0. Introduction
This article seeks to give a summarized overview of what is currently, and has been for the last few years, the landscape of the institutional capability within the climate justice movement in Europe. This overview is based on my experience as an organizer and activist, so rather than a detailed analysis I wil try to make a qualitative evaluation.
What is the institutional capability?
The institutional capability, defined in All In as an extended version of Zeynep Tüfekçi’s typology, “is about engaging in systematizing demands and consolidating victories”, and is a key capability in every social movement that wishes to achieve real political or systemic change.
This capability demands the movement is capable of:
- agreeing on demands and consolidate them into a political program;
- institutionalizing and systematizing that program.
Institutional capability in a ruptural movement?
Contrary to what may be commonly conceived, engaging with this capability does not necessarily mean being absorbed into the current institutions, frames and rules. The reverse assumption might also not be true: Engaging with existing institutional structures does not necessarily exclude an organization or a movement having an anti-capitalist vision; nor does it automatically imply that they use an “inside-the-system” model of transformation.
A ruptural movement may, at certain moments, engage directly with institutions, for example via petitions or referendums as escalation tactics. It may even create an electoral political party to increase or maintain their capacity to agitate the masses, to extend their capacity of consolidating political demands and program, and to avoid being co-opted by others claiming to represent the movements’ demands. But a movement can also create a political grassroots program from below. Both cases demand that the movement is capable of transforming street slogans, or informal demands into political programs.
The institutional capability in a ruptural movement – one which wishes to uproot the system – is also related to the capacity to:
- Envision alternative institutions to the ones we seek to dismantle. The proposals on the post-capitalist institutional setting may take part in the political program of the movement.
- Create institutions to build counter power to the institutions of the system. This task of building parallel institutions, ahead of a moment of rupture, may support movement building. These parallel institutions can also have an important role in defining a political program (I will come back to this).
How could we quantify a movements institutional capability?
In this analytical framing, a movement with a low institutional capability would be a movement with no consolidated demands. A movemet with medium institutional capability would maybe be a movement with a political program developed to some degree, which is able to discuss those demands in the mainstream, and might even manage to systematize some of them. And a movement with a strong institutional capability would then be a movement which is able to fully systematize its demands, and which would know how to use institutions (old or new ones) to do so.
The climate justice movement, I would argue has little-to-medium institutional capability, and this has been a crucial weakness.
1. “Where” am I writing from?
I am a climate justice activist in Climáximo, a climate justice collective in Portugal, and, among many other things but most important to this conversation, I took part in the Climate Jobs campaign, and in the Global Climate Jobs Network, as part of the effort in increasing the institutional capability within the climate justice movement.
Recalling from the campaign’s website and excerpts from All In’s mentions to the campaign,
- Climate Jobs Campaigns bring together the demands of the climate movements and of the labour movements by proposing massive public investment in the creation of Climate Jobs, advocating for a people’s plan for a just transition.
- The campaigns produce their own reports on Climate Jobs Programs that explain which jobs should be created, in each sectors, doing what kind of work, and cutting how may emissions. These reports serve as blueprints for stopping climate change and they are directed towards social justice while informed by climate science.
Rightly so, they propose the only way for such massive transformation to happen – the cutting of effectively all greenhouse gas emissions – is by mass public investment, and the creation of public jobs – the Climate Jobs.
The Global Climate Jobs Network is a network that seeks to bring together the different campaigns and movements for climate jobs, and to be an articulation and coordination platform for those campaigns and movements.
Climáximo was one of the founders of the Portuguese branch of the Climate Jobs Campaign, and it was since then involved in building momentum for the campaigns and its articulation internationally, via the Global Climate Jobs network.
The network, as well as most of the campaigns, have been around since around 2015-2016, so they are about to become a decade old. My first organizational involvement with the campaign in Portugal was in 2020. In early 2022 I started taking an informal coordination role in the network. My experience in both was short enough for me not to stay comfortable, and long enough for me to draw some lessons.
Myself, and the grassroots movement I belong to, have used the Climate Jobs Campaign as a way to engage in the conversation about political programs for climate change mitigation and a just energy transition, as to build institutional capability within the climate justice movement. This organizing work has allowed me to explore the institutional movement landscape.
So, this is where my analysis will come from. I will give some concrete examples througout the text, but I won’t even aim to represent the full picture of the climate justice movement in Europe.
2. The Climate Justice Movement
A movement for climate justice is or should be the movement-as-party ecosystem (as defined in All In) that has the ambition to win climate justice. This, as also claimed in the book, means dismantling capitalism in the short-term. It is good to keep this in mind. If we are talking about capabilities of the climate justice movement, we should be able to separate them, analytically and politically, from the capabilities of the “4.4ºC warming movement” that All In refers to.
So, let’s delve into what the actual institutional capability of the European climate justice movement looks like, and who is holding it.
If we are talking about a movement with the ambition and urgency to change the system, and the institutional capability to do so, then this should be a movement that can transform slogans like “system change, not climate change”, “keep it in the ground”, “power to the people”, etc. into mainstream political programs and demands.
Furthermore, this should also be a movement that knows what institutions to set up as to implement/oversee/be accountable to such program when the movement is in power. Additionally, the movement may have plans to create parallel institutions as part of the struggle (e.g. citizens’ councils, popular assemblies, just transition commissions). These could serve to support the building of social power, to take part in the political process of defining (in more concrete and context-dependent terms) what the movement’s demands are and what political program we are fighting for, while simultaneously laying down the basis for the new institutions to come upon the uprooting of the system.
3. Political Programs and The Green New Deal
I have to start by talking about something that happened outside of Europe (because of its impact also at a global and European level): the release, in February 2019, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Edward Markey of a fourteen page resolution for a Green New Deal (GND) for the USA. This event set a key stone for a more concrete and mainstream societal debate on what political program would achieve climate justice.
As the Climate Jobs Campaigns before that, AOC’s GND called for a massive state mobilization, investment in infrastructure and the creation of good, unionized jobs, in order to tackle the climate crisis as well as social inequality and lack of access to public services. What she also did was to use those fourteen pages as a political tool of agitation and mobilization, and to build a counter-narrative space on what was possible. Later in that same year, the European Green Deal was launched by the European Commission, under the presidency of Ursula Von der Leyen.
Such wide societal plans like the Green New Deals had been around much before 2018-2019, under different names, in different countries, proposed by grassroots movements, civil society organizations, NGOs and/or political parties. But, as Juliane Schumacher rightly observes in Green New Deals, “it was not until the protests of the climate justice movements, ranging from school strikes to the occupation of coal excavators, that the Green New Deal found its way back onto the agenda – and this time its advocates managed to push it to the front and centre of policymaking.”
Since AOC (and later The Labour Party, and Ursula von der Leyen), “proposals for Green New Deals – initiated by a wide range of actors, from political parties and think tanks to movement networks and individual authors – have been developed and published around the world.”, once again citing Schumacher. And although most of them did not transpose the necessary ambition and lacked important issues on ecofeminism, intersectionality, global justice and reparations, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and left out a substantial critique of capitalism, others did.
The arriving of this programatic discussion to the mainstram was important. It pushed the discussion on climate policies forward, and increased our leverage for mainstream agitation on climate policy. The climate justice movement was lacking a concrete view to inspire the general public for struggle and change. The question on whether we used that leverage well is a different one.
4. A failing institutional capability
Fast forward into 2025, none of what we wanted has been implemented. And worse than that, there was little to no adequate response from the climate justice movement, and from the progressive institutional left to radicalize the discussion and take on the opportunities that the mainstream discussion on GNDs opened up:
No progressive left party seems to want to take up a proper climate agenda. Part of the climate justice movement refrains now from talking about emission cuts and energy transition, and rather talk about incremental changes and demands, such as house renovation and public transportation, leaving out the full extent of the political program we ought to execute. And, just to give an example, campaigners from Green New Deal Rising are still targeting politicians and institutions, in the UK, demanding them to pick a side, as if they haven’t long ago chosen one.
