Disorderly Deliberation? Generative Dynamics of Global Climate Justice

Theorisations of global governance invariably conceive of it as bringing order to disorder, whether by increasing the ‘density’ of interstate society, or by expressing the leverage of global civil society. This paper seeks to invert the frame, and to take seriously the active disordering of governance, as a generative challenge, that creates new justice claims, and opens-up new fields of public deliberation. Global climate governance is a particularly powerful context in which to track these dynamics. Climate change imposes its own pace of policy reform, forcing new imperatives; it also imposes its own remarkable scope, in terms of global reach and all-encompassing depth. The paper seeks-out generative disjunctures, where existing justice principles that underpin climate governance are challenged, disestablished, and reordered. The paper explores these themes as a way of mapping contending and conflicting trajectories in the development of climate justice as a principle of governance. The disordering effects of climate governance, the social and political forces that arise out of them and their roles in producing contender principles and practices are highlighted. We may then arrive at a conceptualization of climate governance as a necessarily disorderly process, which addresses cumulative and unanticipated challenges of climate change through successive reorientations in its modus operandi. As such, climate governance may be enabled to proceed through and beyond immediate accommodations, to offer new possibilities grounded in new rules of the game that widen realms of engagement and more effectively apprehend the challenges posed.

. The resulting disorderly transition marks an interregnum in sociological terms, a period of social and political flux, and potential (Sousa Santos 1995). Indeed with the advent of climate crisis we see the emergence of a deep-seated challenge to society's underlying historicity: the crisis literally imperils survival for human society, and insofar as carbon-intensive development underpins social structures, the prospect of de-carbonization challenges the very foundation of prevailing norms and hierarchies.
The systemic ecological challenge posed by climate change, and its intensification, forces the agenda for climate governance. Models for addressing the crisis from within market capitalism have proved to be woefully inadequate; yet they have persisted.
Weak forms of 'ecological modernization,' centred on carbon trading and end-of-pipe technologies, for instance, continue to dominate. Stronger forms of intervention, through fiscal policy and direct regulation for renewables, posit a 'second modernity,' with growth de-carbonized by 'precautionary' technologies and institutional practices (Beck 1995;Blowers 1997;Moll 2000). Yet the decoupling of economic growth from ecological degradation as promoted by ecological modernizers has become more of a fond hope than a present possibility. On a world scale, emissions continue to rise exponentially, testament to the paradox that every reduction in emissions intensity is more than overwhelmed by the increased scale of activity that it enables, as expressed in global economic growth.
As ecological modernity falters in the face of persistently rising emissions, confronted with questions of growth and accumulation, it has quickly been overtaken by a revived denialism and a reactive securitization of the issue. There is, as a result, a deepened polarization of the policy field. Those defending the growth model, whether or not offering the means of emissions reduction, confront those rejecting it. The latter perspective encompasses a range of positions, from ecological sufficiency to ecological socialism and ecological feminism, and may be linked to 'post-developmentalist' and 'subsistence' perspectives (Salleh 1997;Bennholdt-Thomsen & Mies 1999;Hornborg 2001;Foster-Carter 2002;Ziai 2007;Kovel 2007). These psotions share the recognition that climate change requires a post-growth society, and that this necessarily entails the large-scale restructuring of social relations. As ecological modernization fails to remaster ecology for society, we are left with a clear choice: continued burden-shifting and technological optimism, versus an entirely new ecology-society nexus (Harvey 1996).
These policy confrontations play a central role in the intensifying political dynamics of climate justice. The failure of the current model of climate governance is a key factor legitimizing challenges to its 'rules of the game.' Indeed, we may say that we sit on the cusp of a paradigm-shift, one that forces awareness of humanity's planetary agency, and thus awareness of its role in the face of eco-systemic impacts. The 'Anthropocene' era, in which humankind has had the capacity to reshape the bio-physical character of the planet, is said to have been in place since the invention of the steam engine (Crutzen 2002

