,

The Climate Justice Universities Union: Reclaiming the Transformative Power of Higher Education

Formed and launched in Autumn 2024 with colleagues from across the island of Ireland, the Climate Justice Universities Union is a transdisciplinary collective of university workers, students, activists and members of the wider community. Each person represents a diversity of views, experiences and expertise – united by a common desire to build coalitions that help…

By Calum McGeown, Sinéad Sheehan, Jennie C. Stephens and John Barry

What should higher education institutions do about the planetary crisis? How can universities contribute to transformative change?  

The year 2024 will almost certainly be the hottest on record so far. Extreme storms, deadly wildfires and flash flooding are showing what it means to live in a time of intensifying climate destabilisation. Yet the COP29 international climate negotiations held in Azerbaijan in November were just another expression of the immense global failure to tackle the crisis. The relative ease with which fossil fuel interests were able to capture the process, and the blatant disregard shown to those nations and peoples most at risk, is a sadly familiar story. 

The past year has also been defined by extreme violence. Since October 2023, the number of people brutally killed by Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine is estimated to be over 44,000. Of those left behind, more than 100,000 are injured and lacking in basic supplies including food, water and medicines. These levels of inhumanity and destruction are exacerbated by what amounts to the ecocidal annihilation of Gaza’s soils, water and other ecosystems. Since expanding its military operations with the continued backing of many Western powers, Israel has also now killed over 3,000 people in Lebanon and injured or displaced tens of thousands more. Meanwhile in Sudan, over 6 million people are on the brink of famine after a year of conflict.

The stories of these social and ecological crises cannot be told fully without acknowledging academia’s historical and ongoing complicity in them. It is for this reason that a new collective called the Climate Justice Universities Union (hereafter Climate Union) has been established to counter the complacency within higher education institutions on these issues. 

The lack of interventions from powerful institutions and actors to bring an end to such levels of horror, loss and human suffering, including from the vast majority of academia, speaks volumes about dehumanisation and a failure of mainstream politics to protect life and defend the most vulnerable. Pro-Palestinian academic and student activism has been repressed by police brutality in Germany and the Netherlands. Such state repression has also extended to the climate movement. In the UK, Just Stop Oil activists have been jailed for merely attending a Zoom meeting for organising actions. Around the world, governments are introducing draconian anti-democratic legislation limiting the right to protest. Many universities have followed this trend, moving quickly to condemn student activists and in some cases violently remove them from their campuses

If there is any light to be found, it is in the huge numbers of people who have mobilised around the world in solidarity with the oppressed and their struggles for justice. Now is therefore the time for re-evaluating how transformative change might actually be achieved, and for considering what kinds of new organisations and coalitions are needed for the turbulent years ahead. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that transformative action will not be delivered through conventional political processes. After all, how can we expect a political and economic system built on extractive colonial logics to provide the solutions to crises caused by capitalist extractivism and the colonial violence that flows from it? 

The university as a site of struggle

As university workers, we recognise the active role that higher education plays in shaping societies. We experience this on a daily basis, in what research is (or is not) conducted and in what students do (or do not) learn. We see how the power of higher education is leveraged by partner organisations that engage with university systems to promote their interests, and we notice how university structures exclude many perspectives and priorities. 

We also recognise that higher education institutions have a significant level of power – unevenly distributed within them – to support and facilitate the transformations needed across all sectors of society and the economy to address our planetary crisis. As UN General Secretary António Gueterres put it, we need to see change in “everything, everywhere, all at once.” In many ways, however, higher education continues to reproduce unjust and unsustainable social, political and economic ideas and structures rather than challenge and transform them. 

We believe that universities can and should play a larger and more positive role in advancing progressive social and economic change. The fire alarm has been sounding for some time, and there is no shortage of knowledge outlining the integrated and cascading social and ecological dimensions of the “polycrisis” we are facing. Universities must now take up the role of first responder and help implement the policy and structural changes recommended by climate science and demanded by the struggle for climate justice. More than ever before, we must find agency and hope for the future in each other, and together build our collective power for social change.

