A blog written by Kafi Khaibar Lubis, 2022-23 student of the Environment and Sustainable Development MSc

“Your acting was great. But stop crying.”

Not more than 20 years ago, I was called by my hysterical mom to quickly get inside the house while playing outside as a sunburnt pre-teenager. She was upset like I had never seen before, locked the doors, and shouted things at me, my dad, my uncle, and everyone in my family. She cried. I was just wearing a normal-sized T-shirt gifted by my beloved uncle, the only sibling my mother had. I never understood why it upset her so much until decades later.

 

Chapter 1: Sickle and Hammer

A couple of months ago, I crashed into a screening held by a film society at one of University College London’s neighbouring universities. It was for a film that I had always wanted to see but was never able to: “The Act of Killing”, or “Jagal” in Indonesian (literal English translation: “slaughter”), a documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, and an anonymous Indonesian co-director. It was about the mass murder that happened in Indonesia around 1965-1966 to millions of people associated, or assumed to be associated with, the Indonesian Communist Party.

This film was never formally distributed in Indonesia. It was only known through underground screenings and word of mouth, which was not a surprise since the topic of the 1965 mass murder itself is very hard to talk about in the country. One could risk being distanced from, labelled a communist (pejorative), or even prosecuted. The film, therefore, plays a significant role in opening and normalizing discussions about the topic and taking a step in unlocking what has been, for so many decades, a painfully silenced collective trauma.

 

Chapter 2: Confrontation with Reality, Truth, and Knowledge

At the beginning of the screening, they invited Soe Tjen Marching, writer of the 2017 book titled “The End of Silence: Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia” to give an introduction. Her father would have been a victim of the mass murder, if it had not been for the delay in processing his name to join the party’s organizing committee. She introduced the film by bringing to light recently declassified documents from the government of the United States of America that played a significant role in setting off the chain of events that led to the 1965 mass murder. However unsettling, the documents act as robust evidence against justifications made for the mass murder, including and especially the government-produced film of the event that was once a mandatory watch for schoolchildren in Indonesia in the 1980-1990s. These forms of knowledge possession have perpetuated the exclusion, silencing, and denial of genocide, leaving the victims at the hand of many types of injustice (Oranli, 2018; Oranlı, 2021).

“The Act of Killing”, on the other hand, used a unique approach to documentary filmmaking that allowed the perpetrators to participate in the production process and shape the story themselves. The film asks former commanders of the Indonesian death squads, who oversaw the execution of hundreds of thousands of suspected communists and other political dissidents in the 1960s, to recreate their atrocities. Devoid of remorse, the perpetrators were proud of their actions, even providing creative choices to narrate the reenactment in the style of their favourite Hollywood genre: action western.

The film’s epistemology is based on the belief that by allowing the subjects to participate in the production process and control the narrative, the film can achieve a level of authenticity and emotional depth that traditional documentaries may not be able to achieve. One might question why after decades of silencing and exclusion, a filmmaker would give a platform to the perpetrators. They are, after all, most often indifferent to the injury they have done and lack any understanding of the extent of harm they have caused. But as the film progressed, it was clear that this was a well-calculated strategy. It was precisely by giving space for the perpetrator to show off their crime that the truth became plain and visible, the genocide clear and undeniable.

 

There was one powerful scene in which the daughter of one of the perpetrators could not stop crying after they shot a reenactment of women and kids being taken away from their homes and their houses set on fire (Fig. 1). She was just an actress, playing one of the kids in the scene. The perpetrator was visibly aware of his daughter’s distress and was trying to comfort her: “Your acting was great,” he said, “but stop crying.” It was followed by depictions of other actors, children, and adults alike, looking traumatized by the reenactment, some requiring physical assistance to calm them down and remove themselves from the situation. Although obviously much milder than what truly happened in the 1960s, the activity incited an exchange of knowledge, blurring the reality and fiction of what they wanted to portray. It was no hidden knowledge that their crime caused significant terror; it was simply something that everybody was afraid to say. Now, by loudly narrating their own ruthless crimes, the perpetrators got a taste of their own medicine.

This method of filmmaking provides an interesting basis for analysis of epistemic injustice, delving into the nature and limits of knowledge. By allowing the perpetrators to narrate the story, the film not only exposes society’s normalization of celebrating brutal murderers but also places the killers in the position to confront their own past actions and their consequences. Another interesting example was Anwar Congo, a prominent leader in the death squad. Throughout the film’s first half, Congo seemed unrepentant and rather laid-back while recounting the murderous event. However, as the cowboy style film he had directed about his killing past neared its end, he started feeling nauseous. He cried, seemingly having an extremely late epiphany (Fig. 2). In that scene, a vivid connection is built between having knowledge and being aware of one’s own actions.

 

The fact that the filmmakers tried more than 30 times to find and interview different subjects is, in some ways, an attempt to understand the many forms of knowledge and the chase of finding the hidden knowledge held by an individual, as categorized in the Johari window (Bhakta et al., 2019; Shenton, 2007). Also, such effort was a sign that the film was not about them or the filmmaking. Oppenheimer had his realization moment and shifted the focus to the perpetrators; that what they did, was almost like a multi-layer fiction, a simulacrum, to say the least, of hidden knowledge, unknown knowledge, and blind knowledge of the genocides, their regrets, and their pride that in itself is a hidden remorse trying to justify their past actions.

Reflexivity and self-awareness become the central theme in the film’s method of unveiling the truth about the tragic past. With the denialism of the perpetrators that have been observed elsewhere, the creators might or might not be intentionally utilizing this reflexive participation measure to disclose objective information and even to induce empathy in people who were detached from their cruelty. With the surfacing of the declassified government documents, the fear and secrecy of the victims, and the genocide denialism, the injustice of knowledge possession has been hiding in plain sight, crossing identities and the reality of a whole nation.

 

Chapter 3: Empathy, Trauma, and Dreams of Justices

The images of my memories started to become clearer. I understand better about that day, the day my mother was upset beyond measure towards everyone. I remember the T-shirt I wore, which my uncle gave to me. It was a dark blue T-shirt with a sickle and hammer logo and the bold black writing of “SOVIET UNION”.

The discourse on epistemic justice and participatory measures extends beyond academia and into fieldwork, practice, and lived experience. My own family had their own trauma regarding the 1965 mass murder, which I never entirely understood since it could never be talked about openly. “The Act of Killing” tried to unveil the chronic terror of the tragedy both loudly and delicately, borrowing the voice of the perpetrator to raise the volume of the victims’ collective voice. The film confronted the perpetrators not with a team of obvious enemies, but with the most powerful confronter of all: a mirror image of themselves.

The fruit of participation, or engaging people, can open and lead to many kinds of knowledge, whichever type and however vile or inspirational that is, that leads to something minuscule such as being free to wear anything we want, to be anything we want, to justice, and the truth. Moreover, the disclosure of information, whether it be from the state to the people, from the victims to the public, or even from the very perpetrators to their own eyes and mind, can be the first step to opening up a complex dialogue, taking responsibility and addressing a proper apology, healing a collective trauma, and marching towards a better, more empathetic and just future.

 

References

Bhakta, A., Fisher, J., & Reed, B. (2019). Unveiling hidden knowledge: Discovering the hygiene needs of perimenopausal women. International Development Planning Review, 41(2), 149–171.

Oppenheimer, J., Anonymous, & Cynn, C. (2012). The Act of Killing. Drafthouse Films

Oranli, I. (2018). Genocide Denial: A Form of Evil or a Type of Epistemic Injustice? European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4(2), 45–51.

Oranlı, I. (2021). Epistemic Injustice from Afar: Rethinking the Denial of Armenian Genocide. Social Epistemology, 35(2), 120–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2020.1839593

Shenton, A. K. (2007). Viewing information needs through a Johari Window. Reference Services Review.

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

3.1: Environmental ‘activisting while Black’: Questions and conundrums

 

Within and between the world of mainstream environmental movements and me, there are ever many unasked or unanswered questions about race, wrapped in conundrums of justice, inside notions of common interests and collective visions for a world transformed. On the frontlines of environmental activism, those questions, conundrums, and notions can be tracked and traced in demands for ‘system(s) change, not climate change’, vociferous calls for ‘climate justice now’, and ubiquitous proclamations insisting ‘another world is possible’. What, exactly, do they all mean? For example, which systems are included in my fellow activists’ ideas about ‘system change’? What forms of justice constitute ‘climate justice’? If another world is to be made possible, what is the roadmap for getting there and, perhaps more importantly, who are the cartographers? How, why, and where do matters of race intersect with all those questions?

In this final piece of my three-part series looking at the contested relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice through the bifocal lens of my research and activism with various environmental movements, I offer some reflections guided by those sample questions. I do so in recognition of long-simmering tensions and emergent fault-lines amongst different groups of activists about the locations, hierarchies, and particular forms of justice in the vital interplay of causes, demands, tactics and grand visions that inform what I call ‘the soul-craft of a social movement’ – how any movement understands and frames its organising concerns, demands and tactics to address not just the direct drivers of its discontent, but also the root causes and other interrelated issues beyond.

Having previously looked at how the defiantly-positive Transition movement is now trying to proactively engage with growing queries about social justice in its community-based and solutions-focused approaches to environmental actionism, I now turn to focus on the unapologetically-disruptive Extinction Rebellion (XR), which has become one of the most prominent and influential environmental movements in recent years by using a kaleidoscope of non-violent direct action (NVDA) or ‘dilemma action’ (Sørensen and Martin, 2014) repertoires to arouse public consciousness, engage ‘the power of the powerless’ (Havel, 2009), and invigorate the necessary political debates and actions on the climate and ecological emergency that present a ‘code red for humanity’.

Here in the UK, XR recently embarked on a(nother) journey of critical self-reflection, re-examining its relationships with, and representations of, various forms of justice within its soul-craft. That process arose from sustained scrutiny and criticisms, both internal and external, about the perceived lack of proper or sufficient attention given to persistent and multidimensional matters of (in)justice by the movement since its inception in October 2018.

From the outset, XR presented three core demands to governments. First: Tell The Truth about the scale of the ecological crisis by declaring a climate emergency, and work with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change. Second: Act Now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. Third: Go ‘beyond politics’ to create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle the climate crisis (Rebellion, 2019). Infused in those three demands are far-reaching calls for ‘system(s) change’. The inescapable quandary, though, is, “how far-reaching is ‘far-reaching’?” My emphasis on ‘system(s)’ is a provocation to recall my earlier query about “which systems are included in ideas about system change” on the frontlines of contemporary mainstream environmental activism.

3.1.2: System(s) change: Beyond environmental spheres?

“Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening” — Chico Mendes

Environmental movements like XR are, by definition and ambitions, overwhelmingly preoccupied with the conservation of nature in perpetuity. Environmental sustainability is therefore typically understood and presented as a precondition for anything and everything. On that basis, most environmental movements have traditionally exhibited what is seen as an acutely limited engagement with class struggles and various concerns about justice that are seemingly not immediately connected to the major environmental spheres – the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, pedosphere, and lithosphere.

Answers, then, to questions about what is to be sustained in perpetuity are habitually formulated in relation to the environmental spheres. Accordingly, on the frontlines of contemporary mainstream environmental activism, the predominant demands for ‘system(s) change’ are articulated in terms of disrupting or upending the prevailing fossil fuel-based energy systems and networks of industries, corporations, institutions, and lifestyles that drive, or are known to be complicit in, the degradation and/or destruction of the environmental spheres. The inescapable question though is, what happens after we, for instance, ‘Insulate Britain’ or ‘Just Stop Oil’? Would any such symbolic policy change signify ‘mission accomplished’ for environmental movements?

It is certainly undeniable, a truism, that environmental sustainability is a precondition for anything and everything – and that, sadly, includes, for instance, class struggles, global injustice, social injustice, racial injustice, and various other persistent configurations of distributive and procedural injustice. Arguably, absent of a recognition and meaningful engagement with such struggles and injustices, any talk of system(s) change indicates a misunderstanding of the underlying system and a misdiagnosis of the problem. All too often, this leads to a prognosis that promises to change specific systems whilst keeping everything else the same – in short, a placebo. It is not enough, I would argue, to focus exclusively on sustaining the major environmental spheres without much broader analyses of justice concerns, including class struggles. Doing so betrays a strategically naked and/or elitist approach – compositional or demographic elitism, ideological elitism, and impact elitism.

