And this weekend…

Sat 26, 11am to 11pm ECOWEEKENDA “12 non stop hours of sustainable salsa fun” The Lifestyle Centre, Wythenshawe, M22 1QW
Book here.

If you know of weekend events that are about “climate” (and that includes food growing, or cycling or whatever), then let us know and we can include them in future “Something for the Weekend”s…

And if you know any jokes of the high standard we’ve used so far, please submit ‘em.

MCFly co-editor Arwa Aburawa interviews Mary Heaney, Director of Services at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose responsibilities include the environmental sustainability agenda

Besides saving money, what are the reasons MMU is taking green action?

Money isn’t actually the top priority for us in terms of sustainability – it’s our corporate social responsibility. We are an organisation that devotes it self to the next generation and we think it’s absolutely incumbent upon us to be responsible in the way we operate and look at the way that we function from everything from the amount of chemicals the cleaners use to me pulling down the blinds when I leave that this room is bearable the next day to the way we operate our labs. It’s about being part of the solution, I guess.

Another top motivator that MMU talk about is that preparing students for new realities and embedding green thinking makes them more employable. How are you measuring whether students do indeed have a competitive advantage because of their sustainability knowledge?

Being able to actually measure the impact of the sustainability teaching that happens in the MMU is a little more difficult. But I do think it’s important to carefully embed sustainable thinking in all our students because they are the future generations. There are also a lot of environmentally aware young people coming into the university and in fact, if I’m honest, we started to take this agenda very seriously partly because of the pressure that the students were applying upon us. Before the regime change in the university and before [Vice Chancellor] John Brooks came in, sustainability wasn’t on the agenda and clearly with the Capital Programme we’ve had the opportunity to do new things and conceive the environment differently.

How do you know what the impact is of your work on sustainability in the curriculum?

We are finding this very difficult to measure.  Our Environment team have been discussing how we could develop metrics for this with our Centre for Learning & Teaching colleagues.

What has been the biggest challenge over the last three years in moving the agenda forward, besides limited funds?

I suppose it’s trying to do things economically. Some of the policies that have emerged such as the reduction in incentives in terms of PV panels made us step back and think ‘Is this best way to move forward’. However, we are about to spend some money fitting in some PV at the Crewe campus because the situation has stabilised and we can develop a credible business plan that says that we can recover the money. I guess those are some of the challenges that I face but overall, it’s amazing how much everybody has contributed to the agenda. When we introduced recycling boxes at our tables last I thought we were going to get some resistance and yet I haven’t had a single derogatory remark from anyone about it.

It’s just gone like a dream- but I have to admit other initiatives such as introducing charges for car parking to help change behaviour haven’t gone so well. I guess that was a stick. I think attitudes have changed and there is so much discussion about this out there that it is becoming part of the norm. I mean there was a cohort of people saying ‘why can’t I do this’ but there was also a silent majority who weren’t complaining. So I was quite nervous and I think we’ve learnt from not doing things so well in the beginning to now being able to bring people along.

What are some of the lessons that you learnt from your earlier mistakes?

Have more consultation instead of just a working group as they don’t represent the whole institution and I suppose car parking was a working group whilst waste and recycling was out there with people on the ground talking to each other and explaining how it would all work. For example, we are talking about removing printers from people’s desktops and we doing a lot of work looking at the benefits, the disadvantages and how do we manage those as well as looking those who have specific needs which mean they should retain their printers. I guess we are being a lot more thoughtful and taking our time with things and I guess patience is a big enabler.

In what areas is MMU a UK or world leader on environmental/ sustainability issues?

I think MMU is doing a lot on behaviour and there are lots of examples about great changes to the physical infrastructure but I think we’ve recognised that they are not enough on their own. Green buildings with brown behaviours soon turn brown – so I think we working on the softer side of the issue but I think MMU has developed an edge on behaviour change and we are looking to share that with city through things like the Green Impacts programme.

What would you say to the critics of the Hulme campus, about the loss of green space?

It’s overgrown brownfield, is my first point and we are introducing a number of solutions to keep the good things about the environment around the campus. I mean it is a bit of a wasteland but it is a cherished wasteland so for every tree we are taking out we are putting two back in and we are trying to retain as many indigenous trees as possible and have relocated some to the Princess parkway.