It seems to me that one of the reasons for this failure is that either those who did take on the GND framing to the mainstream did not have a ruptural view (which is blantly obvious, and never in question, for cases such as the European Green New Deal), or, while initially having it they ended up succumbing to a pathway of concessions and strategical and political de-radicialization in order to build larger alliances and coalitions.
But I will also try to argue that another reason has been the grassroots climate justice movement trusting this task to the wrong movement actors; while not building its own capacity for the institutional hustle.
And obviously, the general downfall in terms of mobilization and mainstream relevance from the climate justice movement, from the years of the pandemic onwards, has undoubtfully contributed to a difficulty in consolidating demands, and in maintaing a strong political discussion flowing in the mainstream.
4.1. The wrong institutional actors
There is a fragile balance when it comes to institutional tools. And we do have to be smart about it to play it right. If we are not armed with institutional tools, we may often struggle to reach the general public and make ourselves heard, and we may have to count on others to take in the task on consolidating movement demands.
When we do take on this task, then it really makes it easier if we can directly engage with the institutions of the establishment, but we cannot allow ourselves to be de-radicalized by it. We have to be smart about using our media platform and the movement energy, in order to agitate the general public, hence building up on the momentum.
It seems to me, that to big extent the grassroots climate justice movement abandoned the task of setting up a program and/or to build the institutional capability to defend it, to leftist institutional actors such as political parties, NGOs, trade unions, leftist think-tanks and others. These actors do have, to a bigger or less degree, institutional capability, as in: they can write policy proposals (demands, laws, etc.) and some of them do have the institutional leverage to discuss and take part in their implementation. But unfortunately, most of them have proven themselves not fit for the climate justice definition I have set before.
First off, not all these organizations recognize capitalism as the root cause of the climate crisis. Worse even is that most of them still by now do not address climate collapse as a working-class issue. Citing an observation from All In, “they will talk about climate crisis as one of several ‘issues’ and without any practical implication for the way they work, omitting the implications of climate deadlines in terms of historical responsibilities today.”
Furthemore, the institutional left has been disregarding the urgency of this task, in a terrifying way. More so, part of it has taken action to mine efforts from other movements trying to act in accordance with this urgency, rather than taking advantage of the actions and demands of the climate justice movement, as to build momentum to pass on a radical agenda on a just energy transition.
I want to stop now to give some more concrete examples of the arguments I am making.
4.1.1. Social Dialogue towards a Just Transition
The belief, by an extensive part of the labor movement, in Social Dialogue as a tactic to guarantee a Just Transition, and the resource allocation from the carbon intensive sectors of the labor movement to it is, I believe, a symptom of their belief that capitalism can stop climate collapse or of the lack of ambition to set plans for rupture.
For those interested in this topic, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance ofTrade Union for Energy Democracy (TUED)’ report on Trade Unions and Just Transition. As argued in the report the Social Dialogue approach poses ideological restrictions and it clearly “rejects any serious challenge to current arrangements of power, ownership and profit, opting instead to draw comfort from uncritical endorsement of “win-win” solutions and “green growth” for all.” The authors claim that “Social Dialogue is therefore having a disarming effect on a global trade union movement that already has fewer and smaller weapons at its disposal than probably at any time since the mid-to-late 1800s.” I could not agree more.
The authors of the report argue that the “rise in activism around Just Transition presents an opportunity to have a real debate over the future of worker organizing, programmatic goals and political strategy—a debate informed by the fact that a radical re-structuring of the political economy is necessary, and those currently claiming to lead that process have had little success in altering the course of events.”
Indeed, if there was an ideological agreement on the task and a second agreement on the urgency, rather than delegitimizing and antagonizing actions from the climate justice movements, that for example demand the closure of a coal mine or of an oil refinery (especially given the fact that in most cases the activists show serious concerns and demands in relation to workers’ protection and rights), trade unions and the labor movement could uphold these actions and use them as leverage to consolidate demands and movement building. This could create serious momentum for the climate justice movement to radicalize and grow, and for growing social power in support of workers and communities, in an escalation process where the working class could be the winner. Unfortunately, I have not seen this happening.
