C-Urge project is a doctoral network set up to research and better understand the complexity of climate and enviromental change, that is happening on global, as well as on a local scale.
Through various research approaches set in various countries, we aim to highlight the notion of urgency and need to enrich the debate around the topic of environemtal change, that is both fast, and subtle and poses a serious challenge for the future.
The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is an international organization focusing on various kinds of injustices. They have launched various programs, including Global Wellbeing, Grassroots Feminism, Demilitarise and Movement Building, aiming at addressing various types of worldwide justice struggles.
The Grassroots Global Movement has gathered Climate Justice Alliance, It Takes Roots, People’s Action, and East Michigan Environmental Action Council to build political power for the frontlines communiteis for 2020 and beyond.
The Grassroots Global Alliance provides a strategy for just transition to a regenerative economy. For the policy makers, this organizations has come up with these questions as guidance:
1. Who tells the story?
2. Who makes the decision?
3. Who benefits and how?
4. What else will this impact?
5. How will this build or shift power?
Framework: Protect, Repair, Invest, Transform. Under each category, this organization presents their demands and solutions.
Five points of intervention: the Narratives, Base Building and Organizing, Policy Development, Electoralization and Implementation, Direct Action.
The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is aiming at thriving the green new deal. The core of the work of just transiton from this organizations is the principles mentioned in the green new deal.
1) Industry Led Problem Solving. This element stresses the importance of rethinking industry analyses in order to create quality jobs. Thinking as industry as a whole enables just transition planners to set industry boundries and lift as much of the industry onto the high road as possible.
2) The Partnership Itself is a Priority. This category streeses the importance of leadership committment as well as problem-solving structure and culture building.
3) Incorporate Worker Wisdom throughout Partnership Efforts. This component stresses the importance of valuing the industry workers' opinions and evaluations, and including them into the training process and partnerships.
4) Industry-Driven Education and Training Solutions. This key element stresses the importance of coming up with appropriate an doable education methods.
The California Workforce Development Board is cooperating with 8 other organizations as partnerships to implement just transition.
The Shirley Ware Education Center (SWEC)
The West Oakland Job Resource Center (WOJRC)
Building Skills Partnership (BSP)
The Hospitality Training Academy (HTA)
Joint Workforce Investment (JWI)
The Port of Los Angeles (POLA)
Jewish Vocational Service (JVS)
Worker Education and Resource Center (WERC).
Each organization is partnering with other different cooperations, institutes to implement the plan of just transitions according to the ECJ approach.
Equity, climate and jobs are the cores of the high road training partnerships. Opportunity and mobility, a stronger economy for high road employers, a more sustainable and resilient environment and community are meant to be addressed with the approach of just transition.
The governor's office of planning and research has put forward the High Road Traning Partnership on June 2018. https://cwdb.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2019/09/High-Road-ECJ-B…;
The history of racialized exclusion to both social power and land tenure and homeownership has shaped how bodies are differentially impacted by land use in NOLA. This entire history could (and probably already is) a topic for a dissertation, but one case I found particularly interesting involved the Army Corps of Engineers' 2007 creation of an online database in which residents can find the "flood potential" faced by their homes (http://nolarisk.usace.army.mil/ --unfortunately no longer up). While this database was hailed as a landmark achievement in providing NOLA residents with their "right to know" about the risks in their neighborhoods, only a few remarked on what the data actually showed: that in the two years following the flood predominantly white neighborhoods had experienced 4-6 feet of flood reduction, black neighborhoods had experienced little to no flood reduction whatsoever.
This reminds me of a more general entanglement of racialized disparities, historical disinvestment and inequitable distribution of risk in America, which as Anna Clark so summarily puts it (in respect lead": "lead is one toxic legacy in America's cities. Another is segregation, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes."