AfronomicsLaw & SGEL partnered up for a symposium on Green Deals and Justice. The below contributions bring together a diverse set of perspectives with essays from scholars from the Global South & the Global North. Topics range from the limits of state-centrism, to visions of what a planetary green deal may entail, to the erasure of reproductive justice, a critical assessment of ‘green finance’ initiatives in the African context, and the many limits of the European Green Deal that keep reproducing multiple forms of inequalities.
Convenors: Ivana Isailović, Adebayo Majekolagbe, and Nona Tamale.
Introduction
While the concept of a Green New Deal was proposed prior to the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis as a way of revitalizing and rebranding neoliberal capitalism as ‘green’, it was not until a decade later that a more explicitly Keynesian vision of a Green New Deal became an increasingly popular framework for talking about climate, industrial, and social policies in a unified manner attentive to the conjoined crisis of inequality, labor precarity, and ecological degradation. The notion of a Green New Deal has shifted discourse away from how much addressing climate change will cost, and instead opened conversations about the political potential of climate policy to ‘guarantee [among other things] climate-friendly work and no-carbon housing and free public transit’