ABSTRACT

The Climate Justice Movement (CJM) has been recognized and analyzed as part of the global deliberations on climate change in the fields' international political economy and political ecology. This chapter focuses on the "invention" of Climate Justice (CJ) as a concept for radical climate change mobilization. It analyzes how the central presence of economic demands began to diverge and transform in a different direction while retaining core phrases and demands going back to 1999. The historical context of the 1991 summit reflects an ambition to organize around environmental justice and a critical stance towards a perceived underlying structural racism in the approach of the "group of 10" main US environmental organizations. The concept of the Just Transition places the report firmly in the economic debate between North American unions and the environmental justice movement that had been taking place since the 1970s. A Just Transition concretely requires new sources of finance for both jobs and alternative energy resources.