Taking Responsibility for the Climate Crisis in Massachusetts: Climate Activism, Justice, and Organizing to Construct a Green New Deal

Based on fifteen-months fieldwork conducted in 2018-19, this thesis examines the decision of a climate movement organization in Massachusetts - People for Mass Climate Action (PMCA)- to frame its activism and organizing in terms of a campaign strategy titled Constructing a Massachusetts Green New Deal. Through an exploration of the concept of responsibility, the thesis focuses on the strategic deliberation that produced the campaign strategy and the political-moral reasoning behind PMCA's interpretation of the Green New Deal. In so doing, it views climate justice as a distinctive political-moral modality that is predicated on, and generates, intersectional responses to the climate crisis rooted in cross-movement coalition building, solidarity organizing, understandings of procedural justice, and the cultivation of political-moral subjectivities. It also explores the organizational dynamics, tensions, and ambivalences that the campaign strategy - and the campaign selection process out of which it emerged - helped to reveal, particularly with regards to the relationship between (professional) organizing and activism, as well as the desire to balance 'bottom-up' participation with strategic direction from relatively 'top-down' leadership. Overall, the thesis makes two primary arguments. First, that the concept of responsibility provides a window into the ways in which climate movement actors construct and enact political-moral responses to the climate crisis. Second, that it is necessary to bridge the anthropology of ethics and political anthropology in order to appreciate my interlocutors' attempts to imagine and engender more just worlds. In other words, my ethnography demonstrates the importance of examining the ways in which moral understandings, evaluations, and subjectivity, political deliberations and aspirations, and considerations of strategic agency, are entwined.