For and against climate capitalism
Funding information: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council DE210101443 and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, The University of Sydney.
Abstract
This paper starts from the point that our current political-economic-climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises to protect the city from flooding while enriching city elites, but against which diverse social movements and collectives have organised. The second case is about a cooperative energy provider in Australia, operating on the terrain of a neoliberalised electricity market and climate change, and working towards multifaceted repair by collectivising and redistributing surplus and modelling democratic engagement. Those involved in these vastly different cases both pursue repair and reparations through climate capitalist projects by reckoning with historical and present climate debts while constructing forward-looking programs. As such, they chart the first steps towards reparative climate futures.
Key insights
This article identifies political and socioecological potentials from two key climate capitalist projects: flood protection infrastructures in Jakarta and cooperative energy in Australia. In doing so, it builds a framework of repair and reparations that engages with climate capitalism and argues that the emerging tensions and ambiguities facilitate steps towards reparative climate futures.
1 INTRODUCTION
As with the global financial crisis in 2008, and the political and ecological movements that it spawned, there was breathy optimism for new climate configurations facilitated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the reorganisation of social, political, and economic life that it entailed (Krebel et al., 2020). Before any lockdowns, I stood in the hallways of Madsen, my own workplace in central Sydney, discussing in excitement with colleagues the climate and social potential produced by the suddenly grounded aviation industry and the necessary relocalisation of commodity production. Indeed, there were some exciting opportunities: our cities were emptied of cars, new public spaces were produced, and there were new engagements and entanglements with our local communities, producers, and natures (McGuirk et al., 2021). There were openings towards investments in crucial forms of social infrastructure: an effective rise in workfare payments to liveable levels and free childcare. At other sites and scales, there was even talk of big green stimulus (Vivid Economics & Finance for Biodiversity Initiative, 2021).
And yet, notwithstanding some frustratingly dead-end bike lanes in central Sydney, these socioenvironmental potentials have largely disappeared. In several instances, in fact, the economic crisis of the pandemic has expanded the frontiers of social and ecological exploitation and inequality: Australia chased a “gas-led recovery” (Saunders & Denniss, 2021); Indonesia cut labour and environmental regulations in pursuit of more foreign direct investment (Suroyo & Sulaiman, 2022); and the use of quantitative easing (QE), even green QE, by Central Banks globally has turbo-charged economic inequality (August, et al., 2022). Not only have responses to the multi-sectoral and multi-faceted crisis of the global pandemic foreclosed imaginative and innovative socioecological alternatives, but they have also made market-based mechanisms of climate capitalism look appealing.
It is my argument in this paper that this political-economic-climate conjuncture demands of us—critical geographers, political economists, and environmental students—new, creative, and substantive engagements with “climate capitalism.” In their book of the same name, political economists Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson (2010) have advocated for climate capitalism as a formation that delivers low-carbon economic growth, principally through different types of carbon markets. This definition seems to assume climate capitalism to be a stage, or variety, in an evolution or family of capitalist formations. Instead, following August et al. (2022), I take climate capitalism to be a contingent “dynamic interface” of climate change and capitalism that encompasses: how capitalism and climate change are coproduced; the neoliberal fixation on market-based tools as solutions to climate change; the reorganisation of the state as a facilitator for private capital towards climate investments; and the ways that climate change is inducing transformations in capitalism itself (see also Bryant, 2019). Rather than prompting a binary argument either for or against, the idea of a contingent dynamic interface invites strategic engagement with climate capitalism.
This strategic engagement necessitates grappling with the ambiguities, ambivalences, and potentials of existing “climate capitalist” responses to climate problems while nurturing and scaling their more reparative ends. I analyse these potentially reparative engagements with climate capitalism by reference to contemporary debates about repair and reparations. Where repair suggests an orientation towards the everyday work required to “sustain worlds” (Carr, 2022) in the context of multifaceted, overlapping crises, climate reparations suggest the search for more durable and expansive “worldmaking projects” (Táíwò, 2022). I consider how engagements with climate capitalism reckon with historical, contemporary, and future timescales and across near and far places (Patel & Moore, 2017). This reparative approach is aligned with what Buck et al. (2020) call a strategy of “environmental policy stopgaps” and what activists have called “transitional demands” or “non-reformist reforms” (see Irvine-Broque et al., 2022, for a summary). That is, one works now with emergency repair measures that are only interim or incomplete, but in ways that “buy time” to explicitly work towards more complex and substantial transformations (Buck et al., 2020). As a result, my analysis examines how climate repair and reparations might emerge from, or at least be contested from within, the processes and systems that have produced socioecological harms.
I build my argument about potentially reparative engagements with climate capitalism from two case studies. Each is part of broader research projects: the first, more longstanding project, has examined attempts to make climate adaptation economic in Jakarta, and the second has examined the potential for renewable energy contracting to produce socioecologically reparative outcomes. In the first case, I examine how urban activists and vulnerable kampung communities in Jakarta, Indonesia, have mobilised against climate-induced flood protections with a focus on resisting their elite visions and financialised entanglements. While making claims on the state, and about their presence in the city, kampung communities have used explicitly political strategies to make these financialised infrastructures “risky” to private investors. The second case is of Cooperative Power (CoPower), a cooperative energy retailer established by one of Australia’s biggest trade unions, the United Workers Union. As an energy retailer, CoPower seeks to repair the damage brought about by the marketised electricity sector by redistributing surplus to social and environmental causes as voted by cooperative members. The goal is prefigurative, to spread democratic and cooperative methods of organising essential services and build networks of cooperatives. Both of these cases, and others that I outline briefly, strategically engage at the financialised and marketized heart of climate capitalism, using their affordances (of risk and retailing) to seek reparative outcomes.
