Surging Biojustice Environmentalism from Below: Hope for Ending the Earth System Emergency?

Evidence of an escalating planetary emergency continues to accumulate. Scholars of global environmental politics (GEP) have done well to detail the drivers, consequences, governance approaches, and political dynamics of the intersecting crises comprising this Earth System emergency (Folke et al. 2021; Foster 2017). Less common, but equally valuable, are big-picture assessments of the politics underlying progress toward ending this emergency. To contribute to these latter studies, we deliberately step back to take a broad, conceptual approach, aiming to sketch the defining dynamics shaping debates over global environmental policy and governance.

Zooming out helps reveal that the main worldviews underpinning GEP have been shifting and realigning over the past several decades. There is now deep skepticism, if not downright disappointment, with today’s dominant institutionalist and market-liberal approaches for addressing global environmental problems. Increasing numbers of people are challenging the mainstream assumptions that economic growth can, and should, go hand in hand with environmental protection and that interstate cooperation will gradually emerge to promote mutually shared interests in environmental preservation. Not only are these approaches failing to stem the Earth System emergency, critics are arguing, but the resulting policies and mechanisms are frequently making the situation worse by generating false hope, delaying action, and enabling business as usual.

In response to this grand failure, we argue, various strands of critical environmentalism have come together into a movement we describe as “biojustice environmentalism from below.” This movement brings together critical social green thinking with elements of deep bioenvironmentalism that originally emerged in the 1970s. This worldview channels the frustrations, fury, and mounting anxiety of younger generations, marginalized peoples, Indigenous peoples, and energized individuals who are joining forces through ever larger transnational coalitions and online alliances to resist the destructive forces of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and neoliberalism. Significantly, this movement is more diverse than the critically oriented environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s, which was largely white, Western-centric, and middle class. The new biojustice movement explicitly calls for justice-centered, ecologically driven governance, while leaving behind past ideas such as state-mandated population controls that have been widely critiqued for their racist undertones. As this biojustice discourse spreads, we can see norms, initiatives, and campaigns that are increasingly challenging the liberal world order, nudging states and corporations toward more ecologically oriented, justice-focused discourses and, to a lesser extent, practices.

Significantly, as biojustice environmentalism has been emerging, global environmental governance has been increasingly fragmenting into polycentric initiatives organized around multiple semiautonomous and self-organizing nodes across all levels of authority and at different scales. This shift toward more polycentric governance is opening up new opportunities but also presenting risks for biojustice environmentalism. Polycentric governance initiatives typically comprise multiple types of stakeholders, including civil society; local, regional, and national governments; and sometimes private actors. Many of these initiatives are elevating biojustice goals and strengthening noninstitutional sustainability nodes. And many are promoting more resilient, adaptable, and ecologically and socially effective governance. But market-based schemes and public–private partnerships are also growing in this context, enabling business actors to advance market-liberal ideals under the banners of multistakeholderism and corporate social responsibility (CSR). For this reason, those who espouse biojustice goals are increasingly boycotting corporate-dominated multistakeholder forums, calling them out for downplaying the role of big business in deepening the Earth System emergency.

Surging biojustice environmentalism across this increasingly polycentric governance landscape, while bringing risks and challenges, would appear to offer some hope for ending the Earth System emergency. We recognize that this is a big claim. Our goal in making such a broad argument is twofold. First, we want to spark lively debate among students just starting to study GEP. Second, we aim to inspire deeper scholarly analyses of the potential of bottom-up biojustice environmentalism to transform global environmental governance.

Institutionalist and market-liberal approaches to global environmental governance have certainly done some good since the 1980s. Few GEP analysts would dispute the value of the more than 1,400 multilateral and 2,200 bilateral environmental agreements (Mitchell 2023). But, today, most would agree that progress has been patchy and modest at best. Part of the reason is that at the end of the day, most states end up prioritizing their own domestic political and economic interests, lowering ambitions, weakening rules, and undermining implementation. This pattern has repeated itself over and over again, from negotiations on climate change to biodiversity to trade in hazardous waste. Some international institutions, such as the United Nations (UN) Forum on Forests, are even actively impairing effective governance, working to delay reforms, mask business as usual, and legitimize inaction (Dimitrov 2020).