4.1.2. The left parties
After the 2018-2019 boom in the climate justice movement, some of the organizers and spokespeople, for example from Fridays for Future, went on to join political parties. Some activists also did the same. They got into the “insider-game”, probably with the hope of gaining leverage to bring the demands of the movement to the mainstream and continue their militancy in an institutional setting where they could have a larger and more sustained audience and the party infrastructure and media tools to talk to and with such an audience.
However, none of the left progressive parties has uphold the demands from the climate justice movement (remember we are talking about the climate justice movement and not of the 4.4ºC warming movement). On the contrary, left parties have failed miserably, showing no deep understanding of what climate justice and climate deadlines mean.
In such a vacuum, the Green New Deals, Climate Jobs, Just Transition agenda have been co-opted by the capitalist mainstream without serious countter-hegemonic contestation by the left parties. Worse even, in many cases, left parties not only accepted the neoliberal terms of the debate (markets, growth and profit) but also took programmatic backward steps (reducing the ambition on their proposals) and sometimes even undermined the efforts of the climate justice movement either by direct intervention or by distancing themselves.
The Labour Pary in the UK complicity with an increasing repression of peaceful protests and social movements movements in general is an example of that; as it is also an example the Portuguese Left Bloc abandoning the climate jobs agenda on their electoral campaign together with other climate policies; and the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front populaire) in France taking no mention to fossil fuels in their program (more on this below).
4.1.3. “Unprecedented” context
Everyone is extremely worried about the rise of the far-right and increase in authoritarian policies. But the answer by the institutionalized left has been to de-radicalize and moderate on narrative, programmatic, and strategic levels, and to align and look for coalitions with the “center”. The lack of a radical anti-systemic narrative and program for rupture from the left leaves up space for the far right to occupy.
The far-right, whom we know to be the response from capitalism to the end of the old order of climate stability, present themselves as the anti-systemic option, the radical ones with no shame and with the balls to win it all for the people. Of course, they are talking about a small percentage of “the people”, but the degradation of the material conditions of the working class and poor resonates with the values of securitarianism and protection of the old order. This is happening everywhere.
It is also happening within some of the most progressive trade unions. Right-wing union leaders are getting momentum by vocalizing with boldness the deepest fears and anxieties of the working class. Indeed, the working class is feeling ever less represented by the traditional unions and by left parties, be it labour, communist or so-called socialist parties “behind” them. Some of these party structures and its leaders, including union leaders, have fallen into one of the drawbacks of mass agitation, that of “subsitutionism”. They explicitly claim to represent the workers and the working class, but the majority of the working class does not feel represented or protected by them.
That was why, I believe, for the first time in its history, CGT, France’s second-largest trade union felt they had to make an explicit call “on employees, pensioners and the unemployed to vote in as large numbers as possible on 30 June and 7 July for the programme of the New Popular Front”. Given the “unprecedented context”, the union’s committee felt they had to make this statement.
It is important to recall why the New Popular Front came to be in the first place. After the 2024 June elections, in which the far-right National Rally of Le Pen won with 31.5% of the vote (more than twice that of Macron’s party), President Macron decided to dissolve the national parliament and call for elections. In response, France Unbowed, the Socialists, Communists, Ecologists and other small groups united, launching a new ‘popular front’ with the aim of stopping Le Pen’s party from coming to power in the following elections.
The political programme of the New Popular Front in France promised ‘a new page in French history’, while blatantly ignoring the climate crisis and leaving aside the need to put an end to fossil fuels. This was a programme written in the middle of the hottest year on record that did not once mention emissions or fossil fuels. What was called a radical progressive front visibly abandoned the idea of climate justice, and this created very little contestation from the climate justice movement.