The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 introduces the idea of climate capitalism. I suggest that although geographers have theorised and critiqued capitalist management of climate change and its impacts, they have foregone engagements beyond it. I outline an approach that works towards reparative outcomes from contestations within, and negotiations with, climate capitalism. Section 3 introduces a family of climate capitalist cases that seek reparative outcomes from marketized and financialised responses, spanning sectors, sites, and the causes and effects of climate impacts. I then focus on two case studies: the first of financialised physical infrastructures in Jakarta and the second of Australia’s energy market. Although these cases are ambiguous and contradictory, they are marked by, and reparative because of, their forward-looking ambition, and that point is made in conclusion in section 4.
2 REPAIRING CLIMATE CAPITALISM
Existing examinations of climate capitalism tend toward opposites. On the one hand, there are accounts that seek reforms to existing climate capitalist configurations. As introduced above, political economists Newell and Paterson seek an effective climate capitalism. They suggest that, where climate change was once about sea level rise, the extinction of charismatic megafauna, and unseasonal and sizable storms, it is now instead a world of carbon trading and carbon offsets. In their words: “our … premise is that despite resistance, in fact an embryonic form of climate capitalism is already emerging” (Newell & Paterson, 2010, p. 8). The foundations of this climate capitalism, they argue, are different types of carbon markets. Newell’s and Paterson’s projected climate capitalism hinges on the suggestion that decarbonising the economy does require—and will work from the base of—existing forms of “free market capitalism.” The choice, as they frame it, is between abandoning capitalism because it is hardwired to exploit coal and oil—in Bryant’s (2019) terms, climate change and capitalism are coproduced through particular and peculiar value relations—and finding ways of building the climate capitalism that we want. The former, they suggest, is impossible, at least in the short term, meaning that “a response that focuses on creating markets … is rather appealing” (Newell & Paterson, 2010, p. 10).
In contrast to this direct engagement with building climate capitalist futures, critical geographers have spent much time diagnosing the contradictions of carbon markets. This extant research, including on “new carbon economies” (Bridge, 2011; Lohmann, 2005), has shown that carbon markets have not produced sufficiently transformative climate policy outcomes, perversely reinforcing our dependence on fossil fuels. Instead of a method for decarbonisation, carbon markets have operated as an accumulation strategy or public relations strategy for finance. Moreover, they have produced maladaptive effects across carbon commodity chains, including dispossessing land and myriad forms of socioecological suffering. For instance, in Chiapas, Mexico, political ecologist Tracey Osborne traces trade-offs between cost efficiency and local community development in forest carbon offset projects. Osborne (2011, 2015) finds that campesino participants in the carbon offset projects sometimes formally retain access to their land, but a kind of enclosure is produced through the preoccupation of labour and changes in the temporal distribution of benefits from the land (see also Lansing, 2012).
Much of the critical geographical literature about markets, finance, and environmental change takes as its end goal exposing the dire consequences of leaving mitigation and adaptation to climate capitalism. As a result, critical geographers have been very good at assessing the failures of climate capitalism, but less good at identifying opportunities for building anti-capitalist climate futures. As Gareth Bryant (2019, pp. 2–3) describes, critical researchers “have often been so focused on opposing the market-based policy approach that they have missed opportunities to explore what … carbon markets reveal about the co-production of capitalism and climate change.” In other words, although we know that capitalism is changing the climate, we know much less about how climatic conditions are changing capitalism in uneven and contested ways. This climate-changing capitalism, then, is responsive to climate impacts themselves, but also the political economic and social changes brought to bear through technologies like climate risk, carbon markets, climate finance, and also climate justice (Bryant & Webber, 2024).
This is a different prefigurative, even performative, examination of climate capitalism than that informing diverse and communities economies research (see, for example, recent work on climate change and “doing economy differently”; Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020; Gibson et al., 2015). A brief comparison is illuminating. Although their project is not singular, a core part of the argument provided by Gibson-Graham (1993, p. 12) is that “the economy” has diverse logics and practices that far exceed the “unity, singularity, and totality” that are frequently assumed by political economists. Gibson-Graham and collectives of community economies researchers often depict “the economy” as an iceberg, with the tip that is above water representing those social relations that are typically recognised as economic, or capitalist—that is, wage labour, market production and exchange, and capitalist enterprise (Gibson-Graham, 2008). Below the water, the economy is constituted through a whole range of non-capitalist forms of production, exchange, and distribution, including, for instance, through commons, cooperatives, and informal practices. Like the parts of an iceberg above the water, formally capitalist modes of production depend on the parts below the surface but are not all-consuming of them. Part of the political project is to resurface economic difference as actually existing alternatives to capitalism that are innovative, plural, substantial, and durable—if only both proponents and critics would care to look (see also Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020).
Other feminist political economists, however, configure the capitalist/more-than-capitalist iceberg differently (see Mies, 2014 [1986]). As Collard and Dempsey (2020) write, the ‘diverse economies iceberg’ recognises entanglements across the water line, but, in the capitalist exploitation of non-capitalist practices and processes, those entanglements do not prioritise capitalist relations or highlight how relations below the surface support those above the surface. Yet, although social relations below the surface may not be capitalist, capitalist accumulation dynamics at the tip of the iceberg fundamentally depend on these underwater “cheaps” (Patel & Moore, 2017). In their different forms, the icebergs show capitalist and non-capitalist forms and emphasise how emergent alternatives can be formative of accumulation dynamics. But rather than—or rather than only—seeing climate capitalism as superexploiting the reproductive capacities of (some) humans and non-humans (Collard & Dempsey, 2020), I want to see how different actors and projects might exploit the flows and finance of climate capitalism itself in support of these reproductive capacities. To use the iceberg metaphor further, the goal of strategically engaging with climate capitalism is to examine how all that climate capitalist action on the surface may be made to produce reparative processes and practices below. As such, the relations between capitalist and “more than,” or non-, capitalist forms and outcomes of responding to climate change remain deeply co-constitutive. In short, climate capitalism is the material basis against which to make claims for other kinds of outcomes.
There is a second inversion of the iceberg to highlight, too: that of scale and reach. For Gibson-Graham (2008, p. 617) “diverse economies” are extensive and impactful below the surface, in part as a performative commitment to “open up possibilities.” Although they highlight the scale, for instance, of unpaid care work within the household or of the number of employees of solidarity-focused cooperatives globally, the scope of “alternative” climate policies has often been far more modest (although see proposals for Green New Deals; Aronoff et al., 2019). This limited scope is often by design, as in the case of community-based adaptation (Huq & Reid, 2007) or community energy projects that eschew reach for localisation and political engagement (Hudson, 2021). Although climate capitalist formations such as carbon markets are often not as expansive as imagined by critics (Dempsey & Suarez, 2016; Lave, 2018), their scalar reach is a feature, as is their status as mobile models. The political potentials of engaging with different markets that constitute climate capitalism, in order to change it, are vast. The scale and modelling of the case studies are discussed further below.
But change climate capitalism towards what, and how would you know? Pulling climate capitalist engagements below the surface is achieved, I argue, when it produces reparative outcomes; thus, in my analysis, repair and reparations1 animate the potentials for and against climate capitalism. Cohen and colleagues (2022) identify the growing importance of “reparative accumulation”: the expansive industry of financial strategies and tools that use finance to address the social and environmental problems of capitalism, for a profit. They argue that the techniques of reparative accumulation “make the project of socioecological repair into a site for the extraction of financial rents” (2022, p. 2357). Repair, here, is principally for finance itself (see also Sommerville, 2021). Instead, I take the reparative idea as an insistence on reckoning with historical climate debts and their futures, and as co-produced with and through socioecological harms, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism (Heynen & Ybarra, 2021; Pulido, 2017). But such a reckoning, spawned by the climate crisis and produced through uneven climate debts, is just a preliminary step along a path towards repair, restoration, redistribution, replenishment, and reparation (Buck, 2019, p. 245).
In geography, and in the social sciences and humanities more broadly, there is a growing body of research about the everyday work of repair, necessary to “sustain worlds” in the face of climate and other crises (Carr, 2022). Much of this research has been urban and infrastructural (see Mattern, 2018). Often contrasted with the flashy, technologically enabled, and future-oriented visions of entrepreneurial and innovative action, repair instead highlights the work of fixing, maintaining, and restoring (Jackson, 2014). For instance, De Coss-Corzo (2021, p. 238) works alongside water infrastructure repair teams in Mexico City, characterising this work as “improvisational and adaptive labour, driven by human ingenuity” to keep the water flowing through the city. Importantly, De Coss-Corzo highlights how this repair work—or “patchwork,” as a repair logic, practice, and infrastructural form—is structured by austerity, uneven expressions of decay, and ever-changing urban ecologies. Similarly, Ponder (2022, p. 5) urges greater recognition of the ambivalence of repair, as practices “connected to broader systems of domination and oppression.” In Puerto Rico, Ponder shows how adaptive repair and patchwork have taken the form of changing tax exemption status, municipal bankruptcy proceedings, and anti-democratic financial oversight, all in service of uneven accumulation dynamics.
In other words, if “repair is retrospective … traversing the ground between past and present, seeking to restore order and function in the face of breakdown,” then when might we want something to “fail” (Carr, 2022, p. 6)? Or, indeed, when do we need to look beyond repair to the future to build something anew? Although being materially regenerative and politically strategic, climate repair may signal a backwards-looking ecological relation. For example, reparative finance “requires reckoning with the past … look[ing] in the rearview mirror, to address ruination left in the wake of so much capital and imperial accumulation” (Irvine-Broque et al., 2022). But, as Patel and Moore (2017) configure, reparations ecologies “sees history as well as the future.” Building reparations ecologies means asking: who pays, and who is owed? In that way, damage and impact are linked across space and time. Obviously, a redistributive economic register is key and central to my concerns with climate capitalism and finance that addresses climate debts.
A recent and forceful demand for reparations in response to climate change is made by philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (2022, p. 70), who formulates climate reparations as a “forward-looking target.” The initial tactics for this target include making base and unconditional claims for redistributed finance, through, for instance, unconditional cash transfers or undoing tax havens (see also Perry, 2020). But Táíwò takes redistribution further; climate reparations are part of a “larger and broader worldmaking project … Concerned with building the just world to come” (p. 74). Climate reparations are both compensation and also building worldmaking platforms towards resilient, low-carbon development (Táíwò & Bigger, 2022). There is no comprehensive plan for climate reparations and its worldmaking, because actions and approaches emerge from particular contexts, strategic situations, and political struggles.
How might climate capitalist financial flows be harnessed in this direction? In the following section, I engage with examples built from the tensions, possibilities, and contradictions of climate capitalism in ways that are reparative. These cases directly engage with existing frameworks and financial flows of climate capitalism but are oriented to redressing the harms produced through climate capitalism and those programmed into its future. Although they are strategic interventions in the present that account for the past, they also seek to prefiguratively enact resilient, low-carbon futures. In the first case, I look to an increasingly important—for protection, as well as for climate capitalism—asset class: resilient infrastructures. Examining investments in flood protection in Jakarta, I show how kampung communities have mobilised against financialised and real estate-led infrastructure and, in doing so, made these assets a risky proposition. Their vision is one of a city where kampung communities have a place and flood protections are codesigned. In the second case, an energy cooperative has intervened in Australia’s hyper-neoliberalised electricity market. Cooperative Power generates income as a retailer in this market but, in doing so, models methods of economic democracy to redistribute its surplus. In doing so, they seek to repair social and ecological damages of neoliberalised energy and work towards a network of cooperatives.