We’ve also got an arrangement with the Hulme Garden centre to grow some fruit trees for us over the next two years and we’re just tidying up the contract for that. So these will be very much replacing what’s there with something we can all share with the community- so I expect there to be some foraging events soon. We really want this campus to be permeable and we have a real opportunity in Hulme to make it a shared space. We also want to try and procure the materials for the buildings and landscaping locally and use recycled materials as much as possible. We also want the campus to be a learning lab for the local schools and colleges and the energy centre will be open to the public for use.

What response does MMU have to the proposal by the Manchester Green Party to ring-fence university places for locals?

With the Hulme campus, we are keen to get the locals involved. I mean part of the building tender terms is that they employ at least 10% of their workforce from the local area and once we start to occupy the building, we will prioritise local employment as much as possible. For example, we now prioritise our vacancies in the first third grades at Moss Side’s The Works and we’ve filled 50 posts over the last couple of years through that. We’ve also being working closely with Webster primary school and Loreto College in mentoring schemes and they sometimes come through as applicants for teacher support training at MMU.

However, in terms of ring-fencing places I don’t think it’s something that we would be able to do. We’ve signed an access agreement and that doesn’t allow us to ring-fence places but we do have a joint strategy with the University of Manchester to work with local schools because although we want a healthy level of application from the local community we want to increase their aspirations so it’s great to see young people going into higher education wherever that may be rather than just coming to us or the University of Manchester.

How are the emissions of international students for their travel to and from their home countries being calculated?

We are starting to look at this issue some time ago and I remember that Marc Hudson (MCFly editor) asked me at a meeting who owned student emissions and I said ‘we do’ and I had no idea at the time that that was a big admission to make. I remember he thought it was quite a brave thing to say. We are monitoring all our business travel but it isn’t so easy when its comes to monitoring students although it’s lot easier to monitor their travel back and forth once they are here.

It’s certainly is an issue of concern for us and in fact a lot of our international work is now looking at establishing partners abroad. We have decided that we need to grow our international partnerships and instead of bringing more people here, the focus is on supporting the indigenous talent over there to grow their own education. So we are going to be sending staff abroad to help and so that will probably balance out the international travel by our international students. And international student travel is currently monitored through surveys that we carry out.

[From a subsequent email - ] “All Higher Education institutions have a voluntary action through a data return we make to the Higher Education Funding Council to start recording this.  We have started to look at this, but the work is quite complex and requires a lot of data manipulation.  The main theme is that home to term time address travel is viewed in 2 ways – European students make about 2 home trips per year, international outside EU are classed as one.   As I mentioned to you we will be revisiting our carbon management plan this year to include scope 3 emissions of which this forms part.”

Are staff being encouraged to minimise their air travel?

Yes. Although business air travel has gone up 5.7% on last year, the amount of car travel has gone down by 3% whilst business travel by rail has gone up 22% , bus travel has gone up by 155% and tram travel has gone up by 272%. But we will have to monitor that because if we send more staff abroad for teaching then that will show up as an increase but if you look at international students then overall there will be a decrease in air travel. Obviously, business travel is a lot easier to monitor as people have to apply for funds but student travel isn’t as easy to keep tabs on although we do use surveys throughout the year to keep an eye on that.

Arwa Aburawa

Freelance Journalist

This below is a cross-post from Mad Cycle Lanes of Manchester (a blog that does what it says on the tin, and more.)

In response to the following request:-

1. In the current financial year, how much money is the city council planning on spending on cycling and issues related to cycling, including capital spending on projects and buildings?

2. Of that total expenditure, how much will be spent on each of the following areas:- cycling as transport – e.g. cycle lanes & road safety schemes cycling as leisure – e.g. recreational cycle routes cycling as sport – e.g. expenditure on sports facilities anything else

3. Please list all the major projects

I received the following from Manchester City Council:

The Council’s capital expenditure in 2011/12 on cycling as transport – e.g. cycle lanes & road safety schemes is as follows:

£111,000 on cycle paths and measures to reduce cycling casualties which include:
Hyde Road cycle lane: Highway alterations between Pottery Lane and Reddish Lane;
Ashton New Road: Installation of cycle lane;
Safety improvements along Oxford Road;
Princess Road Cycle Path: Providing a shared pedestrian / cycle footway on the western footpath of Princess Road, between Whitchurch Road and Mauldeth Road West and also between its junction with Great Western Street and Moss Lane East; This scheme was funded by a DfT grant which Manchester City Council successfully bid for as part of its congestion performance initiative.