Few analysts, too, would completely discount the value of market-based mechanisms for improving global environmental governance. Certification and eco-labeling programs are offering consumers better-managed seafood, palm oil, coffee, tea, and timber. Regulatory safeguards have been put in place for the trade, use, and disposal of some chemicals, persistent organic pollutants, and electronic waste. Considerable progress has been made in preventing the illegal trade in endangered species, ivory, and wildlife. There is even solid evidence that corporate self-governance and CSR programs have slightly improved the environmental management of energy, mining, and shipping (Alger et al. 2021; Bloomfield 2017).

Nonetheless, although the situation would certainly be worse without these efforts, the stability, resilience, and functioning of the Earth System are continuing to deteriorate (Folke et al. 2021). The dominance of market-liberal thinking within state and corporate governance is a major reason why this is occurring. Most obviously, by stressing only a minimal role for regulatory authorities, this dominance has left international organizations and national agencies without sufficient mandates and powers to protect ecosystems. In some respects, these institutions would almost seem to be structured to fail the Earth System, relying on technocratic problem solving, market-driven measures, and incremental goal setting to address interlocking crises and planetary instability (Bernstein 2001).

Institutionalist and market-liberal approaches, for instance, tend to downplay or ignore the consequences of the shadows of consumption. These arise from the strategic “distancing of waste,” as better-off populations dispose of household garbage, e-waste, and used clothing in marginalized neighborhoods or in poorer countries overseas (Clapp 2002). Ecological shadows are cast as states and firms strategically hide the costs of exploitative global supply chains. They intensify as imports rise following passage of domestic environmental laws, as has happened for tropical timber after states have restricted logging of domestic forests. And they arise as costs accumulate without anyone realizing, as occurred for decades as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) drifted skyward from refrigerators, air conditioners, and housing insulation to damage the ozone layer. Shadow effects often accumulate over time, as with carbon in the atmosphere, persistent organic pollutants in the Arctic, and microplastics in the oceans (Dauvergne 2008).

Mainstream policies also tend to discount the shadow effects and lock-in dynamics associated with technologies that corporations often promote as environmental solutions. In part, this occurs because of a weak precautionary principle when introducing new technologies, with firms needing to demonstrate only short-term rather than long-term safety. Indeed, substituting known harmful technology with new and untested technology is a common prescription of market-liberal thinking, as was done when replacing CFCs with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to protect the ozone layer (HFCs, scientists would later discover, are potent greenhouse gases).

State and corporate environmental policy, too, commonly assumes that new technology will enhance the eco-efficiency of production, transportation, and energy use across global supply chains. Yet this assumption largely ignores the potential for these efficiency gains to rebound into more production and consumption as firms reinvest savings—and in the process spur ecosystem decline, as industrial fishing nets, trawlers, and sonar have done in the once seemingly limitless oceans. At the same time, states and firms frequently exaggerate the benefits and downplay the inequalities and injustices arising from new technology. The narrow focus on technology also tends to benefit large transnational firms with extensive research and development departments, which typically focus on technologies that deliver profits and extend market power, such as high-tech precision technologies that reinforce industrial forms of agriculture, rather than approaches that do not rely on corporate-delivered technologies, such as agroecology (Clapp and Ruder 2020).

At the same time, institutional approaches tend to overestimate the capacity of states to arrive at actionable international targets that are followed through with domestic legislation, while market liberals tend to overestimate the potential of corporate self-governance to ease global environmental turbulence (Dauvergne and Shipton 2023). With respect to the former, the repeated failure of states to arrive at meaningful and enforceable climate and biodiversity targets is a continual frustration. With respect to the latter, corporations such as Amazon, Coca-Cola, Nike, Unilever, and Walmart have been pledging a suite of seemingly impressive aspirations, including 100 percent recyclable packaging, 100 percent renewable energy, and zero carbon, zero waste, and zero deforestation, but with little intention of achieving them in practice. These approaches, more and more analysts and activists are now agreeing, set aside fundamental causes of the Earth System emergency, such as inequality, racism, colonialism, forced labor, and environmental injustice. Meanwhile, states continue to put on a charade of endless negotiations toward goals that are never met, while business managers continue to hide social and environmental costs inside long, complex, and opaque supply chains.

