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Intersectional praxis - the practical application of intersectional theorizing into action - can be highly relevant for pursuing social-ecological transformations. Yet, we know little about the benefits and challenges of trying to mobilize such praxis for pursuing transformations. In this contribution to critical feminist and political ecology scholarship, we explore this gap empirically through a case study of producing a grassroots Green Deal in North Macedonia in which intersectional theory principles were employed in a process of collective visioning and grassroots organizing around that endeavor. To identify benefits and challenges related to this process, we inquire into the documents produced and the experience of organizers coordinating and catalyzing those efforts. We find that the benefits of enacting intersectional praxis relate to strategizing and mobilizing, collective action, and intersectional solidarity building. Challenges faced included fears concerning the unfamiliarity with the concept of intersectionality, and issues related to the capacity of individuals from subaltern groups to participate in collective visioning processes under conditions of precarious existence. We conclude that grassroots organizing around the Green Deal framework could have a potential to address some critiques of mainstream Green Deals, shift narratives of socio-ecological transformations (SETs), unite different movements working towards climate and social justice, and mobilize people power under an umbrella framework that dominates the policy arena, such as the Green Deal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a whole, the Green New Deal (GND) is discussed as one of the most promising political projects to address social justice targets together with climate goals. Yet, as most individual GNDs focus on the national level, concerns about global justice have largely remained absent from early debates, leading some to conclude that the GND reproduces neocolonial and extractivist schemes. To analyse programs for a GND in relation to issues of global justice requires an analytical framework able to evaluate justice claims in extended geographies. Drawing on the later work of political theorist Iris Marion Young, we develop a framework that foregrounds three principles: shared responsibilities for environmental harm of global reach, self-determination for those effected by these harms, and a forward-looking political responsibility to address the structures producing and sustaining injustice. We employ this framework to conduct a qualitative content analysis of four selected GND proposals from the UK, the EU and the US. This analysis indicates that all selected GNDs acknowledge in principle the global reach of responsibilities and formulate (limited) proposals to address these in different fields. However, they do not think of global justice in terms of a forward-looking notion of political responsibility that acknowledges the need of structural reforms and the self-determination of those experiencing harm. Instead, when addressing justice beyond the level of the nation state, these GNDs fall back on a notion of distributive justice. Based on the work of Young, we conclude with a set of propositions for global democratic structures that would support the outlined principles of global justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced the Los Angeles Green New Deal (LAGND), an ambitious plan to shift the city's power system to 100% renewables by 2045. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—the electricity provider for the city and the largest municipally-owned utility in the United States—began a consultation process with local stakeholders and energy system modelers to determine possible scenarios to accomplish this goal. While the LAGND was lauded by environmentalists and progressives both within Los Angeles and beyond, it has been heavily opposed by the IBEW 18, the union that represents nearly all employees at LADWP. IBEW 18 has staged protests, created political advocacy organizations, and funded anti -decarbonization political candidates. This paper draws on 20 semi-structured interviews and other secondary materials to understand the union's oppositionand to demonstrate some of the unique challenges that municipal-scale Green New Deal (GND) plans face. We argue that the tensions between the mayor's office and unionized utility workers can be explained, at least in part, by three instances of scalar misalignment—or mismatch—that arise from trying to undertake a GND plan at the city level. These include mismatch between: (1) the scales of political activism and engagement between the mayor and the union, (2) the aims of the GND narrative and the limits imposed by the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles, and (3) the current and future geographies of the electric power system and related infrastructure and its path dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault's ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a "technology of government" operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly "green" mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of "vulnerability" in adaptation policies; and the governing of "climate migrants". We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as "in need of improvement". And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]