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This study looks at the case of industrial energy transition campaigning by a traditional conservation group in a regional city that hosts coal- fired power and emissions-intensive industry. We ask, what tensions do metropolitan campaigners find when communicating the idea of just transition and building alliances in regional places? How do they deal with those tensions? What does this mean for the task of developing ‘useable useful theories of environmental justice’ ? Our results illustrate the need to navigate three principal tensions: inclusivity, recognition, and equity. The case of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Gladstone reveals that as these tensions get worked through, the campaign goal is reframed as something other than ‘just transition’ and more akin to a local environmental justice campaigning. Ultimately, the ENGO now wrestles with the local difficulties of building energy justice politics on the scale and time-frame that climate science implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary replies to Joshua Newman's article and 'counter narrative' about the Rudd government's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), shelved in 2010. Newman argues that other analyses of the CPRS amount to a 'prevailing narrative' that Labor should have pursued an alliance with the Greens and independents for stronger climate mitigation policy rather than bipartisan Coalition support in parliament. His narrower empirical focus on parliamentary norms and practices is not sufficient for establishing a compelling explanation of the events surrounding the CPRS. Newman's analysis is valuable, but it gives us a weak grip on the key issues of interpretation and explanation we're all facing with regard to that political moment. I reflect on the methodological challenges when establishing meaning and causation in political analysis of the CPRS because it involves evaluating party-political strategy amid a deepening crisis for the state as it (mis)manages climate change with ad hoc market solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia's humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as 'core' disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section of New Political Economy demonstrates the value of critical environmental political economy for our understanding of energy, and possibilities for, just energy transformations. In the following essay, I identify key themes from the special issue papers addressing the political economy of decarbonisation strategies and potentially deeper green transformations in capitalist economies. These are: (1) the historicity of energy-society relations; (2) the crisis tendencies of energy capital; (3) the spatial re-configurations associated with energy transitions, and (4) the generative and contradictory dynamics of political contestation. By foregrounding these analytic themes, political economic analyses challenge much of the existing energy transition literature that describes fuel switches and technological innovation without thematising relations of power or the historical significance of capitalist eco-social relations of energy. In order to advance the critical political economy contributions to our understanding of energy transition, I discuss key analytic insights from this tradition into agency, structure, space and process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical environmental justice (EJ) scholars, focused on the role of race, gender, capital, colonization, and power as key to environmental injustice, argue that EJ thinking and practice should move past the traditional focus on liberal and state-based remedies. There are many scholarly accounts of critical EJ, but no systematic examinations of such views in practice. This paper reports on a survey of the meanings of EJ circulating among activists and scholars globally. Using Q method, we found strong agreement with this more critical framing of EJ – representing an important development of EJ as a global discourse. At the same time, we found important differences in terms of knowledge and standpoints, participation, the liberal state, EJ praxis, and the politics of disruption. We argue that this heterogeneity of perspectives, within a generally critical approach, reflects the context-specificity, evolution and expanding reach of EJ and reflects the field’s overarching ethos of plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Within different social science and humanities disciplines, there has been debate about the impact of feminist knowledges and scholarship by women in general. This study systematically investigates the differential impact of feminist thought on disciplinary domains in the social sciences and humanities. Using quantitative citation data from the Web of Science, we investigate the extent to which gender-related research is produced and circulated in the 'centres' of six disciplines: economics, history; international relations; political science; philosophy and sociology. We then analyse the production and circulation of knowledge produced in feminist disciplinary sub-fields. The study findings show gender inequality persists, evidenced by gender representation in editorial positions and authorship. The proportion of gender-related research articles published in sociology is significantly greater than in economics, history, international relations, philosophy and political science. Interdisciplinarity appears to mediate the status of feminist knowledge within disciplines. The marginalisation of feminist discipline subfields appears to be constituted through practices of strong disciplinarity. Highlights • Gender inequalities persist in the practice and organization of disciplinary knowledge. • The impact of feminist knowledge on social science disciplines has been uneven. • Citation patterns reveal disciplinary differences in patterns of knowledge circulation. • Interdisciplinarity mediates the status of feminist knowledge within disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is global‐North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas – climate change, HIV‐AIDS, and gender studies – through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern‐tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. A pattern of extraversion, involving active adoption of paradigms from the metropole, is widespread and institutionally supported. Major alternative knowledge formations have not emerged in these domains. However contestations of more specific kinds are frequent. Paradigms are adapted, criticism is offered, activism is engaged, capacities are developed and allegiances sometimes changed. The valorization of local knowledge, which goes beyond the abstractions of universalized paradigms, is particularly significant. Not stark subordination, but a complex collective negotiation characterizes the response of intellectual workers in the Southern tier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of movement activity has been negotiations over climate policy. More recently, activists and communities are engaged in a struggle over the expansion of fossil fuels. A third contest has been waged over the present and future position of renewable energy technologies in Australia’s electricity market. In the wake of climate policy failure, energy campaigns have been deepened, and it seems that a broader energy justice agenda is being forged. New strategic dilemmas are visible in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist economics has taken up the concept of gender norms, most commonly conceived as a constraint on women's voice and gender equality. This contribution examines the concept of gender norms and summarizes key insights from sociology and other social sciences. Norms do not float free: they are materialized in specific domains of social life and are often embedded in institutions. An automatic process of “socialization” cannot explain the persistence of discriminatory norms. Norms change in multiple ways, both in response to broad socioeconomic change and from the dynamics of gender relations themselves. Restructuring of gender orders, and diversity and contradictions in gender norms, give scope for activism. The rich literature on normativity supports some but not all approaches in feminist economics and indicates new possibility for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost two decades since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising rapidly. We argue that the global climate policy focus on carbon markets has played a significant role in the failure to reduce emissions. There are 16 compliance carbon markets in operation across the world. Many more are planned, although there have been numerous problems with carbon trading, including ineffectiveness, weak regulation and implementation, instances of fraud, little to no emissions reduction and major legitimacy issues for governments and the private sector. In this paper we take a “strong” position, arguing that carbon markets do not have a role to play in a policy scenario that requires radical emissions reductions in order to avoid dangerous greenhouse gas concentrations. We put forward 10 reasons why carbon markets should not be the preferred climate policy choice, which we have collated from positions taken by grassroots social movement organizations, think tanks, NGOs and other political advocacy groups as well as individual scientists and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper maps the sites of forest carbon market development in the Asia-Pacific region. Institutional architecture for the forest carbon market is fast developing amidst a chorus of claims that it is, or will be, a win-win-win apparatus for ecological, economic and social outcomes. However the various experiments in forest offset projects and inter-state agreements for REDD lurch forward in the midst of growing evidence of governance failure and corruption. The claimed victories and simultaneous crises of legitimacy faced by REDD initiatives in the Asia-Pacific exemplify the impacts and tensions behind carbon market extension into the world's forests. Points of contention over seminal state-led pilot initiatives as well as corporate REDD projects for the voluntary market in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are considered as early signs of the trajectories of REDD marketisation. This review of REDD in the region opens up questions for future investigations into the shifting modes of authority that make this process possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers her views on the political argument that is being waged over the creation and application of market-centric policies on climate change. She argues that the prevailing economic precepts on market-based regulation is not fully realized as they lack clear philosophical and societal foundations on which they could stand upon. She then discusses climate markets through the factors that they entail including their epistemology, policy and philosophy of praxis. She then states that climate justice is the best policy for climate change.