The Council’s capital expenditure in 2011/12 on cycling as leisure – e.g. recreational cycle routes is as follows:

£90,000 on Rochdale Canal Towpath Cycle way: Improvements to the stretch of the Rochdale Canal Towpath from the Oldham boundary to New Islington, linking to the City Centre and Piccadilly Station approach. This included approximately 1000 metres of surface improvements to the canal towpath over 3.5 km. The funding has targeted the worst affected sections. This scheme was funded by a DfT grant which Manchester City Council successfully bid for as part of its congestion performance initiative.
Manchester City Council have also bid, through the Government’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF), for £500,000 to fund Regional Centre Cycle Routes. If the bid is successful, this scheme will introduce a number of on-street measures designed to encourage and promote cycling. These will include cycle lanes and improvements at junctions. The scheme will link existing cycle routes that terminate at the edge of the City Centre with cycle hub facilities that are to be provided within the City Centre. The outcome of this bid will not be known until June 2012.

The Council’s revenue expenditure in 2011/12 for cycling sport is as follows:

The Velodrome Trust – £26,000 Cycling Development – £38,000Cycling Events – £112,040Grants to Cycling Groups – £13,830
In addition, Sport England and the Council also received funding from the Stadium Rental Agreement (Manchester City Football Club) and agreed to spend the following on Cycling projects:
The Velodrome Trust – £328,000Cycling Development – £20,000

The Council’s Capital expenditure in 2011/12 for cycling sport is as follows:
BMX Centre – £5,200,000
This is the 2011/12 spend out of a total of £21,000,000 since 2009/10.
Velodrome maintenance – £54,000

So that’s over £5.5M of spend on cycle sport, whilst cycle routes get a pitance…

“Havana by necessity had to make the transition to being a sustainable city. Now, it has almost 200 urban allotments, helping the country to become 90% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables, and hitchhiking and carpooling are commonplace.

“As the oil runs out and we address the threat of climate change, how will Manchester have to change? What does a sustainable Manchester look like – where does its food come from,  and how do people get around? Can we learn lessons from Havana?

Here’s our opinion, fwiw.
It has the potential to be a decent event. Prof Kevin Anderson (chair) and Liz Postlethwaite are good thinkers and speakers (that’s not to say the other two panellists aren’t, we just haven’t met ‘em). It also has the potential to be a soul-sucking sage-on-the-stage bore-fest stalked by chest-beating q and a. Time will tell.

It’s free, and it’s on the evening of Thursday 14th June.  The following day there’s an even more amazing event.

You can book here.

We took the photo from the festival of transition page.

Arwa Aburawa, co-editor of Manchester Climate Monthly, on the long long wait for ward level plans for Manchester.

It’s been almost two months since the wards plans for Machester were supposed to be approved by Manchester City Council. And we are still waiting. We were lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the draft plans for Chorlton. According to these, the only plans relating to environmental issues included sorting waste and recycling for some flats, graffiti reduction, litter issues and leaf clearance. There was however one interesting promise to “put in place targeted support to the Friends of Beech Road Park.”

Ward plans for Harphurhey remain in the bureaucratic pipeline. According to an MCC bod, “Unfortunately a document like this needs to be seen and approved by several managers and elected officials before it can be signed-off. The wards plans for all 32 wards in Manchester are currently being updated in this way so I can’t jump the gun until there is a city-wide green light.” Surely, they knew all this before so why has it been months since the official approval date (March 2012) and actual announcement (still waiting)? We remain, as ever, waiting for answers and a logical explanation.

And more importantly, will these much-awaited ward plans include climate change issues and ways to increase the resilience of the ward? Only (lots more) time will tell.

Related articles

• “What did you do in the ward, daddy?” (manchesterclimatemonthly.net)

hope you’re all well.  Please do read the story before this one on the site – Manchester City Council is going to be releasing a report about Steady State Economics soon. This is, I think, a Big Deal, regardless of what conclusions the report actually comes to.  More later.

In the meantime, as ever, we want your news and views and your spare hours of time here and there.  If you want to volunteer, get in touch! mcmonthly@gmail.com

Marc Hudson

Coming up this week

Weds 23 May  First meetings of two rejigged Manchester City Council Scrutiny Committees – “Economy” and “Communities”.  The Economy is going to be having a “Sustainable Economic Development” meeting in June!