Climate Justice Universities Union

Shared concerns about higher education’s reproduction of values, structures and practices which promote/legitimise inequality and greenwash unsustainability are what brought us together with people from across the island of Ireland in 2023 in Galway. Since then, we have collaborated with, and been led by, others to hold People’s Assembly-style events in each of the four provinces of Ireland with additional meetings in Belfast, Dublin and Cork. These grassroots deliberative forums were designed to connect people from all over Ireland to mobilise around the question “What should higher education institutions do about the planetary crisis?”

Anyone who works in the higher education sector will recognise how precarious, siloed and isolating it can be to advocate for change in universities.  The neoliberal creep and the financialisation and the corporatisation of higher education has reinforced a system where individuals and institutions are increasingly pushed into competition with each other for jobs, grants and promotions. In light of this, it is striking that the community emerging from our events are fuelled by radical ideas, an appetite for collaboration and a passion for social change. Still in its early days, the Climate Union aims to support the expansion of that community by connecting people and providing a structure that enables us to work collectively to reclaim higher education as a force for the common good. 

Formed and launched in Autumn 2024 with colleagues from across the island, the Climate Union is a transdisciplinary collective of university workers, students, activists and members of the wider community. Each person represents a diversity of views, experiences and expertise – united by a common desire to build coalitions that help redirect the power of higher education towards transformative socio-ecological change. This means prioritising human and more-than-human well-being in all research and education and this can only be done by breaking free of the grip that capitalist (neoclassical) economics and its preoccupation with endless, ecocidal GDP growth has on curricula, research agendas and university management practices.  

Climate justice will certainly not be achieved against a backdrop of genocide, ecocide, repression, worsening inequalities and famine. Neither is there any prospect of justice in climate action that does not also recognise, represent and attend to the interests and needs of the working class. As Chico Mendes put it, “Ecology without class politics is just gardening.” 

Structure

The Climate Justice Universities Union is made up of individual Members, Working Groups, Institutional Representatives and a Coordinating Team. The organisation is so far based mainly in Ireland but international membership is growing and we are co-designing mechanisms to engage across national boundaries. As a collective, we take a non-hierarchical and deliberative democratic approach to our work and decision-making. 

Membership is free and open to anyone who believes that higher education has a critical role to play in societal transformation toward an equitable, decolonised, stable and healthy future. The foundation is a commitment to work towards rebalancing human society within ecological systems of reciprocity and regeneration, and recognise the need to care for land, water, biodiversity and human well-being as part of natural interconnected healthy ecosystems. 

Ambition

Members of the Climate Union are currently beginning a process of co-developing goals that will form the basis of organising actions focused on transforming higher education for the common good. So far, proposed collective goals include: 

  1. Ensure every student graduates with knowledge, skills and understanding of the causes, consequences and responses to the climate and ecological crises
  2. Call for all higher education institutions to declare a climate and ecological emergency and endorse the fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty
  3. Commit to ending economic precarity among staff and students
  4. Support and encourage scholar-activism of staff, students and administrators
  5. Advocate to end university partnerships with extractive and destructive industries

The Climate Justice Universities Union will organise and take actions to collectively advocate for higher education to play a larger role in imagining and co-creating transformative knowledge, education and connection. We are collaborating and experimenting together. We are striving to build coalitions within and beyond higher education around the goal of social transformation. We are sharing resources and ideas to contribute to larger social movements for justice and sustainability. We are starting new conversations and encouraging new ways of thinking about systemic transformation. We will challenge complacency about inequality and injustice, and we will collectively encourage disrupting widespread acceptance of dominant economic paradigms and power structures. Will you join us?

To find out more and join please visit the website:

https://www.climatejusticeuniversitiesunion.org

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *