Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Struggle for Climate Justice Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Reed Michael Kurtz Graduate Program in Political Science The Ohio State University 2019 Dissertation Committee Alexander Wendt, Co-Advisor Joel Wainwright, Co-Advisor Jason Moore Alexander Thompson Inés Valdez 1 Copyrighted by Reed Michael Kurtz 2019 2 Abstract This dissertation project responds to the global ecological crisis of climate change, showing how the temporal and spatial dimensions of the crisis challenge our capacities to imagine and implement effective political solutions. Rather than being natural limits, I argue these dimensions of the crisis are inherently social and political, derived from contradictions and antagonisms of the global capitalist nation-state system. I thus take a critical approach to ecology and politics, in the tradition of Marxist political ecology. I read Antonio Gramsci’s political theories of hegemony and the integral state through an ecological framework that foregrounds the distinct roles that human labor, capital, and the state system play in organizing social and environmental relations. I develop an original conception of hegemony as a fundamentally ecological process that constitutes the reproduction of human relations within nature, which I use to analyze the politics of climate governance and climate justice. Grounded in textual analysis and fieldwork observations of state and civil society relations within the UNFCCC, I show that struggles for hegemony among competing coalitions of state and non-state actors have shaped the institutional frameworks and political commitments of the Paris climate regime complex. I demonstrate how climate governance reproduces capitalist political relations predicated on formal separation of ‘state’ and ‘civil society,’ and the endless accumulation of capital, thereby serving to reproduce, rather than resolve, the ii contradictions of the crisis. I then center my focus on the global movement of movements for climate justice. Using textual analysis and qualitative fieldwork conducted as a critically-situated, participant-observer of the climate justice movement at various sites, including the COP22 and COP23 climate negotiations, I show how the climate justice movement constitutes itself as a distinctly anti-systemic and ecological historical bloc in world politics. I demonstrate how ecological direct action is central to the movement’s efforts to achieve “system change, not climate change,” by working to reorganize the reproduction of relations between humans and the rest of nature along direct democratic lines. iii Dedication To my family, especially Maca, Robyn, Greg, Karl, Anna, and Puma and Luna iv Acknowledgments There are a great number of people to whom I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for contributing, in one way or another, to the production of this dissertation. First, I wish to thank my dissertation co-advisers and committee members Alex Wendt, Joel Wainwright, Alex Thompson, Inés Valdez, and Jason Moore for their invaluable support and guidance throughout this process and its culmination. I would also like to thank Jennifer Mitzen, Mike Neblo, Ben McKean, Chris Gelpi, William Minozzi, Amanda Robinson, Daniel Verdier, Rick Herrmann, Mat Coleman, Kendra McSweeney, Courtney Sanders, Melodie McGrothers, Cathy Becker, and Jessica Riviere for their contributions at various points throughout my career at Ohio State. Special thanks are due to Drew Rosenberg, Avery White, Anna Meyerrose, Austin Knuppe, José Fortou, Kailash Srinivasan, Matt Soener, Dan Silverman, Corey Katz, Henry Peller, Guillermo Bervejillo, Patrick Cleary, Kyle Larson, Iku Yoshimoto, Ruthie Pertsis, Leyla Tosun, Lauren Muscott, Ben Kenzer, Dan Kent, Liwu Gan, Greg Smith, Linnea Turco, Krista Benson, Maria Fredericks; Alec Clott, Jared Edgerton, Grant Sharratt, Vlad Chlouba, Jon Green, and Andy Goodhart for their friendship and support at Ohio State. I would also like to thank discussants and other participants in workshops and other venues where I presented earlier versions of this work, including OSU’s Political v Theory and Research in International Politics workshops. Chapters 2 and 5 in particular were developed out of papers presented in these fora, respectively. Colleagues and friends at other institutions, including but not limited to Kevin Funk, Mauro Caraccioli, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Goodhart, Jason Keiber, Marcus Green, Naeem Inayatullah, Kevin Surprise, Harry van der Linden, Jay Bolthouse, Aaron Vansintjan, Raúl Pacheco-Vega, Kiran Asher, Naty Gandara, Victor Salinas, Alfred Hinrichson, Nico Gorigoitia, Daniel Hartley, Richard Widick, John Foran, Elisabeth Ellis, Brooke Ackerley, Matthew Paterson, Mike Barnett, Mark Salter, Libby Anker, Loubna El Amine, Ian Manners, Jeff Payne, and Craig Auchter, have also contributed valuable insights into my work and our profession. I am very grateful for their time and consideration at this early stage of my career. I would also like to thank those panelists, discussants, and other contributors who provided insightful feedback at conference sessions and workshops where earlier versions of my work (Chapters 2 and 5 in particular) were presented, including annual meetings of the American Association of Geographers (2018, 2016), International Studies Association (2018, 2017) and ISA-NE (2015), the American Political Science Association (2018), and the World-Ecology Research Network (2015), Association for Political Theory (2016), and Western Political Science Association (2019). I also owe a great deal of thanks to a number of contributors whom I met in the field while doing fieldwork at the 2016 COP22 and 2017 COP23 climate meetings in Marrakech and Bonn, the 2017 People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, and community activists and organizers here in central and southeastern Ohio during my time vi here at OSU. I would like to thank a number of people, including but not limited to: Tati Shauro; Carmen Capriles; Tadzio Müller; Ruth Nyambura; Nathan Thanki; Noah Goodwin; Garrett Blad; Lucile Daumas; Remy Franklin; Noëlie Audi-Dor; Michel Le Gendre; Morgan Curtis; Antonio Zambrano; Kevin Buckland; Pascoe Sabido; Kailea Frederick; Paul Getsos; Aura Vasquez; Mathias Bouuaert; Angus Joseph; Amalen Sathananthar; Collin Rees; Kjell Kühne; João Alves; Ben Goloff; Juan Reardon; Alex Carlin; Lidy Nacpil; Kayla DeVault; Devi Lockwood; Michael Charles; Dineen O’Rourke; Bader Rachidi; Hamza Akhouch; Otman Basahbi; Katja Garson; Tetet Nera- Lauron; Lainie Rini; Kenny Myers; Becca Pollard; Matt Myers; Emma Schurink; Megumi Endo; Shradha Shreejaya; Naveeda Khan; Frida Kieninger; Heather Doyle; Michaela Mujica-Steiner; Karina Gonzalez; Ryan Camero; Eva Malis; Troy Robertson; Amelia Diehl; Varshini Prakash; Kyle Lemle; Bean Crane; Andrea Schmid; Jawad Nostakbal; Nadir Bouhmouch; Nadja Charaby; Max Högl; Caitlyn McDaniel; Yuki Kidokoro; Sondra Youdelman; and Melinda Tuhus. I have truly learned so much from you all, and this project has been profoundly shaped by my experiences in the field working alongside you. I hope that this project can contribute in some small way to giving back and working towards our shared goals of realizing climate justice and system change not climate change. I dedicate this dissertation to my family, especially Greg, Robyn, Karl, Anna, and Maca. Without their unwavering love and support, I cannot imagine how I would have come this far. And because my dissertation is ultimately about human and non-human relations in nature, I must also recognize the contributions of my two feline companions vii throughout this journey, Puma and Luna. Together, more than anyone else, those two have spent more hours with me as I write these pages. viii Vita 2005-2009.........................B.A., Butler University 2013-2015.........................M.A., Political Science, The Ohio State University 2015-2019.........................PhD Candidate, Political Science, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Political Science ix Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita ..................................................................................................................................... ix List of Tables ................................................................................................................... xiii Preface. Welcome to the Anthropocene; Or, the Planetary Ecological Crisis of Capitalism .......................................................................................................................................... xiv Chapter 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1.................................................................................................................................... 1 2.1.................................................................................................................................. 14 3.1.................................................................................................................................