Friday 25 May – Climate Jobs Caravan events
In Manchester the caravan will be in Piccadilly Gardens 11am to 3.30. All Saints from 4.15 till 6pm. The evening meeting will be at the Friends Meeting House (M2 5NS) from 7-9pm. Speakers will include Sir Richard Leese, Martin Empson from the Campaign against Climate Change and Hannah Thomas from the Otesha Project in London. We will argue that one million climate jobs could be created, cutting CO2 emissions by 80%, and we will call on the government to set up a National Climate Service (NCS) to invest in climate jobs.

Sat 26, 11am to 11pm ECODAYA “12 non stop hours of sustainable salsa fun” The Lifestyle Centre, Wythenshawe, M22 1QW

Stories you may have missed on the MCFly website

• Event Report: Transforming Manchester, or “The thin veneer of climate governance”
• Thoughts on a protest…
• Articles Review: Crises, Camps and Citizenship
• How about we…
• Event Report: Green Expo 9/10 May in #Manchester
• Environment Commission plays musical chairs: without a chair.
• Event Report: #Manchester #madf or a digital future. A green one? Not so much.
• Ecocities “widening debate” on Manchester adaptation – in parallel universe, maybe
• Book Review: Green Political Thought
• Job Alert: Herbie Co-ordinator

Lessons we like to pretend we’ve learned
We can’t pretend we’ve learnt any this week.

Paid gigs!
Job Alert: Herbie Coordinator

National News
Caroline Lucas not standing to be leader of the Green Party again
The Committee on Climate Change release their Local Authority advice. All of which – and it kills us to type this – Manchester City Council is already doing.

16 May William Hague, foreign minister, has been warning Dave C about the threats to Britain’s clean tech (green/low carbon) industries) because of ministers’ “failure to make the case vigorously”

17 May Britain’s first geoengineering experiment – spraying water into the atmosphere from a tethered balloon, is cancelled.

19 May The Financial Times reports that ex-minister Peter Hain is backing another Severn Estuary tidal power thingie.
Things worth reading
Local film-maker and artist Erinma Ochu on a resilience self-audit.

Scary Science
Arctic melt releasing ancient methane by Peter Black (BBC)

According to a document released on the City Council’s website the report will;

Include “a potential strategy to counter the tension that exists between the sustainability that steady state economics advocates and the Council’s economic policy.”

Explain “how the Council’s economic policy fits into the context of the priorities identified in the report to create a model of sustainable economic growth based around a more connected, talented and greener city region;”

Provide “comparison of the steady state economic models with other economic models”

and explain “the economic model that the city works under ensures the economy grows in ways that minimise negative impact on the environment.”

The report is scheduled for discussion at a meeting to be held from 10am on Wednesday June 20^th, 2012 at Manchester Town Hall.  (We would encourage everyone who is interested in Manchester’s future to attend! It’s free and will be very very interesting. We promise.)

Now the caveats and quibbles
- the signatories of the Open Letter that kicked all of this off last November have not been alerted to the impending report and meeting.
- the offer from the signatories of the letter was to work WITH the Council. What is being offered by the Council is – if you were being cynical – the opportunity to be a rubber stamp for work that they have done in-house, without collaboration.
- we have no idea how thorough or even-handed the report will be.  The reason there was an open letter in November 2011 was that the Council’s first bite at this cherry had taken a year and was little more than a page in length.

Still, “victories” of this sort are rarer than horse’s teeth, so let’s not look the gift hen in the mouth. Or something like that.

Watch this space.

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

Still confused?
What’s a Steady State Economy? Visit the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Why is infinite growth a bad idea? Watch this short youtube – “The Impossible Hamster”

MCFly co-editor Marc Hudson went to an academic seminar about, well “Transforming Manchester” and came away informed and intrigued.

The first of the two speakers was Dr Jeremy Carter, of the Centre for Urban Regional Ecology and the Ecocities project (yes, the very same one MCFly recently dissed). He explained the “adaptation imperative” for Manchester.

He set the scene with a few observations;

• there has been a significant acceleration of climate change in recent decades
• recent impacts are above/beyond the IPCC’s “worst case scenarios”
• recent emissions have been above the IPCC’s “worst case scenarios”
• it turns out thresholds for significant impacts have been revised downwards (i.e. it turns out it is going to get worse sooner than we thought)
• there is little commitment by government, business or society to address this.

So, for example, if five years ago you’d talked about a four degree global average temperature rise in the coming century as a given, you’d have been risking your reputation as a reasonable and serious commentator. Now four degrees is the new normal (as seen in the new website, www.adaptingmanchester.ac.uk), with its strap-line “Four degrees of preparation”

Dr Carter said that for Manchester the main direct impacts would be flooding (especially surface water flooding) heat waves and droughts, with impacts on “critical infrastructure” and health and well-being.

In a subtle rebuke to the relentless framing of climate change as both a threat and an opportunity, he said “the opportunities perspective is quite hard to see when you look closely.” Indeed!

After looking at the advantages and disadvantages for (Greater) Manchester in planning around climate, Dr Carter mentioned the framework of Albert and Kern (2008) (see footnote 1), with cities tackling climate through 1) self-governing 2) governing by enabling, 3) governing by provision or 4) governing by regulation. Manchester is, it seems, governing by enabling. If ever we  at MCFly Towers see any enabling, we will report it, and we ask our reader(s) to keep his/her/their eyes peeled.

He closed with some observations around the difficulty for adaptation versus mitigation – Conceptually the problems included the lack of a clear time-line or endpoint for adaptation.
Practically he cited “institutional inertia, short term political motivations, regulatory structures that facilitate mal-adaptation” and posed a (rhetorical?) question around whether adaptation planning should go further, in recognition of ‘its holistic and cross-cutting agenda’?

Sandwiched between questions of “what is mal-adaptation?” and “what about the free-rider problem?” MCFly asked the following “Looking back 20 years from now, what will we regret having done/not done in the period 2009 to 2014?”
Dr Carter said it would be not drawing up the connections between mitigation, adaptation and transport. The problems can’t be solved individually without solving the others, so the siloed agendas need to be joined up.

Dr Hannah Knox of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)  (footnote 2) was up next, with a presentation entitled “Green and Digital Manchester: A reflection on two revolutions”
She was at pains to say that it is based on work she is in the middle of doing, so her perspectives and analysis are very provisional.

She started by introducing a work of art that was launched in 2007. UHC, a local art collective, produced a work called “The Thin Veneer of Democracy”.

On a big oak table they had etched a schema of the links between individuals and organisations in Manchester around
Knox pointed out how, in the space of five years, the diagram had become surprisingly dated – institutions are gone, projects renamed, new links formed.

Using her anthropological training, looking at the “cultural expectations” individuals and organisations have, Knox is looking at how Manchester is gearing up (or not) to deal with the “catastrophic forces” of climate change, using the late 90s/early 2000s action around ‘digital Manchester’ as a compare-and-contrast.
Back then (and not much has changed!) the media revolution was to be inspired to move to Manchester because it had all the “right” ingredients – a music scene, ethnic diversity, cheap office space, universities The key trope was “convergence” around technological knowledge, creative flair and managerial ability. The public sector saw itself as trying to get networks going (hosting events, minglers, etc – almost ‘enabling’ you could say). [Much of the same language is used for climate, and Knox's observations fit neatly with Aidan While et al's notion of the “sustainability fix.”]

Reiterating that her observations were provisional, Knox said that she is looking at the “cultural politics of climate change” – what is deemed ‘appropriate’ in terms of responses by different actors.
After outlining to the two headlines of the Manchester Climate Change Action Plan (a 41% cut by 2020, and a process of culture change), she turned her attention to the thorny question of carbon footprints. Whose emissions? Counted how? You can either tote up the energy use data, or you can look at the “Total Carbon Footprint” (TCP) (which includes the energy used to create the products that are then imported from ‘abroad’). [Manchester, btw, is committed to moving to a TCP approach – something Dr Knox didn't mention.]

She touched briefly on the built environment and the way that Housing Associations are becoming important players, and asked where precisely the ‘Manchester collaborations’ will lead.

In the Q and A Professor Kevin Ward asked her whether she’d looked at how policy documents bring some issues forward and silence others [and MCFly thought about George Monbiot's observation - that we can't seem go Google - that the policy documents are the policy] and Peter Fell, director of regional and economic affairs at the University of Manchester, highlighted the fact that University of Manchester is a major energy player, in terms of Research and Development.

Footnotes
Footnote 1 Albert and Kern (2008) Governing Climate Change in Cities: Modes of Urban Climate Governance in Multi-level Systems [30 page pdf here]
Footnote 2 Knox is co-organising a panel at CRESC’s annual conference in early September on “Promises of a Green City”

“Transforming Manchester” is a programme within the “cities@manchester” collaboration. You’ll be shocked to learn that  MCFly blogged about the previous event, held in January.

