Marie Petersmann (London School of Economics – Law School) has posted Hope in Climate Justice: Tales of Transition and its Refusal on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This article examines two contrasting articulations of hope in climate justice discourse by analysing how different understandings of ‘creative destruction’ shape contemporary climate action. I explore how hope is differently mobilised in climate mitigation and adaptation debates by analysing the IPCC’s 2022 Working Group III report and the Bridgetown Initiative. I identify two distinct forms of hope. On the one hand, a ‘hyper-modernist’ hope that seeks to reconstruct our ‘fossil modernity’-or the entrenched entanglement between modern societies and fossil fuels-through technological solutions like negative emissions technologies. On the other hand, an ‘anti-modernist’ hope that rejects the system’s rules through practices of refusal. While mitigation discourse invests hope in techno-fixes that displace rather than reduce carbon emissions, adaptation discourse articulates hope through a rejection of colonial structures and refusal of ‘unpayable debts’-as exemplified by Small Island Developing States’ demands for debt cancellation. These contrasting approaches reveal fundamentally different ways of making sense of and accounting for the origins and socio-ecological legacies of ‘fossil modernity’ and its uneven distribution of climate harm.