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This chapter draws on theories, particularly the scholarship of Antonio Gramsci, in offering a strategic framework that considers power relations. It argues that the world is not the same as it was back in 2008 before the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen. It explores recent shifts in power dynamics and considers their impact on our ability to take effective and equitable action on climate change. The main argument here is that the world order has transformed along four main axes: its political economy, geopolitics, ecological conditions, and the capabilities of transnational civil society. The chapter focuses on the struggles of marginalized and particularly vulnerable states and civil society actors seeking climate justice, and the processes that inhibit and facilitate their influence.

This chapter summarizes the book's main arguments and considers how global climate justice might be achieved in the coming years. Given the need for independent actors whose focus is on the global public good of avoiding catastrophic climatic change, it argues that a transformed approach of civil society is our best hope for realizing an equitable, sustainable, and effective international climate treaty and advancing global climate justice. Revelations about the system's unsustainability will not occur—or lead to the radical change—unless political forces broadly mobilize to effectively counter the competing narratives and structural privileges of those who still benefit from the existing system. The chapter concludes by identifying three main shifts that transnational civil society will have to undergo in order to advance international climate justice, and introduces the concept of linking movements to specify necessary changes for the development of climate justice.

This chapter discusses the role of civil society in the AIDS response. It explains the heterogeneity of civil society movements and AIDS activism, as well as the variability of their involvement in global or national responses. It cites examples of AIDS activism in countries such as France, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, and Thailand. The second part of the chapter deals with AIDS and globalization. It suggests that the AIDS movement may be the first example of a new type of transnational civil society movement without clear leaders or programs, driven by social justice and acting simultaneously globally and in a very agile way thanks to modern communication tools. Some examples of more formal global and regional networks are discussed, although much of the AIDS movement is not that formally organized, and certainly not hierarchical.

This chapter describes how the presence of strong trade unions in the maritime industry was all but taken for granted in the mid-1960s. Neither the unions nor their employer counterparts likely imagined that their worlds would be shaken to the core within just two decades. Yet, if the loss of union influence became a common theme of contemporary political history across Europe as well as North America, the sustained “renewal” of maritime unionism at the end of the twentieth century stood out as a dramatic exception. The players involved in this transformation, encompassing both national and international organizations spread across the globe, offered a testament to the power of transnational civil society. Moreover, that such a renewal should come at the very hands of the world economy that was otherwise shredding traditional worker protections made the latest chapter of maritime labor regulation perhaps the most surprising of all.