CLIMATE REPARATIONS READING GROUP
The Climate Reparations Reading Group has been meeting since 2023 to discuss interdisciplinary texts to explore the relationships between different demands for reparations for the violent histories of colonialism, slavery, and environmental exploitation, as well as the relationships between demands for reparations and other transformative justice struggles in different parts of the world.
SEMESTER 2, 2024
#1: Climate Reparations as Contesting International Financial Subordination?
Bhumika Muchhala, “A Bundung Woods” Progressive International 13 January 2023 https://progressive.international/blueprint/67ace315-fd9d-4ddf-8125-70f5c45f37ed-muchhala-a-bandung-woods/en
The Third World Network’s Bhumika Muchhala calls for an NIEO II capable of containing the power of finance, undoing neoliberalism’s colonial logics, and dual delinking from both colonial capitalist structures and Eurocentric knowledge systems.
Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock, Ingrid Kvangraven & Jeff Powell, “International financial subordination: a critical research agenda” (2023) 30(4) Review of International Political Economy 1360-1386, DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2022.2098359
Despite a varied picture in terms of their relative economic strength, Developing and Emerging Economies (DEEs) remain in a subordinate position in the global monetary and financial system. While the IPE and economics literatures provide rich insights about the significance of this phenomenon, research efforts remain fragmented. To address this problem, we offer an umbrella concept—international financial subordination (IFS)—to channel research efforts towards cumulative theory-building. IFS is about unearthing why the structural power of finance takes a particularly violent form of expression in DEEs. To provide structure to IFS as a scholarly field, we first assess the contributions of IPE in analyzing various factors that reproduce IFS. To better ground these efforts in processes of accumulation and the histories of the relation between finance and (post)colonial development, we then offer a critical synthesis of three heterodox traditions—dependency theory,post-Keynesian economics, and Marxism. Next, we develop a pluridisciplinary research agenda organized around six analytical axes: the historical analysis of financial relations, the relations between financial and productive subordinations, the constitutive role of monetary relations as expressions of power, the role of the state, the actions and practices of non-state actors, and the spatial relations of financial subordination.
#2: Bridgetown Initiative: Reparations or Re-legitimation?
The 2022 Bridgetown Initiative for the Reform of the Global Financial Architecture, 23 September 2022, https://pmo.gov.bb/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/The-2022-Bridgetown-Initiative.pdf
Unpacking the Bridgetown Initiative: A Systemic Feminist Analysis & Critique (Feminist Action Nexus) https://wedo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ActionNexus_BridgetownBrief_EN_June2023.pdf
Additional: M Cockburn and S Jansson, View Point: The Big Watershed in Development & Climate Finance: What is being done and what is being overlooked? (CEPA Economics Matters, November 2023) https://www.cepa.co.uk/images/uploads/documents/CEPA_Development_and_Climate_Finance_Jan24.pdf
Michael Franczak and Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò, “Here’s how to repay developing nations for colonialism – and fight the climate crisis”, The Guardian, 14 January 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/14/heres-how-to-repay-developing-nations-for-colonialism-and-fight-the-climate-crisis
#3: Compounding Crisis: Debt and Climate
The Vicious Cycle: Connections Between the Debt Crisis and Climate Crisis (ActionAid, April 2023) https://actionaid.org/sites/default/files/publications/The_vicious_cycle.pdf
Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò and Patrick Bigger, Debt Justice for Climate Reparations (Climate + Community Project, 2022) https://www.climateandcommunity.org/_files/ugd/d6378b_d2a7db36122c4d31a9b14aa69f6274da.pdf
Additional: Ketaki Zodgekar, Avery Raines, Fayola Jacobs & Patrick Bigger, “A Dangerous Debt-Climate Nexus” (2023) 55(3) NACLA Report on the Americas 319-326, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2023.2247773
#4: Climate Reparations through and Against Capital?
Sophie Webber, Sara Nelson, Nate Millington, Gareth Bryant and Patrick Bigger, “Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures: Capital Switching, Repair, and Decommodification” (2022) 54(3) Antipode 934-958 https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com/doi/10.1111/anti.12806
Despite geographical critiques of the financialisation of climate governance, the realities of deteriorating environmental conditions, entrenched market logics, and the concentration of capital in the hands of financiers demand new strategies to contend with climate finance. We envision routes to better futures by surveying “financialised” responses to climate catastrophe that might be harnessed towards more reparative and decommodified ends. We combine ideas of “repair” and “capital switching” to evaluate financial tools for “reparative climate infrastructures” in five cases centred on energy, land, and water in the United States, Australia, Indonesia, and Brazil. Through these cases, we identify three key themes—governance, scale, and the state—that illuminate the socioecological, material, and political dimensions of reparative capital switching. The cases are each hopeful and cautionary. Together they offer a window into the contested terrain of climate finance in the present and highlight the need for critical attention to its strategic possibilities.
Additional: Sophie Webber, “For and Against Climate Capitalism” (2024) 62(1) Geographical Research 14-27 https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-5871.12628
This paper starts from the point that our current political-economic-climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises to protect the city from flooding while enriching city elites, but against which diverse social movements and collectives have organised. The second case is about a cooperative energy provider in Australia, operating on the terrain of a neoliberalised electricity market and climate change, and working towards multifaceted repair by collectivising and redistributing surplus and modelling democratic engagement. Those involved in these vastly different cases both pursue repair and reparations through climate capitalist projects by reckoning with historical and present climate debts while constructing forward-looking programs. As such, they chart the first steps towards reparative climate futures.
#4a: Loss and damage and human rights within the UN
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Surya Deva – Climate justice: loss and damage, General Assembly (17 July 2024), UN Doc A/79/168, https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/211/94/pdf/n2421194.pdf
In the present report, submitted to the General Assembly pursuant to Human Rights Council resolutions 33/14 and 51/7, the Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Surya Deva, develops a climate justice framework comprising four pillars (mitigation, adaptation, remediation and transformation) and 12 overarching human rights principles. He proposes that climate change-related loss and damage, which undermines the right to development of individuals and communities, especially those living in developing countries, should be seen as part of the remediation pillar of the climate justice framework. The Special Rapporteur recommends a rainbow of measures that States, international financial institutions, multilateral development banks and businesses must take to address loss and damage. He also outlines several human rights principles that the World Bank, as an interim trustee of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, and the Fund’s Board should integrate into all aspects concerning the Fund’s administration.
Additional: Analytical study on the impact of loss and damage from the adverse effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights, exploring equity-based approaches and solutions to addressing the same: Report by the Secretary-General, Human Rights Council (28 August 2024), UN Doc: A/HRC/57/30, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/a-hrc-57-30-aev.pdf
The present report of the Secretary-General, submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 53/6, contains an exploration of the interlinkages between human rights and loss and damage from climate change. The report includes the identification of legal and policy frameworks relevant to ensuring effective remedies for loss and damage, a description of human rights- and equity-based approaches and solutions and a series of recommendations.
#5: Litigation for Reparations
Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, “The Rising Tide of Rights: Addressing Climate Loss and Damage through Rights-Based Litigation” (2023) 12(3) Transnational Environmental Law 537-566
This article offers a comprehensive analysis of rights-based climate litigation aimed at addressing climate change-induced loss and damage, underlining its potential as a transformative force amid the minimal progress towards a coordinated global response on this topic. It builds on literature highlighting the potential of rights-based climate litigation to fill the gap in accountability for climate change and its consequences, noting that research to date has not systematically analyzed the remedies that plaintiffs have sought or secured. By focusing on remedy claims, this study illuminates the capacity and the limitations of such litigation to unlock redress for loss and damage while highlighting its reciprocal relationship with international negotiations. This synergy implies a promising trajectory towards a more equitable climate governance framework, despite the complexities and challenges inherent in this rapidly evolving field.
Additional: Submission by Greenpeace International to the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the “Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change” (21 March 2024) https://www.greenpeace.org/international/greenpeace-brief-to-international-court-of-justice-on-obligations-of-states-regarding-climate-change/
#6: Corporate Reparations from Fossil Fuel Companies
Marco Grasso, “The Case for Climate Reparations by Fossil Fuel Companies: Ethical Foundations, Monetary Estimates and Feasibility” Development and Change https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12837
This contribution argues that the fossil fuel industry has played a major role in human-driven climate change and should agree to shoulder the burden of the associated damages. To this end, the article develops a responsibility-based approach to operationalize and quantify fossil fuel companies’ climate reparations and locate them in the current political economy context. It explains the rationale for a responsibility-based approach to climate reparations, investigates their foundational elements and proposes a Global Climate Reparations Fund to manage them. The article continues by providing a typology of climate reparations and their operational aspects, which makes it possible to quantify the financial burden as amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars annually over the coming decades. The political economy of climate reparations, with particular attention to their feasibility, is then analysed. The article lays the groundwork for a reasoned dialogue within and between civil society and political representatives of different backgrounds on the responsibility of fossil fuel companies in the climate crisis and on their role in rectifying climate damages through reparations.
Additional: Marco Grasso, “Fossil fuel companies’ duty of reparation: why the industry must concur to foot the climate bill” (2024) 21(4) Globalizations 630-647, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2023.2239566
The fossil industry has greatly contributed to the increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This evidence and five morally relevant facts establish its moral responsibility for climate harm. This responsibility imposes on fossil fuel companies a duty of reparation for the climate crisis which requires them to redress their wrongful actions that have led to climate harm by disgorging funds. The article justifies and develops such duty of reparation in terms of financial rectification of climate-related harm. This duty provides a framework for an informed dialogue with civil society and between political representatives on the accountability of fossil fuel companies in the climate crisis and on their role in rectifying the harm they have concurred to create. Fossil fuel companies’ duty of reparation is a moral determination with direct relevance for the ethics, politics, and policy of climate change.
Additional: Big Oil in Court: The Latest Trends in Climate Litigation Against Fossil Fuel Companies (Oil Change International, 2024) https://www.oilchange.org/publications/big-oil-in-court-the-latest-trends-in-climate-litigation-against-fossil-fuel-companies/
#7: Reparations, Transformation and Worldmaking
Matthias Schmelzer & Tonny Nowshin, “Ecological Reparations and Degrowth: Towards a Convergence of Alternatives Around World-making After Growth” (2023) 16 Development 15-22
Faced with multiple crises, recent years have seen the rise of degrowth as a newly emerging field of research on alternatives to development in the Global North, as well as increasing calls for ecological reparations to the Global South to address the harm done by colonial, capitalist, and extractivist development over the past centuries. This article makes a twofold argument about the need to closely interlink these. Degrowth and ecological reparations discourses, policies and related movements could gain from strengthening their connections and a mutual integration of core perspectives and demands. On the one hand, we argue that degrowth needs to develop into a global justice perspective by integrating demands for (ecological) reparations, freedom of movement, and a global-justice oriented reshaping of the international economic system—demands most prominently articulated from Global South movements. Without this global justice outlook, degrowth risks becoming an inward-looking, provincial, localized, and eventually exclusive project within Europe and the Global North. On the other hand, demands for reparations—strongly articulated from the Global South—could benefit from incorporating the call for degrowth in the Global North. Without this call—which can, of course, be articulated by using different terms—the reparations agenda risks a key opportunity to address core structural and systemic drivers of extractive processes.
Erin Fitz-Henry and Elise Klein, “From Just Transitions to Reparative Transformations” (2024) 108 Political Geography 103004
This article reflects on one aspect of the rapidly growing body of research on just transitions that we think has not been robustly enough explored: the difference that more explicitly reparative approaches to historical injustice rooted in racial capitalism might make to how these transitions are conceptualized and enacted. To advance this argument, we turn to recent scholarship on reparations, and particularly reparations for slavery, colonization and Indigenous genocide, to draw out critical insights that might helpfully expand and redirect just transitions work to more fully address the ongoing legacies of what Olufemi Taiwo has recently called, ‘global racial empire.’ Specifically, we examine the reparative demands embedded in the Cochabamba People’s Declaration in Bolivia (2010) and the Black Hive’s Black Climate Mandate in the US (2022). Through close analysis of these two documents, we draw out and expand four principles that we see as critical to the development of more reparative policy options for just transitions at both national and international scales. Specifically, we draw attention to the need for just transitions work to 1) draw on broader temporalities that foreground the long afterlives of colonial genocide and slavery; 2) more thoroughly recognize geographical interconnectedness across nation-state boundaries, including the powerful persistence of neo-colonial relationships of exploitation and expropriation; 3) redirect processes of highly racialized global (mal)distribution; and 4) attend to more ‘pluriversal’ possibilities for rectifying these inequalities.
#9: Race and the Reparative Conjuncture
Jovan Scott Lewis, “Black life beyond injury: Relational repair and the reparative conjuncture” (2024) 108 Political Geography 102963, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102963
In our political present, shaped by the insurgent recognition of the consequences of antiblackness following the murder of George Floyd, but whose influence is quickly expiring, this article examines what the possibilities are for African American reparations. Thinking from this reparative conjuncture, the article examines the societal and ethical limitations of what kind of reparations this moment can produce. Identifying that the harms against African Americans and Black life in the Americas more generally are harms against Black relations, the article engages with the possibility of the relational discipline of Black ecologies to offer a framework for conceptualizing a full sense of reparation. However, in recognizing that Blackness as conceived within Black studies, and thus Black ecologies, is still largely limited to a commitment to the study of antiblack violence and its related practices of resistance, the article advances novel pathways for pursuing a formula for repair outside the terms of Black injury, which might produce relational repair.
#10: Calling for Redress
Sarah Riley Case, “Ch 4. Calling for Redress” in Climate Change, Anticolonial International Law, and the Universality of the Commons (PhD Thesis, University of Toronto, 2023) https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/128120
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Photo by Amanda Chen on Unsplash