At first glance, XR’s three demands appear to exemplify the elitist or exclusionary perspectives and approaches of traditional environmental movements; the principal focus is on achieving environmental sustainability. However, a closer examination of the demands, when taken together with a longitudinal analysis of the movement’s ‘soul-craft’, suggests that XR has a much broader agenda infused into its overarching ambitions for systems change. To wit, the movement’s untamed cries of crises, of emergency and of urgency, coupled with its unsanitised warnings of impending civilisational collapse, all of which are amplified by the language of ‘extinction’ in clarion calls for rebellion, imply that XR is not solely concerned with the environment, but about everything – this changes everything.

The suggestion that ‘this changes everything’, invites questions about the degree and/or nature of social transformation that XR and its activists are committed to. Are they talking about a tinkering or tweaking of the existing order, the status quo, or are they looking for far-reaching social, economic, and political changes beyond the environmental spheres? In other words, are they, or I should perhaps here say ‘are we’, talking about revolution or reform?

3.2: Kairos: XR and the choice between reform and revolution in social transformations

“It’s time to change the course of human history. We appear to be heading into what the ancient Greeks called Kairos, a window of opportunity, when our capacity for change is put to the test.” — David Wengrow

Notions of ‘revolution’ often invoke negative emotive forces associated with violence in the overthrow of an existing government and/or the prevailing social, economic, and political regime. In contrast, most references to ‘reform’ come with positive connotations of an improvement to the status quo (Nielsen, 1971). Since joining XR in April 2019, I have spoken with hundreds – 311 and counting – of my fellow activists and ‘Rebels’ during and between the movement’s biannual ‘Rebellions’, about their perceptions of ‘system change’ – as both a process and an outcome. Most activists expressed a tacit understanding that systems are constantly in flux, but the processes of change have been pushed and pulled in the wrong direction by the vested interests of a few elites – elite capture (Táíwò, 2022). ‘Elites’ in this context can best be described as the oilgarchy and oligarchy whose pervasive and/or unchecked economic powers have been increasingly blended into the politics of statecraft, thereby distorting democratic mandates to advance their corporate and individual self-interests – resulting in what the political theorist Sheldon Wolin referred to in his book Democracy Incorporated as an ‘inverted totalitarianism’; in part a state-centred phenomenon that primarily represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry” (Wolin, 2017).

Given that understanding, my questions about perceptions of system(s) change elicited diverse and, in some cases, divergent responses relating to both processes and outcomes. On the possible processes, perspectives offered ranged from a spectrum of national democratic changes centred on notions of participatory democracy, to the rather more radical and internationally-focused anti-oppression and liberatory consciousness advocates who insist that the existing interrelated national and international routes for change are woefully inadequate to bring about the deep structural – local and global – transformations needed to address the root causes of the crises. As Audre Lorde (2003) said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.

In terms of envisioned outcomes, opinions ranged from improvements to the insulation of all social housing – Insulate Britain – to no new fossil fuel licences in the UK – Just Stop Oil – as well as a growing volume of anti-state perspectives advocating for a borderless world – ‘No borders, No nations, Stop deportations!’

Within and beyond the reformist and radical viewpoints, and indeed the various shades of grey in between, there are numerous ‘Rebels’ who are “mad as hell”, and lean towards Andreas Malm’s (2021) “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” provocation, which suggests that strategic property sabotage is the only viable route to revolutionary change. For those so-inclined, the roll-call of disappointments – following decades-long appeals, campaigns, and mass street protests, as well as the countless international agreements, accords, protocols, and development goals that emerge as inconsequential from lobbyists-infested meetings such as the, to date, 27 Conference of the Parties (COP) gatherings – justifies sabotaging, even if only symbolically, the properties of corporations and institutions linked with the fossil fuel industry.

However, against the backdrop of increasing state repression, any acts of sabotage, and for that matter civil-disobedience, that seek to disrupt business-as-usual with the intention of disrupting the unsustainable trajectories of business-as-usual, are being met with tougher punishments including unlimited fines and/or imprisonment. In spite of those threats, the moral imperative to rebel continues to drive many activists.

For XR, the moral imperative to rebel remains because despite the clear and present danger, the ‘code-red for humanity’, that the climate and ecological emergency presents to current and future generations, particularly in countries of the Global South that have been least responsible for causing the crises, the dirigiste state’s environmental policies continue to be mediated and tamed by GDP growth-fetishism, and delimited by pliable politicians shaped by lobbyists and opinion polls in the vagaries of sado-populism (Snyder, 2018) and, additionally, the short-termism of Party-manifestos within the circus of electioneering cycles that position elections as the defining feature of any modern democracy – electoral fundamentalism (Van Reybrouck, 2018).

To that point, we may recall here that XR’s third demand is for governments to go ‘beyond politics’ to create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle the climate crisis. That demand, I believe, harbours considerable revolutionary potential. It is borne of a recognition that the highly-managed and money-saturated variants of representative democracy here in the UK and elsewhere around the world are, effectively, not fit for purpose in terms of representing the diverse interests and welfare of people and planet.

Yes, XR’s third demand, as with the first two, has been seen and criticised as being too narrowly focused on the climate and ecological crises as sine qua non for social transformations. In that respect, when I first joined the movement, I thought the founders – all ‘White by law’ (Lopez, 1997) – in formulating the demands, had chosen, as environmental movements usually do, to contest just the direct drivers of their discontent, but not the root causes and other interrelated issues beyond. If that was the case, then I suspected the demands could, on the one hand, be easily co-opted by the government and institutions paying lip-service – essentially green-washing – all the while maintaining fealty to business-as-usual – plus ça change. On the other hand, I feared the demands may even be hijacked to further eco-fascist agendas, given the current political currents of identity politics and sado-populism (Snyder, 2018) in politics feeding into and being fed by growing ethnonationalism and social polarisation.

From my background of racial, social, and global justice activism, and my critical analyses approaches steeped in the traditions of UCL’s Development Planning Unit, the climate and ecological emergency is understood as symptomatic not of a broken system, but, rather, of a system working exactly as designed; religiously pushing to its limits, and resiliently fulfilling, the ideological intents and purposes of a certain demographic – elite capture (Táíwò, 2022). Applying that perspective, I thought the demands could have been formulated as follows:

• Tell the Truth, the whole truth – the science, the histories, and the geographies – about the scale of the ecological and inequality crises by declaring a climate and inequality emergency, and work across institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
• Act Now to halt biodiversity loss, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to real zero by 2025, and announce policies to address the growing income and wealth inequality.
• Go ‘beyond politics’ to create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle the climate and ecological emergency, as well as the growth in inequality.

Despite my initial reservations about the absence of explicit references to inequality or justice concerns in XR’s demands, I found the movement, across the various camps during the April 2019 ‘Rebellion’, quite compelling. From the audaciously-sited pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus, to the transformation of Waterloo Bridge into a garden bridge complete with 47 trees and countless potted plants, and from the various presentations, workshops, talks, music and dance around the Marble Arch encampment, to the localised Citizens’ Assemblies held in Parliament Square, the movement seemed to present and represent, even but for a fleeting moment of untamed utopian imaginaries, something of a revolution in motion. The sublime madness of some 10,000 or so fellow activists convivially reclaiming public spaces, making their voices heard, and engaging in various radical and experimental practices of deliberative democracy and mutual aid, whilst contributing absolutely nothing whatsoever to the production of any profit, embodied Henri Lefebvre’s (1968) call to imagine “the reversal of the current situation, by pushing to its limits the converted image of the world upside down” – ‘The Right to the City’ manifested.

However, within and between the conviviality of the different sites there was, notably, an issue I often refer to as a ‘diversity deficiency syndrome’, which seems, in part at least, to define mainstream environmental movements and organisations. That is to say there is a persistent scarcity of people like me – ‘openly Black’ (see, CB4, 1993) – in environmental spaces. This has long been recognised and criticised, mostly through the prism of ‘privilege’, as being symptomatic of wider pathologies of systemic racism that are systematised via unequal power relations. Beyond the usual proliferation of what sometimes appears perfunctory or perhaps ‘à la mode’ but nevertheless noteworthy criticisms, my longitudinal research into the perennial challenges of diversity and inclusion in environmental movements, reveals that the issue is highly complicated, with dynamic social, economic, and political dimensions in causal relationships, which constantly interact with one another in some unpredictable ways that make it resistant to optimal resolutions. In short, it is what is called a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973).

In lieu of the publication of my research findings and analyses, it suffices for me to say, in this final ‘reflections from the frontline’, that contemporary environmental movements such as XR have, in general, acknowledged the significance and implications of the issue, and are trying, even if somewhat clumsily at times, to better understand and address the multidimensional nature of demands related to it. That is evidenced in XR’s ‘soul-craft’.

3.3: The ’Soul-Craft’ of XR

Recall here, my earlier conceptualisation of a movement’s ‘soul-craft’ as being ‘how any movement understands and frames its organising concerns, demands and tactics to address not just the direct drivers of its discontent, but also the root causes and other interrelated issues beyond’. That conceptualisation draws from and builds on what the renowned philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West articulates as “the formation of attention that gets us to attend to the things that matter, not [just] the things on the surface” (Cunningham, 2018).

Yes, XR’s organising concerns, demands and tactics centre on addressing the climate and ecological crises. However, we must note here, in considering the movement’s soul-craft, that, from the outset, the founders were aware of and understood the multidimensional nature of their concerns. That is to say they recognised that the climate and ecological emergency, the direct drivers of their discontent and ire, are but the surfaced symptoms of an exploitative and ultimately unsustainable socio-economic system deeply rooted in and evolving from the histories, geographies, and politics of imperialism’s many crimes. More recently, those crimes have been camouflaged and channelled through a seemingly unfettered rise of corporate power and predatory capital(ism) propelled by transnational market forces to reach into the Earth’s most remote corners. To paraphrase the noted geographer and anthropologist Neil Smith (2010), from his book ‘Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space’, capital stalks the Earth in search of material resources; and to that end, no part of the Earth – the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, pedosphere, and lithosphere – is immune from transformation by capital and its vast spectrum of attendant isms including, but not limited to, colonialism, extractivism, market fundamentalism, materialism, consumerism, nationalism and protectionism.

Crucially, in relation to my introductory remarks, the founders of XR acknowledged how and why, in their formation of attention to attend to the things that matter regarding the climate and ecological emergency, issues of uneven development and disproportionate impacts highlight questions about race that are inextricably wrapped in conundrums of justice inside notions of common interests and collective visions for a world transformed. Although being quite well-versed and attuned to the multifaceted correlations between matters of race and environmentalism, the founders sought, like all movements ought, to build solidarity across differences with some seasoned activists and groups that bring the necessary but oft-marginalised voices of Global South concerns and resistance to inform a justice focus on, and greater understanding of, the histories, geographies, and politics of imperialism old and new – we cannot heal what we do not understand. By fostering solidarity through shared critical analyses of the dominant social, economic, and political systems, they engaged in meaningful dialogues around radically different perspectives and practices from all over the world that offer an environmentally sustainable and socially just vision of the world transformed. ‘Unity without uniformity’ thus drives the pluriverse approach championed via the vital work of the Extinction Rebellion Internationalist Solidarity Network (XRISN) and affiliated groups.

Taken together with the demand for a Citizens’ Assembly that seeks to go ‘beyond politics’ in order to transcend the pathological partisanship that has come to define contemporary politics, ideas about building solidarity across differences, unity without uniformity, and pluriversality in XR’s soul-craft, all suggest that if another world, a better world, is to be made possible, the cartographers of the roadmap for getting there must be ‘the people’. Therein lies the revolutionary kernel in XR. All power to the people to ‘fight the power’ (Enemy, 1989).

The revolutionary potential or fervour imbued in any movement’s soul-craft does not begin with questions about what is practical. Rather, it is nurtured by asking what is right. Intrinsic to the formation and evolution of XR’s soul-craft, are constant deliberations about what is right in terms of particular tactics and targets pursued by the movement. This drives the concerted exposé of, and unrelenting attacks on, the various wrongs of corporate power and the egregious abuses of government power that bring to light issues of democratic deficits hidden in plain sight. Since the movement’s most notable and, perhaps arguably, most impactful ‘Rebellion’ in April 2019, XR’s actions have increasingly targeted fossil fuel companies and numerous public and private institutions that enable them, as well as mainstream media establishments that fail to convey the truth, urgency and gravity of the climate and ecological crises, clandestine anti-climate lobby groups, and organisations with historic and ongoing ties to the endurance of extractivism and other forms of exploitation that not only represent but intentionally perpetuate the proclivities of overproduction and overconsumption, growth-fetishism, and imperialism.

From a systems analysis point of view, the specific targets chosen by XR for direct action interventions, represent what the environmental scientist Donella Meadows (1999) and other systems thinkers conceptualise as ‘leverage points’ – places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can activate or produce big changes in everything. Leverage points are key points of power. Notwithstanding the disproportionate and undue influence of elites and corporations in the policy-making decisions and agendas of government(s) pursuant to addressing the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency, the most important leverage point in any properly functioning democracy should, logically, be ‘the people’. In that context, XR has sought to raise awareness to shift the mindsets and paradigms out of which the socio-political and economic systems’ goals, power structures, rules, and culture arise and are legitimised.

As well as targeting the leverage points represented by certain government institutions, companies, and organisations, XR is well-known for its repertoires of public disruptions. These include, for example, the blocking of roads and bridges, and, quite often, activists locking-on or gluing themselves to various structures, thereby inviting police arrest and subsequent engagement with the criminal justice system. Although such ‘dilemma action’ (Sørensen and Martin, 2014) tactics have been effective in gaining widespread publicity and stimulating important dialogues about the cause across different sections of society, research suggests that they – the disruptive protest tactics – often undermine popular support for any movement due to reduced feelings of emotional connection and social identification with the movement.

That said, and despite varying types of cost to some individual activists and indeed public perceptions of the movement as a whole, XR has, until very recently, been unyielding about sounding the ‘code red for humanity’ alarm not through the ‘practical’ – tried, tested, and failed – routes of marches, petitions, and letters to MPs, but by deploying the ‘right’ repertoires of public disruptions and dilemma actions deemed commensurate with the existential threats that the climate and ecological emergency presents for current and future generations. Whilst that has caused much consternation amongst some sections of the public, evidence from a variety of polls suggests that the message is getting through (Corner et al., 2020). That is to say, in recent years there has been a remarkable shift in the British public’s perceptions towards greater awareness and apprehension about the different risks and impacts associated with the climate and ecological emergency. That shift, it would appear, closely correlates with the emergence and ‘impossible to ignore’ activities of XR – and, of course, other contemporary movements such as the youth-led Fridays For Future (FFF), and their vociferous demands for climate justice.

Quite clearly, there is something of a symbiotic, albeit somewhat fraught and often fragile, relationship between XR’s disruptive protest actions and attracting broad public support. Cultivating a critical mass of awareness, and by logical extension support, has always been a strategic goal in the movement’s quest for ‘tipping points’ towards multi-level and deep societal transformations. However, amid unsettled debates about the percentage of the population needed to achieve that tipping point goal, there are underlying questions about how to convert awareness into concern through a greater understanding of interconnected issues, and then converting concern into a significant support base who are willing to coalesce in civic actions – not necessarily civil disobedience or direct actions associated with XR – that could help to disrupt the unsustainable trajectories of business-as-usual.

Whilst those debates and questions have been oscillating since the emergence of the movement, we should perhaps consider, as XR activist Nuala Gathercole Lam (2021) argues, “So what if Extinction Rebellion isn’t popular? We’re protesting to bring about change, and it’s working”. Similarly, as psychology professor Colin Davis (2022) of the University of Bristol has pointed out, “people may ‘shoot the messenger’, but they do – at least, sometimes – hear the message.” That succinctly captures the idea of “the activist’s dilemma”, wherein disruptive actions that raise awareness also tend to diminish popular support.

On that note, an inescapable quandary for us to keep in mind is how public opinions of XR’s disruptive actions might influence political agendas and the course of government decisions or policies. Two key questions arise. First, do such actions that raise awareness likewise increase public support for more urgent climate action from the government? Second, and relatedly, do disruptive protest actions increase public backing for greater police powers and the introduction of draconian measures to discourage such protests? A necessary reflection when grappling with those two questions is the role of the media in steering public narratives. If power is, as often thought, the ability to control what happens, then real power is controlling what and how people think about what happens.

The reciprocal nexus between disruptive protest actions, public perceptions, the media, government policies, and the police and criminal justice system, takes on a different hue and cry when viewed through the prism of race matters. In the overarching context of questioning environmental sustainability’s problematic relationship with social justice, and more specifically my inquiry in this section into how matters of race intersect with the formation and evolution of tactics in XR’s soul-craft, it is noteworthy that among the criticisms from certain sections of the public about the movement’s use of disruptive actions, XR has also been periodically rebuked, and in a few cases even ‘cancelled’, by some movements representing racially marginalised people’s interests, for being insufficiently attentive to the things that matter in what W. E. B. Dubois (2015) called ‘The Souls of Black Folk’. In our current era, the things that matter in the ‘souls of Black folk’ includes the near-constant drumbeat and reminders of institutional racism and durable inequalities within and beyond the police and criminal justice system. Hence, a backdrop of social injustices foregrounds the ‘hostile environment’ viewpoints of many Black, Brown, and ‘othered’ people in the UK.

In the unsettled multiculturalisms of Occidental countries such as the UK, ideas about ‘appropriate adaptations in a hostile environment’ mediate the everyday life experiences and conduct of many Black and Brown people. A major consideration in that regard are the disproportionately negative interactions and outcomes with the police and criminal justice system. Consequently, for a variety of groups representing different interests of racially marginalised people, any possibilities of coalescing with XR were stillborn in the widely-publicised moments of the movement’s activists declaring love for the police during the April 2019 Rebellion (Campfire, 2019). Additionally, the fact that XR’s brand, to date, has been in part shaped by and seen as inviting arrest, has tended to reinforce some perceptions of privileged ignorance (Wretched of The Earth, 2019). That, of course, calls into question, as outlined in my opening remarks and provocations, fundamental notions of common interests and collective visions for a world transformed.

The more people identify with the soul-craft of a movement, the more they are inclined to join that movement. Put differently, unless the organising concerns, demands, visions and tactics that determine a movement’s soul-craft collectively and positively resonate with people, they may support the cause but will not join the course. Accordingly, as Assata Shakur, a political activist in the USA with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army in the 1970s once said:

“No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times. If it isn’t growing, if it’s stagnant, and without the support of the people, no movement for liberation can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the situation is. That’s why the political work and organizing are so important.” 

3.3.1: This is the work

Being a radically decentralised leaderless movement as XR is, can sometimes frustrate the pace of decision-making processes needed to help advance any tactical reorientation and organising to help build solidarity across differences. Nevertheless, in the past year, after much internal deliberation ever since I joined, the movement has undergone what I think are two significant changes worth highlighting here as I begin to draw towards my conclusion.

First, after countless meetings, workshops, conversations, and agonising debates about understanding the justice conundrum and how best to explicitly situate and communicate it within a revision of the movement’s demands, a decision was finally reached. The preamble to the revised demands clearly illustrates that XR is not just a movement solely focused on environmental sustainability, but is also “rooted in love, care and a fundamental commitment to climate justice”. Further, the preamble emphasises that “In the UK, we bear a particular responsibility to the Global Majority, and acknowledge and support the incredible work of the many organisations specialising in the specific issues related to justice”. However, despite the justice-turn in the revised demands, the decision not to include a fourth demand specifically about justice proved to be a point of considerable distress, a deal-breaker, for some activists – of all colours, but most pertinently some racially marginalised activists – who subsequently decided to withdraw or reduce their participation, citing irreconcilable differences.

The second significant change by the movement, is a recent “controversial resolution to temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic”. Perhaps even more so than the revision of the demands briefly sketched above, that decision signifies a radical departure from XR’s brand, which I earlier described as ‘unapologetically-disruptive’. For various reasons, not least of which is an authoritarian-turn by the government marked by an increasingly repressive approach to many forms of protest, the movement will, for now at least, “prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks”. To that end, and as I write, XR has facilitated the coalescence of a ‘movement of movements’ – The Big One – which has involved building solidarity networks across over two hundred social, environmental, and justice campaign groups, movements, and unions – Unite To Survive. The aim is to become even more impossible to ignore by encouraging a hundred thousand supporters to peacefully occupy the public spaces in and around the epicentre of politics and government power. This strategic pivot from the movement’s established public disruption tactics, has been criticised by some seasoned activists who argue that the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency, coupled with the government’s record of inaction, demands more, not less, disruptive actions.

We should note here that as, over years, a certain level of familiarity and, inevitably, staleness have gradually crept into the multi-level impacts of XR due to the repetition of disruptive repertoires, questions about the movement’s own sustainability have arisen. In that context, many studies of radical environmental movements suggest that they rarely last more than a few years, even if the reasons for their discontent and emergence remain just as urgent. As I suggested in a presentation to the movement’s Strategy Assembly in February 2021, social movement theory indicates that XR was, at the time of my presentation, at a crucial stage wherefrom there were at least seven possible, but not mutually exclusive, outcomes: success, failure, fragmentation, co-optation, repression, stagnation, or going mainstream – which would require aborting the movement’s distinguishing repertoires of public disruptions in order to garner greater support from the general public, and build a broader coalition of interests. In many ways, I would argue, the movement has succeeded. All its demands have been met, albeit severely compromised adoptions, by the government. Most crucially, public awareness about the climate and ecological emergency has increased exponentially since XR’s emergence despite, or perhaps even because of, the repressive actions of the State. Therefore, the resolution to temporarily shift from public disruptions is, I suggest, not only timely, but altogether wise. It should address some of the glaring blind spots in the movement’s determination to reconcile its environmental sustainability aims with a broad range of social justice concerns.

3.4: Conclusion: We cannot heal what we do not understand

In this three-part series questioning the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice, I have presented a snapshot of my longitudinal research on the perennial challenges of inclusion and diversity in environmental movements as a way of problematising and interrogating that relationship. Drawing on my research experiences at UCL’s Development Planning Unit, the underlying consideration that has driven my journey is the fundamental question about development: What is development? At the heart of that deceptively simple question, are some of the most basic but deep philosophical reflections about ‘the human condition’: What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be human? Who are we to each other? How best can we organise ourselves to collectively thrive on this finite planet, knowing that our journey is limited and, in many cases, riddled with durable inequalities and uncertainties?

Given the persistent absence or failure of adequate multi-level governance responses to some of the most pressing problems in contemporary development thinking, planning, and practice, a brief study of recent human history across space and time tells us that collective action has always played a vital role in resolving a myriad of intractable societal issues. In that respect, social movements have been absolutely instrumental in driving some of the most important and positive social transformations in modern times, including independence from colonial rule, universal suffrage, civil rights, and much more.

In many ways, then, we can think of social movements as somewhat prophetic. That is to say they `speak before’ to announce what is taking shape even before its direction and detailed contents have become clear. They can be seen as thermostats shaping the climate of socio-political changes that are yet to be, and yet must be. Whilst many of our lobbied and pliant politicians tend to check the temperature of polling data before declaring what their deepest convictions are, movements like XR force issues out into the open, onto the streets, infiltrating the attention marketplace and opinion corridors with particular demands for transformative change. The success, failure, or indeed the degree of change achieved by any movement, often depends on interlinked dynamics between various factors such as the production of space and time, resource mobilisation, and the political opportunities that foreground their emergence and operations.

Moreover, with the current social and political currents increasingly being fuelled by identity politics, culture wars and, relatedly, the weaponisation of ‘belonging and othering’, ‘us versus them’, one of the foremost challenges and determinants of success or failure for environmental movements like XR, involves reaching beyond the low hanging fruit or echo chambers of ideologues in order to achieve the critical ‘mass factor’ necessary to trigger the tipping points for regime change in socio-political conventions. In that context, the inescapable conundrum that all movements must grapple with, is how to build and maintain solidarity within, with and between different interest groups, without fatally compromising the core cries and demands of each group. A successful coalescing of groups, then, should begin not by seeking to erase, circumvent or dilute differences, but, rather, by recognising, respecting, honouring, and appreciating differences. XR has come a long way in doing that.

The movement has been, encouragingly, attentive to the different justice demands of other non-aligned groups. To that point, we should note here that justice is a multifaceted ideal and, consequently, as I have frequently highlighted in various spaces and conversations within the movement, it can be quite cumbersome to specify and then amalgamate different types and hierarchies of justice into the specific demands of environmental movements. Thus, whilst numerous theories of justice – beyond the immediate scope of my enquiry in this piece – have been debated and advanced over many centuries by a number of notable philosophers, the relatively recent concept of climate justice has been profusely adopted by the current generation of mainstream environmental movements such as XR and the youth-led Fridays For Future.

“What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? NOW!!!”

What, though, is the justice demand in climate justice? An array of formations exist, perhaps best encapsulated by the demand that “polluters must pay”. Imbued in that phrase are three fundamental formulations of justice: justice as recognition, distributive justice, and procedural justice. Within and beyond those three forms of justice that frame ‘climate justice’ as a demand, the concept has become something of an empty signifier that is sufficiently capacious and user-friendly enough to suggest that the demands of environmental sustainability can be reconciled with the quest for all iterations of social justice. As the British MP David Lammy (2020) explained:

“The climate crisis is in a way colonialism’s natural conclusion. The solution is to build a new coalition made up of all the groups most affected by this emergency. Climate justice is linked to racial justice, social justice, [and] intergenerational justice”.

The links between historic and ongoing forms of colonialism and the climate and ecological emergency have now been recognised (IPCC, 2022), and are broadly accepted. In that context, capitalism alone cannot explain the racial inequities produced by the twinned crises. Colonial and racial capitalism can help us develop a better understanding of the origins, dimensions, and impacts of the crises. Put differently, and as I have often discussed with fellow activists, if we do not understand the idea of racial capitalism – how it started, what it is and how it works in our current era (Kelley, 2017) – then everything we think we know about the climate and ecological emergency will only confuse us, and the possible solutions that we propose in our activism, will most likely be futile.

The Green New Deal, as currently proposed and widely understood, supported, and promoted by many contemporary environmental movements and progressive politicians, offers, as has been pointed out by Jasper Bernes (2019), a promise to change everything while keeping everything the same – a placebo.

Any truly just and sustainable solution to the ‘code red for humanity’ requires us to recognise and understand the stratification of global and local societies – world systems analysis (Wallerstein, 2004). More pointedly, any/all solutions, I would suggest, should take as their starting point, the perspectives of racialised and colonised communities. We cannot heal what we do not understand.

Thankfully, there is a rich corpus of literature from marginalised scholars to help us; for example, from the Black feminists Anna Julia Cooper, bell hooks, and Mariame Kaba, postcolonial thinkers like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Arundhati Roy, Indigenous scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr., Winona LaDuke, and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, and the liberatory consciousness and critical social theories from the Black radical traditions of resistance evidenced in the works of Cedric Robinson, W. E. B. Dubois, and numerous others.

On that note, just as I began this final offering of my ‘reflections from the frontlines’, I now close by invoking, through paraphrasing, the sentiments of W. E. B. Dubois in his landmark book ‘The Souls of Black Folk’.

Between me and the world of mainstream environmental movements and activists, there are ever many unasked questions: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way during or between protests and meetings, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then cautiously enquire, “how can we attract more Black and Brown people into our movement?”, or they say something like “I wish there were more people like you in our movement”. Sometimes, after a little discussion, some reveal in exasperation, “we have tried and tried to get them to join us, but they won’t”. Others imply, after several conversations, that ‘race as a focal point for considering matters of environmental sustainability, means that we fixate on differences instead of similarities, which does not lead to what Martin Luther King Jr called The Beloved Community’. At these I smile, and remain focused. To the real question, “What if justice, particularly social justice and racial justice, are distractions that are getting in the way?” I answer seldom a word, for I know that we cannot heal what we do not understand. Justice is key.

I also know that no movement in history has ever been perfect, and the mélange of activists that make up any movement are not perfect either. As Cornel West so often reminds us, “we are all cracked vessels, trying to love our crooked neighbours with our crooked hearts”.

We cannot talk about climate change without acknowledging the sciences of climate change. We cannot acknowledge the sciences of climate change without looking into the histories of climate change. And we cannot look at the histories of climate change without seeing the geographies of catastrophes mapped out on what the United Nations General Secretary António Guterres has referred to as “an atlas of human suffering”. That atlas makes apparent the enduring prominence of race matters and matters of injustice in what I call ‘the necropolitics of climate change’.

Meaning what?

Meaning that is the title and subject of my next blog. See you soon.

 

Recommended reading, listening, viewing, and visiting

Bernes, J., 2019. Between the Devil and the Green New Deal. Commune. Issue 2, Spring 2019. Accessed via:

https://communemag.com/between-the-devil-and-the-green-new-deal/

Campfire, C., 2019. Police, We Love You, We’re Doing It For Your Children Too. Accessed via: https://youtu.be/uAH3AkuNCO8

CB4., 1993. – I’m Black, Y’all! Scene. Accessed via: https://youtu.be/Y_21Agi0t8I

Corner, A., Demski, C., Steentjes, K. and Pidgeon, N., 2020. Engaging the public on climate risks and adaptation: A briefing for UK communicators. Accessed via:

https://climateoutreach.org/reports/engaging-the-public-on-climate-risks-and-adaptation/

Cunningham, P. 2018. In keynote address, Cornel West urges integrity, action, and ‘soulcraft’. Yale News online. First published 5 February 2018. Accessed via:

https://news.yale.edu/2018/02/05/keynote-address-cornel-west-urges-integrity-action-and-soulcraft

Davis, C. 2022. Just Stop Oil: do radical protests turn the public away from a cause? Here’s the evidence. The Conversation online, First published 21 October 2022. Accessed via:

https://theconversation.com/just-stop-oil-do-radical-protests-turn-the-public-away-from-a-cause-heres-the-evidence-192901

Du Bois, W.E.B. and Marable, M., 2015 [1903]. Souls of black folk. Routledge. Accessed via:

https://openlibrary-repo.ecampusontario.ca/jspui/bitstream/123456789/1284/2/The-Souls-of-Black-Folk-1645717452._print.pdf

Enemy, P., 1989. Fight the power. Def Jam Recordings—Let the People Speak. Accessed via: https://youtu.be/mmo3HFa2vjg

Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D., 2021. The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK.

Havel, V., 2009. The power of the powerless (Routledge revivals): Citizens against the state in central-eastern Europe. Routledge.

IPCC., 2022. Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Accessed via:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FullReport.pdf

Kelley, R.D., 2017. What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism? Boston Review, 12, p.2017. Accessed via:

https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/What-Did-Cedric-Robinson-Mean-by-Racial-Capitalism-by-Robin-DG-Kelley.pdf

Lam, N. G., 2021. So what if Extinction Rebellion isn’t popular? We’re protesting to bring about change and it’s working. Independent Newspaper online. First published 01 September2021. Accessed via:

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/extinction-rebellion-protests-uk-climate-crisis-b1912418.html

Lammy, D., 2020. Climate justice can’t happen without racial justice. TED Talks. First published 13 October 2020. Accessed via: https://youtu.be/EkIpeO1r0NI

Lefebvre, H. 1996 [1968]. ‘The right to the city’, in H. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities. Ed. and Trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas, pp. 63–184. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Lopez, I.H., 1997. White by law: The legal construction of race (Vol. 21). NYU Press.

Lorde, A., 2003. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader, 25, p.27. Accessed via:

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/eng2850kmaspring2017/files/2017/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf

Malm, Andreas. How to blow up a pipeline. Verso Books, 2021.

Meadows, D., 1999. Leverage points. Places to Intervene in a System, 19. Accessed via:

http://drbalcom.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/35173014/Leverage_Points.pdf

Nielsen, K., 1971. On the choice between reform and revolution. Inquiry, 14(1-4), pp.271-295. Accessed via:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00201747108601635?journalCode=sinq20

Rebellion, E., 2019. This is not a drill: An extinction rebellion handbook. Penguin UK.

Rittel, H.W. and Webber, M.M., 1973. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), pp.155-169.

Sørensen, M.J. and Martin, B., 2014. The dilemma action: Analysis of an activist technique. Peace & Change, 39(1), pp.73-100.

Smith, N., 2010. Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space. University of Georgia Press.

Snyder, T., 2018. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Crown.

Táíwò, O.O., 2022. Elite capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else). Haymarket Books.

Van Reybrouck, D., 2018. Against elections. Seven Stories Press.

Wallerstein, I., 2004. World-systems analysis, in world system history. Ed. Modelski, George. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). Oxford: Eolss.

Wolin, S.S., 2017. Democracy incorporated. In Democracy Incorporated. Princeton University Press.

Wretched of The Earth, 2019. An open letter to Extinction Rebellion. Red Pepper. Accessed via: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/

 

**VISIT: Kairos, The Bookroom, Essex Hall, 1-6 Essex Street, London WC2R 3HY

https://www.kairos.london

Read Part 1 here.

Mainstream environmental movements in Occidental countries such as the UK have long been challenged by what I call a ‘chronic affliction of diversity deficiency syndrome’. A consistent criticism levelled against them is that of ‘elitism’, which comes with a charge that their activists tend to be predominantly White, middle-class, well-educated, and post-materialist people who often have the time, space, and wherewithal to engage in environmental activism. Implicit in that charge is that environmentalists are constantly preoccupied with, for example, the conservation of nature and the increasing parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but otherwise characteristically silent or seemingly apathetic to the hostile environments billions of people endure and navigate daily due to a variety of persistent and durable inequalities (Cf. Tilly, 1998; Morris, 2000).

Relatedly, from my research exploring the perennial challenges of inclusion and diversity in glocal environmental movements, movements which ‘think globally and act locally’ on issues of environmental degradation – case study the Transition movement – a question that I have wrestled with is ‘do environmentalists have a problem with social justice?’

Introducing that question in my previous piece (Anim, 2021a), I signposted research by various political theorists and urban planners which problematise and challenge the widely-held assumption that environmental sustainability and social justice are not only interconnected, but also interdependent in a relationship of mutual reinforcement on the same virtuous circle of development (see, for example, Dobson, 2003; Marcuse, 1998). Theories and debates examining their immanent antagonisms, tensions, ambiguities and universal compatibility notwithstanding, my longitudinal autoethnographic research of, and hence activism with, diverse environmental movements and organisations, indicate that two recent global events – the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations – ushered in something of a critical inflection point regarding how, and perhaps even more importantly why, movements for environmental sustainability should try to build solidarity across differences with groups fighting against persistent issues of racial and social injustice, in order to achieve their shared demands for systems change.

Against the backdrop of social justice grievances being filtered through the lens of racial justice and propelled to the fore by those two recent events, I reflect in this piece on trying to help the Transition movement (TM) better understand and address its diversity deficiency syndrome, and consider how the movement has been recalibrating its notions and narratives of environmental transformations to include concerns about social justice.

 

Transition and the collective action dilemma of ‘all lives matter’

Since its emergence in 2006 as an environmental movement predominantly concerned about peak oil and energy descent, the TM has always been in transition; a real-life, real-time global social experiment that periodically revises its principles and core-values through iterative processes of learning and unlearning. Based on its ideological roots and references to the principles of permaculture, the TM’s community-led model for change has frequently emphasised the importance of diversity as a segue to encouraging local Transition groups to engage with matters of social inclusion and, relatedly, social justice. However, in practice, the approach adopted by many groups has, at best, been passive and, at worst, non-existent. My research suggests that for many activists drawn to the movement by its defiantly positive solutions-based approach, and its staunchly apolitical stance, ‘wicked problems’ of social and particularly racial injustice are often seen as far too political and divisive, especially in our current moment of polarising identity politics.

