The Promise and Threat of Climate Justice : Geographies of Resistance in the Context of Uneven Development

To examine the eclectic manner in which particular constituents of the environmental justice movement have sought to challenge myriad orthodox approaches to climate change we begin by considering some of the current empirical facets of the current crisis in the global economy. This is our starting point inasmuch as the ideological basis for solutions to the economic crisis are co-terminus with prescriptions for resolving the climate crisis. We move forward by tracing the ways in which, neoliberal economic doxa has been doubly prescribed, infected and inserted itself into both hegemonic economic and environmental policy-making. The extent to which this doxa has taken hold of environmental policy-making it has been utilized and promulgated by a wide variety of hegemonic or "establishment" environmentalists - to use the parlance of some scholars. As few global-scale infections (metaphorical or real) rarely occur without countermeasures, penultimately we examine the manner in which institutions and individuals supportive of and within the environmental justice movement have responded to the hegemonic environmental movement and its doxas. We focus on the countermeasures of the environmental justice movement in the form of two seemingly disparate yet related conferences and their outputs. We conclude by situating these countermeasures and the resultant conflicts within and against the emerging literature on novel forms and expressions of geographies of resistance