In brief, growing numbers of analysts and activists, including us, have come to the conclusion that institutionalist and market-liberal approaches to environmental management, while promoting marginally better practices on some measures, are too embedded in the values and assumptions of interstate competition and neoliberal capitalism to alter the underlying structures causing the eco-turbulence, eco-calamities, and eco-violence displacing people, destroying livelihoods, and disrupting community life all around the world—from bushfires in Australia to floods in China to heat domes in Canada to murders of land defenders in Brazil.

Over the past few decades, alliances have been forming of critically oriented environmentalists who are frustrated and angry at the ongoing failures of global environmental management. These alliances, which extend across a wide range of civil society groups, marginalized populations, and Indigenous peoples, are linking local resistance to corporate extractivism, state appropriation, livelihood loss, and ecosystem destruction. Various strands of critique of mainstream environmentalism have been meshing, amplifying voices of dissent. Environmentalism from below still comprises a great variety of values, perspectives, and goals. Yet, in our view, biojustice environmentalism, broadly merging progressive ideas from the older worldviews of “social greens” and “bioenvironmentalists” (Clapp and Dauvergne 2011), is now the primary strand contesting mainstream state and corporate environmental thinking.

Biojustice environmentalists share four anchoring beliefs. First, they see the destructive forces of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and neoliberalism as core drivers of the intertwined problems of inequality and ecological damage that are hallmarks of the Earth System emergency. Second, they see market-liberal solutions as simply not up to the task of addressing the challenges, and indeed some see them as heightening injustices and ecological degradation. Third, and related, they see sweeping political and economic reforms, community agency, and local empowerment as essential for moving toward global sustainability. Fourth, and again related, they see a need for justice-centered governance of ecosystems, embedded in the principles of systems thinking, biological integrity, equitable living, and sustainability and aiming to protect vulnerable peoples and promote community well-being.

Significant differences of opinion do exist here on what exactly is required. Some biojustice environmentalists call for stronger institutions, stricter regulations, and tighter controls on transnational corporations. Some are demanding a dismantling of state sovereignty. Some emphasize the necessity of decolonial justice framings and justice for nonhuman life (Menton et al. 2020). And some are advocating for the full unraveling of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, some grassroots biojustice activists have raised concerns about the accountability to local communities of more established environmental justice nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Perez et al. 2015). Yet, despite some tensions and disagreements, all agree that market-liberal environmental institutions are failing to prevent the damage of economic growth and that justice-centered, ecologically oriented governance is necessary at all scales, for all ecosystems, including the Earth System.

Broadly, biojustice environmentalists are striving to reclaim global environmentalism as a movement of people, rather than a strategy of governments and corporations. This biojustice movement includes environmental justice campaigns, rights of nature advocacy, environmentalism of Indigenous peoples, degrowth activists, and community resistance to logging, mining, megadams, and plantations. It includes “environmentalism of the poor” (Martinez-Alier 2003)—or what Temper (2014) calls “environmentalism of the dispossessed.” It includes mobilization for water rights, food sovereignty, and the rights of youth and future generations. It includes local advocacy in cities and towns to mitigate climate change, reduce waste, and improve energy efficiency. And it includes community activism to end plastic marine pollution, tropical deforestation, chemical contamination, overfishing, wildlife poaching, and trade in endangered species, among other environmental problems.

Biojustice environmentalism is challenging the core tenets of institutional and market-liberal environmental thought through a wide variety of mechanisms and pathways. Transnational advocacy networks are confronting the destructive forces of state and corporate accumulation. Grassroots campaigns are advocating for food and climate justice. Social media activism is mobilizing activists across cultures. Indigenous peoples and disadvantaged groups are exposing environmental racism. Scientists are speaking truth to power. Youth-activists are joining student clubs and marching for climate action. Scholar-activists are penning popular books, featuring in documentaries, sitting on governing councils, and advocating over social and mainstream medias. And, even as states increasingly crack down on direct-action dissent, individuals are risking their lives to block logging roads, demand water rights, and oppose megadams, coal mines, and plantations.