Advising on that reticence to engage in race matters and why matters of race matter in environmental matters, I have, in numerous presentations and workshops delivered to various Transition groups and other environmental organisations since the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent BLM protests, argued that to demote, sidestep, hold at arm’s length or strategically swerve persistent matters of racial and social injustice in the dogged apolitical prioritisation of ecocentric resilience and sustainability, is to appear well-adjusted to injustice, well-adapted to indifference, or to live in cognitive dissonance.

On that last point of living in cognitive dissonance, an apolitical stance that is grounded in the post-political conditioning and configurations often deemed necessary for the disciplining role of consensus-building in environmental activism, betrays an ignorance borne of and maintained by a social, moral, and epistemic imaginary of self-deception and structured blindness. And that, as Charles W. Mills has argued, reveals an implicit ‘agreement to misinterpret the world’ (1997:18). Seen as non/mis/mal-recognition, that approach functions to effectively filter out any empirical evidence about the durable inequalities that conspire to create and perpetuate social and, relatedly, racial injustices. Such self-deception and structured blindness are axiomatic in the recursive and pervasive ecologies of wilful ignorance intrinsic to the colour-blind perspective within environmentalism’s, and hence environmentalists’ de facto ‘all lives matter’ entry point. Yet, ‘all lives matter’ is a promise, an ideal, that is yet to be met. And yet, it must be met. And therein lies an inescapable collective action dilemma – the recognition of difference. Aristotle was right; there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals. In the context of the BLM protests, ‘all lives can’t/won’t matter, until Black lives matter’.

When allied with power and the ‘invisible knapsack’ (McIntosh, 1988) of race privileges in the unsettled multiculturalisms (Hesse, 2000:2) of countries such as the UK, it becomes clear that the wilful ignorance of colour-blindness, understood as an active and dynamic perspective formed through processes of knowing designed to produce not knowing, is, in the words of James Baldwin, ‘the most ferocious enemy justice can have’ (2007: 149). The silence of wilful ignorance, colour blindness, ‘all lives matter’, is a form of power too. With the power and privilege to speak or act in the face of others’ distress and injustice, to remain a silent bystander, to bear silent witness, is to be complicit. Silence is violence.

Transition’s (a)political pivot?

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, and during the BLM protests, the organisational body of the TM released a statement of solidarity, expressing an ambition to do much better and much more to “become a movement which actively supports social justice and amplifies the work of Black and [B]rown communities striving to create a safe, resilient and regenerative future for all people, [and] to bring clearer focus to the huge shifts urgently required of the Global North if we are to deliver anything remotely resembling climate justice for Black and [B]rown communities in the Global South” (McAdam, 2020).

Overall, the statement captured perhaps the most explicit suggestion of a paradigm shift intention by the TM since its inception. In its entirety, it appeared to orientate the TM towards adopting a more political stance, and a proactive, rather than passive, approach to social justice. How, since then, has the movement operationalised those intentions?

Transition Bounce Forward: (re)locating social justice in the Transition Movement

Following the TM’s BLM statement, the ‘Transition: Bounce Forward’ (TBF) initiative was set up with the express ambition of helping local Transition groups advance its paradigm shift intentions. I joined the nascent TBF team to advise and help assess how emerging Transition projects could better understand and then engage with issues of social justice, looked at through the varifocal lens of race, class, and other constructs of marginalisation.

Under the momentum of that paradigm shift thinking, we, the TBF team, designed and delivered the ‘What Next? Summit’, a series of online events that were held over a three-week period. We grappled with challenging topics, questions, and conversations about the intersections between justice and the environment, and how Transition groups might navigate issues of inclusion and diversity in their community-engagement approaches. For several sessions of the Summit, we platformed and amplified the work of Black and Brown community organisers, as well as projects focused on the concerns of marginalised groups.  In my research and activism with the TM, it appeared that the Summit marked a pivotal moment in the movement’s approach to issues of social justice (see, Anim, 2021b).

To say the Summit ‘appeared’ to mark a pivotal moment for the TM is to simultaneously acknowledge and suggest that time will, ultimately, be the arbiter of integrity and success. In that respect, it is also important to question how the visions of paradigm shifting that were widely discussed and promoted during the Summit, have cascaded down to the ways Transition groups are reaching beyond ‘the usual suspects’, their choir of adherents.

To help Transition groups navigate issues of inclusion and diversity in their locality, TBF offered a course on ‘engaging with difference in collaborative community organising’. A key focus was on learning and unlearning to encourage activists to develop an approach to community engagement practices that put connections first by building relationships through trying to understand the lived experiences of disparate community members. With this approach, the course aimed to prompt and help Transition groups to pursue collaborative projects that bring together social justice and environmental sustainability.

It is noteworthy here that although the course was fully funded and open to all Transition groups in the UK – just under 300 – less than 10% of the groups took up the offer. Whilst bad timing and availability of activists were given as the main reasons for the low uptake, the question about environmentalists having a problem with social justice looms large.

In my study of Transition Town Brixton (TTB), guided by my research findings and the discussions during the ’What Next? Summit’, as well as the TBF community engagement course, we conducted some visioning exercises that involved numerous interviews with diverse members of the community, and four online workshops under the umbrella question of ‘What If Lambeth?’ to establish how people envisioned the borough in 2030. Focusing on four themes – food, enterprise, community spaces, and fashion and music –the resulting visions, captured in the composite sketch below, begin to encapsulate our recalibrated ambition of ‘inspiring local action for a sustainable and socially just future’. Whilst there is much more work to be done in relation to what I call ‘hot-button issues’ such as racist policing and the politics of urban poverty, the paradigm shifting has begun.

To conclude this piece, the question of whether environmentalists have a problem with social justice and, perhaps more specifically, issues of racial justice, is one that has long plagued mainstream environmental movements in Occidental countries such as the UK. Regardless of how accurate its analysis of the situation is, no movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing. Therefore, it is vitally important, from time to time, to engage in a dose of critical self-inventory. Why? If a movement is unwilling to expose itself and its ideas to some scrutiny and criticism, then it will not grow or succeed. In that regard, the TM has, even if morally coerced to do so by the zeitgeist resulting from recent events, embarked on a journey that I believe will help it become more relevant to different groups beyond its usual adherents. That is especially important in the unsettled multiculturalisms of urban agglomerations where there are often imbalances in available resources, cultural heterogeneity, ethnic and/or class tensions and transient populations. Though the organisational body of the TM, and indeed other environmental movements such as Extinction Rebellion, have seemingly embraced a ‘justice pivot’, many activists remain reticent. It is, therefore, the duty of the core movement organisers to help activists understand why their fight for environmental sustainability and matters of justice are intertwined and inseparable in the long quest for ‘systems change, not climate change’.

Having mainly focused here on the ‘how’ factor of the TM’s efforts to address matters of social justice, I propose, in my third and final piece under the titular question ‘does environmental sustainability have a problem with social justice?’, to look at ‘why’ I believe environmentalism should not be pursued in dogmatic isolation, and hence movements for environmental sustainability should try to build solidarity with social justice groups.

 

References

Anim, N., 2021a. Reflections from the frontline: Does environmental sustainability have a problem with social justice? (Part 1). The Bartlett Development Planning Unit. Access via: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dpublog/2021/04/01/reflections-from-the-frontline-does-environmental-sustainability-have-a-problem-with-social-justice-part-1/

Anim, N., 2020b. The What Next Summit: a pivotal moment for social justice in Transition? Transition: Bounce Forward. Transition Network. Access via: https://transition-bounceforward.org/the-what-next-summit-a-pivotal-moment-for-social-justice-in-transition/

Baldwin, J., 2007. No Name in the Street. 1972. New York: Vintage.

Dobson, A., 2003. Social justice and environmental sustainability: ne’er the twain shall meet. Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world, pp.83-95.

Hesse, B. ed., 2000. Un/settled multiculturalisms: diasporas, entanglements, transruptions. Zed Books.

Marcuse, P., 1998. Sustainability is not enough. Environment and urbanization, 10(2), pp.103-112.

McAdam, S., 2020. Black Lives Matter: A statement written collaboratively by the Transition Network team…Published 6 June 2020. Accessed via: https://transitionnetwork.org/news/black-lives-matter/

McIntosh, P., 1988. White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

Mills, C.W., 2014. The racial contract. Cornell University Press.

Morris, A., 2000. Building blocks of social inequality: a critique of durable inequality. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(2), pp.482-486.

Tilly, C., 1998. Durable inequality. University of California Press.

Co-authored with Trinidad Avaria

What are the role of crafts in political processes? Can crafts be a tool for individual or collective awareness? Can they open space for social justice for women? In December, we undertook an explorative workshop in the city of Santiago to answer some of these questions with women making Chilean arpilleras (burlap in Spanish), which are tapestries embroidered with scraps of recycled fabrics. The workshop was organised by the Chilean NGO Casa del Encuentro of Fundación Santa Ana that works with low-income women and their children, providing practical work skills for women and a safe space for children to play.

The motivation of the workshop came from our personal experiences. Having both grown up in Chile, we were familiar with the craft and we were aware of its political connotation during the military regime (1970-1980s). Over the last decade, we have both worked with low-income women in the country, looking at the cross section between gender and class, in a country that remains mostly unequal, segregated and machista. And this specific craft was an interesting entry point to discuss women’s participation in social and public life.

The history

 The first arpillera workshops were organised in 1974 by the Catholic Church, Vicarate of Solidarity and the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared. Concerned by human rights violations and women’s struggles, they supported a space for women to grieve and help each other, through sewing and embroidery. Thousands of low-income women participated in workshops making arpilleras, the motives of the embroidery was a way to denounce the cruelty of the dictatorship. As such, the production and sale of the arpilleras was clandestine. They were sold abroad, and were bought by people in exile as well as left-wing European supporters.

More than 200 arpillera workshops in low-income neighbourhoods across Santiago, transformed the private and feminine nature of sewing and embroidery into the production of “political objects” that both challenged the dictatorship (Grindon & Flood, p. 11, 2014; see also Krause, 2004), and provided emotional relief for women (Frank, 1996). In doing so, they strengthened their political awareness by socialising with other women in the same situation (Baldez, 2002), and encouraged each other to take action. Ultimately, the making of arpilleras was a way for many women to engage with politics (Boldt & White, 2011).

Women

In Latin America, it has been widely documented by feminist researchers that women’s political participation has been initiated by their roles as mothers (Baldez, 2002; Chaney, 1979). This does not necessarily challenges their traditional gender roles, but instead uses it to become active in the public sphere (Classic examples include, Madres de Mayo in Argentina and Ollas Comunes in Chile).  After the dictatorship, women were expected to go back to their traditional roles, as they no longer existed in a state of exception. However, what happens when democracy is institutionalised, but women remain in a position of inequality? What spaces to participate exist and how can they access those spaces? Almost 40 years have passed since the official arpillera workshops closed. However, low-income women in many parts of the country continue meeting to make tapestries, passing the knowledge from one to the other.

Fundación Santa Ana works in two of the same areas where these workshops started decades ago. In their experience, they see how the role of women is still shaped by deep gender and class inequalities. These are manifested in low employment opportunities and strong reproductive responsibilities, leaving them bound mostly to the private space of the household and with few spaces to socialise, beyond with their families. This does not only have consequences for the women themselves, but also to their children. As the NGO has documented, women confronted with the loneliness of raising children mostly on their own are likely to transfer that frustration to their children. It is in this context that the workshop emerges, as a way of understanding how women from the same area are able to play a different role and take up other spaces of socialisation and engagement beyond the home space.

The workshop

In December of 2018, we ran a workshop with Renca’s arpilleristas (women that make arpilleras) and women from the area. The arpilleristas have worked in the craft for 20 years, and lived through the dictatorship (although many would not discuss it), continue making arpilleras to sustain their households, and say that arpilleras “saved their lives” from depression, separations and other afflictions. During the workshop, they taught the craft and shared their stories.

From the workshop we can see that contemporary arpilleristas’ work does not necessarily target a specific political event, however it remains an important activity as a source of income – selling finished items in Chile and abroad – and as a space to socialise and support each other. Although living conditions are radically different to those during the dictatorship, the growing economic inequality of the country, paired with a machista culture and conservative gender legislation, keeps low-income women in a challenging position. As such, the three aims of arpilleras during the 1980’s – (i) economic support, (ii) a space to socialise, and (iii) create awareness and become effective leaders, remain relevant today.

References:

Baldez, L.(2002), Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Boldt, K., & White, T. (2011). Chilean women and democratization: Entering politics through resistance as Arpilleristas. Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, 24(2), 27-44

Chaney, E. (1979). Supermadre: Women in politics in Latin America. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.

Grindon, G., & Flood, C. (editors) (2014). Disobedient objects. V&A Publications.

Krause, W. (2004) The role and example of Chilean and Argentinian Mothers in democratisation, Development in Practice, 14:3, 366-380.

The William Benton Museum of Art (2018). Accessed: https://benton.uconn.edu/exhibitions/arpilleria/images/

 

Ignacia is a Research Associate at UCL and has a PhD in Development and Planning (UCL). Trinidad is the director of Casa del Encuentro at Fundación Santa Ana and has a Master in Psychoanalysis (Universidad de Chile).

Two weeks before the Rio 2016 Olympic Games opening on August 5th, a poll confirmed the vibe felt on the streets[1]: 50% of Brazilians were against the mega event and 63% believed it would bring more harm than good to the city. Against a backdrop of political and economic crises, Brazilians were comprehending that hosting such a party was going to cost a lot. And that they weren’t really invited to join.

 

Protests gained force as the torch travelled throughout the country. Demonstrators managed to extinguish the Olympic flame several times. More often than not, the parade happened alongside protests against poor living conditions. Many of Rio’s public schools have been closed and on strike since March. Hospitals haven’t got the basic materials to function. In July, the governor declared a ‘state of emergency’ due to the state of Rio’s bankrupt situation. In a decree, he established that it was up to authorities to take ‘exceptional measures’ for the ‘rationalisation of all public services’ (i.e. cuts) in order to ensure that the Olympics happened smoothly, as the event has ‘international repercussions’ and any damage to the country’s image would be of ‘very difficult recovery’[2].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70q_FOICM-Y

Video of attempts to extinguish the torch in protest in the periphery of Rio available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70q_FOICM-Y

 

Pretty much the opposite of what the world watched in the beautiful opening ceremony on August 5th, in the ‘preparation’ for the Games citizens watched favelas being bulldozes; Pacifying Police Units trying to silence funk music; the genocide of black youths sponsored by the state; the destruction of a natural reserve for the construction of a golf course; the closing of sports equipment where unsponsored athletes trained; imposed interventions; violence against protesters; corruption; and the absence of a social or environmental legacy for the city.

 

Resistance

 

The World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee of Rio de Janeiro is an articulation that has since 2010 gathered popular organisations, trade unions, non-governmental organisations, researchers, students and those affected by interventions related to the World Cup and the Olympics for the construction of a critical view of these mega events. Committed to the struggle for social justice and the right to the city, the Committee promotes public meetings and debates, produces documents and dossiers on human rights violations, organises public demonstrations and spreads information.

 

In the first week of August, the Committee organised a series of events in Rio de Janeiro under the title “Games of Exclusion” for the promotion of dialogue, cultural activities and protests (met with violence by the ‘National Force’ currently occupying the streets).

 

As part of the Games of Exclusion, the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (Ibase, in Portuguese) took forward a partnership started with the DPU last year to discuss the Olympic social legacy – or lack thereof – for Rio de Janeiro. Ibase aims to influence public debate for the development of the Rio we want: an inclusive, diverse and democratic city.

 

For the dialogue ‘Housing and Mobility: Connections with the city and impacts in favelas’, Ibase partnered up with community-based organisations from the favelas of Rocinha, Complexo do Alemão, Borel and Providência[3] to debate themes related to transport and mobility within favelas and the latest initiatives, such as the construction of cable cars, funiculars, and the legalisation of alternative modes of transport like vans and moto-taxis. Alan Brum, from the CBO Raízes em Movimento, questioned the priorities chosen by the government when investing over £200,000 in Complexo do Alemão: “Public policies and intervertions without dialogue are for whom? Our priorities are housing and basic sanitation, not a cable car”. The discussion, of course, went beyond favelas’ borders to explore dwellers’ access to the mobility interventions taking place in the city in light of the Games, such as a new metro line, BRTs, VLTs, among other actions.

 

 

 

These interventions have a direct impact in housing and public security, continuous sources of concern for those living in favelas. Since 2009, year in which the city was chosen to host the Games, more than 77,000 people were evicted and lost their homes in Rio[4], mainly under the excuse that these communities had to give room to expressways and Olympic equipment. In Complexo do Alemão alone, over 1,700 families are still being paid a ‘social rent’ whilst waiting for the delivery of new housing units. Their expectation, as Camila Santos pointed out during the dialogue, is that the benefit will stop being paid as soon as the Games end and that these family are going to be left empty handed with the state’s empty promises.

 

Since 2009, police forces have also killed more than 2,600 people in the city[5]. According to figures published by Amnesty International, there was a shocking 103% percent increase in police killings in Rio de Janeiro between April and June of 2016 in comparison to the same period in 2015, shattering any chance of a positive legacy to the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. “Security cannot come at the expense of human rights and the fundamental principles of democracy”, defended Atila Roque, AI’s executive-diretor.

 

 

In fact, the urbanisation of all of Rio’s favelas by 2020 was supposed to be the Olympic’s biggest legacy to the city and the most ambitious slum upgrading programme ever implemented. When launching the the Morar Carioca[6] programme in 2010, the city government promised to upgrade all of Rio’s favelas and to promote accessibility, waste management, public spaces and services, environmental protection and eco-efficiency, reduction of density, resettlements and housing improvements – “all with transparency and popular participation”[7]. However, the programme was cast aside by the government in 2013 as if it had never been proposed (and the fact was also completely overlooked by the mainstream media).

 

“What’s Rio’s post-Olympic agenda? We don’t want any more white elephants to show-off policies for favelas. We want to think about the city from the perspective of favelas. Favelas are a constituent part of the city. They present a different paradigm and show that diverse urban spaces may coexist, provided inequities are overcome and adequate living standards are universalised”,  concluded Ibase’s director Itamar Silva.

 

 

[1]    Dafolha, July 2016: http://media.folha.uol.com.br/datafolha/2016/07/18/olimpiada.pdf

[2]    Quotes from the decree.

[3]    Raízes em Movimento (Complexo do Alemão), Rocinha sem Fronteiras (Rocinha), Comissão de Moradores da Providência (Providência) and Agência Internacional de Favelas (Borel).

[4]    Rio 2016: Jogos da Exclusão, Jornada de Lutas, Rio de Janeiro.

[5]    Instituto de Segurança Pública do Rio de Janeiro (ISP/ RJ).

[6]    Morar means “to live”; carioca is an adjective relating to someone or something that comes from the city of Rio de Janeiro.

[7]    SMH, 2011.

 

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Mariana Dias Simpson is a DPU MSc Urban Development Planning alumni. She works as a researcher at the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (Ibase) in Rio de Janeiro and has worked with urban issues related to favelas, housing, public policies, poverty and inequality for several years.

Originally published by Urban Transformations

Will 2016 be an urban year in international development policy? In September 2015, the United Nations Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to supersede the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). One notable feature was the introduction of an ‘urban goal’, Goal 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. Planning is at the centre of the new urban goal. It includes an explicit planning target, Target 11.3: “By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries.” Target 11.3 synthetizes a long history of international development thinking to make cities sustainable through planning.

The target also emphasises the relationship between inclusive development and sustainability. In doing so, the target expresses explicitly the interconnection between social and environmental issues in planning. By emphasising capacity, the target also points to a fundamental issue in planning for sustainable cities: that institutions with the power to carry on sustainable action, or even to understand what sustainable action is, are frequently absent. The target specifies how planning has to be: it has to be participatory, integrated and sustainable. This last adjective emphasises that sustainability is both a characteristic of the output, i.e., a sustainable city, and of the process whereby that output is achieved: i.e. participatory, integrated.

To a certain extent, Target 11.3 follows on from the guidelines of Chapter 7 in Local Agenda 21 that was later consolidated in the Habitat II agenda in Istanbul, 1996. The assertive formulation of Target 11.3, putting at its core both participation and integrated planning, suggests an association of planning and urban management with social and environmental justice objectives. As part of the preparations for the Habitat III conference in Quito 2016, UN-Habitat has promoted the slogan “the transformative force of urbanisation”. The slogan is designed to harness the energy emerging from positive views of urbanization which do not just see it as an unavoidable global phenomenon, but embrace it as a positive force with the potential to change unsustainable societies. The use of the word ‘transformative’, however, suggests a radical departure from business as usual scenarios, a deep structural change that will not only reconfigure cities but also, will reconfigure contemporary societies and economies towards a fairer world which respects its environment. Overall, the link between inclusive and sustainable cities, the emphasis on the sustainability of both processes and outputs, and the framing of planning as a tool for radical change towards a better society all point to a greater interest on achieving environmental and social justice in urban areas. The central question that should be asked in the road towards implementation of SDG 11 and in the preparations for Habitat III is: what kind of planning can bring about cities that are both sustainable and just?

 

The protection of the Earth’s life-support system and poverty reduction are twin priorities for development. In relation to the new urban agenda, this is akin to achieving ‘just sustainabilities’ through linking social welfare and environmental protection (Agyeman et al. 2003, Agyeman 2013). Just sustainabilities approaches have the potential to reinvigorate notions of sustainability in the new urban agenda, helping link environmental concerns with the needs and perceptions of citizens, and their articulation in social movements.

The notion of just sustainabilities emerged as a response to the 1990s debates on sustainable development, and how sustainability goals in an urban context reproduced, rather than prevented, the conditions of inequality and environmental degradation. In urban planning, there has long been a concern about the limitations of using sustainability-oriented urban policies to address social justice issues (Marcuse 1998). Political theorists have questioned broadly where social justice and environmental sustainability are actually compatible (Dobson 1998, Dobson 2003). However, for proponents of just sustainabilities, social justice and environmental sustainability are interdependent problems that challenge existing power structures (McLaren 2003).

The linkages between environmental change and social justice are apparent in empirical evidence of how environmental degradation and resource scarcity is experienced by the urban poor. Unsafe and inadequate water supplies, inadequate provision of sanitation and waste management, overcrowding, lack of safety, and different forms of air and water pollution continue to shape the lives of many citizens around the world (e.g. Hardoy and Satterthwaite 1991, Forsyth et al. 1998, Brennan 1999, HEI 2004, WHO 2009, UNDP 2014). For example, almost 10% of deaths in low-income regions are directly attributed to environmental risks such as unsafe water, outdoor and indoor air pollution, lead exposure and impacts from climate change (WHO 2009). Poverty and inequalities in access to resources and livelihood opportunities increase the vulnerability of the urban poor to climate change impacts and natural disasters (Revi et al. 2014). By 2030, the global demand for energy and water will likely grow by 40%, while for food it may increase by as much as 50% (ODI/ECDPM/GDI/DIE 2012). This is likely to further hinder poor people’s access to even basic resources. For example, the number of people without energy access is raising, regardless of infrastructure developments or urbanisation rates (IEA 2014).

 

Incorporating notions of justice in environmental policy and planning emphasises both the distributional impacts of environmental degradation and resource scarcity and the need to adopt decisions that emerge from a fair and open process of policy-making. This also requires broadening the notion of justice beyond a narrow distributive conceptualisation with a recognition of how environmental problems are experienced by diverse groups of actors – especially those which are disadvantaged and struggle to make their views known – the extent to which they are represented and participate in environmental decision-making, and how environmental policy influences people’s opportunities for fulfilment (Schlosberg 2007).

