UCLA

The climate crisis has been severe in the Philippines, which has been experiencing historically unprecedented super typhoons, worsening floods and droughts, coral-reef destruction from oceanic acidification, and sea-level rise that threatens to submerge islands and coastal regions throughout the archipelagic country. In response, Philippine climate-justice activists have been waging an increasingly powerful struggle to transform the economy of the Philippines to be sustainable, economically just, and powered by 100% clean and renewable energy. Using ethnographic methods, this dissertation investigates the political struggle being waged by the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), the largest and most prominent voice for climate-justice activism in the Philippines. The dissertation analyzes the postcoloniality of Philippine climate justice, calls for “climate reparations” from the Global North to the Global South, a movement of “insurgent ecological citizenship” in a coal-affected community in the province of Bataan, efforts for energy democracy and energy decolonization in the push for 100% renewable energy, and the terrible role of authoritarian political violence against environmental advocates in the Philippines. The dissertation contends that Philippine climate-justice futurity is fundamentally based on political-economic and cultural decolonization. Philippine climate justice seeks to create a clean-energy and sustainable future that is also based on egalitarian social relations free from oligarchic inequality, authoritarianism and violent impunity, and foreign imperial interventions.