Community economies and climate justice

This chapter hopes to contribute to affirmative experimentation with political–economic arrangements in which the environment is central to economic decision making. An important feature I focus on regarding the collectives concerned about climate change (see Roelvink 2016) is the shift they have made from a politics of resistance (such as that associated with the more traditional left, including in academic critique) to one of affirmation (Roelvink 2016). Thus, the kind of social movements concerned with climate change that this chapter explores are not focused on resistance but rather are actively experimenting with new ways of living with others, other species and nature. One of the aims of this chapter, then, is to provide some strategies for affirmative, collective, economic action that other movements centred on climate justice might explore. Rather than focusing on injustice, I examine some of the ways in which just economies are created in response to climate concern.