Articulating post-apocalyptic environmentalism: global civil society and the struggle for anti-colonial climate politics in the climate movement

Abstract

This article examines the dynamics of the climate movement’s (CM) engagement within global civil society (GCS), focusing on how this relates to its evolving commitment to anti-colonial climate politics and the wider, ongoing tensions between actors from the Global North and South within the movement. Here, this article contributes with a theorization on how counter-hegemonic and anti-colonial social movement alliances can be forged in GCS, building from neo-Gramscian, post- and decolonial concepts. This theorization builds on a study of the COP26 Coalition’s efforts in Glasgow in November 2021, exploring how the coalition strategically utilized post-apocalyptic environmentalism to amplify Southern and anti-colonial perspectives within the broader CM and to carve out a space for such perspectives within GCS. However, this study also highlights how GCS spaces are shaped by a neo-colonial global hegemony which fosters structures of Northern epistemic dominance which often function to de-legitimize, exclude, or co-opt non-Western knowledges and movements within GCS.