HuK Forum - Louisa Parks: Climate justice movements and the EU

HuK-Forum

“Climate justice movements and the EU: exploring activism for transformative climate democracy”

Louisa Parks

Abstract:

Social movement cycles have long been explored as sources of change in how we govern our societies, but they have been discussed more rarely with reference to transnational governance organisations like the European Union. This talk will explore how successive cycles of protest from the turn of the millennium to the climate justice cycle that peaked around 2018-19 shaped new attention to democratic participation in the European Green Deal. Yet the responsiveness to these claims appears to have serious limitations: new democratic spaces leave little room for fundamental challenges to business-as-usual approaches, while spaces for climate justice movements in both member states and in EU level debates have been squeezed. Where might we find spaces of transformation in the current landscape, and move towards a transformative EU environmental governance and a model of climate democracy by turning towards civil society?

Bio:

Louisa Parks is Full Professor in Political Sociology at the School of International Studies and the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Italy. Her research interests centre around citizen activism and its links to global environmental governance, and she has published articles and books on themes including climate and biodiversity activism at the local, regional, and international levels. Her current projects include research on environmental activism and its contributions to transformative governance, climate democracy and activism, and citizens’ trust and participation in the EU. She is an editor of the journal Environmental Politics.