Suchergebnisse

What education should children and youth be offered about climate mitigation choices? Drawing on critical pedagogy, political ecology, and environmental justice, I here suggest the elaboration of a critical climate education that would provide citizens with knowledge and skills to respond to the climate crisis with responsible action. I argue that students need to learn to critically examine options in their own countries for reducing greenhouse emissions and to discuss whether or not each of these measures may contribute to climate justice in time and space. A critical climate education should also offer insight into reasons why some climate mitigation alternatives have been embraced instead of options that could provide more climate justice in time and space. The need for a critical climate education is illustrated with a case study about climate mitigation choices that have been made in Norway without concern for climate justice. ; This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through the Green mentality project (proj. no. 250975). ; publishedVersion

Environmental justice (EJ) and political ecology (PE) have grown during recent decades to become leading critical approaches to socio-environmental analyses. The two fields share a history of pluralism and an openness to integrating new theoretical insights. Based on work by political philosophers in the radical justice tradition – such as Fraser, Young and Honneth – a 'radical environmental justice framework' has been established within EJ, focusing on three core elements: distributive justice, recognition and procedural justice. Later, inspired by Sen and Nussbaum, capabilities has been added as a fourth aspect. We have read this radical EJ framework through a PE lens and assess the potential for cross-fertilization between the two fields in relation to these four elements. First, the systematic treatment of distributive justice in the EJ literature provides a conceptualization that may be useful for PE in its specifications of various forms of injustice. Second, recognition is a useful perspective for both EJ and PE, but this aspect also highlights power relations that may need to be decolonized. To contribute to such a process of decolonization we suggest a focus on senses of justice and critical knowledge production. Third, the focus on procedural justice in the radical EJ framework would benefit from engagements with various power theories and discussions of participation that are prominent in the PE literature. Fourth, based on the PE viewpoint, we argue that there are two weaknesses in how capabilities theory tends to be used in the radical EJ literature: communities are discussed as homogenous groups without internal power relations; and actors and structures responsible for environmental injustice tend to be downplayed. ; Some of the time spent working on this paper was financed by the Research Council of Norway through the Greenmentality project (project number 250975). ; publishedVersion

This article provides a case study of a project in Kondoa, Tanzania under the programme Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). It demonstrates how a success narrative came to dominate presentations about the project as a multi-win involving not only climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, but also benefits for local people and poverty reduction. Based on repeated fieldwork using qualitative methods, we find that there is lack of evidence to substantiate the success claims. These claims are in particular based on the assertion that a component of 'conservation agriculture' was successfully implemented as compensation for forest enclosure. Gaps between claims and evidence are often exhibited in the scholarship on political ecologies of conservation in Africa, as well as by observers of development aid projects. But how can such gaps be explained? We suggest taking the interests of the actors behind the project as a point of departure, including how individuals as well as organisations have stakes in marketing a success narrative. Furthermore, we argue that an unsubstantiated success narrative of an aid project can be maintained only when there is a lack of structures to ensure independent and adequate examinations of the project by evaluators and researchers. In this case, Norway was the funder of the project, and as the dominant funder of REDD, the Norwegian government has a particular interest in reproducing REDD success narratives, since the credibility of the country's climate mitigation policy depends on REDD being a success. In addition, the case study demonstrates how 'success projects' emerge in the wake of new development fads. ; acceptedVersion