Kapucinski Development Lecture: The climate justice movement

An activist movement and ideological approach known as climate justice has emerged over the last two decades. Its standpoints diverge, often dramatically, from the dominant climate action approach, both its ecological-modernisation grounding and especially from ongoing global (UN and bilateral) policy negotiations.

Where are the conflicts? Climate justice demands

• deep greenhouse gas reductions (mandatory not voluntary, fairly distributed and with accountability, and urgently applicable to the military, shipping and airline industries)
• a far deeper, wider-ranging and more graceful "just transition"
• the redress of social injustices and empowerment of oppressed constituencies
• management of green technology as a global public good
• the need to leave fossil fuels underground and underwater
• the appropriate financing of planetary and social survival

There have been, since the early 2000s, changes in the articulation of such principles, in the ways climate justice analyses have emerged and in approaches to strategies and tactics. Alliances have been forged at different scales, from local "Blockadia" to global protest - all in search of a just alternative to the mainstream institutions’ and governments’ sleep-walking towards climate catastrophe.

Join #KAPTalks lecturer Patrick Bond, distinguished professor of sociology and political ecology, to discuss climate justice’s path and where is it going.

Lecturer bio

Patrick Bond, a scholar of political economy, political ecology and social movements, has worked with climate justice struggles in local and global settings since Johannesburg hosted the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development. He co-organised the civil society People's Space at the 2011 UN climate summit in Durban.

Patrick took up residence in South Africa in 1990, having studied during the 1980s at Swarthmore College, Penn's Wharton School of Finance and Johns Hopkins University. In the mid-1990s he worked in President Nelson Mandela's government as the drafter of the first White Paper on Reconstruction and Development, and a dozen other policy papers, before entering academia.

His best-known book is Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (2000, 2005 and 2014 editions), and he has authored or edited four books on climate justice.