The diffusion of environmental norms is one of the principal ways biojustice environmentalism is influencing global governance. There are once again many possible examples. Local campaigns to reduce plastic pollution, often originating in the Global South, have energized the global diffusion of antiplastics norms, which in turn helped convince states to start negotiating an international plastics treaty in 2022. Community activists have made their voices heard in rejecting the dumping of hazardous waste into poor, racialized neighborhoods. Biojustice activism, community projects, and local norms in countries such as Ecuador have altered international water governance in a process Kauffman (2016) describes as “grassroots global governance.” Indigenous peoples, local communities, and non-Western judges, lawyers, and campaigners have helped diffuse the rights of nature norm into other cultures and into international forums (Kauffman and Martin 2021). Less obviously, the norms and actions of biojustice environmentalism have helped advance “slow justice” gains of “repair, restoration, and resilience” (Neville and Martin 2022, 3).

There are a host of reasons for surging biojustice environmentalism from below. Knowledge of the long-term social and ecological costs of unsustainable development is increasing across all cultures. Place-based, small-scale, nonelite, direct-action activism is spreading. Environmentalism of the poor is intensifying as people fight land grabs and destructive development. Social media is helping to aggregate individual lifestyle shifts, as with vegetarianism and veganism, and bypass the gatekeepers of neoliberal norms. Transnational advocacy networks are growing ever larger as the internet quickly and cheaply connects civil society organizations, communities, and individuals. More and more local peoples, meanwhile, are demonstrating the possibility of overcoming the dominance of market-liberal thinking, as happened in 2017 when El Salvador became the first country to ban metal mining following a grassroots campaign for water and community rights (Broad and Cavanagh 2021).

Rising eco-anxiety would also seem to be further energizing biojustice environmentalism. Research in social psychology and the psychiatric sciences has exposed the mental health harms of environmental disasters, climate change, poor air quality, the loss of homes, forced environmental migration, and conflicts over increasingly scarce resources (e.g., Clayton 2020; Hrabok et al. 2020). Younger adults who self-identify as environmentalists and people living in places where degradation is acute seem especially prone to eco-anxiety (Clayton and Karazsia 2020).

For sure, eco-anxiety can generate apathy, lethargy, and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Yet, as youth-activists such as Greta Thunberg remind us, eco-anxiety can also foster resilience, inspire ecologically oriented and justice-focused environmentalism, and leave individuals fiercely determined to confront the failures of state and corporate governance. Recognizing this, people all around the world are now striving to channel eco-anxiety into a force to advance personal well-being and energize biojustice activism from below, as Thunberg has done with students striking for climate action. To empower biojustice activism, people are being encouraged to watch for the signs of ecological grief, strive for a sense of meaning and purpose, and connect with family, friends, communities, and nature. Some GEP scholars, too, are promoting the value of mindfulness and contemplation to foster self-awareness, decrease stress, promote emotional well-being, and increase tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, uncontrollability, unpredictability, and risk taking as a way of further energizing ecologically grounded and justice-oriented environmentalism from below (e.g., Litfin 2020).

As biojustice environmentalism surges, global environmental governance is becoming increasingly polycentric. Growing polycentricity is partly a reaction of civil society to the shortfalls of intergovernmental cooperation. But it is also partly a product of state and corporate efforts to reshape governance in ways that better serve their interests. The turn away from relying on interstate cooperation for environmental management mirrors a broader trend of states stepping back from making commitments in multilateral forums, such as those that address security, international trade, and development assistance. This shift toward more polycentric governance has only intensified in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which have occurred alongside a rise in nationalism and populism.