3 A FAMILY OF CLIMATE CAPITALIST POTENTIALS
Beyond the two case studies—climate infrastructures and politics in Jakarta and cooperative energy in Australia—exist other suggestive cases working across the terrain of climate capitalism. Consider carbon offset markets, and the repair, restoration, and regeneration involved in land-based carbon sequestration. Cultivating land and its carbon requires “love, care and devotion” and the labour of imagining and creating new ways to “live with the earth into the future” (Buck, 2019, p. 114). Storing carbon from the atmosphere in sinks in the land, and in seaweeds and other biomasses, promises to remove excess greenhouse gases and their climate forcings from the atmosphere while also creating financial flows from carbon offset markets. But burying carbon in soils and through trees is not a one-off, nor is the scale of sequestration unlimited. As Kearnes and Rickards (2017, p. 51) remind us, these burials are not “single or definitive actions of removal” but rather require “ongoing relations of care and obligation” that work towards permanence and durability. Indeed, the volatility of carbon sequestration multiplies the environmental integrity issues of carbon offsetting markets more generally, including permanence, leakage, and additionality concerns (Michaelowa et al., 2019).
Notwithstanding the identified limits, contradictions, and outright failures of carbon offset and cap-and-trade markets, the commodification of carbon through these markets creates financial resources that, under certain conditions, can produce reparative outcomes. Against the backdrop of Indigenous dispossession through, and longstanding resistance to, carbon offsetting (IEN & CJA, 2017) exist attempts to build Indigenous-led carbon offsets that seek transformative social, ecological, and economic outcomes, or reparations. In Australia, Indigenous carbon farming uses traditional cultural burning practices alongside other socioecological practices to reduce land-based emissions while supporting access to Country and formal employment for traditional owners (Jackson et al., 2017; Jackson & Palmer, 2015). Tracey Osborne’s articulation of Indigenous-led carbon mitigation projects in Ecuador are contractually and mutually agreeable rather than delivered through carbon markets (UC Center for Climate Justice, 2022). This carbon burial project mobilises the University of California’s endowment and net-zero commitments in pursuit of sustainable forest management that sequesters carbon, delivers socially reproductive outcomes, builds Indigenous knowledge and practice, and prohibits fossil fuel extraction in the eastern Amazon. In California, the Yurok tribe has sold offsets in the state’s cap and trade system and used the millions in revenue to reacquire territory and expand that under their sovereign control (Kormann, 2018; Manning & Reed, 2019). Although members of the Yurok recognise that participating in California’s cap-and-trade programs has “revive[d] the economy in a way that align[s] with our cultural values,” it also “allows polluters to pollute” (Yurok elders in Kormann, 2018). The social, ecological, and financial relations of Indigenous-led offsetting represent, on the one hand, the commodification of carbon and, on the other, work towards the worldmaking project of decommodified and reparative socioecological relations and Indigenous sovereignty.
Just as Buck (2019) notes that carbon restoration depends on ongoing practices and relations of care, social reproduction and social infrastructures are integral to reparative climate economies. The question of jobs under climate change often pits workers against the environment, with protection of the latter projected to wipe out the former (Carr, 2022). Flanagan (2017) writes that the future of work under climate change is often focused on loss—of jobs, industries, identities, and communities. Instead, in the aftermath of debates about infrastructural stimulus in the United States, journalist Kate Aronoff (2021) declares: “care work is climate work.” Work under climate change is not only going to be making widgets and gadgets—those green colour jobs for the “reserve army of white, male workers”—but instead about “looking after human bodies … the stewardship of ocean, sky and land … aged and disability carers, early childhood educators and nurses—low carbon occupations all” (Flanagan, 2017). As Carr (2022) reminds us, mitigation and adaptation actions under climate capitalism are the work of climate crisis: responding to catastrophe, labouring in just transitions is planetary repair work. Still, repairing fossil fuel landscapes and labourers will be done under capitalist wage labour relations (or, often as unpaid labour) and will contribute to the reproduction of climate capitalism. Struggles over the conditions of this work—and the extent of its superexploitation under climate-induced suffering (e.g. Humphrys et al., 2022; Jordan & Widmer, 2019)—go to the heart of struggles with climate capitalism.
Carbon sequestration and low-carbon repair work are two examples that reckon with climate capitalism and those engaged in that work seek repair and reparations. The case of low-carbon repair work connects closely to climate justice-oriented demands for a Green New Deal, nationally and globally (Aronoff et al., 2019). According to these demands, responses to climate change should be built from the public investment power of the state to simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and produce adapted landscapes and communities, while investing in public services and infrastructure that respond to inequalities and provide social and economic benefits. For instance, a Green New Deal for public housing could expand vitally needed access to affordable housing, that is retrofitted to climate conditions, all while redressing racism, providing jobs, improving health outcomes, and more (Cohen et al. 2021). That is, repair for public housing ties together climate change and the other destructions of capitalism. Beyond these, there are worlds of generative and gestural cases where the financial flows of climate capitalism have enabled reparative climate futures (Webber et al., 2022). Let us now consider two in more detail: the social and physical climate infrastructures of flood protection and democratic forms of purchasing electricity.