Conceptualizing global climate governance
In general terms, climate governance is the structure of authority that encompasses global climate policy: as a mode of governance, rather than simply government, it involves a range of state and non-state players, and is a field of practice rather than simply a set of institutions. As with any mode of authority, as opposed to coercion, climate governance is grounded in principles of justice. Climate governance develops through contestations over these principles, between 'official' and 'non-official' versions: principles emerge and change, from the process of interstate negotiation to civil society mobilization. Approaches to global governance invariably conceive of it as bringing order to disorder, whether by increasing the 'density' of interstate society, or by expressing the leverage of global civil society (Held & McGrew 2002). By focusing on reflexivity this paper seeks to invert the frame, and foreground the challenges to governance. Clearly there are multiple structural challenges to climate policy, as much from intended as unintended effects: the focus here is on the process of reconceptualizing justice claims, in part to address these effects. The aim is to address climate governance as both a disordering and ordering process, analyzing the role of contestation in producing justice principles and practices.
Climate change imposes its own pace of policy reform, forcing new imperatives; it also imposes its own remarkable scope, in terms of global reach and all-encompassing depth.
The resulting justice challenges are manifold, and resonate across a range of disciplines.
The focus on reflexive governance most directly engages with critical international relations and globalization studies. The two dominant traditions in international relations theory-'realism' and 'idealism'-are preoccupied principally with the question of whether state or non-state actors are dominant (Walker 1993). Critical international relations, instead, addresses the process of exercising power and counterpower at all levels (Halliday 2001). Related approaches to interpreting global governance have also emerged from other social science disciplines that investigate globalization across national-international divides (McGrew 1997). Within these fields there is a clear distinction between 'globalization theory,' which positions globalization as a cause of the changes it brings, and the 'theory of globalization' that seeks to explain globalization itself (Rosenberg 2000). These latter, more critical approaches to globalization studies, dovetail with approaches in critical international relations, and offer a rich inter-disciplinary frame.
The relationship between global governance discourses and contending social forces is a focus, especially, of the neo-Gramscian international relations tradition, which positions the governance-contestation nexus as the key explanatory site of global politics (Cox 1987;Cox 2001;Gill 2002;Bakker & Gill 2003;Rupert 2003;Carroll 2007). The aim is for constructive critique, and the generation of alternate principles and guides to action, in order to address climate change and realizing climate justice.
Debates about the extent to which climate change forces a refiguring of hegemonic formations, and the possibilities this offers for counter-hegemonic challengers, are intensifying, especially with the advent of North-South instruments of climate governance (Levy & Egan 2003;Newell 2008;Paterson & Newell 2010). The attempted monetization of greenhouse gas emissions, and the construction of the carbon commodity, allow new forms of marketization to offset mitigation. This neoliberalization of climate policy offers new sites for displacement from high emitters in the North, and from their Southern counterparts, and thus for new forms of contestation (Okereke 2008). 2 In this way, North-South climate policy frameworks create transnational political spaces, which can be used to politicize ecological unevenness. As such, North-South relations in climate justice are simultaneously positioned alongside fields of postcolonial and critical development studies. Confronted by global environmental change the development problematic is redefined as a concern for over-consuming industrialized societies as well as for newly industrializing and under-developed societies (Robinson 2002;Biel 2000;McMichael 2003). This shared development crisis sets the mould for climate justice debates. Out of the confrontation between developmentalist and post-developmentalist models, where Southern and Northern exemplars are set against each other, has emerged a more explicitly 'reflexive' developmental frame, which rests on mutual recognition of shared problems and the pursuit of common targets (Pieterse 1998;. Rather than looking to the North as a guide for development, or to the South for post-developmentalist scenarios, the 'reflexive development' approach finds new pathways at the nexus between North and South for confronting and addressing globalizing pressures. The reflexive logic was exemplified by the 'global justice movement' that emerged in the mid-1990s, in which neoliberal globalism was identified as the shared problem of both North and South (Della Porta 2007). This allowed the identification of common targets, including interstate agencies charged with implementing those precepts (Starr 2000;Reitan 2007 (Anderson 2006). Consequently, with the associated 'climate justice movement' there is a deeper and more existential community of fate. Again, challenges are articulated in the form of shared problems, aspirations, and targets (Roberts & Parks 2 'North' or 'Global North,' and 'South' or 'Global South,' are used here to simultaneously recognise social and spatial inequalities: most low-income societies are in the Southern Hemisphere, but the 'South' is also global, with extreme poverty also in the Northern Hemisphere; likewise for the high-income 'North', which is both spatially concentrated and globalized. As discussed in this article, the ambiguity of these categories is increasingly played-out in the dynamics of inter-state climate policy. There is, indeed, a key place-based dimension to the mobilization of climate justice claims, and thus to global climate governance. In climate governance the contradictions between policy and practice are most evident in particular sites of carbon policy: a geography of carbon policy can be traced from expanding carbon-intensive infrastructure in the North, to carbon trading finance houses, and then to 'clean development' offset sites located in the South (Roberts & Tofflon-Weiss 2001;Chatterton 2005;Plows 2008). Climate action, then, is enacted in specific places, where the concrete instances of climate policy failure are manifested. Such sites acquire a meaning that is simultaneously local and global, reflecting the spatial politics of climate change (Seel 1997;Griggs & Howarth 2004;Pickerill & Chatterton 2006;Bosso & Guber 2006;). As generative sites, these can be conceptualized as places where new insights emerge, and new justice claims are produced (Johnston & Goodman 2006;Massey 2007). Here, the territoriality of climate policy becomes a key dimension of politicization and mobilization (Brenner 2004;Drainville 2004;Harvey 2010).

