What do we want? Climate justice!

The demand for climate justice is increasing. From climate-affected people to journalists to academics to activists: the term is everywhere. But what do these differently positioned socio-political actors seeking climate justice mean, and what are their theories of change for effecting it? 

I grapple with these questions in my recently published paper, “Australian third sector actors’ theories of change for climate justice: real and apparent barriers and obscured root causes.” Based on a 10-month ethnography in Australia, I zero in on a subset of my data focusing on 25 non-governmental organisations and not-for-profits — collectively known as third sector organisations (TSO) — working within social and environmental advocacy spaces. During the early stages of this ethnography, I observed TSO actors working towards climate justice, and I wanted to unpack this further. 

I therefore identified what I call participants’ ‘subjective visions of climate justice’. Then I explored the theories of change within these visions, following Hestres’  definition that theories of change are ‘the combination of advocacy goals, the strategies and tactics an organization believes will achieve them, and the assumptions underlying these strategies and tactics’. 

Climate justice visions

The most widespread subjective vision of climate justice was social justice for vulnerable groups. One social advocacy participant representatively stated that climate justice was about creating a ‘fairer and more just society for everyone, but especially those most marginalised’. Indigenous people were widely perceived to be the most marginalised and deserving of climate justice among such TSO actors. 

More-than-human concerns were peppered through the responses of those who foregrounded social justice and solidarity. However, a significant sub-population of environmental advocates envisioned an ecologically balanced Australia as the end goal of climate justice, with limited reflection of where people fit. Indeed, many such advocates were almost anti-human, with some highlighting unsustainable population growth from immigration to Australia as a cause of ecological decline. Such discourses have eugenicist undertones.

Others foregrounded ‘just transitions’ for regions dependent on the fossil fuel economy, and their narratives were often ‘nativist’ due to centring white settler working-class subjects as being those most deserving of climate justice. 

Theories of change

The most common theory of change that I identified, held by around two-thirds of TSO actors, is well represented by the following statement from a participant:

"I think to me, it’s always been sort of networking and mobilising like-minded people who care about climate change for various reasons and use political and social strategies at our disposal to make change … trying to influence government policy. And so, more specifically that looks like reaching out to people who are interested or communicating with them about climate change and why it might matter to them. And getting them along to events and training them up in theories of how to make change and the skills that are needed to do that."

In such theories of change, the underlying structure of Australian society (i.e. settler colonial and capitalist) was rarely problematised, and therefore, change within the current system was assumed to be possible.

An Indigenous TSO actor from Queensland had a radically different theory of change. They spoke of their distrust of policymaking or change from within, based on their multiple generational lived experience of settler violence in the form of massacres, dispossession of land, incarceration, and being ‘betrayed by those claiming to help us’. They claimed their people and allies ‘never bowed down’ or ‘gave into to settler governments’ and spend much of their limited resources travelling and organising among Aboriginal communities around the country to ‘contribute and build the movement’.

Many participants emphasised the importance of wider social movements, horizontal and vertical networks, and cross-sectoral alliances to achieve climate justice. While some felt despair at the perceived failure to achieve substantive change, all felt that the effort put into ‘coalition building’ was worthwhile and necessary to improve or at least prevent further regression of climate action in Australia. However, few could articulate a clear theory of change to scale such coalitions up, with a perception that regional coalitions are easier to sustain but less impactful.

Obscured root causes and barriers to true climate justice

Regardless of subjective visions of climate justice or ToC held, powerful state and non-state actors and those who have internalised their values resist socioecological transformation in Australia. Despite discourses of social and environmental justice in Australia, social inequality is increasing, ecosystems are collapsing, and climate change loss and damage is accelerating at national and regional scales.

Only a minority of white settler TSO actors accurately identified the underlying root causes of climate injustice or the power relations that sustain it. Australia’s colonial history perfectly captures the causes and consequences of the Anthropocene and brings into clear relief the accumulation by dispossession driven by the ideologies of whiteness, private ownership and commodification of land, labour and life (and non-life).

From this research, I argue that to ensure that climate justice becomes more than just an empty phrase, it is important to unearth and critique what it currently means for advocates and the assumptions, strategies and tactics that underpin their theories of change. There was relative despondency and recognition of structural power and fixity of socioecological relations, but there was no coherent strategy to confront such power apart from Indigenous interlocutors. I suggest that, beyond a white, liberal solidarity discourse of climate justice that prevails, there needs to be more intensive power and resource sharing from TSO and the people they claim to be serving. 

Indeed, the colonial-capitalist system is not broken; it is working as intended. Without a coherent anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movement across TSOs and beyond, the social and ecological indicators across Australia and beyond will continue downward. The historical and ongoing harms to Indigenous people in Australia represent the ongoing violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour globally. Climate justice must always be targeted at those who continue to be sacrificed by capital’s never-ending expansion.

Author bio

Guy Jackson holds a PhD in Human Geography from The University of Queensland and is currently a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Northumbria University. An interdisciplinary human-environmental geographer, Guy researcher explores human-environmental relations through the examination of social, cultural, and political impacts of, and responses to, disasters, climate change, and environmental change. Guy has undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in Australia, Papua New Guinea, the UK, and Vanuatu. Find him on Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash