Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my field-philosophical research in Pödelwitz, I propose a transformative concept of climate justice. This concept bridges academic and activist discourses, responds to the political struggles in the post-coal transition, and contributes to locally varied understandings of climate justice.

Paper long abstract:

Climate justice is both a precise conceptual tool to analyse the injustices caused and compounded by climate change as well as a powerful rallying call for political struggles around the globe. Despite this undeniable impact, critical scholars have recently emphasized the need for a transformed understandings of climate justice (Sultana 2021; Newell et al. 2021; Ranganathan & Bratman 2021): Academic and activist discourses have often remained siloed and both have predominantly focused on climate change mitigation, neglecting injustices in adaption. In addition, conceptions of climate justice should be locally varied rather than universal or global in order to account for geographical disparities of climate change.

In this paper, I will present and develop a transformative notion of climate justice drawing on my field-philosophical research in Pödelwitz. Pödelwitz is a village in the central German coal district where local residents and climate justice activists resisted the expansion of a neighbouring lignite mine. From this successful struggle, a civil society initiative emerged which aims to transform Pödelwitz into a social-ecological model village. Even though the work of the initiative stands in continuation and solidarity with the resistance, it requires a renewed understanding of climate justice. After Germany’s exit from coal, Pödelwitz transformation is more threatened by solar parks and post-mining lakes than fossil energy. Together with the initiative, I propose a concept of climate justice that emerged from and responds to these new challenges in theory and practice along its distributive (socialization of property), procedural (democracy and anti-fascism) and recognitional (more-than-human) dimension.