3.1 Risking financialised infrastructures
Infrastructure—grey and green, hard and soft—is a growing asset class under climate capitalism. For proponents, this infrastructure promises to protect communities, ecosystems, and indeed other infrastructure, from the ravages of climate impacts, while securing the ongoing circulation of goods and services. Simultaneously, infrastructure offers opportunities for financial speculation, as something that can be owned and sold, and against which income streams can be generated. For climate financiers, including multilateral development institutions, the nexus of climate change and infrastructure poses both problems and opportunities. On one hand, climate change demands new infrastructures in new places, bigger or higher performing infrastructures, and retrofitted old infrastructures. On the other hand, infrastructural climate solutions come at a cost, perhaps more than states or the public are willing to pay (Bigger & Webber, 2021). This “gap”—the gulf between the costs of infrastructure for responding to climate change, and the existing flows of climate finance towards this asset class—justifies a different role for public finance (Bryant & Webber, 2024). As a result, a “Wall Street Consensus” suggests that states should no longer primarily invest in public goods and services but instead produce de-risking, subsidy, guarantee, and insurance tools to facilitate private financial investment in climate infrastructures (August et al., 2022; Gabor, 2021).
Geographers, urbanists, and environmental scholars have all shown that these investable forms of climate infrastructures can produce socially and ecologically maladaptive and anti-democratic outcomes (Bigger & Webber, 2021). These infrastructures—from engineered flood protection to water conveyancing systems and dams—often displace urban poor communities (Doshi, 2019; Millington, 2018), create expansive ecosystem damage, and through their financialised forms can reduce democratic oversight and participation (Castree & Christophers, 2015). As a result, rather than reducing vulnerabilities, financialised climate infrastructure often redistributes them, simply shifting risks around (Atteridge & Remling, 2018). Moreover, climate infrastructure-as-asset class is not producing the “billions to trillions” of finance promised; despite public de-risking, subsidies, and guarantees (the “billions”), private finance (the “trillions”) is not flowing into climate infrastructures in the global South. As one commentator describes, this idea is “[not] just fiction, it was fantasy” (Kenny, 2022). These are encompassing critiques: achieving resilient infrastructure under climate capitalism appears to fail on its own financial terms as well as the socioecological ones of its critics.
With the following example, however, I want to explore the financially, socioecologically, and politically reparative potentials that emerge from, or against, financialised climate infrastructure under climate capitalism. I examine the case of flood protection infrastructures in Jakarta a city portrayed globally (Colven, 2022) as at extreme risk of flooding both along its northern coastline and from the many rivers that snake through it from the mountains in the south (Budiyono et al., 2015; Firman et al., 2011). The response to flood risk from the Jakarta provincial government and the national government of Indonesia has been multi-infrastructural, seeking to fortify the city and its flows against emerging risks. Residents have, in turn, reacted to flood risks, fortified protections, and their financialised configurations. In doing so, they have reimagined the terms of flood protection, housing, and kampung community rights (Betteridge & Webber, 2019). The twin crises of floods and financialised flood infrastructures, and responses to them, have the potential to produce reparative socioecologies in the face of devastating climate impacts.
In attempts to secure the growing megapolitan from the increasing severity and frequency of coastal and riverine flooding, provincial and national governments, along with international consultants and financiers, have invested in big flood protection infrastructures (Colven, 2017). These infrastructures spread throughout and beyond the city and include sea walls, dams, dikes, retention ponds and reservoirs, new canals, and ongoing maintenance work to channelise, clear, and clean the city’s rivers. Each of these infrastructures has its own specific public, private, and public–private financial arrangements. Consider two flood mitigation projects: the Jakarta Urban Flood Mitigation Project (JUFMP) and the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development project (NCICD), also referred to as the Great Garuda Sea Wall (GGSW). A US$90m World Bank loan financed the JUFMP (originally it was US$140m, but the loan was restructured and reduced because of the devaluation of the Indonesian Rupiah). According to the investment proposal, savings from reduced flooding would more than cover the anticipated costs of the infrastructure itself (Independent Evaluation Group, 2020). The US$50bn NCICD/GGSW is a more explicitly speculative proposition (Colven, 2022; Wade, 2019). Although stalled as planned, and mired in ongoing legal and corruption scandals, the proposed vast sea wall would be constructed by real estate developers as a series of private islands with commercial and residential facilities along the city’s northern coast. This real estate solution was necessary to cover the costs of the climate infrastructures, with taxes and other revenues streams from the private developments to fund the protective sea wall. As a financial advisor to the sea wall described it: “without them [private investors], we can’t do anything” (cited in Colven, 2022). Both of these flood protection measures replicate the scarcity logic of the climate infrastructure finance gap and the billions-to-trillions Wall Street Consensus and are representative of climate capitalist approaches to coastal protection in their reliance of private sector funding and strategies.
These big climate infrastructures have had expansive negative impacts. The projects imagine a modern city (Wade, 2019), which prioritises real estate development over the lives and livelihoods of the city’s poorest residents. As a result, the JUFMP and the NCICD/GGSW have been built on the eviction and destruction of kampung communities (Leitner et al., 2017). They also have had distributed negative socioecological effects, including on fisheries and other coastal livelihoods in the Jakarta Bay (Betteridge & Webber, 2019) and at sites of aggregate extraction to build the infrastructure itself (Batubara et al., 2018). And, they have not addressed the underlying causes of flooding in the city, all while enriching World Bank bond owners and real estate developers.
However, these infrastructures, their financial entanglements, and the urban transformations they program have also ignited sustained and collective resistance that makes claims about the rights of kampung communities in the self-consciously modernising city (Colven & Tri Irawaty, 2019; Emmanuel, 2017; Irawaty, 2018). Not all kampung communities have been able to mobilise against evictions and flood infrastructures, particularly along key rivers in the city (Wilson, 2016). But, in North Jakarta, coalitions of residents, urban activists, and legal representatives have enabled kampung communities to insistently return to their homes, while exploiting an electoral strategy that traded blocs of votes at a gubernatorial election for promises of protection against eviction (Colven & Tri Irawaty, 2019). Social infrastructures are the basis for this response: in returning to sites of eviction—and indeed after floods—kampung members mobilise social relations and practices of care to ensure continued access to essential goods and services, rebuild livelihoods, and even “autoconstruct” more modest flood protections (Betteridge & Webber, 2019).
