Overcoming the Inequalities of Green Transition
MONDAY 21. 8.
Against inequalities
Opening part
8:00 - 9:00 REGISTRATION OF PARTICIPANTS
9:00 – 09:30 Opening of the Summer School and welcome speeches
Over the past five years, the idea of a Green New Deal has become prevalent in climate politics. In the North, GNDs have been one of a larger set of planning proposals, seeking to re-orient the relationship of the human productive apparatus to the remainder of the planet. This lecture canvasses the landscape of GNDs and other green transitions, assessing how transformative they are, how they approach capitalism, how they see the ecology, and how they approach the Third World, the national question, and internationalism. In particular it elaborates some ideas for a possible People’s Green New Deal as a proposal for southern transformative national-popular planning.
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee break
Abstract to bo announced.
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break
The hegemonic capitalist system likes to argue that endless growth is possible, that if you work hard enough, you too can have your mansion with blue swimming pool and lush green lawns, gas-guzzlers in the garage and maybe a football team in one of the top European leagues. Unrelenting cultural hegemony messaging is churned out to co-opt enough people to join the impossible rat race to the top of the consumerism matrix. But make no mistake: hegemonic capitalism is both the creator and consequence of brutal exploitation of black, brown and white bodies, women’s backs, nature and all the commons that we were all meant to enjoy equally. This architecture of bottomless greed reorganised power relations pertaining to land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship away from people-owned circular, ecocentric commons in favour of selfish, soulless, individualistic & anthropocentric relationships. The pervasive hegemonic anthropocentric ontology powered the British-centred food regime, the industrial revolution, post-World War II expansionism, the American-led food regime, the modern financialised food-regime and everything else in-between. The climate crisis confluences with a multitude of other crises – mental crisis, solitude crisis, identity crisis, green colonialism and usurping of customary lands, etc. – to create a post-Covid reckoning in which more and more young people are saying: no more!Far from being limited to the Global North, capital and corporatisation has expanded its frontier of accumulation to so-called emerging and underdeveloped countries in the Global South. In this perspective, the degrowth debate invites itself to the Global South, not in the sense of litigating levels of consumption in affluent societies, but rather to dismantle the global architecture of exploitation that sucks the lifeblood of the Global South in order to provide the Global North with cheap meat and cheap electronics. This lecutre argues that the current anthropocentric ontology is quickly taking us to the edge of a cliff – the point of no return – and the only thing that can help us avert certain disaster is an ethnocentric degrowth ontology within a new internationalism.
The pervasive hegemonic anthropocentric ontology powered the British-centred food regime, the industrial revolution, post-World War II expansionism, the American-led food regime, the modern financialised food-regime and everything else in-between. The climate crisis confluences with a multitude of other crises – mental crisis, solitude crisis, identity crisis, green colonialism and usurping of customary lands, etc. – to create a post-Covid reckoning in which more and more young people are saying: no more!Far from being limited to the Global North, capital and corporatisation has expanded its frontier of accumulation to so-called emerging and underdeveloped countries in the Global South.
In this perspective, the degrowth debate invites itself to the Global South, not in the sense of litigating levels of consumption in affluent societies, but rather to dismantle the global architecture of exploitation that sucks the lifeblood of the Global South in order to provide the Global North with cheap meat and cheap electronics. This lecutre argues that the current anthropocentric ontology is quickly taking us to the edge of a cliff – the point of no return – and the only thing that can help us avert certain disaster is an ethnocentric degrowth ontology within a new internationalism.
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break
In this roundtable discussion we will deepen the discussion of the concepts presented during the morning lectures, as well as their interconnections. We will discuss the relation of inequalities to the Green Deal, growth economies, and the capitalist system. Conceptual considerations will be put into the context of the Global South-North divide, within-country inequalities and the human-nature relationship. Based on the diagnoses of the causes of social and ecological inequalities we will also touch upon solutions, including degrowth policies, a new internationalism, and ecocentric approaches.