Conceiving of global environmental governance as polycentric builds on the work of Elinor Ostrom, who, along with her colleagues, revealed the power of local polycentric governing systems to self-organize, adapt, and sustainably manage local resources, including common-pool resources—avoiding what some describe as “the tragedy of the commons” and others as the “free-rider problem.” Robust, cooperative local institutions, Ostrom and many others have shown, can manage local common-pool resources sustainably. Ostrom (2010), for instance, has made the case for the value of polycentric governance for addressing climate change. Global treaties and institutions are necessary, she believes, especially in the long term. Yet polycentric governance, she argues, can be highly effective in reducing greenhouse gases through, for instance, bottom-up initiatives in villages, towns, and cities mitigating emissions at multiple scales. Critically for her, too, polycentric governance tends to foster learning, innovation, and experimentation. Effective environmental governance, as she and many others have shown, does not require privatization or a central authority to override local self-interest. Fragmentary local actions, meanwhile, do not necessarily equate with ineffective global governance, as local sustainability aggregates to the global scale (Biermann et al. 2009; Zelli and van Asselt 2013; Jordan et al. 2018).

There are numerous examples of polycentric governance that extend across borders in networks of local actors and initiatives that address environmental problems, many of which embody biojustice goals and are grounded in community efforts. One example is the rise of transnational networks of cities pledging to address climate change at the urban scale, where agreement on ambitious carbon reduction targets has been easier to achieve than in interstate negotiation settings—what Betsill and Bulkeley (2021) refer to as “multiscale” governance (i.e., where actors at one level explicitly connect different levels and spheres of authority, both vertically and horizontally). The 2,500 or so governments across more than 125 countries in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, for instance, have agreed to shared targets for sustainable urban development on a range of issues, from reducing carbon emissions to promoting more sustainable food systems to supporting renewable energy. Polycentric initiatives grounded in communities with strong justice goals have also emerged to address other international environmental issues, such as transboundary water governance (e.g., Baltutis and Moore 2019).

Polycentric global governance certainly has limits and weaknesses, including potential inconsistencies in implementation, power inequities, high operational costs, free riding, management inefficiencies, and system stagnation. Polycentric initiatives can also struggle to respond effectively to rapid change, including the acceleration of environmental change. As polycentric and multistakeholder initiatives have become more prominent for addressing global-scale problems, there is also growing concern about the potential for corporate actors to capture governance spaces. Transnational multistakeholder sustainability certification schemes, for example, while technically polycentric in the sense that they include an array of actors from NGOs to governments to the private sector, and while often claiming to be advancing justice goals alongside sustainability, have been widely critiqued. These kinds of initiatives, such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil and other commodity-based certification schemes, are typically advancing market-liberal ideals and have in practice been weak and largely ineffective in enhancing on-the-ground social justice and ecosystem sustainability (Schleifer 2023). Local grassroots organizations reject these kinds of transnational certification schemes in favor of local sustainability measures, such as food sovereignty initiatives that reduce reliance on global commodity supply chains (Wittman 2011).

There are also numerous other examples of biojustice groups raising alarm bells about uneven power dynamics and the undue influence of corporations in multistakeholder environmental arenas, including ones coordinated by the UN. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit, for example, which sought to promote more sustainable food systems for all, was roundly critiqued, and boycotted, by grassroots biojustice-oriented groups for appointing leaders friendly to corporations and adopting a multistakeholder governance model that gave business actors a priority seat at the table. Even as corporations had privileged roles in shaping the summit’s agenda, the organizers branded the initiative a “People’s Summit” based on the participation of some larger mainstream NGOs (Canfield et al. 2021). Post summit, however, a coalition of diverse groups has emerged around promotion of the concept of agroecology. Other UN initiatives, meanwhile, are increasingly partnering with large transnational corporations, raising concerns among biojustice groups. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, for instance, has a partnership with CropLife International, a pesticides lobby representing transnational chemical companies. Polycentricity can certainly promote global sustainability; yet, as these examples remind us, not all polycentric initiatives are equal, and some are vulnerable to corporate capture.