MCFly writer Philip James ponders the ethics of non-violent direct action, and seeks readers’ opinions…

Take the Flour Back is a non-violent direct action event against a crop trial of GM wheat taking place at the Rothamsted Institute in Hertfordshire on May 27th. The action aims to destroy the crops, or conduct a ‘decontamination’ as the campaign puts it. Many Manchester campaigners are in support and planning to attend (see http://www.underthepavement.org/listen-again/ for an interview with two such campaigners).

However, there are concerns that direct action of the kind planned by Take the Flour Back sets a dangerous precedent: if you don’t agree with something, break it. If every time somebody disagrees with something they break it, where does that leave us? Is it acceptable to destroy the power lines to a wind farm because you hold the sincere opinion that it spoils the environment and harms birds? We are entering highly charged times and the environmental movement might just need the rule of law and much as it needs to circumvent it. To quote A Man for All Seasons:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

Then again, if you always took the Thomas More line where would we be?

Do you sometimes have to break the law to change it? Are all forms of
direct action equally valid? Is passive resistance more powerful than an act of destruction?

Any thoughts Dear Readers on direct action of this kind and where it leads for the environmental movement. Go on, post a comment!

MCFly co-editor Marc Hudson reads three academic papers on the stepper at the gym. And is impressed, distressed and depressed, in that order. Compressed reviews follow.

Economic and Ecological Crises: Green new deals and no-growth economies Bob Jessop
Beyond the ‘Green Economy’: System change, not climate change? Nicola Bullard and Tadzio Muller
Incentives to Promote Green Citizenship in UK Transition Towns Amy Merritt and Tristan Stubbs
all published in Development: Greening the Economy, Vol 55 (1) March 2012

Bob Jessop is a very big name in theories of the state and capitalism. He’s been around a looong time, and a lot of people cite his ideas. That doesn’t, of course, automatically mean this paper is any good. Turns out it is though.

He sets out to explain that we think in stories, and that these stories can be unpicked (“critical semiotic analysis”). So, there are stories we tell ourselves about the economic crisis (greedy bankers, sleepy regulators, dodgy mortgagers) and stories we tell about ecological crises (greedy capitalists, sleepy publics, dodgy technologies). He uses the term “imaginaries” to label these stories.

“An imaginary provides one entry point into a supercomplex reality and can also be associated with different standpoints, which frame and contain debates, policy discussions, and conflicts over particular ideal and material interests.”

As in – some stories hide more than they reveal, and are successful because of who they are told by, and how they help things stay the same/change. Stories are fought over (the sides have different resources and ‘truth’ doesn’t necessarily win”.)

Interestingly, Jessop then talks about crises in a system and crises of a system.

“Crises of a system are less common. They occur when there is a crisis of crisis-management and efforts to defer or displace crises encounter growing resistance. Such crises are more disorienting than crisis ‘in’, indicating the breakdown of previous regularities and an inability to ‘go on in the old way’, indicating scope for new imaginaries, visions, projects, programmes and policies.”(p 19)

Having laid this theoretical ground work, Jessop looks at the way elites have talked about the recovery from economic crisis.

“Of particular concern is how the imaginaries and imagined paths to recovery from the GFC that shaped crisis management neglected or marginalized ecological issues, food and fuel crises, and issues of social development and social justice from the mainstream policy agenda.” (p 20)

Well, concerning, yes, but hardly surprising (I suspect Jessop would agree). He then looks at how the various “Green New Deal” proposals become an inkblot test for individuals and institutions to project their own desires and expectations.

It is hard, Jessop points out, to think “outside the box” (‘never ask a goldfish for a definition of water’, as we say too frequently here at MCFly towers).

“… it is the deeply rooted nature of these categories that makes it so hard to think outside a capitalocentric imaginary, and therefore relatively easy for the logic of capital to reassert itself theoretically and practically. Small-scale trial-and-error experimentation and the collection of best-practice have a critical role to play here in designing and implementing a no-growth strategy and in providing evidence that another, non-economistic, ecological-friendly world is possible…. Local solutions can be developed to address the short-term effects of the crisis in its various local manifestations, and the challenge is to establish ways to exploit this real-time experimental laboratory to find what works, for whom, when, and why, as a basis for mutual learning and policy transfer among subaltern groups.” (p 23)

Jessop has made a rigorous and nuanced argument that will doubtless repay repeated reading. I defy anyone to say the same about Bullard and Muller’s effort.