Moderator: Jonnas Sonnenschein
Guests:
Max Ajl, Bue Rübner Hansen, Ronald Ngam
Evening programme
TUESDAY 22. 8.
Social struggles
The lecture engages with the link between the social question and environmental issues in such a way that the two poles are not mutually exclusive but, rather, the latter entails an expansion of the former. In this context, Just Transition initially indicates a defensive posture in industrial relations. Subsequently, however, the encounter with Climate Justice provides it with ‘new clothes’, which enable a class-based perspective on the environmental crisis. The case-study of the GKN Factory Collective in Campi Bisenzio (Florence) will show how workers' knowledge and sustainability can eventually merge into a horizon of ecological transition from below.
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
Every policy defines the ontology of the actors in a given field, sometimes in explicit, sometimes unspoken ways. Ecofeminism helps to identify those who have been rendered invisible or made expendable under the industrial extraction that powers the global economy. Ecofeminism draws on women’s embodied experiences to challenge the exploitation and environmental degradation, violence, and insecurity intrinsic to growth-based global capitalism.
In this talk, I will discuss a line of ecofeminist thought that has critically analyzed Western humanism and industry through both cultural sociological and biologically based perspectives. I will present an overview of ecofeminist responses to the nexus of poverty and exploitation bound up in climate crises and the various kinds of social conflicts exasperated by energy extraction in vulnerable communities around the world. I then apply an ecofeminist framework to green transition policies, identifying new social and ecological injustice concerns.
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch break
In the third decade of the 21st century, Serbia is experiencing a profound transformation of environmental movements. The issue of ecology in Serbia is becoming, above all, a radical political issue. The following factors will be highlighted as causes of radical action: intensive economic investments, general mistrust that political structures are generally capable of solving inherited and new environmental problems, and the creation of a situation where environmental movements act more like classic political than social movements. The lecture will contain transformations of environmental movements and factors that accelerated that transformation, as well as new methods of their action, especially those caused by the case of the Rio Tinto Company and the problem of mining lithium. Additionally, two new terms - "politization of ecology" and "post-politization of ecology" - will be explained. The politization of ecology means the use of environmental problems for short-term political promotions, and the post-politization of ecology means the transition of ecological movements into classical political movements, i.e., parties. On the other hand, the lecture will also include an analysis of four types of new environmentalism, specific to the digital age: "influencer environmentalism," "celebrity environmentalism," "tabloid" environmentalism, and "glamping" environmentalism.
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break
We will discuss the role of labour movements and feminism in the environmental struggle as components of a green social transformation. Although issues related to the environmental crisis are central to the struggles of the working class and women, these struggles are mostly taking place in isolation, each in its own context.
We will ask the following questions - why is the integration of social struggles and solidarity between movements necessary for a green social transformation that will eliminate inequalities? Is this possible within a capitalism that sees human and non-human reproduction as a means of endlessly increasing GDP? How do we manage solidarity and integration in practice and what are the obstacles? How to achieve mass support, is it possible to mobilise people on the basis of this rather abstract threat of environmental collapse?
We will discuss all this with representatives of the trade union central, Youth for Climate Justice and feminist activism in Slovenia.
Moderator: Taj Zavodnik
Guests:
- Sara Svati Sharan, Feminism Committee of the Iskra Student Association
- Gaj Kolšek, Youth for climate justice
- David Švarc, Professional Firefighters' Union of Slovenia
Evening programme
WEDNESDAY 23. 8.
Energy
This lecture focuses on the global geographies of energy poverty – a multidimensional predicament stemming from interactions among deeper structural challenges in society. I will explore how the injustices associated with this form of hardship connect to socio-technical provision systems across the world. I will pay particular attention to the critical political ecologies of a ‘just transition’ (Bouzarovski 2022) involving an alternative understanding of infrastructural recognition and governance.
