Between Green Capitalism and the Southern Ecosocial Pact: Limited Proposals to Ad-dress the Ecological Crisis

FÉLIZ, MARIANO; MELÓN, DAIANA ELISA

Conferencia; Development Studies Association (DSA) 2021 Conference ?Unsettling Development. COVID19, climate change, populism, demands for racial justice and the rise of new powers are among the themes that will be explored?; 2021

University of East Anglia

As the climate crisis worsens, the debate on how to confront it grows. While dominantclasses propose a Green(er) capitalism, many organizations are talking about a GreenNew Deal, or an EcoSocial Pact in the south. Green capitalism includes fullcommodification of nature (eg., carbon markets, green taxes) and technologicalsolutions (eg., bioengineering) to environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the GreenNew Deal pushes for greater State intervention in the (capitalist) economy, presumingthat the problem is neoliberalism?s irrationality, but not capitalist racialized, patriarchalsocial relations.The relevant issue is that both initiatives negate the role of imperialist and dependentarticulations within global capitalism thus forgetting that greener capitalism in the northmight also mean growing extractivism and further commodifying of life and natureelsewhere, with greater destruction of the livelihoods of people in the peripheries (andespecially, young racialized women). We also need to address the fact that morecapitalist State intervention means less autonomy for social movements. We will provide a critical overview of these proposals, showing that their key initiativeslack an in-depth understanding of actual global capitalist relations, ignoring themechanisms that reproduce unequal (dependent), racialized and patriarchal forms of capitalist destruction of common goods. Also, we?ll show that the EcoSocial Pactsponsored by well known NGOs and scholars in Latin America (thus relevant for thediscussions in the region), lacks the radical stance the current crisis warrants andwrongly places social agency with the capitalist State. We will discuss why any realalternatives for socio ecological transformation need to begin with the actual practiceof social organizations leading the struggles for (anti)postcapitalist social change.