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This article was downloaded by: [UOV University of Oviedo]On: 22 October 2014, At: 08:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Environmental PoliticsPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fenp20
Perspectives on justice,democracy and global climatechangeLudvig Beckmana & Edward A. Pageb
a Department of Political Science, StockholmUniversity, Stockholm, Swedenb Department of Politics and International Studies,Warwick University, UKPublished online: 08 Aug 2008.
To cite this article: Ludvig Beckman & Edward A. Page (2008) Perspectives on justice,democracy and global climate change, Environmental Politics, 17:4, 527-535, DOI:10.1080/09644010802193393
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644010802193393
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Perspectives on justice, democracy and global climate change
Ludvig Beckmana* and Edward A. Pageb
aDepartment of Political Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden;bDepartment of Politics and International Studies, Warwick University, UK
Anthropogenic climate change, understood as the ongoing and complexpattern of changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere arising fromhuman activity, has in recent years prompted a re-thinking of the scope andcontent of justice. A consensus is emerging that a theory of obligation isrequired that takes seriously the special features, and global reach, of climatechange (Singer 2002, pp. 14–50, Page 2006, Roberts 2007, Vanderheiden 2008).Such a theory will involve a significant temporal and spatial aspect to reflectthe fact that climate change will have far-reaching, and potentiallycatastrophic, implications for the well-being of non-compatriots and non-contemporaries.
At present, the precise nature of our climate-related obligations, as well asthe public and environmental policies these obligations entail, remains unclear,as do the implications of climate change for our current understanding ofdemocracy and the institutional orders with which it is associated. Oneexplanation for this unclarity is that genuine attempts to link philosophicallyrobust accounts of democracy and justice on the one hand, and concretequestions of policymaking and democratic deliberation on the other, have onlyrecently been forthcoming. In this edition of the journal, nine authors from across-section of social science disciplines seek to fill this gap by contributingarticles on the scope and democratic implications of, and conflicts between,obligations generated by anthropogenic climate change.
The articles that follow are usefully located in the context of fourdimensions of ‘climate justice’, defined here as the study of the special problemsof obligation and participation posed by climate impacts and policies for theirmanagement. The themes are: (1) the scope and content of climate justice; (2)global and intergenerational democracy; (3) poverty and posterity; and (4)science and society.
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Environmental PoliticsVol. 17, No. 4, August 2008, 527–535
ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online
� 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09644010802193393
http://www.informaworld.com
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Scope and content of climate justice
There are at least three important issues here – the first being is how to establishthe ‘recipients’ of justice (Dobson 1998, p. 64ff, Page 2006, p. 50ff). This is thequestion of which entities (individuals, groups, countries, generations) possessclaims against others that their atmospheric security be respected. The secondissue concerns the ‘pattern’ of distributive justice, or in other words theadoption of a distributive principle that specifies what exactly the recipients ofjustice are entitled to receive. Thus, it has been suggested that we allocatebenefits and burdens so that they are maximised, shared equally, or so that asmany people lead a decent life. The third issue turns on the identification ofthe entities that bear the ‘burden’ of guaranteeing that distributive entitlementsare respected. As reflected in their frequent appearance in the contributions tothis volume, the issues of who (recipients) should get how much (pattern) atwhose cost (burden bearers) are of great importance for our understanding ofjustice both within and between generations. No comprehensive account of ourduties to others, whether in the localised realm of climate justice or in terms ofjustice more generally, can succeed without a convincing account of these threeissues.
The difficulties involved in providing such an account are well illustrated byreflecting on the first issue. Much of the recent literature on climate justiceappeals to some version or another of the following generic argument for theexistence of extensive duties of climate justice: (1) acts or policies that modifythe atmosphere threaten the interests of future persons; (2) human activitiesthat threaten the interests of future persons are unjust; therefore, (3) acts orpolicies that modify the atmosphere are unjust. Although a mainstay of recentdiscussions of climate justice, the argument that obligations of justice applywith equal force beyond the immediate future is subject to three problems towhich a number of the articles in the issue make reference. According to theuncertainty argument, our inability to predict the impacts of alternativeenvironmental policies on future well-being means that we have no, or few,obligations to future persons (Routley and Routley 1979). According to thenon-reciprocity argument, taking future interests into account in our policy-making cannot be required by justice since justice presupposes certainconditions that are absent in dealings between generations, such as mutuallyadvantageous interaction. The result is that the above argument should berejected because (2) is false. According to the non-identity argument, justice andrights cannot meaningfully be extended to posterity because the acts and socialpolicies that might be thought to harm or benefit future persons also serve asremote, but necessary, conditions of them coming into existence. The upshot isthat no particular future person’s interests or rights will be violated by theatmospheric modifying acts and policies of earlier generations for, in theirabsence, they would never have been born. So (1) is alleged to be false for manywho belong to proximate generations and to all who belong to remotegenerations (Parfit 1984, p. 367ff, Page 2006, p. 132ff).
