Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Kevon Rhiney, Rutgers University

; ,

Description:

A paradox lies at the heart of the climate debate, with serious implications for both theory and praxis. On one hand, weak mitigation of climate change over the past few decades has spurred various attempts to motivate action by invoking a sense of emergency and exceptionalism (Oels 2013, von Lucke 2014). One such campaign aims to designate the present conjuncture in earth’s history as a distinct geological epoch, characterized by the unprecedented scale of anthropogenic impacts on the environment. The “Anthropocene’ is the most widely circulated term for this period but has come under intense criticism, in part for promulgating the notion that all humans are equally culpable for the terrestrial, biotic, and atmospheric transformations that have driven climate change, species extinctions, altered ocean chemistry, and habitat destruction on a global scale (Malm and Hornborg 2014, Davis and Todd 2017). In other words, the notion of the Anthropocene effectively flattens social difference by ignoring the highly skewed circumstances in which the combustion of fossil fuels and industrialization of manufacturing and economic activities have come to destabilize planetary-scale processes (Davis et al. 2019).

On the other hand are those who view climate change as inherently an issue of differential responsibility. This position maintains that a minority of nations, industrialists, political elites, and relatively wealthy consumers are disproportionately at fault for the climate crisis, at the same time highlighting that they are the least vulnerable to its effects. Climate justice scholarship and activism has focused on documenting and remedying these asymmetries through redistributive mechanisms like reparations, loss and damage, risk transfer and polluter-pays policies such as carbon taxes (Page 2008, Burkett 2009, Grasso 2010). However, financial redress within a legal climate justice framework relies on the accounting and assignment of costs that, at their core, assume that culprits and victims can be unambiguously identified (Barnett 2020). Thus, if the Anthropocene implies no social differentiation, justice theory suggests the existence of clear and distinct differences—a premise that quickly collapses once applied. This is evident in the intense debates and contestations that have long persisted among parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change over terminologies such as “loss and damage” and “liability and compensation”. Aside from questions of practicality, some decolonial thinkers are beginning to challenge the presumption that climate injustices can be rectified through legal means (see Anghie 2007). What possibility exists to remedy climate change and its uneven impacts within the remit of the laws and political institutions designed by the same broad set of actors that created these problems? How can climate justice be realized within a world system that, from its inception, has thrived on the exploitation of distant places and people not recognized as fully human? Such questions simultaneously pinpoint and contest the limits that liberalism imposes on climate justice and point to the need for more critical engagement with liberal theory and the ways it continues to inform mainstream environmental policymaking, activism, and political thought (see, for example, Povinelli 2016, Maboloc 2020, McLaughlin 2020).

Papers in this session will address questions that may include, but are not limited to, the following:

- What are the different ways in which climate justice is being pursued and understood?
- What are the limits of justice theory for addressing climate change?
- How do we take seriously the colonial roots of the current climate crisis when attributing responsibility itself is so fraught? For instance, are calls for climate reparations compatible with justice theory’s normative basis for ascribing responsibilities?
- Is redistributive justice sufficient to address the structural dimensions of climate change?
- How can we reconceptualize justice as a decolonial onto-epistemic project?
- Besides justice, what other frameworks, approaches and moral considerations are being employed to make sense of, and give meaning to, climate change and its uneven consequences?
- Are there other ways of envisioning and enacting climate justice outside of liberal environmental thought?

This session is sponsored by the following specialty groups: Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE), Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC), Development Geographies (DGSG), and Socialist and Critical Geography.

References
Anghie, A. (2007). Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Barnett, J. (2020). Global environmental change II: Political economies of vulnerability to climate change. Progress in Human Geography, 51(1), 030913251989825–13. http://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519898254

Burkett, M. (2009). Climate reparations. Melbourne Journal of International Law, 10, 509–542.

Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME (Vol. 16, pp. 761–780).

Davis, J., Moulton, A. A., Van Sant, L., & Williams, B. (2019). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, ... Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises. Geography Compass, 13, 1–15. http://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12438

Grasso, M. (2010). An ethical approach to climate adaptation finance. Global Environmental Change, 20(1), 74–81. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.10.006

Lucke, von, F., Wellmann, Z., & Diez, T. (2014). What’s at Stake in Securitising Climate Change? Towards a Differentiated Approach. Geopolitics, 19(4), 857–884. http://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2014.913028

Maboloc, C.R. (2020) Liberal environmentalism and global climate justice. Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, 30(2), 51-56.

Malm, A., & Hornborg, A. (2014). The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 62–69. http://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613516291

McLaughlin, A. (2020) The limit of climate justice: unfair sacrifice and aggregate harm. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2020.1786306

Oels, A. (2013). Rendering climate change governable by risk: From probability to contingency. Geoforum, 45(C), 17–29. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.09.007

Page, E. A. (2008). Distributing the burdens of climate change. Environmental Politics, 17(4), 556–575.

Povinelli, E.A. (2016) Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda