Logistics Landscapes: Green Growth and Just Transition Politics at the Port of Oakland

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Political Economy, Capitalism, and Markets

Abstract

In the US and globally, climate change policy and discourse have decisively turned towards a green growth paradigm, which asserts a strong complementarity between environmental sustainability and economic growth. While critiques of green growth qua green capitalist system have challenged whether it is possible to retain market-based mechanisms’ growth orientation without the social and environmental harms they have previously wrought, we understand less about how really existing green growth projects became politically possible and what their effects are for implicated workforces and communities. Analyzing the regional politics of decarbonization around the Port of Oakland, this paper argues that the Port’s decarbonization program operates under a green growth bargain. I explain how this bargain became politically viable by tracing two historical arcs dating to the 1950s, one following the labor relations of longshoring and the other the environmental relations of Oakland’s urban development. I show that these arcs were both driven by the political economic incentives of regional development and global logistics, but that despite this they unfolded in apparent separation until the late 1990s, when a working-class environmental justice movement emerged that constructed port growth as a problem, thereby explicitly articulating environmental and labor politics. This paper adds to eco-Marxist and social movement theories of collective climate politics by showing how histories of contention condition political opportunities and strategic decision-making.

Author

• Thomas Gepts, University of California-Berkeley