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Although we have not the space here to develop the issue further, thetheoretical challenges posed by the pattern and duty bearers of climate justiceare at least as great as those raised by the issue of the recipience, furthercomplicating the explication of what we owe to others in terms of justatmospheric usage. By inheriting all of the classic problems of global andintergenerational justice, and adding new concerns such as the uncertain long-term effects of atmospheric change, climate justice is a truly complex enterprise.
Global and intergenerational democracy
Troubling questions of global and intergenerational democracy, notably therole that democratic institutions should play in protecting our environmentalheritage, are also raised by climate change. If there are far-reaching obliga-tions that the living owe the unborn, it would appear that current politicalsystems of government need to be reshaped in order to be more sensitive to theinterests of future people. Would such measures be the full realisation ofdemocratic ideals or require a radically different understanding of the conceptof democracy?
One aspect of this question concerns the rationale for the idea of extendingdemocracy into the future. A common argument is that the living generationhas little incentive to pursue policies in the interests of future people and thatwhat is needed is consequently that they be represented politically (Kavka andWarren 1983, Goodin 1996, van Parjis 1998). It has also been argued that the‘all affected’ principle (according to which everyone affected by a decisionshould have the right to participate in its making) generates an obligation togrant future generations a ‘voice’ in democratic institutions (Dobson 1996,Eckersley 2000). Yet the all affected principle is ambiguous (Beckman 2006,2008) and there are many issues that need to be explored further about itsphilosophical status, as well as its implications for democratic institutions(O’Neill 2001, Thompson 2005). A further aspect of the debate concerns themethods by which granting a ‘voice to the voiceless’ could be institutionalised.
One indirect method of representation is to introduce a system ofconstitutional rights that prevents earlier generations from adopting policiesand laws that are discriminatory towards later generations. Tim Hayward, forexample, has argued recently that a fundamental right to an adequateenvironment should be entrenched into the constitutions of moderndemocracies (Hayward 2004). A more radical set of proposals involves thereserving of parliamentary seats for parties acting as trustees for futuregenerations (Ekeli 2005) or granting the environmental lobby a special status inthe legislative process (Dobson 1996). The Israeli Parliament’s (the Knesset)decision to appoint a Commissioner for future generations, with the designatedtask of guarding the interests of future people in new reforms and legislation, isone interesting example of how future people might be represented today(Shoham and Lamay 2006). But which possible institutional measures wouldbest allow future people to be represented?
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Poverty and posterity
Much of the growing literature on climate justice focuses on the way in whichclimate change violates duties of intergenerational justice. Yet there are alsolargely unexplored questions connecting environnmental protection withdevelopment and poverty reduction. A common point is to argue thatintergenerational obligations cannot be isolated from a consideration of whatwe owe to peoples in other parts of the world (Singer 2002, p. 26ff). But apotential dilemma arises between policies that will benefit future members ofthe developing world ‘directly’ by protecting environmental resources andsystems and those that will benefit them ‘indirectly’ by helping their societies todevelop. Moreover, reducing current consumption may conserve resources forthe unborn at the cost of worsening the lot of the present poor by contractingexisting opportunities for trade, work and growth (Beckerman and Pasek2001). If these are questions concerned with the potential clash between presentand future, a further issue is how to devise policies to protect the interests ofposterity that are also fair towards distinct interests here and now. Given thelarge disparities in wealth between the rich and poor members of the livinggeneration it appears evident that the responsibilities to invest resources inmitigating or adapting to climate change have to be distributed carefully inorder not to exacerbate existing, or create new, inequities. These issuesdemonstrate that, to cope with global climate change, a theory of intergenera-tional justice requires not only theoretical sophistication but also practicalapplication as well.
Science and society
The fourth category of issues concerns the relation amongst justice, science andsociety and the challenge, amongst others, of modifying our normativetheorising and policymaking in light of developments in our scientificunderstanding of environmental processes. Compared to many other pressingsocial and political problems, our understanding of climate change is parti-cularly dependent on the results and methods of natural science. As a con-sequence, science is of immense importance in the construction andimplementation of appropriate policy responses. The problem, of course, isthat each generation of policymakers is faced with a profound lack ofknowledge of the future with the result that they lack more than a minimalbasis from which to establish the long-term impacts of alternative environ-mental policies. So, even if a strong consensus emerged on a specific approachto climate justice, policymakers would not be in a position to guarantee itsrealisation. To the problem of the limitations of scientific knowledge it shouldalso be added that environmental policymaking contains an irreduciblynormative element that we ignore at our peril. Considerations of justice anddemocracy, it seems, will form an inescapable part of any equitable andefficient response to climate change even if the aims and objectives of this
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response are also guided by the science and impacts of climate threats (Shue1992, Adger et al. 2006, p. 264ff).
Outline of the volume
The ECPR Workshop from which this volume grew invited explorations of theproblems of justice, democracy and rationality posed by global climate change,with special emphasis on global and intergenerational perspectives. The issuesaddressed concerned the limits of science in climate change policymaking; thescope and content of climate justice; liberal cosmopolitanism and theenvironment; theories of ecological citizenship and deliberative democracy;and proposals for reforming democratic legislatures to represent the needs andinterests of future generations. The papers herein reflect the diversity of theWorkshop, which brought together scholars engaged in research on environ-mental justice and climate change from a variety of disciplines to exploreparallels, synergies and conflicts between various perspectives. Although thepapers lack a common methodology, they share the objective of mergingtheoretical sophistication with a focus on practical policy implications ofnormative enquiry.
The first three papers address the distribution of responsibility in attackingthe causes of climate change (mitigation) and defending the world from itseffects (adaptation). The volume begins with Simon Caney’s exploration of arights-based approach to intergenerational justice and its leverage forunderstanding the normative concerns raised by climate change. As madeclear by Caney, this theory generates obligations for the existing generationonly if it can be shown that the rights of future people are at stake and ifprotecting these rights should not be subject to significant temporaldiscounting. Caney disentangles the steps needed for the first claim to betrue, that is, for saying that climate change should be perceived as a threat tothe human rights of beings that do not yet exist. The remainder of the paper isdevoted to a critical evaluation of various arguments for adopting a positivediscount rate in relation to the interests of future people. We have become soused to thinking that the current value of future gains and future losses shouldbe discounted that it may seem evident that future violations of human rightsshould also count for less today. However, Caney rebuts several arguments tothat effect and provides a powerful defence of a zero rate of discount for theinterests of future generations.
Successful policymaking requires principles guiding the distribution ofobligations towards the future. The living generation may have an obligation incommon towards future generations in preventing some of the disasters on thehorizon, but an obligation held by all of us should not necessarily be dividedequally among us. Edward Page engages these issues in his paper, offering acareful investigation of the considerations that should direct the distribution ofburdens among the world’s nations in order to combat climate change. Pagesurveys several approaches to the allocation of the costs involved, i.e.
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according to ability to pay, the benefits received and the contribution to theproblem, as well as combinations of all of them. A viable framework, heargues, must steer the right course between philosophical sophistication andpolicy relevance, taking on board enough of both. In the end, Page argues infavour of the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) approach which offers ascheme for a fair distribution of responsibilities with sufficient account taken ofpractical policy considerations.
A further look at the basis for distributing responsibilities for the costs ofclimate change is taken in the paper written by Sverker Jagers and GoranDuus-Otterstrom. The central thesis of the paper is that the conceptions ofresponsibility accepted by us will produce different conclusions, not justdepending on the various concerns with equity examined by Page, but alsodepending on the strategy for action in question, i.e. mitigation oradaptation. Normally, of course, we would say that dealing with climatechange requires attention both to mitigation and adaptation. The centralmessage of the paper is that the appropriate mixture of these strategiesdepends on the normative significance of causal responsibility for climatechange and the relative importance of wealth in paying for it. The package ofpolicies available in the face of climate change would consequently have to beunpacked before we could even start dividing the burdens among the world’snations.
