As the Durban Climate Change Conference (COP 17) continues, we present the views of a range of international climate justice activists and writers on where the movement should go from here. Contributors were asked to produce a short response to the following question:

The current outlook for climate justice strikes many as bleak. Hopes for the Durban talks are low, recent years have seen a resurgence in climate change denial, and recent data show greenhouse gas emissions for 2010 were even higher than the worst projections. Why has climate activism so far failed to force governments to change course on climate change and what should be the tactical and strategic priorities for a successful climate justice movement? 

If you'd like to contribute your own views to this discussion, email alexjamesdoherty@gmail.com.

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Quincy Saul is editor of Ecosocialist Horizons. He is currently in Durban,from where he wrote this piece.

This discussion may be the most important one in the world: As Chris Williams asks, "how can we raise the temperature of the movement, not the climate?" First of all, we cannot lay all our troubles on the doorstep of our adversaries, claiming that "we" have done our best and that "they" are just too powerful. Self-criticism is the priority for us all as individuals, organizations and movements. But we must be careful and strategic in how we go about it. We must beware the unnecessary sectarianism that so thoroughly infested 20th century revolutionary politics. Hot air is not only useless, it is downright dangerous. Time is running out for the planet as we know it, and the most urgent thing in the world is to build a united front for climate justice. It is only with that common cause and understanding that these criticisms of the climate movement can be useful:

1. There is a revolving door between big NGOs, capital, government, and PR firms. This revolving door is economic, political and personal. Not only do individuals move from sector to sector, but you could literally write a book about who sleeps with whom at COP. The solution is to struggle for ideological clarity, which means making definitive ruptures with the enemies of nature and justice. This will entail dispensing with the polite liberalism which pervades both UN negotiations and many civil society organizations.

2. There is an infantile fetishizing of the UN process, on the inside and the outside. Civil society mirrors the elite by COP-hopping all over the world. The result is a dead-end of oppositional politics, where people are too busy with protest tactics to do anything else. There is a lot of sitting in conference rooms like the capitalists and with the capitalists, instead of doing the necessary preparatory work for the local and international struggle against imperialism. The solution, as suggested by the old Situationist slogan, is to kill the COP in our heads. Instead of chasing our enemies around the world, we should do as Amilcar Cabral advised, and "return to the source": Our comrades in the global South are leading the way. We should follow the practical and theoretical precedent set in the climate talks in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010, and build an autonomous base of international struggle for climate justice.

3. No matter how good our ideas may be, logistics make or break us. We are severely disorganized in relation to the magnitude of what must be done. In many civil society spaces, the tyranny of structurelessness prevails, and the result is often that the big NGOs define the space and the discourse. There is also a lot of insufficient preparation. Many people arrive not prepared either to take on their enemies (empirically or tactically) or to struggle collectively to achieve a strategic or theoretical consensus with fellow climate justice advocates. The long term solution to all this, in my humble opinion, is that we must begin the collective and creative construction of an ecosocialist international, led by the new revolutionary subjects of the 21st century (indigenous women in particular). With disciplined cadres and a creative programme, it should both organize an international united front against the capital-dirty energy regime, and also begin the construction and coordination of productive bases of self-reliance that will become the soil and the blossoms of the future ecologically rational civilization.

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Ro Randall is founder and director of Cambridge Carbon Footprint, a charity which uses approaches drawn from psychotherapy and community work to engage diverse audiences in work on climate change.

The word defeat was rarely used in the aftermath of COP15. People wrote of disappointment and a balance of positives and negatives. Occasionally they spoke of failure but more frequently of hopes for the emissions pledges and for Cancun. As we approach Durban it may be worth remembering the hope, anticipation and enormous hard work that characterised 2009. Many people gave everything they had to campaigns to achieve a just solution and entered 2010 not just shocked, bewildered and dismayed but exhausted as well. The agreement that should have framed and supported the coming years’ work had evaporated. For many individuals and organisations, nothing made much sense any more. Whether you were involved in political lobbying, in direct action or in work on mitigation it was hard to get a clear sense of direction. In the two years since COP15 small organisations have imploded or become less active, leadership and political focus seem lacking, people have drifted away from the movement and some of its key figures have indulged in unpleasant recriminations – for example Mark Lynas’ attacks on campaigners in his recent book The God Species. While there are undoubtedly political reasons to explain these phenomena, the psychological ones are also worth considering. They relate to the experience of traumatic defeat.

Psychologically, for a trauma to be recovered from it has to be named, recognised and understood. The feelings that accompany it must be experienced and witnessed and time taken to live through the painful process of realising that what you hoped and worked for is lost. Un-named, unrecognised, misunderstood or repressed a defeat of this kind can exercise a corrosive influence, foster an atmosphere of blame and recrimination and encourage false hopes.

Laura Martin Munillo, in one of the few articles to openly use the word defeat, captures the difficulty of acknowledging it. In a post written shortly after COP15 for Stakeholder Forum she says in one sentence “In Copenhagen we lost all.” A few paragraphs later she asserts, “None of the above issues have been lost.” In the first state of numbness and shock that defeat brings, this moving between acceptance and denial of the truth is common. It needs to be followed however by increasing acceptance of the reality, a working through of the painful feelings of anger, guilt and despair before the changed and much more difficult world can be engaged with. The alternative is to live in states of illusion or denial, to become bitter, to withdraw, to become depressed and hopeless or to indulge in blame, often of one’s colleagues and comrades.

To speak of defeat often brings accusations of defeatism but in fact it is the lack of acknowledgment that produces defeatism. In Requiem for a Species Clive Hamilton writes movingly of the process of coming to terms with the truth that it is now extremely unlikely that warming can be kept within 3° let alone 2°. His mantra ‘Despair, Accept, Act’ could be taken as a template for the climate justice movement. What matters is to recognise both publicly and in a personal, inner sense that COP15 was a defeat, that the political process failed, that the enemies of climate justice gained ground and that democracy was too corrupted to deliver what was needed.

The acknowledgment of defeat should not be a source for shame or a cause of blame. Rather it is the means by which strength can be found to continue to act. Only when despair is spoken and shared can it be overcome and a realistic determination to continue be found. Only then is it possible to put aside false hopes and re-find the qualities of courage, perseverance, resource and skill that extreme situations demand.

Our task may no longer be to stop climate change’s devastating effects but to work for justice in the face of their likelihood. Some of the things we do may not alter. We still need international agreements. We still need to insulate houses. We still need to talk, argue and convince and take part in acts of civil disobedience. But the psychological place from which we do that may need to change.

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Dr. Yash Tandon is the Executive Director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank of developing countries. He has worked in Uganda and abroad as a policymaker, a political activist, professor and public intellectual.

Why has the left’s climate activism so far failed to force governments to change course? A self-consoling answer is that the left’s vision on Climate Change (CC) is not realisable in the short term. CC is a long term project. This explanation, unfortunately, is not self-consoling; it is self-deluding. The truth is that the left does not know what it wants out of CC.

I illustrate this in relation to but one dimension of the problem - that between the South and the North. There is much confusion among the left, especially in the West, over what the people in the South want out of CC. For the people of the South CC is a significant issue, but it is one among several other, even more urgent issues related to immediate survival. For a rural household in Uganda, for example, sustained more often than not by an aging woman whose older children have gone to the city to look for work, the choice between protecting the woods or cutting the trees to secure fuel for immediate needs is, to say the least, not something on which she wants advice from a CC activist.

The essential survival needs - access to food, water, housing, and cheap energy – are the daily, hourly, preoccupations of the bulk of the people in the South, not excluding big countries such as India and China. It might be argued that the meeting of needs is what people all over the world want – in the US and Germany just as much as in Egypt or South Africa. Yes, but there are enormous differences. To state the obvious – the US and Germany are industrialised economies whereas Egypt and South Africa are at best semi-industrialised.

But there is something even more fundamental than the economic divide. The vital difference is political. The US and Germany are independent countries - the people are struggling against their own governments. Egypt and South Africa, on the other hand, are neo-colonies - here the people are still fighting for liberation from the clutches of imperialism. They struggle against their governments (like in Tahrir Square, for example), but behind their governments lies American, European and Japanese – in other words, imperial – power. This fact is never fully understood either by the left in the West or by its several variants in Africa.

Some clarity of thinking on this matter is emerging, ironically, as a result of recent events in Europe following the financial/economic crises. The people in Greece have taken to the streets to fight their government against austerity measures only to discover, through praxis, that they are fighting against even bigger forces embodied in the European Central Bank, the European bureaucracy, and the International Monetary Fund. People in Africa have a similar experience for decades through the “structural adjustment programmes” and austerity measures imposed on them by the IMF and the so-called “donor” credits which are euphemistically called “development aid”. In fact, imperial capital has been sc***ing Africa since its partition by European colonisers following the fatal Berlin conference of 1984. For Africa, liberation from the Empire overrides all other issues. To view CC as an isolated issue, as the left CC activists tend to do, is dangerously myopic.

The African left activists who make common cause with the left in the Empire on CC should look at the broader landscape. “Know thyself” sounds a simple prescriptive adage, but under it lies a profound crisis of identity of “the left”. The left in Africa needs to know where it comes from and where it must go.

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Guppi Bola is a co-founder of the Healthy Planet campaign and has been a campaigner with Oxfam. She has been active in climate campaigning and helped initiate the UK Youth Climate Coalition.

The climate movement has come through much criticism over the past couple of years. This is not that surprising given that climate activism has, indeed, “so far failed to force governments to change course on climate change”. However, with a bit of outside context, and some positive visioning, we can see that in fact our climate movement is strong – and that our interpretation of its successes and failures rest strongly on our view of what the climate movement is, and what it aims to do.

