Yuanni Wang is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology at Hohai University in Nanjing China and Xinhong Wang is Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK.
This study has additionally been published with additional guides to project and organizational management, such as the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, published by the Project Management Institute. It serves as a source of reference for other organizations hoping to operate within China’s semi-autonomous state. As a case study of effect bargaining and collaboration with government actors, this text has further been referenced across non-profit management guides, as well as environmental justice studies within similar academic settings to our class.
What does an environmental justice movement look like in a semi-autonomous state? Green Yunnan and their organizational approach to operating within a government well known for its restrictions on free speech, can serve as a proxy for other environmental organizations seeking to do the same. In a similar context, Vietnam’s semi-autonomous state has rendered it extremely difficult for victims of the Formosa environmental disaster to achieve redress. Protests and opposition to government actors in this case has resulted in deaths, injuries, and collective trauma for members of Central Vietnam’s fishing community. As research on this case builds, another important dimension worthy of investigation includes understanding how current Vietnamese environmental organizations can employ the same diplomatic strategy to achieve environmental redress. A greater understanding of effective organization could lead to future “soft” confrontations that do not end in bloodshed or engender greater government animosity against affected communities.
“Soft confrontation” perhaps sounds oxymoronic, yet under the current political system in China, it has provided the opportunity for the local organization to play an effective role in pushing forward its aim of environmental protection.” (Wang and Wang, 2020, p 232).
“Yet with the Chinese government gradually increasing its control over civic organizations, the question of whether future soft confrontations will continue to be acceptable is impossible to answer..” (Wang and Wang, 2020, p 232).
This text focuses on articulating the various political strategies employed by environmental organizations in China to accomplish their demands. The study itself analyzes the efforts of Green Hunnan, a Chinese civil environmental group, in navigating the complicated bureaucracy and hierarchies of China’s water management bureau. Specifically, the text employs empirical data generated from focused interviews and media analysis to outline how community groups diplomatically engage with government groups to achieve observable redress to environmental pollution.
The main narrative of this text centers on addressing how civil environmental organizations can negotiate with, as well as “push back” (Wang and Wang, 2020, p 229) against government inaction in a semi-autonomous state. The tightrope these organizations must navigate, as exemplified by Green Yunnan’s efforts, show that demands for environmental redress are possible in such contexts, but requires heightened attention to diplomacy and engagement with wider social support. The ways in which Green Yunnan employs media publications, as well as their strategy in leveraging governmental hierarchies, serves as additional guidelines for other environmental organizations operating in similar political environments.
Page 157: ".. it is much easier to develop an anticapitalist critique of climate change than it is to develop a theoretical and practical vision of postcapitalist social relations that might be adequate to the warmer planet on which we will have no choice but to live."
Page 158: "Similarly, our contradictory yes-but-no stance regarding global climate politics—structured entirely on the basis of sovereign territorial nation-states, which are taken as the natural and only viable building block for the struggle— has prevented us from taking on the nation-state, both analytically and practically. Of course, movements for climate justice all over the world have bravely confronted particular nation-states’ elites and institutions of governance. But the question of the legitimacy and naturalness of the modern nation-state as the base unit of global political life is rarely raised, at least way to sustain a livable planet. Beyond some “realist” argument based in path dependency, however, there is no reason to think so, and many more reasons to suggest that the state is likely one of our biggest obstacles…. “But the question of the legitimacy and naturalness of the modern nation-state as the base unit of global political life is rarely raised, at least partly because we too are convinced that (at least at present) interstate “global cooperation” is the only way to sustain a livable planet.”
Page 162-3: "In other words, as Horkheimer says, we cannot leave open the question of what we believe in with the mute hope that it will get worked out as the movement progresses. Neither, as Adorno cautions, can we paint a picture of a positive utopia, the unworldliness of which is no more helpful than when Marx and Engels admonished against it in the original manifesto more than a century and a half ago. Adorno suggests that what is required is not an account of a perfect world we can hold in our minds like a dream that can be realized merely because we can dream it, but instead an account of the possible (futures we can come to identify as potential outcomes of our present) in which things can (not will) “come right in the end.” Adorno seems to think this will entail the emergence of a radically new form of political authority, for which we might attempt to “formulate some guiding political principles.” We propose at least three such principles as fundamental to any presently emergent or future Climate X. The first is equality…. This leads to the second guiding political principle: the inclusion and dignity of all. This is a critique of capitalist sovereignty and the thin form of democracy upon which it has come to rely. Democracy is not majority rule and has little to do with the vote. Rather, democracy exists in a society to the extent that anyone and everyone could rule, could shape collective answers to collective questions. No nation-state today meets this criterion. This demands a struggle for inclusion The third principle is solidarity in composing a world of many worlds. Against planetary sovereignty, we need a planetary vision without sovereignty.”
Climate Leviathan is largely a critical discussion of various ways of envisioning and organizing the Macro level including sovereignty, the nation-state, capitalisms, geopolitics, the world system, geo-engineering, etc. However, by rooting the discussion in “the political,” besides the obvious recognition of carbon emissions (and a few others) as toxic, the primary toxin discussed in this text is all the way down at the Nano level of ideology. The main problem isn’t fossil fuels, our dependency on them, or the corruption of the politicians in their pockets, it is in our incapacity to recognize how the tools we resort to (capitalism and the nation-state) are fully incapable of addressing the problem at hand. Indeed, they argue that addressing climate change without a critical theory of both capitalism and the state “would be like trying to model hurricanes without a theory of thermodynamics or an understanding of the effects of changing ocean temperatures on cyclone dynamics” (2018, 66).
Their “cure” to ideology is a Gramscian strain of absolute historicism. Take for example their discussion of progress. They quote Gramsci:
“‘…progress has been a democratic ideology.’ … [However] Progress has lost its democratic aspect because ‘the official ‘standard bearers’ of progress’ (the bourgeoisie) have ‘brought into being in the present destructive forces like crises and unemployment, etc., every bit as dangerous and terrifying as those of the past,’ and it is clear that these forces are as much a result of ‘progress’ as technology and scientific knowledge.” (2018, 94).
In this discussion, progress transforms from ideological tonic to ideological toxin based upon its associated deployments within a new historical context. Under the rule of monarchy, the ideology of progress enabled the establishment of liberal democracies. But under liberal capitalism, this ideology underwrote the “production of a separation in the social world between the political and the rest and a consequent neutralizing onslaught on the political that attempts to proceduralize and depoliticize domination, that is, the continual production of freedom for some and unfreedom for others” (2018, 83). These facts notwithstanding, the authors do not recommend an outright denial of progress: “A blanket rejection of progress confuses the idea and its standard bearers, who are now in fact part of the ‘natural order’ in crisis” (2018, 95). The same goes for the current stand-in for the ideology of progress, adaptation: “adaptation is becoming the “progress” of our time. Adaptation is to the ideology of Climate Leviathan what progress was to bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century” (2018, 95). Which, once again, does not mean we are to get rid of the concept of adaptation “as if a revolutionary social movement for climate justice can somehow decide against adaptation. The question, rather, is how—how to reshape a conception of the political in a very hot world.” (2018, 95).
What this discussion suggests is that it is that toxicity, as it pertains to ideology and social structure, is not a simple binary relation. To argue this would amount to “blanket rejection” of the ideology of progress as toxic to democracy. Rather, the authors’ example demonstrates how toxicity entails a triadic relation to a relation. It is how the ideology of progress relates to the historically evolving relationship between the dominant and the dominated that determines whether or not the ideology of progress is toxic to democracy or not.
The political and economic fallout that has emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic fits the criteria of events that Mann and Wainwright specify as likely to engender the planetary Leviathan: “Processes are more likely to drive the creation of Leviathan if [a] they present an existential threat; [b] they are large scale (global); and [c] they pose challenges for the existing political order” (2018., 142). However, the history enfolding before our eyes doesn’t look like the birth of a new global sovereignty. Given that nothing close to either a Leviathan or Climate X alternative to the nation-state presented itself, citizens are left with no choice than but to rely on adapting extant public institutions, infrastructures, and state directives. At the national level, the US government responded by blaming the symbol of global public health, the World Health Organization, among its other political rivals, China and Iran. This is in keeping with the “Western” world’s tactic of pointing the carbon-emission finger elsewhere as well:
“Unfortunately, in discussions of climate politics, China is usually considered only a problem, an amoral polluter. How often are we in North America or western Europe told our efforts to slow climate change are meaningless because whatever ‘good’ we do, ‘China’ will ultimately render it futile? Sometimes this is a product of ignorance, sometimes of racist Eurocentrism, sometimes both” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 116).
Both the Chinese and Iranian governments have returned condemnations along with supporting conspiracies. Thus, rather than leviathan, we seem to be witnessing a Behemoth scenario in which “one or more of these competing powers will continue to compete with the United States” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 143). And perhaps we should take heed the warning that “History would seem to suggest this will lead to war, and it may well” (2018, 143). Currently these Behemoth-like counter hegemonies are merely struggling to win a rhetorical war of self-righteousness and self-preservation. What is uncertain is whether or not these responses to COVID-19 are indicative of a schismogenetic pattern developing in the contemporary geopolitical order. As Wainwright and Mann comment:
“The implication is that the management of the planet would unfold in the context of a world system that is neither democratic (since the vast majority of nation-states and peoples would have no real involvement in the important decisions about the Earth’s management) nor clearly dominated by one hegemonic power. Planetary governance would unroll on a lumpy, conflictual geopolitical terrain upon which elites continue to seek “adaptations” that meet their needs—political stability, continued accumulation, and so on” (2018, 143).
“To put it in our terms, Behemoth hates Mao for its faith in secular revolution, Leviathan for its liberal pretension to rational world government, and both for their willingness to sacrifice “liberty” for lower carbon emissions.” (?120)
“In this sense the political is not, strictly speaking, a relational concept. “The political” defines a relation tout court: the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. The political is not an arena in which dominant groups impose their interests and subaltern groups resist; it is, rather, the ground upon which the relation between the dominant and dominated is worked out... How our way of defining the political differs from that common sense is crucial to our analysis of the current conjuncture and the ways in which the political is being shaped by climate change.... That work is usually dismissed by liberals as unfortunate products of the times, as if Locke, Franklin, or de Tocqueville were only ardent supporters of colonialism and racial slavery by historical chance. It cannot have had anything to do with liberalism per se, which, as an unqualified commitment to universal freedom, cannot be responsible for the unfortunate backwardness of the historical communities in which it was born." (?148-150)
“Liberalism is founded upon the production of a separation in the social world between the political and the rest and a consequent neutralizing onslaught on the political that attempts to proceduralize and depoliticize domination, that is, the continual production of freedom for some and unfreedom for others.”
“Consequently, in modern liberal capitalism, the political is not founded in any idea or organizing principle, but always exists as the product of the exercise of sovereign power.”
“Thus, for Gramsci, “nature” and “society” are inseparable, active relations. And these relations are themselves inextricable from the processes through which we forge critical conceptions of the world. These are the result of earlier historical struggles that have laid down, “layer upon layer,” the consciousness of “the right to live independently of the planning and the rights of minorities”—in other words, independently of the “rights” of elites to plunder subaltern social groups.”
"Liberal conceptions of democracy, freedom, politics, and so on remain hegemonic—these particular conceptions stand in for a presumably universal “common sense”—even though their glaring inadequacies to this moment in the planet’s natural history are increasingly evident, even to liberals themselves."
"With the closure of the possibility that the effects of climate change might be subject to a meaningful degree of carbon mitigation, adaptation is becoming the “progress” of our time. Adaptation is to the ideology of Climate Leviathan what progress was to bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century."
“The dismantling of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s brought the Keynesian house down, and the floating exchange rate system in place since then has helpfully greased the neoliberal wheels: sovereign debt has skyrocketed, alongside finance capital’s power to “discipline” any polity, at any scale, that does not play by the fiscal rule of austerity.”
“Green Keynesian proposals are accompanied by the suite of institutions and policies associated in the ecological modernization literature with “just transition”—termination and reinvestment of fossil fuel subsidies (which amount to approximately $US 5.3 trillion annually, according to the International Monetary Fund), green investment initiatives, decentralized production and energy systems, green banks, and so on.”
“By the time his ideas were starting to circulate widely in the 1940s—at the end of more than thirty years of calamity in the heart of liberal capitalism—no small part of their attraction was attributable to the fact that the feeling that the whole of “civilization” was on a precipice was widely shared. This is the fundamental basis of Keynesianism, and today it is the existential precariousness of civilization (and not a general interest in Keynesian political economy) that makes the question of green Keynesianism so urgent.”
"The scale of the problems is so great, it seems impossible to confront them without the state, but it seems just as impossible that the state as currently constituted is going to get the job done. We face a situation in which there is, under current geopolitical and geoeconomic arrangements, no right answer.”
“To restate the political paradox more sharply: to address its contradictions—including the ecological contradiction that capital’s growth is destroying the planet—capitalism needs a planetary manager, a Keynesian world state. But elites have proven reluctant to build it, and it appears unlikely to miraculously realize itself. So, the only apparent capitalist solution to climate change is presently impossible; the only even marginally possible green Keynesianism that could save us is still predicated upon the territorial nation-state."
“This is why the proposals always seem so formulaic and empty, and virtually never involve substantive targets or means and timelines for implementation.58 The diagnosis of the problem continually takes us to the edge of the chasm between what we know is necessary and the common sense judgment that it is totally impossible.”