Presentation short abstract

Seeking grantees in Poland, Spain and Greece revealed how Western climate justice frames clash with local histories, distrust of philanthropy, and uneven geographies of organising. We show how movement-based knowledge can reframe climate justice through semiperipheral and grassroots perspectives.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation draws on field reflections from the scouting process of the Collective Abundance fund across Poland, Spain and Greece. Collective Abundance is a new philanthropic initiative that aims to redistribute resources to grassroots movements and to support collaborative funding processes shaped by the needs, knowledges and priorities of the groups themselves. These three country contexts reveal how dominant environmental justice frames, shaped in western policy and NGO environments, often fail to resonate with local struggles.

As scouts rooted in grassroots movements, we repeatedly met tensions that challenged mainstream understandings of climate justice. Across all three countries, the term had weak grounding and was often associated with professional environmentalism or academia rather than social struggles. Workers’ collectives spoke of class, exploitation and unsafe labour. Queer and BIPOC groups described their struggles with state violence, racism, and queer/transphobia. Rural communities fighting destructive projects spoke of fear, surveillance and the challenges of resistance. These experiences carried an understanding of justice, but it did not easily translate into the language of the climate crisis.

Our scouting turned into a work of translation, and relational learning, where the meaning of climate justice was shaped within the groups themselves. This work showed that justice is articulated through lived experiences of exclusion, exploitation and resistance, not through abstract environmental narratives. We reflect on scouting as a non-obvious methodological tool for political ecology fieldwork - one that foregrounds positionality while allowing access to embodied knowledges and voices of distrust that challenge the dominant notion of climate justice.