Climate Justice Movements: How effective for local, national and international negotiations

• In Event: Environmental Justice, DEI, and Threats to Equity Work

Abstract

Are the climate justice movements struggling to achieve success in local, national, and international negotiations and holding the responsible agencies accountable? This paper critically examines climate justice movements organized in different countries, evolved from local level and scaling up to global level, to develop an understanding of their effectiveness and challenges in achieving goals of the movements. A qualitative systematic literature review on climate justice movements has been conducted to author the paper. The literatures have been collected from peer-reviewed journals following an inductive approach that relied on the concepts used in theoretical framework constructed for this study. The findings suggest that climate justice movements are helpful to raise climate justice issues at different forums and claim justice for climate-vulnerable countries, particularly in the Global South. However, the climate justice movements at various levels are struggling to achieve success to hold the climate culprits accountable or yield political consequences that bring changes in policies and practices and ensure multidimensional climate justice in a sustainable manner. At every level, their voices experience difficulties of being heard and counted due to the recognitional crisis of climate justice by powerful elites, businesses, and governments of carbon-emitting countries. Some climate justice movements can be successful at local level, but they are found to be less successful at national and international levels due to various challenges created by government agencies and their allies, such as the fossil fuel industry and even conservative media, and thus the success of the movements gets tarnished.

Author

• Abu Said Juel Miah, Loyola University Chicago