ABSTRACT
Lived or situated experiences of contestation through articulations of climate justice at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC) at the Universidad de Valle campus in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010 are a focal point of this chapter. While the World Social Forum (WSF) was envisaged to bring together northern-and southern-based movements of civil society to contest neoliberal globalization primarily through the dynamics of open space, the WPCCC was an initiative of the government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in response to the perceived failure of the ‘Copenhagen Accord’. It called for activists, social movements, scientists, academics, lawyers and governments to come together to address the pressing issue of ‘climate justice’ and absence of attention to ‘buen vivir’ and ‘rights of Mother Earth’ at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2009. Reflecting its reception by global environmental governance, scholarly responses to Cochabamba have been muted thus far. Nevertheless, Cochabamba remains a key referent point for climate justice activism as it secures a position in ‘global’ activism for social and environmental justice that, in the declaration of the People’s Summit at Rio+20 in July 2012, is inserted alongside contestation at Rio 1992, Seattle, the WSF, COP17 in Durban, and mobilizations against the G8-G20. In what follows, articulations of working groups at the Cochabamba conference and the final production of the People’s Agreement are assessed in terms of deepening debate on the politics of contestation that moves from but remains related to the World Social Forum. The conceptual potential of ‘global civil society’ and ‘Mother Earth’, however, is constrained by symbolic, metaphorical usage which, it is argued, delimits their capacity to represent an alternative politico-ethical worldview.
