Climate Justice, Recognition, Pluralism (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
How have racism and colonialism contributed to creating the climate crisis; how have they shaped the response to it; and why is the crisis hitting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPoC) the hardest? The framing paper addresses these questions through a broad framing of the complex historical and empirical realities that show that colonialism and racism have played an integral part in shaping, and continue to shape, climate change and climate policy to this day. It shows (I) how colonialism and racism have enabled climate change, (II) how colonialism and racism have shaped climate policy and action, and (III) how racialized communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change within countries. It also suggests (IV) ways to urgently decolonize movements, institutions through a deep cultural change, as well as undertake structural and institutional reforms to address institutional racism at scale. The paper demonstrates that there can be no climate justice without racial justice, and that a clear, deep and empirically grounded understanding of the many links between those two types of injustices is essential to addressing both. The paper analyses the ways in which international climate governance continues to be steered by countries in the Global North – countries that fail to acknowledge their historical climate and development debts. What is more, countries in the Global North are not actively pursuing the 1.5℃ target nor are they meeting their financial commitments to developing countries to support adaptation, as well as efforts to address loss and damage from the impacts of climate change and to ensure access to quality and affordable energy for all. Meanwhile, the climate crisis disproportionately affects BIPoC communities worldwide, with Indigenous Peoples, migrant communities and other racialized communities, particularly women, being the hardest hit. The framing paper shows the effects of the dominance of the Global North in United Nations-led processes, in multilateral and bilateral organizations, as well as in the climate movement. These effects show up in the prioritization, design, and coordination of climate change projects implemented in the Global South. They are also evident in current inclusion practices which often lead to the tokenization of BIPoC, and in the constraints they face in assuming leadership positions, particularly on the international scene. Mainstream representation of BIPoC as “victims of climate change,” or as beneficiaries of projects, also negates their roles as knowledge holders, innovators and leaders. Institutional racism materializes in the silencing or denial of racism by those who are working with or “for” BIPoC communities, both in the Global North and the Global South, which can be related both to vested interests and collective trauma. Eliminating racism in climate policy and action requires individual and institutional coordination of multilevel response that would entail: Acknowledging the history and legacy of colonialism in climate policy and action. Facilitating a deep cultural change within institutions and organizations based in the Global North and questioning current inclusion practices in order to foster the actual participation and engagement of diverse BIPoC. Addressing specific disproportionate harms wrought by climate and environmental racism and sexism through enforcement of human rights obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, as well as under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Taking different perspectives and diverse world views into account and accepting multiple realities and ways of solving the climate crisis beyond the Global North’s perspectives. Facilitating research into the specific dynamics, manifestations and disparate impacts of racism, resistance and pathways to empowerment in environmental and climate policy, the global climate regime and climate activism that centers BIPoC perspectives, and is informed by BIPoC epistemologies and methodologies, that is: ways of knowing and doing research.
2010
This essay discusses the place of indigenous peoples within the politics of climate change. In the United States, contemporary policymakers understand federally-recognized Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations.” In that capacity, tribal governments have the power to address many environmental issues arising on their reservation lands and impacting their members. At the level of international policy, Native Nations are designated as “indigenous peoples,” with a distinctive set of human rights related to their unique identity as land-based communities with longstanding cultural connections to their environments. Sometimes those two identities operate consistently, allowing Native Nations to preclude forms of energy development that threaten their lands, communities, and cultures, as the Navajo Nation did when it enacted the Dine Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005, which banned uranium mining within Navajo Indian Country. Sometimes, however, the identities may be in tensio...
