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Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice

Kurtz, Reed Michael
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1748-596X
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1566180060639625

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Political Science.
This dissertation responds to the global ecological crisis of climate change, showing how the temporal and spatial dimensions of the crisis challenge our capacities to imagine and implement effective political solutions. Rather than being natural limits, I argue these dimensions of the crisis are inherently social and political, derived from contradictions and antagonisms of the global capitalist nation-state system. I thus take a critical approach to ecology and politics, in the tradition of Marxist political ecology. I read Antonio Gramsci’s political theories of hegemony and the integral state through an ecological framework that foregrounds the distinct roles that human labor, capital, and the state system play in organizing social and environmental relations. I develop an original conception of hegemony as a fundamentally ecological process that constitutes the reproduction of human relations within nature, which I use to analyze the politics of climate governance and climate justice. Grounded in textual analysis and fieldwork observations of state and civil society relations within the UNFCCC, I show that struggles for hegemony among competing coalitions of state and non-state actors have shaped the institutional frameworks and political commitments of the Paris climate regime complex. I demonstrate how climate governance reproduces capitalist political relations predicated on formal separation of `state’ and `civil society,’ and the endless accumulation of capital, thereby serving to reproduce, rather than resolve, the contradictions of the crisis. I then center my focus on the global movement of movements for climate justice. Using textual analysis and qualitative fieldwork conducted as a critically-situated, participant-observer of the climate justice movement at various sites, including the COP22 and COP23 climate negotiations, I show how the climate justice movement constitutes itself as a distinctly anti-systemic and ecological historical bloc in world politics. I demonstrate how ecological direct action is central to the movement’s efforts to achieve “system change, not climate change,” by working to reorganize the reproduction of relations between humans and the rest of nature along direct democratic lines.
Alexander Wendt (Committee Co-Chair)
Joel Wainwright (Committee Co-Chair)
Jason Moore (Committee Member)
Alexander Thompson (Committee Member)
Inés Valdez (Committee Member)
321 p.
Environmental Studies; Geography; International Relations; Political Science
Climate Change; Global Environmental Politics; Social Movements; Critical Theory; Environmental Justice; Environmental Political Theory; Marxism; World-Ecology; Global Governance; Gramsci;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kurtz, R. M. (2019). Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1566180060639625

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kurtz, Reed. Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice . 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1566180060639625.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kurtz, Reed. "Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1566180060639625

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1566180060639625
961
© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.