They argue that the main reason for the weakness of the “counter-hegemonic ‘climate justice’” movement is that global elites are not talking about climate change in the way they did up to the end of 2009.

There is an extraordinary brace of sentences (p56) “The movement’s hopes were set high. Indeed, Barack Obama had (in)famously referred to this summit as ‘the last, best hope’ for avoiding runaway climate change.”
Several points here. The movement, as I recall, was far more skeptical about a positive outcome, but went on and held its marches (anyone remember the “Big Wave”?) and its summit-hoppings anyway. For various reasons, none of them that reflect well on the participants.

The suggestion that no-one predicted failure is akin to George Bush arguing that nobody could have predicted Hurricane Katrina, i.e. demonstrably false and morally repugnant.

For example, the current author was arguing – in print – by the middle of 2008, that Copenhagen, in the words of Admiral Akbar “a trap” that would at best drain energy away from local climate activism and at worst create the kind of dilemma faced by NGOS after the Kyoto Protocol (complaining it was grossly inadequate, but defending it all the same). Much more significantly, and with far more suppleness, an Australian writer Ant Kelly wrote “Demobilisation: avoiding the post cop doldrums.” It is extraordinary that this work is nowhere mentioned in reference list (nor the response it elicited by Tord Bjork).

From reading Bullard and Muller’s article, an uninformed reader would have no sense that thorough-going critiques of activist cultures and assumptions were written in the aftermath of the J18 Carnival(in Cologne and London) that provided the inspiration for the “Battle for Seattle”. [Give up Activism. much?] The reader would not be aware of the critiques of “summit-hopping” (turning up to disrupt IMF, World Bank and G8 meetings). The problems of summit-hopping (Gleneagles 2005) was a major spur for the very creation of the Camp for Climate Action that Bullard and Muller write about. The bitter irony that in the space of a mere three years the Camp went from staging its own events on its own terms to … summit-hopping at Copenhagen is one that has either escaped the authors or one that they feel it would be impolite to mention.

The article also takes at face value the movement’s self-description  “open, networked and consensus-based”, where all these terms could profitably be challenged. Still, we should be grateful that they at least are able to see that these features (whatever label you would want to put on them) create “problems in terms of sustainability and organizational growth and from their extremely narrow base from which broadening-out has been very difficult both to other existing movements and towards affected communities.”

To use the word “dynamic” for climate justice movements in the Global North is, frankly, embarrassing. The movement desperately needs thorough, unsentimental and constructive analysis. This article is not within a thousand miles of that.

Finally, Merritt and Stubbs want “to determine the key challenges of participation in the green economy, and how local and central government can play a role in promoting community action through formal political channels.” Turns out you can’t trust councils to help out (who knew?). The paper then “explores innovative ways of funding community initiatives by publicly indexing local sustainability initiatives, and considers how indexing could work in practice.”

They did a desk survey (i.e. read a lot) and “supplemented [their] findings with extensive primary research, including interviews with TT members, environmental campaigners, political party candidates, policymakers, academics, NGO and think tank staff in the UK.”

But not anyone particularly cynical, it seems.

Still, there were a couple of wry and rueful smiles to be had -

“people become very passionate about their work in TTs, and egos come into play rather than looking at the bigger picture”;

“TTs tend to be dynamic [that word again – it's the new 'sustainable, it seems] in areas where the local council is dynamic on sustainability issues. In more deprived areas, TTs tend to be more lacklustre: their council shave to deal with more pressing socio-economic issues.’

“Our research has identified engaging people from marginalized and poorer backgrounds to be a key challenge for TTs.”

Dr Amanda Smith‘s work on Nottingham Transition Towns is conspicuously absent. Whitmarsh, Seyfang and O’Neill’s distinction between carbon literacy and carbon capability might also have usefully got a look-in, but still and all, these three from the bibliography look interesting -

Brannan, Tessa, Peter Jon and Gerry Stoker (eds) 2007 Re-energizing Citizenship: Strategies for civil renewal. Basingstoke

Trachtenberg, Zev (2010) Complex Green Citizenship and the Necessity of Judgment Environmental Politics 19 (3): 339- 55.

Weber, Edward P. (2003) ‘Bringing Society Back’ in Grassroots Ecosystem Management, Accountability, and Sustainable Communities. American and Comparative Environmental Policy. Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.