a call to action now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global environmental crisis requires a grasp of how human society interacts with nature, but also, simultaneously, how the world is divided into multiple societies. International Relations has a weak grasp of nature treating it as external to the international – an 'environment' to be managed – while environmentalism has a planetary epistemology that occludes the significance of the international. How to break this impasse? While neither Geopolitics nor 'new materialism' capture the complex conjuncture of socio-natural and inter-societal dynamics, I argue that Justin Rosenberg's theorization of the international as 'the consequences of societal multiplicity' provides a theoretical opening. If a materialist notion of societal is adopted, 'societal multiplicity' allows human-natural and international dynamics to be grasped together. Thus, climate change is not a problem arising exogenously to the international, but something emerging through international dynamics, reciprocally affecting the units, structure and processes of the international system itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on climate and food inequalities while highlighting food sovereignty responses. It provides an analysis of climate inequalities ramifying through the world today. At the same time, food inequality is conceptually clarified as a counter approach to food security. It is argued that food inequality is consistent with the case for food sovereignty. Moreover, the combination of climate and food inequalities also highlight the complexity of climate crises and the challenges they pose for food regimes. The article further highlights the emergence of the food sovereignty response and systemic alternative. Taking this further is a case study of the transformative politics of the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and its constitutive approach to various forms of power from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the role of the individual in transforming union organizations by discussing the experiences of Ulf Jarnefjord and his efforts to introduce climate change policies into the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union [Transportarbetareförbundet]. Research investigating the integration of climate change policies into the agenda of Swedish trade unions has identified a disconnect between policy development among leaders on the one hand, and engagement among members on the other. Employing the life-history interview method, and the analytical concept of ‘organic intellectual’, this article focusses on the ways in which Ulf, as a regional health and safety officer, has experienced engaging with climate change issues in relation to both members and the leadership of his union. His experiences point to the importance of learning about how climate change and production impact on the everyday lives of members for developing and mobilizing support for climate change policies in unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is a contribution to environmental labour studies, which aims to investigate the practices and theories that integrate labour and nature, by focusing on labour environmentalism. While nature is privately appropriated and exploited by Capital, workers’ organizations tend to construct nature as labour’s other, a place to enjoy or a place to be protected from destruction at best. In the following introductory article to this special issue, we present our view of what environmental labour studies are investigating and might investigate in the future and the place of labour environmentalism within this broader agenda. We also suggest an analytical framework to evaluate the depth, breadth, and level of the agency of the variations of labour environmentalism. We suggest that environmental labour studies can be a way of studying not only the intersections between social and environmental justice, climate change and working conditions but can also contribute to building a bridge between environmental theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the life histories of two environmentally engaged unionists in South Africa, who were decisive for formulating the environmental programmes of their respective trade unions. Their experiences of participating in the resistance against apartheid in universities and factories taught them the necessity to connect different struggles and equipped them with the knowledge and ability to connect the fight for workers’ rights with the fight against environmental degradation. Both activists experienced the difficulty of integrating ‘the environment’ politically and practically into a trade union agenda. The labour movement has traditionally experienced nature as a place outside of work to be enjoyed for recreation. While nature constitutes an indispensable condition for labour, it has been privately appropriated by Capital. For environmental policies to form an integral part of union agendas, nature needs to be wrestled away from its appropriation by Capital and understood as an inseparable ally of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary climate change politics, dominated by neoliberal and ecological modernization framings, has reached an impasse. This article utilizes literature on the environment and employment relations to interrogate the largely neglected field of trade union activities on climate change. The main findings are that some trade union climate representatives (‘green representatives’) in some sectors have made an independent contribution to climate mitigation and adaptation strategies in the workplace. There is evidence of trade unions instigating transformation change and expanding climate awareness in the workplace. The principal conclusions are that workers have the interest and collective capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to address the differential impacts of climate and climate policy, and to coalesce workers to tackle climate change. The recent experience of UK trade unions suggests they have a vital role to play as climate actors and, suitably reconfigured, the capability to renew their role in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate justice is an important issue for civil society advocacy at the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the climate justice movement has received increasing scholarly attention, the contribution of faith-based actors (FBAs) to justice debates at the UNFCCC has been largely overlooked. This article examines the contribution of FBAs to the debate on climate justice and their relation to and difference from the climate justice movement. Based on a constructivist assumption that the meaning of climate change can be interpreted differently, this article understands action on climate change as an effect of its discursive construction. This article argues that FBAs are part of these discourses and that their religious and spiritual practices are constituted and constitutive of climate justice practices. Therefore, the aim of this article is to understand FBAs’ climate justice practices and critically reflect on their contribution to global climate change politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following one of Gerard Delanty’s recent arguments, if political philosophy is about the desirability or feasibility of norms, sociology is about the emergence and empirical existence of these norms. Cosmopolitanism has together with its normative dimension a cognitive and an epistemological one. It is because cosmopolitanism is basically a process, rather than a fixed condition, that the objectives of global justice are finally determined ‘by public argumentation and reflect the outcome of social processes in which normative ideals are contested and de-contested’. I argue that there is a specific version of cosmopolitanism, which tries to incorporate, although not exhaust, the three dimensions mentioned above within its normative foundations. This version is called ‘contestatory cosmopolitanism’, and it is political rather than moral and prescriptive. Second, by focusing on social processes, it is mostly exemplified in global social movements. These social movements, through contestation of existing norms, unveil the essential cognitive dimension of cosmopolitanism as a learning process, which is based and enhanced by its normative foundation. Third, in relation to climate change, I show that climate justice social movements that come from below constitute the avant-garde of a cosmopolitan order to come, by producing critical knowledge of transformative potentials. Yet, ‘contestatory cosmopolitanism’, although empirically manifested in climate justice social movements, also justifies and shapes their claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article tracks the key events that set the stage for the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, particularly as they relate to politics of convergence. One side of this coming together is an intersection of issues, where new terrestrial and aquatic carbon sequestration programs have blurred the margins of climate change mitigation and resource grabbing. These programs, enclosing forests, farmlands, and oceans, are likewise fused together in what can be described as an emerging ‘carbon complex’ that is part of the wider blue/green economy. On the reverse side, the clear intersection of issues as witnessed by radical, and historically sectoral, agrarian/social justice movements is causing them to intertwine in resistance. The realm of climate change has proven to be an exceptional space of struggle and countermovement building. Political interactions between movements have become increasingly sophisticated—requiring frameworks that address environmental, agrarian, and oceanic issues at once, as the issues have become ever more complex. Agrarian/social justice movements maintain that their agendas for food sovereignty and climate justice hinge upon exposing fault lines in the system and advocate overall system change. COP21 and its parallel side events were together a landmark moment, but part of a much more involved process, ‘the road through Paris’, along which movements had carved out transnational and local spaces of convergence against the backdrop of a global carbon complex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current global climate change negotiations face some contradictions that are not always addressed as they are considered politically incorrect. These include, first, the decoupling of commitments for planetary environmental policies with the actual national strategies. A relevant example is the Bolivian administration, which presents a strong rhetoric for biospheric Mother Earth Rights, but its national development strategies generate more environmental impacts and weaken enforcement at the local level. Second, the core ideas and beliefs that explain development varieties that generate climate change are deeply rooted, so changes in political ideologies, either from traditional ‘left’ or ‘right’, do not determine policies to effectively overcome climate change. Third, accumulation of scientific information is not enough to promote the necessary changes, because these deep roots conditioned perceived and acceptable alternatives. Fourth, this lead to tensions among the pursuit of economic financial globalization, the sovereignty of the nations-states, democracy, and the basement of global environmental conservation. This is a quadrilemma, because if one or two of these objectives are pursued, at least one other is violated. Nevertheless, international negotiations rest on wishful thinking that this is possible. Uncovering these contradictions is politically incorrect for many realms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the shifting meaning of the notion of sovereignty from the modern age to the age of globalization and its aftermath, envisaging new constellations of sovereignty taking shape across the globe. Observing the term's centrality in the configuration of the modern nation-state and its epochal semantic shifts, it briefly examines the concept's ‘decline’ during the era of globalization. It then introduces the notion of ‘liquid sovereignty’ in the context of rapidly changing ideas of territoriality, power, and inter-dependence. This in turn, it is argued, is connected with the surfacing of new forms of sovereignty centred on aliments, nutrition, and survival, encapsulated in the notion of ‘food sovereignty’. The article suggests that the food sovereignty movement has helped in the recovery of basic aspects of sovereignty in a world threatened by climate change and neo-liberal globalization, as the cosmopolitical dimension merged with ethno-political claims, particularly amongst Indigenous Peoples in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, Western sub-state nationalist movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to Hannah Arendt, the concept of ‘political action’ is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by ‘enframing’ it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the author's comments on how global problems like financial crises, food crises and climate change are creating a web of multiple crisis whose component elements are strengthening each other. She says that social inequality has reached unsustainable levels in different parts of the world. According to her, poverty and food insecurity is also spreading. She says that reality generates fear about the future of the world, and hope is the only way to confront these problems.

The article discusses about government policies concerning climate change. According to the article, it has been established that under the agreements made during the Kyoto protocol, carbon emissions by all signatory states should be decreased. However, developing countries have yet to take definite moves on this matter. Ironically, based on a study, developing countries accumulate a large percentage of carbon emissions.