Ecological disruptions and disasters are converging and compounding. Multiscale instability is escalating. Global turbulence is intensifying as increasingly unstable socioeconomic, political, and natural systems interact (Dauvergne and Shipton 2023). And humanity is approaching—and for some biological systems exceeding—planetary limits. Observing this, scholars and activists have come to lament the “death of environmentalism,” the growing dominance of “environmentalism of the rich,” and the “dangerous incrementalism” of liberal environmentalism (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2005; Dauvergne 2016; Allan 2019). Others are noting the ways that states and corporations capture ecologically oriented concepts such as “sustainability,” redefining them for purposes of diplomacy and branding. Still others are documenting how few concrete actions are accompanying the rhetoric of “sustainable development” (Biermann et al. 2022). Such analyses offer valuable insights into why so many ecosystems are in decline. So do ones revealing the half-truths, lies, and disinformation of industry (Oreskes and Conway 2011).

Lost here, however, is an explicit recognition of the consequences of shifting and realigning worldviews for GEP. An especially consequential trend, as we have strived to argue, is the rise of bottom-up biojustice environmentalism in the face of the failures of mainstream environmental management. Environmental activism is intensifying in marginalized neighborhoods. People dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods are fighting back. Transnational advocacy networks are growing larger. Indigenous peoples are demanding justice, political rights, and compensation for environmental harms. More and more youth-activists and scholar-activists are decrying the worsening state of the planet. And more frustrated, angry, and anxious citizens are calling for transformative reforms to end the destructive consequences of the unequal and unfair distribution of earth shares.

Biojustice environmentalism from below has the capacity, in our opinion, to alter the very nature of GEP. Much of the response of states and corporations so far has been rhetorical: a greater willingness to admit mistakes, apologize, and promise future sustainability. Still, more international agreements are now reflecting grassroots concerns. Some state policies have become stricter and more rigorously enforced. Some corporate environmental programs, too, are starting to reflect some community concerns. Yet, as we have argued, to grasp fully the significance of surging biojustice environmentalism, it is equally, if not more important, to recognize the ways it is energizing and deepening polycentric environmental governance by fostering independent, self-governing, local sustainability nodes all around the world, albeit frequently contested as corporate actors edge their way in to try to hijack agendas.

What are the takeaway lessons of this analysis for the study of GEP? For starters, it suggests the value and importance of further research on the consequences of surging biojustice environmentalism. Many questions remain. What, more precisely, are the contours and political dynamics of the biojustice movement? Why, and under what circumstances, is biojustice environmentalism able to transform governance? Is a backlash possibly intensifying? What are the consequences of escalating personal, political, and planetary turbulence? How are differences and disagreements among biojustice activists affecting the efficacy of polycentric global governance? What are the implications of alliances and tensions across global movements for the potential of bottom-up biojustice environmentalism to end the Earth System emergency?

For us, too, the analysis in this article helps show that new approaches to addressing environmental problems are not just possible but required. It also makes clear that the principles of justice, equity, inclusion, and diversity are vital if we are to have any hope of sustainability in the future. These principles must not only be central in measures to address the planetary emergency in all its dimensions but they are also vital to governance processes themselves. Polycentric governance initiatives will not advance these principles if corporate actors capture agendas. For this reason, it is extremely important to take a decolonization approach and foster global norms that embody the foregoing principles, such that they form the basis of both polycentric and multilateral governance efforts.

For sure, biojustice environmentalism from below is not about to rein in corporate power or replace the state any time soon. Indeed, looking broadly, it is reasonable to conclude that state and corporate environmental policies are still doing far more to protect the interests of wealth and privilege than the interests of people and the planet. Yet, although more research is necessary to trace the extent and nature of influence, biojustice environmental norms, ideas, and initiatives originating from below do appear to be gaining political power, partly by exposing the failures of market-liberal and institutional environmental management and partly by forging new kinds of polycentric pathways for advancing biological integrity and social justice. Recognizing these trends is crucial for sustaining the vitality of environmentalism as a movement of movements, as well as for moving toward more effective, just, and sustainable global environmental governance.

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and Global Environmental Politics editors for their astute feedback on earlier drafts of this article.