Resistance to eviction and big flood protection infrastructures has depended on complex political and financial alliances. A network of kampung communities, non-government organisations, activists, urban poor movements, and architects and urban planners fought against the eviction and infrastructural campaigns of then Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) in 2016 and worked with his eventually successful campaign rival, Anies Baswedan, to ensure a halt to evictions and a program of kampung upgrading in exchange for votes (Colven & Tri Irawaty, 2019; Irawaty, 2018). That network of activists made the flood protection projects politically risky. In addition to this progressive collective of urban activists, networked well beyond the city itself, the campaign depended on the finances (and, in protest, bodies) of hardline groups and vigilantes, including the Defenders of Islam Front (see also Wilson, 2015, 2016). Following these campaign promises, in the final years of his governorship, Anies committed to improve and upgrade a few dozen kampungs, and several of these have now been completed.
In Kampung Akuarium, a kampung demolished in 2016 by Ahok, the province worked with evicted kampung residents to design and build a vertical kampung with a modest seawall (Suhenda, 2021). This vertical kampung is now almost complete, and the residents are working with the provincial government of Jakarta towards independently operating it as cooperative housing. Nearby kampungs are, at the time of writing, beginning similar processes, looking towards negotiating vertical and cooperative housing with national and provincial governments and incorporating modest flood protection infrastructures such as polders, dikes, pumps, and seawalls. These reimagined housing and flood protection solutions centre co-design and cooperatives instead of real estate speculation and complex international financial agreements. The current sea wall plan for fortifying Jakarta’s northern coast broadly rejects the real estate development deal, instead relying on a patchwork of provincial and national government-funded construction, with some small exceptions. These outcomes suggest a rejection of the terms of financing and inclusion rather than the climate infrastructure itself. Instead, they make claims on the local and national state as a provider of goods and services in the city and upon which more community-based social and physical infrastructures might be built.
The financial and social relations of these reimagined kampungs and coastal protections are ambiguous (Webber et al., 2022). In Kampung Akuarium, the community’s persistence to return after eviction and work with activists and the Province towards an upgraded kampung depended on and mobilised social and physical infrastructures and relations (Betteridge & Webber, 2019). These practices have been socially reparative, for livelihoods, communities, collectives, and politics in and beyond the kampungs. But they also financially depended on conservative Islamic groups and the provincial government, a fragile, contradictory coalition at best. The nativist, populist politics of this protest and electoral campaign contradicts the encompassing, emancipatory social alliances necessary for reparative climate futures. Nonetheless, the scale of political and social alliances has put the financial relations of climate capitalist infrastructure “at risk,” with investors reportedly wary of speculating on waterfront redevelopment and protection given the substantial public opposition to the NCICD (Colven, 2022). The state and community will continue to bear risk, however, as the protection offered against sea level rise and flooding also remains unclear, and as the meagre provincially and nationally built and funded seawalls contend against the sinking city and increasing ocean incursions.
Financialised infrastructure-as-asset class for climate protection—as in the case of flood defences in Jakarta—is a growing part of climate capitalism. In this case, coalitions of directly affected communities and their supporters explicitly rejected the financialised form of these infrastructures, particularly the speculative real estate deals and the dispossession they produced. The reliance on private sector investors—core to the financialised structures of climate capitalism—who baulked at the political risks of flood protection projects was the basis for this outcome. The rejection meant reimagining the role of climate infrastructures and the place of kampung communities in the city and built social relations alongside more modest sea walls. In the place of privatised fortifications, this collective has demanded state-based protections and public housing that pave the way for cooperative and collective housing. There are noted limits to the politics of this infrastructure in Jakarta, but the contestations outlined here are inherently scalable to the challenge of addressing climate and environmental crises for the most vulnerable within a highly vulnerable city. As an organised, electoral campaign at the city scale, it sets the people power of the kampungs and their allies against coalitions of developers and real estate interests. Which visions of the city endure, who the city is for, and which communities, infrastructures, and ecologies remain at risk, against the backdrop of ongoing devastating floods, are still being worked out.
3.2 Repairing electricity
Australia’s electricity market is hyper-neoliberalised, structured by an ideological—if not practised—commitment to competition and least cost. The market experienced substantial restructuring through the rolling privatisation and deregulation of electricity governance beginning in the 1990s (Chandrashekeran, 2021, 2022). This transformation targeted state-owned, vertically integrated provision and introduced a collection of regulatory agencies and bodies to oversee the market rules of the unbundled grid, and generation, grid, and retailing functions. Despite the challenges and contradictions of marketizing this complex infrastructure, the reactions to various failures have been to fail forward into ongoing “market tinkering” (Chandrashekeran, 2022, p. 7).
The (nearly) National Electricity Market and the marketisation of electricity have created a series of structural problems with extraordinary social and environmental effects. Electricity bills have rapidly increased over the last decade (irrespective of the 2022 food and fuel price spikes), driven by the network charges associated with transmission and distribution (ACCC, 2018). The limited policy oversight and management of the high dependence on aging and unreliable coal-generated electricity have led to blackouts and reduced generation and, in turn, contributed to these increased electricity prices. In its current structure, electricity governance has been unable to deliver decarbonised energy at the scale required and regulate and integrate renewable energy sources into the existing market and grid infrastructure (Chandrashekeran, 2021). Sub-national state actors, in particular, have attempted to respond to the decarbonisation challenge and provide energy stability and security, often competing with each other in infrastructure provision. Meanwhile, within the context of a marketized renewable energy transition, renewable generation is proliferating at decentralised, organisational, and household scales, with implications for safety, consumer and worker rights, quality, and distributional inequality (Vaughan & Webber, 2022).