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
Over time and space, the multiple transformations of energy systems have always been accompanied with injustices and inequalities. And the current process is not devoid of them. But who are the losers and winners of this process? How and why are citizens affected? Drawing such a multidimensional diagnosis of the injustices caused by the current process of energy transition is necessary if we want to address the just transition challenges.
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch break
Increasingly large wind and solar parks, and, noticeably, even nuclear plants, are now presented as indispensable for a transition to environmental sustainability. In the case of industrial scale wind/energy generation this becomes possible by black-boxing everything but the presence of a desirable input (from the wind/sun); in nuclear energy by black-boxing everything but the absence of a non-desirable output (chimney smoke). This leaves out of sight, indicatively, (1) the established fossil fuels extractivism (nuclear energy) or the emerging extractivism for materials for wind turbine blades and solar panel cells (wind/solar energy), both possible through a colonialist-type degradation of labor and nature, (2) the equally colonialist dumping of depleted fuels (nuclear energy) or exhausted materials (industrial wind/solar energy), and (3) the long distance transmission network shared by both, which makes energy appear clean/green at a social center of ‘consumption’ no matter how dirty/black may be at the ‘production’ at some social periphery. In the end, this makes it possible to present the technical as separable from the social, material designs as indifferent to social interests, energy technologies as innocent of the destruction of nature and exploitation of labor. Taking advantage of approaches to technology from the humanities and the social sciences, the lecture will invite attention to the potential of opening the energy technology black-boxes as a prerequisite of arriving at a proper definition of (and a real transition to) renewable energy.
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break
Energy poverty affects many people in "rich" Europe, let alone elsewhere in the world. The Right to Energy Coalition has identified three essential ways to end energy poverty in Europe: 1) access to affordable and clean energy as a basic human right, 2) energy democracy, 3) decent, energy-efficient and affordable housing for all.
We will focus mainly on the first two, saving the third for the next day. How can we ensure an adequate distribution of energy to avoid both limited consumption and "decadent" consumption? How can we ensure that people affected by energy poverty are fully integrated into energy communities? The focus should be on the right to energy services rather than energy, but how can such a right be practically implemented?
Moderator: Lidija Živčič
Guests:
Stefan Bouzarovski, Saška Petrova (both included in the ENPOR project) Arisototel Timpas, Rachel Guyet
Evening programme
THURSDAY 24. 8.
Housing
The lecture will review concepts of housing inequality (such as housing wealth, tenure, home-ownership regimes, spatial opportunities linked with housing), and revisits mechanisms relating to the perpetuation of housing inequalities. We will look into some data on key features of housing inequality and delve into how urban governance and housing inequalities, including housing segregation, are linked, and what implications that has for social and ecological justice in the CEE context
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
This lecture is based on the work of FEANTSA (the European federation of national organizations working with the homeless) on housing solutions and a just environmental transition. The lecture will focus on the link between housing and environmental policy and bring a critical perspective on how the narrative of addressing housing inequalities is being used in the framework of the Green Deal. It will look at what housing inequalities are from two key angles: housing costs and housing adequacy. It will provide a brief overview of the state of play, causes and consequences and focus on how it relates to the European Green Deal.
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch break
The “Green transition” is a complex process with potentially ambiguous consequences on social inequalities in terms of cost distributions. The relationship between social and environmental policies is from this point of view a crucial issue, which only recently started being considered by scholars. The field of investigation is still characterised by many criticalities: empirical weaknesses; uncertainty and ambiguity about outcomes and by the complexity of multilevel governance arrangements. In my lecture I will address these issues both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Theoretically I will provide an analytical framework to address these issues, and empirically I will be illustrating the complexities at stake by using housing policies and their relationship to environmental policies and social inequalities emerging out of green gentrification processes. As a case I will be using Vienna in a comparative perspective with other European cities.
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break
We have no doubt all heard of the Vienna Housing Model. As soon as the subject of housing policy comes up, someone is quick to tell us how it is done in Vienna. In Slovenia, too, housing policy is to be reformed along the lines of Vienna. But what does this actually mean? Why is it always held up as an ideal? What is the web of policies, measures and actors that create the so-called Vienna model? And what are its effects on the environment and on society? Can we map it in other contexts? Is it resilient to neoliberal global trends, and might it also have weaknesses, if not vulnerabilities? Through an examination of the Vienna housing model, its basic elements, strengths and weaknesses, we will reflect on the building blocks and conditions for the development of a housing policy capable of providing sustainable housing for all, through the prism of the Slovenian context. The roundtable is curated by Maša Hawlina (Zadrugator, Institute for Housing and Spatial Studies). Guests: professor of sociology of University of Vienna Yuri Kazepov and Expert for Housing and Investment and Ministry of Solidarity-Based future (Republic of Slovenia) Gašper Skalar.
Through an examination of the Vienna housing model, its basic elements, strengths and weaknesses, we will reflect on the building blocks and conditions for the development of a housing policy capable of providing sustainable housing for all, through the prism of the Slovenian context.
The roundtable is curated by Maša Hawlina (Zadrugator, Institute for Housing and Spatial Studies).
Guests: professor of sociology of University of Vienna Yuri Kazepov and Expert for Housing and Investment and Ministry of Solidarity-Based future (Republic of Slovenia) Gašper Skalar.
Evening programme
FRIDAY 25. 8.
Conclusion
The session is dedicated to the presentation and defence of the research work of students, who are part of the accredited programme.
The final debate is aimed at reflecting on the summer school.
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
Max Ajl
Max Ajl is a Senior Fellow at in the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is an editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society, and has written for Agrarian South, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Globalizations, Review of African Political Economy, Middle East Report, and many other scholarly and popular journals. He researches climate politics, Tunisian national liberation, agrarian politics in the Arab region, and Arab intellectual history. He has been active in anti-war politics and is the author of a recent book, A People’s Green New Deal.
Bue Rübner Hansen
Bue Rübner Hansen is a postdoctoral researcher and writer. He works on the analysis and history of the present using the tools of intellectual history, sociology and the critique of political economy. His work is concerned with questions of social reproduction, class composition, and political ecology. He is a part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and a member of Selskabet for Kritisk Samfundsforskning (The Association of Critical Social Research).
Roland Ngam
Roland Nkwain Ngam is a graduate of the University of the Free State and the University of the Witwatersrand, both in South Africa. After completing his doctorate degree, he joined a postdoctoral programme in the School of Development Studies in the University of the Witwatersrand, investigating viable alternative ecocentric futures in a rapidly heating planet. He is currently Programme Manager for Climate Change and Socio-Ecological Transformation at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation where he oversees projects in mainland Southern Africa and the South West Indian Ocean. He also manages the website www.climatejusticecentral.org for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s four African regional offices. The platform trains young journalists on climate issues and helps publish some of their work. His main interests include circular ontology theories, climate justice, degrowth, water policy and democratically-owned and managed power grids. He is a firm believer in commoning and co-operatives. He has written extensively on these issues for different publications.
Emanuele Leonardi
Emanuele Leonardi is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy). His research interests include: climate justice movements and their critique of carbon trading; logics of exploitation in contemporary capitalism; working-class environmentalism. He is the editor (along with Luigi Pellizzoni and Viviana Asara) of the Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics (Elgar, 2022). He is a board member of the European Society for Ecological Economics.
Selina Gallo-Cruz
Selina Gallo-Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School for Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York, USA. She conducts research on culture and globalization with a focus on gender and social movements. She has recently authored Political Invisibility and Mobilization: Women against State Violence in Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Liberia and has edited a special issue of the Journal of Social Encounters, “Extractive Politics, Conflict, and Peacebuilding”. Her current research examines institutionalization and change in the movement against violence against women and contentious conceptualizations of climate crisis and policy solutions among experts. The latter project has been supported by the Fulbright Finland Foundation and a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democracy. Selina is co-editor of the Journal of Political Power and Chair-Elect for the Peace, War, and Social Conflict section of the American Sociological Association.
Darko Nadić
Darko Nadic is a professor and vice dean at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, Serbia. He has held several guest lectures at universities in Europe and is a member of the international editorial boards of several scientific journals in the field of political science and sociology. He is the founder of the master's program in Environmental Policy at the Faculty of Political Sciences, which is a unique master's program in Southeastern Europe. At the same time, he is the head of the Center for Environmental Policy and Sustainable Development at the same faculty. His research is focused on the problems that dominate in the social and political ecology, and they relate, above all, to sustainable development, eco socialism, environmental movements and the Green Party, politics and climate change perspectives. His current work relates to the positioning of environmental problems and issues in contemporary pop culture and dystopia problems in post-cataclysmic and post-ecological societies.
Stefan Bouzarovski
Stefan Bouzarovski is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Manchester, where he leads the People and Energy research team at the Manchester Urban Institute. He is also involved in the ENPOR project. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for European Energy and Climate Public Policies in Amsterdam. Most of his professional career has been dedicated to exposing and tackling the socio-political injustices that drive infrastructure inequalities around the world.
Rachel Guyet
Rachel Guyet / PhD / She is director of a Master programme in “Global Energy Transition and Governance” at the European Institute - CIFE, France, since 2016. She has been involved in several European projects (ENGAGER, POWERTY) dealing with energy poverty. Since 2010, she has been working with EDF R&D on initiatives related to energy poverty and is a member of the research group on “Energy and cohesion” at CERI-Sciences Po, Paris.
Aristotle Tympas
Aristotle Tympas is a professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, director of the anglophone graduate program ‘Science, Technology, Society – Science and Technology Studies’, has recently authored ‘Technological black boxing versus ecological reparation: From encased-industrial to open-renewable wind energy’, in Papadopoulos D., Puig de la Bellacasa, M., & Tacchetti, M., (Eds.). Ecological Reparation. Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict, Bristol University Press, 2023, 362-377.
Nóra Teller
Nóra Teller, PhD works at the Metropolitan Research Institute. She is member of the European Observatory on Homelessness and has co-edited the European Journal of Homelessness for 14 years. She has 22 years of research and consultancy experience in social inclusion and housing inclusion measures, homelessness research, and housing de-segregation in the urban and rural context. Beyond working for the Prime Minister’s Office and various local governments and ministries in Hungary, she has worked for the Open Society Institute, European Commission, the World Bank, and the Council of Europe Development Bank. She was also involved in various international research projects on housing security and tenancy issues.
Clotilde Clark-Foulquier
Clotilde Clark-Foulquier is project manager at FEANTSA. She coordinates the Housing Solutions Platform (FEANTSA, Fondation Abbé Pierre, Housing Europe & Habitat for Humanity International) a European cross-sectoral expertise & practice-driven initiative to identify, debate and promote innovative solutions for affordable housing in Europe. She also leads FEANTSA’s work on a socially just environmental transition in the framework of the European Green Deal.
Yuri Kazepov
Yuri Kazepov is Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Vienna). His research interests address the territorial dimension of social policies in a comparative perspective, including environmental policies, social innovation approaches and participatory practices, etc. His latest publications include: the Handbook on Urban Social Policy. International Perspectives on Multilevel Governance and Local Welfare (2022) coedited for Edward Elgar and – with Verwiebe – Vienna. Still a just city? for Routledge. Handbook on Urban Social Policy. International Perspectives on Multilevel Governance and Local Welfare (2022), ki ga je souredil za Edward Elgar, in Vienna. Still a just city?, ki ga uredil skupaj z Verwiebe za založbo Routledge.
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