ABSTRACT

This chapter offers an ecofeminist perspective on just transition, understood as a system change from capitalism to commons. It examines the statements and actions by women grassroots organizers at the “Converging for a Just Transition” workshop held parallel to the 2017 COP23 UN climate meetings in Bonn, Germany. The organizers are from two global grassroots networks: The peasant and food sovereignty movement, La Vía Campesina (“the Peasant Way”) and It Takes Roots, a delegation of grassroots environmental justice organizations. This analysis discusses the ways that the women and their allies seek a just transition that defends and extends already existing commons and Indigenous political economies through which they and their families and communities have direct access to and control over territory, food, energy and other requirements of life. In contrast to mainstream labor organizations and governments for which just transition is aimed at overcoming the divide between waged workers and ecologists and reinforcing capitalism, these grassroots organizers seek to challenge capitalist relations and build life-centered alternatives against fossil fuel and agribusiness value chains. To the extent that this activism is multiplied, the drive and internal imperative of capitalist ecocide is undermined.