In the next set of papers the attention is shifted towards the design ofpolitical institutions and the extent to which climate change introduces newconsiderations that should be taken into account. Given the gravity of thethreats and burdens created by climate change, we should be prepared toaccept that the existing temporal and geographical borders of political entitiesmay not be optimal. The paper by Aaron Maltais examines to what extentanthropogenic climate change prompts a duty to create political institutions atthe global level. Maltais analyses the issue by asking to what extent globalpolitical institutions are required in order to devise effective policies and if aduty to create such institutions would be compatible with non-cosmopolitantheories of justice. Maltais thus takes issue with the idea that global politicalinstitutions could be justified only to the extent that we adopt a cosmopolitanpolitical theory. Trading on the idea of a natural duty of justice, whichprovides the basis for many anti-cosmopolitan theories of the scope of justice,the conclusion defended is that there is a cogent case to be made in favour of a‘global political project’ to manage climate threats.
In his paper, Ludvig Beckman explores the normative implications of thedistinction between obligations to protect future generations from environ-mental harm and obligations to secure the political rights and liberties of futuregenerations. The attempt to protect the environmental interests of futuregenerations by constitutional engineering is vulnerable to the charge that itsubjects the unborn to rigid institutions and rules that they may eventually beunable to control. In order to identify how political institutions should bereformed Beckman consequently argues that we need to take into account both
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sets of obligations and ensure that the policies adopted today can reasonablybe justified by reference to the political as well as environmental interests offuture generations.
The relationship between intergenerational justice and theories ofdemocracy is further explored in Clare Heyward’s contribution. Heywardunearths the assumptions informing the claim of deliberative democrats thatthe interests of future generations should be included in the deliberations ofexisting policymakers because they will be affected by the political decisionsmade today. Exploring several meanings of ‘affected’, she argues that this viewis hard to sustain in the face of the non-identity argument, which we metearlier. In order to meet this challenge, Heyward suggests that we need toreform deliberative theories of democracy (which trigger the non-identityproblem by focusing on the interests of particular existing and futureindividuals) by outlining an impersonal contractualist understanding ofdemocratic legitimacy. This holds that the principles of justice from whichthe constitution will be derived should be abandoned if they can be reasonablyrejected on behalf of a ‘citizen type’ even if they do not harm the interests ofany present or future ‘citizen token’.
The three papers to follow address how increasing awareness of globalclimate change should affect our normative theories in a more general sense.What kind of normative conclusions are warranted by the alarming prospectsconveyed by contemporary climate science? A fundamental issue analysed inJouni Paavola’s paper is the extent to which science is able to establish theinformation needed for political action. The estimates that science can deliverabout the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change could readily beaccepted as a necessary backdrop from which to start. However, for reasonsidentified by Paavola, it would be both unrealistic and unwise to ignorenormative conceptions of justice in considering what governments should do toaddress the problems it identifies. It would be unrealistic because theexpectation that actors should be able to respond rationally trades onassumptions of human behaviour that are unlikely to hold true. It would beunwise because the implementation of policies designed without recourse toconsiderations of justice are likely to be perceived as illegitimate which, in turn,may undermine efforts on behalf of these policies to establish compliance.
A sceptical look at the alarm caused by global climate change is provided inthe paper by Raino Malnes. In his contribution, Malnes emphasises therelevance of strategic reasons in evaluating which attitudes are appropriate inrelation to events characterised by great uncertainty. It is not just that theuncertainties as such are hard to handle, but also that the costs of adoptingstrongly emotional attitudes are sometimes high and may obstruct the makingof effective decisions. Global climate change, in other words, raises a dilemmaconcerning the attitudes we ought to adopt in order not to make things turnout worse than we have independent reason to believe. This argumentillustrates the received wisdom that the way we think about things is asimportant as what we think of them. A further illustration of this thesis, albeit
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from a different perspective, is found in Menno Kamminga’s paper.Kamminga attempts a reconstruction of moral thinking about climate changeby leaving room for more than ‘technical-ethical’ understandings of theproblem. Rather than seeking out purely analytical arguments about whatshould be done, we should appreciate that distinct voices can contribute to(and enrich) our moral thinking on these issues. Along with moral discourses,Kamminga suggests that discourses articulating narratives, policies andprophesies have an important role to play. Together these four discoursesprovide the contrasting points of reference from which an interdisciplinaryresponse to climate change can be developed.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank all of the contributors to this special issue for theircreativity and diligence; and also to acknowledge the detailed reports provided by thevolume’s external reviewers. Finally, they would like to acknowledge the feedback andintellectual stimulation provided by all of the participants in the 2007 ECPR JointSessions of Workshops (Workshop 10: ‘Democracy on the Day After Tomorrow?Global Environmental Change and Intergenerational Justice’), Helsinki University, 7–12 May.
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