4.2. Missing ambition?
So, to sum, it seems to me that the existing institutional left either does not want to take part in a movement strategically and programmatically aligned with climate justice, or it has not dared to take the necessary risks and steps towards that direction.
In either case, what we saw back in 2019 when AOC took the role of being a bold vocal mainstream champion to the institutionalization of the demands of the climate justice movement in the USA (via the GND agenda) has not had a sustaining impact, and it did not happen in Europe to the same level. Back then AOC had the guts to take forward the necessary ambition required by the climate crisis – to say we could and should fight to win it all. Other left party, union, and civil society leaders have not dared to be the champions of the climate struggle, and have instead accepted the wrong terms to this conversation and often discouraged movement action to escalate the anticapitalist substance of the climate struggle.
4.3. Building our own capability
While most of the institutional left abandoned the climate justice movement (which I would argue means to a big extent, abandoning a big part of the international working class) strategically and programmatically, the grassroots climate justice movement also did not live up to the task.
The most disruptive part of the climate justice movement, which, in some cases, did build on its disruptive capability, was not able to build on its institutional capability. That has left it fragile.
You may argue that the task of taking direct action and increasing the level of disruption to the system, and the task of writing political programs and learning about institutional settings should not be left to the same actors. I would also argue that on a developed ruptural landscape, there would be different movement actors focused on different capabilities. But 1) We do not have a developed ecosystem; and 2) Even if we had, the different actors still would have to use each other as leverage for building social power.
We should not leave the task of building institutional capability to those actors who do not share the analysis of the need for rupture in the short-term. We should not accept their spokespeople as our own and instead train ours. We should not accept their political programs as the “politically realist ones”, and instead write ours, and get trained to argue for them. We should not accept current institutional rules, timings and frames, and instead build alternative structures to build social power.
In the UK, for example, Climate Vanguards has done great work to build on detailed programs and proposals, and to open a debate on institutional framing and set-up. However, I have not yet seen this valuable assets being used within a ruptural transformation strategy.
The Climate Jobs Campaign in Portugal, as another example, has laid down proposals on the creation of public bodies responsible for the energy transition and climate change mitigation. We hope some day they will exist. But as a build-up to that, we made the (failed) attempt to create a grassroots self-proclaimed Just Transition Commission, that should be composed of different movement actors (including union leaders, workers, and representatives from local community organizations and collectives) and excluding corporate actors. This commission would have the mission to draw up more concrete plans for a Just Transition in a specific carbon intensive region. We failed in this attempt to build grassroots counter-power.
Nevertheless, to my knowledge, there are at the moment very few successful examples of institutional settings being tested and too little exploration for ruptural institutional capability for the climate justice movement in Europe.
5. Conclusion
Currently there are more global greenhouse gas emissions than there have ever been, there are still new investments been made in the fossil fuel industry and into expanding infrastructure, and conversely, we have had little victories.
We do know quite concretely, what winning would mean program-wise. We know green growth is bullshit, and we are certain that there is no possible reform within the system that will bring about climate justice. Also we understand climate justice means incorporating intersectional perspectives, and it demands an ecosocialist, ecofeminist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist approach, in which global justice and care are at the center.
And we also know that, such program can only be implemented by a mass movement. So we need the discussion to happen and we need everyone, all the people in it. That won’t happen if that conversation is not ongoing. Unfortunately, we have yet not been able to hold that discussion seriously in the mainstream, and less yet have we seen our demands being consolidated at an institutional level. Hence, I made the claim that the climate justice movement currently holds little-to-medium institutional capability.
The building of that power is something we cannot delegate to anyone else to build for us. We must hustle, take risks, and not accept any programmatic compromises. It is either us, or no one else.
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Leonor Canadas is a climate justice activist in Climáximo, based in Lisbon. She took part in the coordination of the portuguese Climate Jobs Campaign, and in the Global Climate Jobs Network. She participated in the writing of two of the campaign’s reports. She has a masters in Organic Farming and Food Systems, and is specially interested in Agroecology and Agroforestry.