Civil society organisations and local community organisations have already made substantial contributions to demonstrating and acting upon the nexus between social justice and environmental sustainability, which have in turn inspired the ideals of just sustainabilities (Agyeman et al. 2002). These are initiatives that recognise the need for people to participate in environmental decisions; the imperative to meet people’s basic needs’ and the normative requirement to preserve the integrity of nature for future generations (Faber and McCarthy 2003). Justice-oriented discourses are already inspiring environmental action for climate change in urban areas (Bulkeley et al. 2014, Bulkeley et al. 2013). Yet, addressing the environmental crisis will require a concerted action between public, private and civil society actors for a sustainability transition.

Demonstrating that just sustainabilities have purchase to deliver an urban future that is both just and sustainable will require operationalising this notion within current governance possibilities. In particular, following Rydin’s (2013) pioneering work on the future of planning, there is a need to think how just sustainabilities can help challenge and redefine environmental planning. Just sustainabilities emphasises the “nexus of theoretical compatibility between sustainability and environmental justice, including an emphasis on community-based decision making; on economic policies that account fiscally for social and environmental externalities; on reductions in all forms of pollution; on building clean, livable communities for all people; and on an overall regard for the ecological integrity of the planet” (Agyeman and Evans 2003; p. 36-37). It adopts an expansive notion of environmental justice which also recognises the just practices of everyday life (Schlosberg 2013). In doing so, it calls for a to move away from current dominant paradigms of growth, using planning as a means to address social and ecological concerns within an unsustainable and unjust economic system (Rydin 2013).

In this vein, just sustainabilities may be thought as the attainment of four conditions simultaneously:

1. Improving people’s quality of life and wellbeing;
2. Meeting the needs of both present and future generations, that is, considering simultaneously intra- and intergenerational equity;
3. Ensuring justice and equity in terms of recognition, process, procedure and outcome; and
4. Recognising ecosystem limits and the need to live within the possibilities of this planet (Agyeman et al. 2003).

There is already a body of empirical evidence about the practice of just sustainabilities (Agyeman 2005, Agyeman 2013). However, does it represent a viable perspective for sustainable planning agendas? Does it have relevance beyond the environmental justice movements from which it has emerged? Can it be integrated into current practices of environmental planning? These are open questions which will unfold as the New Urban Agenda begins to be implemented on the ground. The concept of just sustainabilities emerges as a positive discourse that can support action to deliver urban transformations. Clearly, there are tools available to deliver just sustainability action in urban environmental planning and management, but their applicability, effectiveness and impacts depend on the context in which they are implemented. More ambitious efforts are needed in the New Urban Agenda to redefine urban development possibilities and the way environmental limits are experienced in different cities. Local governments will play a key role in developing strategies to challenge growth-dependence paradigms and to enable collaborative forms of environmental governance.

 

REFERENCES

Agyeman, J., 2005. Sustainable communities and the challenge of environmental justice. New York University Press: New York.
Agyeman, J., 2013. Introducing just sustainabilities: Policy, planning, and practice. London: Zed books.
Agyeman, J., Bullard, R. D. and Evans, B. 2002. Exploring the Nexus: Bringing Together Sustainability, Environmental Justice and Equity. Space and Polity, 6(1), 77-90.
Agyeman, J., Bullard, R. D. and Evans, B., 2003. Just sustainabilities: development in an unequal world. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Agyeman, J. and Evans, T. 2003. Toward Just Sustainability in Urban Communities: Building Equity Rights with Sustainable Solutions. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 590(1), 35-53.
Brennan, E., 1999. Population, Urbanization , Environment, and Security : A summary of the issues. Comparative Urban Studies Occasional Paper Series. Washington.
Bulkeley, H., et al. 2013. Climate justice and global cities: mapping the emerging discourses. Global Environmental Change, 23(5), 914-925.
Bulkeley, H., Edwards, G. A. and Fuller, S. 2014. Contesting climate justice in the city: Examining politics and practice in urban climate change experiments. Global Environmental Change, 25, 31-40.
Dobson, A., 1998. Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Dimensions of Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dobson, A. 2003. Social justice and environmental sustainability: ne’er the twain shall meet. Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world, 83-95.
Faber, D. and McCarthy, D. 2003. Neo-liberalism, globalization and the struggle for ecological democracy: linking sustainability and environmental justice. Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world, 38-63.
Forsyth, T., Leach, M. and Scoones, I., 1998. Poverty and environment: priorities for research and policy – an overview study. Sussex, 49.
Hardoy, J. E. and Satterthwaite, D. 1991. Environmental problems of third world cities: A global issue ignored. Public Administration and Development, 11, 341-361.
HEI, Health Effects of Outdoor Air Pollution in Developing Countries of Asia. ed., 2004 Boston.
IEA, Africa Energy Outlook. ed., 2014 Paris.
Marcuse, P. 1998. Sustainability is not enough. Environment and Urbanization, 10(2), 103-112.
McLaren, D. 2003. Environmental space, equity and the ecological debt. Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world, 19-37.
ODI/ECDPM/GDI/DIE, 2012. Confronting scarcity: Managing water, energy and land for inclusive and sustainable growth. Brussels: European Union Report on Development, 9789279231612.
Revi, A., et al. 2014. Towards transformative adaptation in cities: the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment. Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 11-28.
Rydin, Y., 2013. The future of planning. Policy Press.
Schlosberg, D. 2007. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature.
Schlosberg, D. 2013. Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse. Environmental politics, 22(1), 37-55.
UNDP, Human Development Report 2014. ed., 2014 New York, 239.
WHO, Global Health Risks: Mortality and Burden of Disease Attributable to selected major risks. ed., 2009 Geneva.

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Vanesa Castán Broto is a senior lecturer and co-director of MSc Environment and Sustainable Development at the DPU. Her work spans a range of issues in developing cities, including disaster preparedness, climate change adaptation and energy supply. Vanesa is also Principal Investigator of the Mapping Urban Energy Landscapes (MUEL) in the Global South project at Urban Transformations.

 

To many – perhaps more today than in some generations past – ‘politics’ is a dirty word. Yet the political permeates our social lives on the most personal of levels as well as more generally. And the twin sibling of politics is power; specifically it’s exercise and pursuit. Perhaps the thing that most upsets many of us about ‘politics’ is what we perceive as the naked or covert use of power for personal betterment. But there’s a complication there. As much as we tend to presume that unbalanced power is a bad thing, the reality is that the stability of human societies through history and around the globe rests on just such imbalances. And personal interest occupies an uneasy yet always central motivator in the exercise of that power. In some ways, it is hard to even conceive of power in terms other than in some unbalanced sense. After all, if one person possesses the ability to compel someone else to do something, then that represents an imbalance in itself. There’d be no compulsion if the person compelled didn’t accept the authority of the other. Which highlights the difficult balance we need to try and find as human societies if we are to balance some sense of social justice with the sort of systemic efficacy we must aspire to if our states are to be run with reasonable efficiency.

The idea of the ‘political settlement’ that lies behind this project encourages examination of the nature of those balances in the political realm.

But we can also think of power in different ways. The sense of power as an imbalance in which one person can compel another, which I’ve just described, is what Andrea Cornwall and John Gaventa called ‘power over’. But we also sometimes think of power in different terms. For example, the power to do something is usually more about the capacity we have to act, and we sometimes also talk about ‘inner’ strength; the power we gain from within ourselves. Not quite the same as the capacity to do something because it refers more to strength of character or resolve, but that can connect with capacity as well. There is also a sense of power that labour unions, amongst others, have often used: the power of unity or solidarity. The power we gain by working together with others of like mind.

The ‘Political Settlement in Somaliland‘ research project is designed to dig deeper into some of the attitudes that women and men have to each other’s political engagement, and to find out more about how those attitudes are reflected in the ‘political settlement’ that underpins what has become an enduring peace in Somaliland. In so doing, we will be thinking hard about how different kinds of power are exercised by women and men in Somaliland: both in the negotiations, debates and decisions that form the political settlement, and in the actions people take or have taken in an effort to influence those decisions.

It is axiomatic that one of the most persistently asymmetrical balances of power is where it relates to the roles of men and women in a society. A growing body of research has focused on Somali state-building, and particularly on Somaliland, and there have been a number of studies on gender roles in that context. We are aiming to explore the ideas at the intersection of those concerns by trying to understand more about the assumptions and positions that shape social relations for men and women. That links strongly to a number of specific areas, including violence against women and girls, which seems to have worsened even while stability has been consolidated.

We are still in the relatively early days of the research, and are currently collecting primary data. There’ll be numerous updates of one sort or another. Keep an eye on the research microsite for new material.

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Dr. Michael Walls is a Senior Lecturer at UCL’s Development Planning Unit (DPU) and Course Director for the MSc in Development Administration and Planning. He has twelve years’ experience in senior management in the private sector and lectures in ‘market-led approaches to development’. For some thirteen years he has focused on the Somali Horn of Africa, and most particularly on the evolving political settlements in Somaliland and Puntland. He is currently leading a research project focused on developing a gendered perspective on Somaliland’s political settlement. As well as undertaking research on state formation and political representation, he has been a part of the coordination team for international election observations to Somaliland elections in 2005, 2010 and 2012 and is currently observing the 2016 Voter Registration process. 

On March 16^th, 2016, when I arrived at my first event for the 60^th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the United Nations headquarters in New York, I realized something very profound. As a social development practitioner, this is one of the few times I’ve experienced young African women as the primary narrators of issues affecting African women and girls in their countries and communities.

The Moremi Initiative for Women’s Leadership in Africa (Moremi Initiative) hosted the session entitled “Enhancing Young Women’s Voices for Women’s Empowerment and Sustainable Development: A Multi-generational Dialogue with Emerging African Women Leaders”. As the girls on the panel presented, the aim and the focus of the Moremi Initiative became clear to me. The organization “strives to engage, inspire and equip young women and girls to become the next generation of leading politicians, activists, social entrepreneurs and change agents”. This is achieved through the MILEAD fellowship (Moremi Initiative Leadership and Empowerment Development), which selects young women ages 19-25 from various African countries and the Diaspora to sharpen their leadership skills via trainings, mentorship, networking and resource mobilization. The twenty fellows showcase members of different cohorts from 2009-2015, and represent more than 15 countries attracting a wide audience including 2011 Nobel Prize Laureate, Leymah Gbowee who supports the organization and provides mentorship to the fellows.

While reflecting on this experience, I had a strong sense that an essential ingredient in successfully bolstering African women and girls as change agents is the organization’s emphasis on transformative, feminist leadership. So, I had to ask myself, “what defines this kind of leadership, anyway”? My definition is derived from authors like Srilatha Batliwala (Batliwala, 2010), who believe that it requires engagement with power, politics and values. I will now outline the ways in which I believe the Moremi Initiative cultivates this type of leadership.

 

1. Moremi, Power and Politics

On the surface, Moremi Initiative may appear to be another leadership program. Yet, what makes it formidable is that it is not soliciting African women’s participation in predefined projects affecting them and their communities. Instead the organization acknowledges that African women and girls hold the solutions and must define and set their own agendas. To this end, Moremi Initiative equips fellows with the tools, resources and the space to negotiate their own narratives’ and set the agenda for social change in their regions, countries and communities. Fellows get connected to powerful institutions while being provided with a dynamic support network and training to chart their course as emerging leaders. With these new skills, fellows are able to effectively articulate and advocate for the issues that affect them, their peers and women and girls broadly. One of the fellows who spoke at the CSW event identified this as one of the most important components of the program. Elizabeth Jarvase from South Sudan explains, “After joining the Moremi Initiative, I have represented South Sudan more than three times internationally, simply because ‘Moremi’ gives young African women space to develop and grow; it creates opportunities, and it provides the tools and skills needed to focus and advocate for our different causes with passion and integrity”. One of my favorites moments at the panel entailed Elizabeth putting forth a discussion on the human rights abuses related to the current civil war in South Sudan. She then eloquently asked the audience to reflect on how we can use our knowledge, abilities and power to end the suffering of women and children in this crisis.

 

2. Moremi, Politics and Value: embedding women’s empowerment in social justice

One of the aspects I revere the most about the Moremi Initiative is the way in which feminism is treated as an integral part of social justice work in Africa. After one of the MILEAD trainings, a fellow reflected, “I also got enlightened on the term feminism which interested me a lot because of its concepts. I also got to know that it is a very good term, and in my own understanding I have come to define feminism as having equal rights and opportunities between men and women” (Winnie, 2015). Many of the girls in the program come from diverse backgrounds and advocate for an array of issues ranging from youth empowerment to clean water, not all are overtly related to gender. Yet the choice to introduce and engage with definitions of feminism is both political and indicative of a value that upholds gender equity. I believe this is essential to achieving a type of leadership that places African women at the forefront of social change.

 

3. Moremi: creating resilient leadership and values through inter-generational mentoring

Another objective of the MILEAD program is to “build intra and inter-generational solidarity that cuts through borders”. I witnessed this while attending the 15^th anniversary gala celebrating the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), and it was magnetic to see the confluence of generations in the same space. Described as being “at the forefront of the African women’s movement, AWDF supports the work of African women’s organizations and activists throughout the continent” (Siyonbola, 2016). The organization boosts of a dynamic and pan-African network, which is why Moremi Initiative prioritizes bringing fellows into these spaces to ensure the building of bridges across generations. This not only maintains the legacy of African women’s leadership, but also engenders the emergence of fresh new ideas and issues from younger generations.

I want to conclude this reflection from a place rooted in my own personal history and experience. I am a non-African woman, raised in the United States. As an ally, I believe one of the best ways I can support the Moremi Initiative is nurture deeper relationships and leverage opportunities to grow, and acquire relevant knowledge and skills about Africa, women and girls. When all is said and done, for me it is important to always be conscious that this platform is ultimately about the voices and decision-making of African women and girls.

After all, this is what moved me most about the Moremi Initiative’s participation at the 60^th session of CSW: many individuals, including allies, partner organizations and donors aided in getting the fellows to New York. Yet the stories heard in the room that morning — the topics of discussion — were all determined and articulated by bold, visionary, resilient and emerging young African women leaders.

More information on Moremi Initiative can be found on their website, and you can also check out their Facebook page.

 

References:

Batliwala, S. (2010) Feminist Leadership for Social Transformation: Clearing the Conceptual Cloud. Crea-Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action. Available at: https://www.justassociates.org/sites/justassociates.org/files/feminist-leadership-clearing-conceptual-cloud-srilatha-batliwala.pdf

Winnie, N. (2015) Winnienansumba. [Blog] World Press. Available at: https://winnienansumba.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/24/.

Siyonbola, O. (2016) Incredible Women Don’t Just Happen: AWDF’s 15^th Anniversary. Applause Africa. Available at: http://applauseafrica.com/2016/03/18/incredible-women-dont-just-happen-awdfs-15th-anniversary/

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Ashley Hernandez is an SDP graduate who is passionate about gender equity.  She is currently working with Moremi Initiative for Women’s Leadership in Africa and volunteered with the African Women’s Development Fund USA for their 15th Anniversary Gala. 

Right when we decided to hold our regional conference in Nairobi, Kenya around integrating women in economic development, the Lions from the Nairobi National Park decided to visit the city. Amidst the friendly carnivores, we held a successful conference and agreed to come together as the Mitreeki 2016 Network and committed to work tirelessly to promote and protect the rights and integrity of all women and girls. We also pledged to:

• guide and sustain knowledge based partnerships for economic empowerment of women across developing countries (especially from India and Africa);
  • Share experiences on empowerment of women and girls that have brought results and have generated interest regionally and globally;
  • Invite like-minded organizations and individuals to join the network; and
  • Call upon international community and national governments to support this initiative and promote empowerment of women and girls at local, national and regional levels.

 

Why is Women Economic Empowerment needed?

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said “if the world is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), we need a quantum leap in women’s economic empowerment” while announcing the formation of the first ever high-level panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment in Davos (2016).

Women are the most deprived and marginalized across countries and cultures – a concern captured in the UN SDG 5 that urges equality and empowerment of all women and girls. Representing half of world’s population, women should ideally comprise 50% of world’s labour force, but in reality they only comprise around 30-40% of the total work force in developing countries (according to World Bank, globally 40% of all world workers are women). Issues such as persisting lack of voice and social status, education, skill sets, security at work place and equal opportunities are reasons for their low participation. And because of unequal opportunity and related reasons just 18% of firms globally have women at the top management level.

Map depicting percentage of women workforce across the globe

Despite grim statistics, it is believed that women’s economic empowerment is essential for any country’s development. It not only promises to increase a country’s GDP but also ensures a secure and a sustainable future for its citizens. Recently Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State repeatedly made an economic case for improving the status of women, citing research showing the benefits to a country’s GDP. Quoting the No Ceilings Report (Gates Foundation, 2015) she said “Closing the gap in women’s labor force participation across OECD countries is estimated to lead to average GDP gains of 12% by 2030, including almost 20% in Japan and Korea, about 10% in the United States, and more than 22% in Italy.”

 

India and Africa Connect

Both in India and Africa the gender divide, especially in rural areas, is quite intense and women are openly subjected to various kinds of discrimination and denial of rights. Women bear a disproportionate brunt of poverty which forces them into increasing drudgery, longer hours of work under conditions of poor nutrition, food insecurity and falling health. The entrenched socioeconomic prejudices results in progressive marginalisation of womenʹs role in the household, neighbourhood, and in the community. However, despite these limitations, India and Africa have achieved some noteworthy success in women empowerment and poverty reduction.

 

India, where only 27% of women work in the formal sector has a long way to go in meeting gender parity. At the same time, several indicators of human development and gender parity reflect that India compared to other Low Income Countries (LICs) has achieved success over the years. In 2013, India fell under the Medium Human Development category, while a majority of the countries in Africa fell under the Low Human Development category, with the Gender Inequality Index value ranging from as low as 0.410 to 0.591 demonstrating that a lot can be done to empower women in Africa who face high levels of inequality and discrimination. (source: http://www.ipekpp.com/knowledge_p.php)

 

Women face common challenges in India and Africa and the Mitreeki 2016 conference organized under the Knowledge Partnership Programme (KPP), funded by Government of UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), managed by IPE Global Limited, impressed upon the need to come together and address such issues to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. Many experts at the Nairobi conference, organized under the KPP in association with Kenya Association of Women Business Owners (KAWBO), felt that engendering development goals will supplement efforts individually made towards achieving the 17 SDGs by 2030.

The conference discussed key challenges faced by women in the two continents, especially pertaining to – access to education; access to credits & loans; access to markets; access to safe work places; etc. Day one of the conference focused on plenary discussions while day two facilitated a dialogue between practitioners to understand the good practices in more details and how these could be applied in their respective contexts. The panelists relayed success stories around financial inclusion; market linkages; opportunities in the emerging sectors from their own countries and deliberated on the social norms that impede women’s economic participation. Each session reflected on policies; programmes and models from the participating countries (Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and India) that have addressed these barriers.

The conference culminated in the signing of a resolution and a mutual agreement to create a ‘Mitreeki Network’ housed in either of its facilitators (IPE Global or/and DFID) which will further the women economic empowerment agenda by sharing, learning, linking and advocating for a gender just world. The network will have representatives from Local Governments, Organizations, Academia, Women Entrepreneurs, Private Sector, Donors, Women Beneficiaries, etc. from across Africa, Asia & UK and individually they would help identify and showcase initiatives that have succeeded in achieving targets of women empowerment and collectively imbibe learnings in their own context.

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Daljeet Kaur has a double Master’s degree in Environment and Sustainable Development from the DPU and Environmental Planning from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. She has worked as a qualified planner and an architect for more than eight years at IPE Global Limited. Her interest lies in urban planning; urban reforms, environmental management; climate change and its mitigation & adaptation; knowledge management.

At present she is working as a Senior Programme Manager for the DFID funded Knowledge Partnership Programme (KPP), implemented by IPE Global. The programme has established more than 50 partnerships to date with a wide range of partners in a number of sectors, including IDS (Sussex), UNDP, FAO, and Governments of Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Kenya and Malawi. For more information about the programme please visit www.ipekpp.com.

 

 

When I was undergoing my masters degree in Social Development Practice at the DPU, I was consistently amazed by the insight that development gurus provided when discussing and critiquing the design of public policy for development. As a student, reading about government policy was comfortable because you could deconstruct, isolate variables and analyze government performance by focusing on issues regarding diversity, identity, and the importance of planned intervention. We usually come to the easy conclusion that it is (sometimes) inefficient, separated from the reality of those in poverty, swamped with bureaucratic nonsense and overall unable to perform correctly. However, we usually look at this from a distance and perhaps we lack insight into how public policy is designed and the complexities of its execution.

 

In January I joined the national Ministry for Social Development in Mexico City, as a senior advisor for the under secretary. This is by far the most challenging professional opportunity I´ve had and is one that requires lots of work, dedication and most importantly, patience. Why? Because there are many things to be considered before any work is actually done. It’s attempting to reach the most people in poverty, with the most cost-efficient programmes, whilst balancing a complex political agenda….AND at the same time, attempting to put into practice all the knowledge gained from other development experiences and from my brand new masters award. It sounds tricky right? Well, it is.

So far, this is what I have learned.

Lesson one: In Mexico, public social policy is understood as the norms, institutions, programs and resources that are designed to improve livelihoods. It is meant to be a tool for the promotion and protection of basic social rights, but in reality it translates into each government undertaking a set of compromises that match the current political agenda.

There is a long-term national development effort that can be traced all the way back to the 1910 Revolution and to the recognition of social rights in the Constitution of 1917. For years, the social agenda has been woven into the very fabric of government institutions in this country, but it is constantly changing, shifting priorities and strategies depending on the political arrangement. The implications of this are that once a particular government ends, a new administration starts all over again. New priorities, new strategies. There is no continuity in this “long-term development effort” except for a few successful exceptions which are worth mentioning on a different entry.

Lesson two; “Cost-efficient and viable programmes that reach the most people living under the poverty line”… Cost-effective is not a sexy concept in the world of social development. We analyze and deconstruct loads of other more profound concepts, like power dynamics or citizenship. In practice however, while all of these profound concepts are essential, cost-efficiency becomes a priority to public policy. I learned this recently when I had to define with a group of experts where to open 200 community dinners for women and children that lack access to nutritious food. So I work for hours putting together all the social variables that ought to be considered, from the figure of mothers as caregivers and how that ought to change and include other roles, to the complexity of food chains and power relations. I sit down to discuss this strategy and the main issue is, where can we reach the most people with the most cost-effective operation. No need to say more.

Lesson three; in a public institution, everything is urgent, it needs to be done as soon as possible. So when cost-effectiveness meets viability, then that´s it. The policy gets designed and it operates under those two principles. More profound, long term considerations are harder to incorporate, not because they are considered less important, but because there is a utilitarian formula at place. Reach the most people, other aspects will eventually be introduced. I learned this whilst performing an evaluation of a Woman’s Centre in one of the poorest areas in the country. I had exactly 4 hours to conduct an evaluation of the social impact of this place and report back. My evaluation would determine important things at a higher level. 4 hours. Is it cost-effective, is it reaching the targeted population, is it viable to keep? Of course I had a file with a vast number of considerations that I learned in the Practice module of my Masters degree, but only got to use very few of them.

Lesson four; however difficult it its to incorporate the knowledge from my previous experiences and from my master degree, I recognise the privileged position I´m in. To work in these issues is to be able to impact thousands of people who live in the most poverty stricken areas in the country. What a great responsibility right? So this is why I started my entry by saying patience is the most important lesson. By having patience I will hopefully learn how to play this game, how to match the political agenda with the life agenda of those we work with, not for. How to match what is cost-effective with what is profound and sustainable. Of course, having been in this job for less than two months, any ideas and suggestions on how to do this would be greatly appreciated!