Cooperative Power (CoPower) is a cooperative energy retailer that intervenes in this neoliberalised energy market in search of socially and environmentally reparative outcomes. Although energy cooperatives are differentiated in their democratic and environmental ambitions, they typically operate through “one member, one vote” rather than “one dollar, one vote” governance structures common to capitalist enterprise. Members of energy cooperatives are typically workers, producers, or consumers, or organisations thereof, who make democratic decisions over the production, distribution, or consumption of energy. Across the diverse ecosystem of energy cooperatives globally, a commonality is their embeddedness in marketised electricity landscapes, where, energy—including renewable energy—is an investable asset (Bridge et al., 2019), secured through a variety of state regulation and interventions.
Energy cooperatives are one form of a broader landscape of community energy, which is a small but growing part of the Australian electricity sector. According to the Community Power Agency (2022), there are some 128 community-owned renewable energy groups in Australia, which span generation, retailing, and energy efficiency. These community energy groups differ in their emphasis on, and practice of, economic democracy. Many of these community energy organisations are highly localised approaches to building social and environmental sustainability in energy systems. It is more rare that, as in the case of CoPower, they build collectives across social and spatial communities (Hudson, 2021).
CoPower was established in 2019 by one of Australia’s biggest trade unions, the United Workers Union (UWU); CoPower is part owned by, but independent of, UWU. Its membership includes unions, including my own in the university sector and others in community and social services, civil society organisations, environmental groups, and other cooperatives. Currently, CoPower has about 4500 households as customer members, of an estimated 250,000 potential members from its member organisations. The explicit goal of CoPower is to respond to problems in the energy sector caused by marketisation, including failures in decarbonisation, the high and rapidly increasing cost of energy, and the erosion of working conditions in the sector (Cooperative Power, 2020). It does this in partnership with Energy Locals, a socially and environmentally conscientious energy retailer. Although they are only one part of the unbundled sector, retailers play a significant role in the renewable energy transition as signatories of the Power Purchase Agreements that make installations investable.
The politics and possibilities of CoPower rest in it as an “intervention in the market, as it exists,” as one of its organisers describes (Webber et al., 2022). That is, CoPower works within the confines of the neoliberalised electricity market and, in the context of climate change, the weaknesses of organised labour and limited social and democratic engagement (APHEDA & Moase, 2022). It seeks to respond to these challenges through collectivising and redistributing the surplus from electricity payments. In particular, CoPower collectivises the electricity payments of its customers and leverages these for more affordable retail offers closer to wholesale rates (Cooperative Power, 2022b). They also do not invest in advertising. The savings are then used to invest in social and environmental causes; recently, this has included investments in First Nations-owned solar-PV projects, reinvestment in CoPower itself, and funding social solidarity measures, such as subsidising the power bills of members who are income precarious, supporting strike funds, and contributing to APHEDA, the global justice organisation of the Australian union movement (Cooperative Power, 2021). The scale of CoPower’s interventions depends on the “organising maths” as its advocates describe: bringing in more member organisations and organising with them to convert as many of their members to customers. This organising maths can be boosted by external shocks; there was a more than tenfold increase in membership following the sale of one of Australia’s biggest green electricity providers, Powershop, to Shell in 2021 (Cooperative Power, 2022b). The scale of this growth is worth noting: it increased CoPower’s investable budget from less than AU$10,000 to more than AU$100,000. Switching members to CoPower is configured as a red-green political act, supported by campaigning and organising with its member organisations.
CoPower’s practice and ethic of repair are well illustrated in the approach to offering gas as part of their retail product (Cooperative Power, 2022a). Although an urgent transition away from gas is needed, many households—particularly renters—are locked into gas, including for heating and hot water. Similarly, gas workers and communities dependent on gas economies require a just transition that is not yet planned in the sector. The solution, as endorsed through customer members, was an explicitly reparative one: for CoPower to offer gas retailing but in a way that contributes to “degasification.” In practice, this requires any revenue from gas to be “ring-fenced” from the rest of the budget and directed to subsidise members to electrify through services offered by partner cooperatives—such as EarthWorker’s electric hot water systems. In their words: “CoPower recognises that broader social action is required but that switching to this product can be a political act that highlights demand and support to switch away from gas” (Cooperative Power, 2022a). This degasification plan provides both a short-term strategy for gas consumers to access gas from a socially and environmentally reparative retailer, while offering a pathway to transition away from gas, despite the expanding state support for gas exploration in Australia. CoPower does this through a self-consciously prefigurative modelling of democratic and transparent decision-making.
Despite participating as a retailer in the neoliberalised electricity market, CoPower works towards socioecological repair and ultimately a more collective, even post-capitalist, electricity market. CoPower is repairing the damage of the existing electricity market by building power in the non-unionised retailing and renewable energy sectors, reducing the cost of an essential service in a time of wage stagnation, and investing in decarbonisation. This repair depends on mobilising financial flows produced through existing carbon capitalism. There are obvious constraints to this strategy: the disaggregated energy sector and extreme barriers to entry in other sites mean that they can only engage in retailing. And, even within this component of the sector, their customer member base and financial portfolio remain limited. They have been shielded from the recent energy crisis—in no-small part, a manufactured local shortage during global energy price increases—because of conservative contracting from their partner, Energy Locals. Like much repair work (Ponder, 2022), however, CoPower is currently unable to undo the systemic perversities in the electricity and gas economy, and there are no guarantees that these structural limits will not undermine CoPower’s success in the future. Acting both within (as a retailer in the neoliberal electricity market) and beyond (modelling cooperative methods of organising and distributing essential services) climate capitalism, CoPower demonstrates the dynamic interface between capitalism and climate change, and the potential to productively intervene at this site.