Official and non-official climate justice
The impact of climate change has been likened to that of a third world war, one at least as devastating as its predecessors. In this war the Global South is in the immediate  (Parry et al. 2007). The Report predicted major water shortages due to climate change, with a potential halving in agricultural production in some regions of Africa by 2020, and a one-third reduction in yields in Central and South Asia by 2050, as well as inundation of the densely populated megadeltas of South and South-East Asia due to rising sea levels.
In this context, those amongst Northern and Southern elites who continue to benefit from continued accumulation do so at an immediate and measurable cost to Southern Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. Failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem. Looking to the future, no countryhowever wealthy or powerful-will be immune to the impact of global warming. (UNDP 2008: 1) The asymmetries of cause and effect in climate change directly reflect global development divides, making the question of how to address climate change unalterably a question of justice. As noted, the inter-governmental Climate Change Convention and Kyoto process was primarily directed at Northern climate change culprits with the aim of reducing their emissions. The impact of that effort has been minimal-securing at best a one per cent reduction in overall anticipated global GHG emissions from 1992 levels (Christoff 2006 to disrupt and distort Southern societies, to support GHG polluters in the North, and to create windfall profits for carbon traders (Lohmann 2006 With these developments we have seen the centre of gravity for unofficial climate governance passing from a transnational climate advocacy network focused on the interstate process (expressed in the international Climate Action Network), to a heterogeneous climate justice movement that challenges climate governance through a transnational collective consciousness and capacity to mobilize (see Keck & Sikkink 1998). In what follows this capacity is explored through an exploration of sites of climate justice, North and South.

Generative sites, North and South
Generative sites for climate justice, both North and South, are in the first instance sites of climate policy failure. As sites of failure, they are nonetheless also sites of possibility.
In this respect the disorders of climate governance are themselves generative. In both North and South the physical manifestations of climate policy failure most dramatically undermine the legitimacy of the official model, and prefigure new approaches.

Northern Sites
One • 100,000 more people losing their dry season water supply • Up to 300 more people dying every year due to malnutrition • Up to 60,000 more people suffering from drought in Africa • 50,000 more people going hungry due to drought and lower crop yields • Up to 40,000 more people exposed to malaria • 20,000 people being forced our of their homes and becoming climate refugees • Around 30,000 more people losing their homes every year due to coastal flooding. (WDM 2009) More broadly, the Camps were surprisingly successful in constructing counter-sites, designed to unmask and contest plans to expand carbon-intensive infrastructures and industries (Newell 2008). As such, carbon hotspots become physical manifestations of climate policy failure, their meaning thus transformed: from functional mechanisms they become reconfigured as threats to planetary survival (a similar approach was observed for anti-road protests: Seel 1997). The low walls and fences that skirt the facilities, protecting people from the heavy machinery, become highly politicized boundaries protecting the facilities from climate justice claims. As their existence is challenged, the sites acquire intense symbolic meaning, their boundaries acquiring a simultaneously local and global resonance (Bosso & Guber 2006 those who now are required to suffer the consequences. Offsets, therefore, are seen as compounding these climate injustices.

Conclusions
Despite the broad structural context of a newly reciprocal imperative for global development, as imposed by climate change, it must be acknowledged that many of the possibilities for disordering prevailing climate governance remain unrealized. The barriers to unofficial climate justice, and thus to reflexive global climate governance, should not be underestimated. The sheer scale of, and system-wide challenge posed by, climate change are themselves demobilizing. In Northern contexts there is an additional sense of complicity: here, rather than producing a climate movement, the intensifying crisis can produce a form of 'apocalypse blindness' (Beck 1995;Depledge 2006). In many contexts climate consciousness can exist as a latent subjectivity, where publics share an awareness of contradictions but fail to engage in social action (Doherty 2002;Norgaard 2006;Boycoff 2008). A tension can build up, but remain internalized, with the resulting crisis of belief embedded in everyday subjectivity, but repressed from public policy (Agyeman & Evans 2004;Dorsey 2007). We witness the deferral of social power to the public authorities, by which climate change is framed as a problem for policy elites and only incidentally for their increasingly anxious constituencies.
In this scenario the constitutive power of social agency, an historical actor capable of remaking society, remains unrealized. Something of the scale of the problem in the North is reflected, for instance, in concern at the lack of mass mobilization expressed by the UK Energy and Climate Change Minister (and later Shadow Prime Minister), Ed

Miliband, in December 2008:
When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilization. Maybe it's an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there's a real opportunity and a need here. (Adam & Jowitt 2008; see also Hinsliff & Vidal 2009) Nevertheless, as suggested in the foregoing examples, the injustices of official climate governance can provide the antidote to passivity. The injustices of climate change are distanced from everyday experience, embedded in centuries of global uneven development as a structural 'fact of life,' and normalized as inevitable. In contrast, the injustices of official climate governance are present, manifest, and concrete. As climate crisis intensifies there is a sharpened contradiction between official acknowledgement of the growing problem and the inadequate (often self-serving) policy responses. That contradiction is increasingly salient, especially across the North-South axis. Indeed, official climate injustice is the product of deliberate decisions: someone gains, someone looses, and both can be identified. There are clearly definable culprits, with specific installations and projects to be targeted, and disrupted. Herein, perhaps, lies the potency of unofficial climate justice claims, as a counterpoint to the official script, embedded in concrete social and ecological contradictions of climate policy.