More powerful together: collaborative theorizing with social movements about decolonizing and decarbonizing Canada

While the climate and inequality crises intensify in Canada, the federal government continues to approve pipelines and other oil and gas projects, violating commitments to both climate action and reconciliation with Indigenous nations. In response to this, grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and Indigenous communities are working hard to contest these projects and the colonial capitalist logics that underlie them. This thesis reports on four years of qualitative research developed and conducted in collaboration with people actively involved in the Indigenous land defense, climate/environmental justice, and anti-pipeline movements in Canada.The research explores, as a first central theme, the ways that movement actors understand the crises and their underlying causes and how they envision the worlds they want. People in these movements are seeing that climate change and inequality are both driven by colonial capitalism, which is undergirded by western worldviews that promote domination of people over nature and of people over other people. These systems have bred systemic disconnection from land and from each other, cutting us off from the communities, tools, and knowledges we need to get ourselves out of this mess. Their visions of the worlds they want conjure up a future of flourishing networks of decentralized, self-determining communities, powered by renewable energy, and learning from the land. This is a future where a hard process of decolonizing relations renders us all much more capable of living and making decisions together – decisions that benefit all beings. This future depends on a fundamental restructuring of our systems and a massive redistribution of wealth, power, and land.A second major theme of this work is the ways that people conceptualize how large-scale change happens. This theme is engaged first through a literature review of theories of change (TOCs) from various bodies of academic literature including Indigenous scholarship, Historical Materialism, Intersectional Feminism, Social Movement Studies, and Social-Ecological Systems Transformation. This thesis also brings together the TOCs held by activists in these movements. Though their TOCs are diverse and conflicting at times, when brought together, they emphasize that transformation happens through a complex convergence of 1) the contexts in which we act, 2) people’s understanding, worldviews, and values and 3) building power through collective action and directing that power in various ways. 4) Undergirding these 3 factors is how we relate to each other and how all our efforts combine in mutually supporting ways. The third major theme in this thesis examines the obstacles to change being faced. Activists and land defenders identified barriers that are external to the movement, including lack of public will, the capitalist-driven economic system, corporate influence over public decision-making, criminalization of activists, and others. People I spoke with also identified barriers more internal to the movements. These include fragmentation, internal tensions, the trends towards NGOization, hierarchical, centralized organizing structures, as well as the insular, overly-critical activist culture and activist burn-out. This project culminates in a collective strategizing on what can be done to overcome the barriers and increase the transformative power of these movements to successfully contest and weaken colonial capitalism and offer viable and inspiring alternatives. To overcome all these daunting barriers, we need much bigger, much stronger movements and to do so we need to develop more capacity for thinking and working across differences. A shared understanding that emerges from all the chapters is that forging stronger, more just relations within and across movements is crucial for strengthening our collective ability to bring radical change to Canada’s economic, political, and social systems

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