Beyond the immediate socioecological dimensions of repair for customer members and workers in the sector, CoPower’s reparative ambitions are notable for their scale. CoPower currently has a small reach. But its model is scalable, with potential to expand its customer member base with the backing of influential member organisations. As customer members switch to CoPower, so too does the power of their collective and democratised energy relations increase. By collectivising purchasing for its customer members from Energy Locals, CoPower secures not only different kinds of social relations that affect the price and benefits of its electricity but also the conditions under which this electricity is produced. The provision of essential services through cooperatives is a mode of economic governance within climate capitalism that can also support repair at larger scales. Indeed, CoPower connects with other cooperatives through their degasification strategy and is actively seeking to build cooperatives and cooperative networks in other crucial, complex services such as housing. The model of redistributing surplus is a practice of participatory budgeting that CoPower expects to expand democratic decision-making beyond their own organisation. CoPower’s theory of change is that customer members build their experience of transparency and democratic decision-making and take this practice into their political lives. Cooperatives do not guarantee progressive outcomes—as with urban environmental activism discussed above. Instead, outcomes depend on building democratic power for reparative climate action within and beyond the confines of climate capitalism. Cooperative energy begins to build this power.
4 CONCLUSION
To argue for strategic engagements for and against climate capitalism, I have used two divergent cases—one of infrastructural and housing upgrading in the context of increasing flooding at the heart of one of the world’s biggest and most vulnerable cities, and one of a small but scalable Australian electricity retailer that uses the economic democracy model of cooperative power. The cases map a generative pathway between often binary analyses of the limits and potentials of climate capitalism within geography and cognate fields. This contradictory pathway is, moreover, configured in sites where the scales and stakes are significant, with implications that reach into the practice of vital mitigation and adaptation activities.
The two cases, and the broader family of climate capitalist actions highlighted, are contradictory, ambitious, and ambivalent. But they are also suggestive of the political potentials that might emerge from climate capitalism and across sectors and sites of climate change’s causes, effects, and responses. The cases have trade-offs in the scale of their reparative socioecological ambitions, their reach, and their engagements with the state and market under climate capitalism. In Jakarta, for instance, the stakes militate around social actions to maintain kampung life and livelihoods, but their ability to withstand increasingly severe and frequent floods remains unclear. This case is ambitiously networked and scaled across the megacity, yet not centred on the scale of climate extremes. In contrast, CoPower is small, and it engages directly the marketized and regulatory landscapes of privatisation, but its model is easily scaled to meet the challenge of decarbonising one of Australia’s most polluting sectors, and its reparative acts are explicit. The trade-offs and complementarities across the cases are perhaps inherent; rather than complete utopic configurations, they are a set of first steps as reparative engagements with climate capitalism. Nonetheless, the cases each reach for repair and reparations, engaging strategically on marketized terrain to pre-figure something durable.
But the practice of repair and reparations, its linking of past and future, of social and ecological, also demands new configurations that move us towards abundant climate futures and away from climate capitalism. Unlike most adaptation and mitigation responses to climate change, the efforts described here are not backwards looking, seeking to return to or restore previous socioecological configurations or relations (Paprocki, 2021). Even within the confines of climate capitalism, they grapple with the histories and presents of marginalisation, dispossession, and extraction at its heart, while charting a reparative climate future that rebuilds from that base. Similarly, these efforts are not based on models of what might be lost under climate change but instead seek abundant climate futures, new ways of living under climate change (Collard et al., 2015). Engaging at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism demonstrates the closure of possibilities alongside an opening and invitation for abundance. What kinds of climate futures, new durable socioecological relations for the long term, might we engender if we begin with the contradiction of reparative climate capitalism? The two cases laid out here offer initial hints.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was written on unceded Gadigal land; these lands and waters are one of many affordances that facilitated the ideas contained here. This paper emerges from ongoing conversations, debates, and disagreements with Patrick Bigger and, in particular, Gareth Bryant; I thank them both immeasurably for allowing me to share what is collaborative and collective. Thank you also to Emily Rosenman, Sage Ponder, Kurt Iveson, and my Urban Crew, several honours and PhD students with whom I have worked over the last few years, collaborators in Indonesia, and the Institute of Australian Geographers and its annual conference for facilitating deep engagement and generous comments at the Fay Gale Memorial Lecture, which I gave in 2020 and from which this paper emerged. Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Sydney, as part of the Wiley - The University of Sydney agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
ETHICS STATEMENT
The research was conducted in accordance with University of Sydney Human Research Ethics protocols 2017/387, 2019/421, and 2022/707.
ENDNOTES
- 1 Across different theoretical traditions, political demands, and socioecological contexts, the durability and scope of repair versus reparations is contested. For instance, in their conceptualisation of abolition ecology, which draws heavily on the Black Radical Tradition, Heynen and Ybarra (2021, p. 29) suggest that building “freedom as a place” (following Gilmore, 2017) will require “relations of repair (sometimes glossed as reparations).” In this formulation, then, socioecological relations and institutions of repair are elevated, at the expense of narrowly conceived financial reparations. In contrast, for Achille Mbembe (2017, p. 182; see also Táíwò, 2022), “the concept of reparation is not only an economic project, but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repairing broken links, relaunching the forms of reciprocity without which there can be no progress for humanity.”
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Due to the qualitative nature of this publication, no data have been made available.