First off, a bit of tangential history. In 1975 the Alma Mata Declaration was hailed as a global agreement that would pave the way to Health for All by the year 2000. The realisation soon hit that this was an improbable reality within a 25 year timeframe. After much soul-searching and evaluation of what went wrong, campaigners came together to commiserate over their shared failure. It felt as depressing as the hangover after Copenhagen, Much to everyone’s surprise however, a network bound together by the name The People’s Health Movement was created, and so the fight for Health for All continued.

Ten years on, and the PHM is going strong. Though Health For All still remains more a vision than a reality, its commitment to justice in health continues to inspire and mobilise campaigners across the world. What is fair to say, is that their development and response to global health issues looks very different to the original Alma Mata movement, and it is here that we can learn a lot about our approach to climate activism today.

The similarities between both movements are striking. Copenhagen was indeed our Alma Mata moment. Over the last decade, health campaigners realised there was more to achieving Health for All than the provision of primary healthcare. Their messages diversified to areas of economics, trade, governance, corruption and even climate change. Their tactics spread from political lobbying to professional mobilisation, direct action and grassroots capacity building, expressing various theories of change, but supporting the existence of the others. Their identity developed, moving away from western led campaigns to the integration of southern movements, and a profound respect for diversity and culture. Although differences existed, the core vision of Health for All remained intact, and each arm of the movement was valued and strengthened by the existence of PHM year on year.

This isn’t to say however, that climate activists are moping around with their tails between their legs: far from it in fact. Just because the movement hasn’t progressed under the guise of an international network, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Our actions have shifted in the past two years: UK Uncut, student protests, Occupy – the list goes on. These are not insignificant or distinct from the climate movement. No indeed, they are the very roots of our movement’s realisation that something needed to change. And so it did.

What inspires me now is that it’s not a political moment that will determine when and where we act. It is not the resources of large NGOs that we will lead us to communicate. It’s not our media, our politicians or big business that will decide when and where we organise. To me this movement is strong. It is exploring within itself new ways of working, and new ways of expressing itself. Yes, it is less tangible, and yes, our approaches may be oblique – but climate change is a big issue with many entry points and that means many angles from which to take action. So let’s celebrate this new wave of activism and recognise and respect each other’s contribution towards it. The PHM still exists and will do so for many years to come. Let’s hope the climate movement will continue to identify new challenges to address and for us embrace and explore exciting new ways to overcome them. The climate movement is strong, and that excites me. I hope it excites you too.

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Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is co-editor of the ecosocialist journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.

The short answer is that you cannot solve a problem by using the tools that cause it. To address the question a bit differently, activism so far has actually been very successful at raising awareness among millions, despite huge odds. The forces against even talking about linking global warming to industrial sources are formidable. It is also not completely true that governments have not changed course. The governments of Ecuador and Bolivia, for instance, have been responsive.

Nevertheless, the tremendous efforts by thousands of activists have certainly not led to reductions in greenhouse emissions at all. The main problem is that responsive governments have little clout in the world (those that do are heavily dependent on fossil fuels to exert their military and economic power) and most activism has been largely misdirected, whether by petitioning or legal action against governments and corporations, by diffusing information and even technologies, or by devoting much work to election campaigns. Some activism has turned into an outright obstacle to mounting the concerted offensive needed worldwide to struggle against institutions promoting or enforcing continued reliance on fossil fuels. I am thinking here of those folks who promote nuclear energy, large-scale dams, or precision farming as viable alternatives, without questioning the authoritarian structures that run the world and create the global warming problem in the first place.

Imagine what could be achieved if all the efforts made for the ballot box, lobbying, and other such conventional means were instead redirected and refocused to fight for developing a different global system (one, for example, responsive to all people’s basic needs) and against the violent institutions that uphold the current fossil-fuel based world economy. This has, of course, yet to be achieved and part of the reason is because movements and activists are sharply divided politically – there is no common overall political objective. Unlike problems such as the emission of ozone layer disrupting compounds, which have been more or less resolved through technological replacements and international policy accords, greenhouse gas emissions are tied to the very foundations of the entire world economy, which is a predominantly capitalist system. A capitalist economy is based on the profit-driven endless production of goods and services (“economic growth”) on the basis of an essentially finite amount of energy and material resources. Profit-making generally rests on fossil fuels and therefore on the relentless emission of greenhouse gases.

To expect that governments, especially the most powerful governments, could be brought to phase out fossil fuels is like dreaming that corporations will redistribute their profits to the rest of society so that everyone can have a decent life. Hence, it is not possible to tackle the problem through temporary alliances among otherwise politically opposing factions. There has to be full awareness and then broad agreement about the causes of the problem and the solutions to be built. The problem being a social system, the solutions cannot but involve overhauling the entire social system. For this to occur, priority should be given to raising awareness about the inextricable linkage between capital and human-induced global warming, to promoting debate and dialogue on democratic egalitarian alternatives to capital, and on that basis organise and refocus all the disparate movements into devising and implementing alternatives here and now. This, as a result of the violent authoritarians that currently rule the globe, will include and has already included much bloodshed (the Ogoni struggle being one case among too many), and part of the challenge will be to mitigate the violence, if not neutralise the means of violence.