The Geographical Journal, 2021
The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has raised alarm bells globally (IPCC, 2021). While IPCC assessments over several decades have warned how rapidly climate change has been occurring and the increasing need to halt rising global temperatures, action has been tragically slow. Given how relatively quickly institutions, states, and citizens across the globe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it became evident that drastic and rapid response to climate change is possible. While climate breakdown has been acutely experienced across several regions and communities for quite some time, a delayed but welcome global-level public consciousness to climate change has awoken as climate-related disasters have become more profound. While mainstream debates around climate change have historically been scientific and technical, and climate action has been mired in delays as well as climate denialism (Lamb et al., 2020), greater attention is increasingly given in public discourse to climate justice. Climate justice helps to reframe mainstream debates to usher in critical attention to social impacts, outcomes, and justice concerns. In general terms, climate justice scholarship demonstrates how climate change is a moral and justice issue, not just a science, techno-managerial, or finance issue (Gardiner, 2011; Shue, 2014). In other words, climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to how climate change impacts people differently, unevenly, and disproportionately, as well as redressing the resultant injustices in fair and equitable ways. The goals are to reduce marginalization, exploitation, and oppression, and enhance equity and justice. Applying a climate justice approach is an intentional process that involves carefully analyzing who is excluded or marginalized by climate change processes as well as any adaptation or mitigation
Different Angles on Climate Justice: Insights from Non-Domination and Mutual Recognition
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
Practitioners occasionally demure that the current academic literature on climate justice is overly abstract and unhelpful in their attempt to promote more effective and equitable climate policies. This paper analyses the claim that one reason for this might be that the debate is currently shaped by a particular narrow understanding of justice as impartiality and neglects other important approaches to justice. I first introduce my interpretation of Erik O. Eriksen's three conceptions of global political justice focusing on impartiality, non-domination, and mutual recognition. Then, I present the key concerns and positions that shape the debates on climate justice in the field of political theory and show why (and in how far) I think current climate justice is predominantly shaped by 'justice as impartiality'. I argue that this explains the emphasis on substantive justice over procedural questions. Furthermore, I show that looking at key questions in climate justice from the perspectives of theories emphasising non-domination and mutual recognition helps to identify some blind-spots in the current debate. Among the issues that are currently somewhat neglected are questions relating to the nature of the relationships of the relevant parties negotiating climate policy. This concerns on the one hand power inequalities and dependencies that shape the interactions between different parties. On the other hand, this relates to the question of how agents perceive these relationships with regard to dimensions of recognition, respect, and concern. It seems likely that less powerful agents have good reasons to feel that the global political regime as it currently works does not treat their interests and demands with the same urgency and importance as is shown for those of some more powerful players. Furthermore, their concerns regarding the normatively significant features of the situation at large are not always respected as equally valid contributions to the debate. I conclude by arguing that climate justice nonetheless cannot do without a rights-based framework typical for justice as impartiality that protects fundamental interests and the preconditions for free and equal participation.
Climate Justice in a Climate Changed World
Planning Theory & Practice
Where I write from, in southeastern Australia on the lands of the Kulin nation, now called Melbourne, the stark and terrifying dimensions of injustice in a climate changed world feel very present. As this season's unprecedented bushfires in Australia took hold, we stared the new normal, of living in a climate changed world, in the face. It looked a lot like the dimensions of injustice that are already known all too well, but with much sharper and more concerning edges. Dimensions of climate injustice came into view that were perhaps previously hidden or obscured, the distributional aspects of effects and impacts so obviously burdening those already disadvantaged. Climate justice is a framework that brings into view the intersection between climate change and the way social inequalities are experienced as structural violence. Climate justice has grown in public debate and grassroots campaigning over the past decade, where not for profits and environmental NGOs in particular increasingly make the connection between human rights, uneven development and climate change. Often presented as a question of human rights, climate justice debates are often focused on the distributional effects of climate changepointing out that those effects disproportionately burden the poorest and least disadvantaged. Much discussion in the climate justice field has examined the global maldistribution of climate change impacts, particularly between developing and developed nations. Linked with the understanding that developed nations are the biggest producers of the emissions that induce climate change, the ways that privileged nations and groups redistribute the effects of the harms they produce to burden the poor somewhere else, becomes clear. In this Interface, we bring together scholars, educators, practitioners and activists to consider climate justice from a range of perspectives that extend and deepen these more established lines of thinking. The papers examine questions for planning that are perhaps less obvious or explicitly discussed in climate justice debates. The intention here is that these issues might become more prominent in our thinking and practice. Hence, the contributions interrogate issues such as planning education, the norms of the profession, the research that underpins knowledge about climate change, and the sharing of that knowledge as justice questions in and of themselves. The papers also focus on the principal dimensions of planning response and activity in relation to climate change, especially in key sectors such as housing, and also adaptation planning. Taken together, the papers reveal that how planning responses are framed, articulated and enacted is itself a live climate justice question. The contributions reveal the importance of ongoing efforts to
On the evolution and continuing development of the climate justice movement
Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice, 2019
The concept of climate justice has emerged over several decades as a research agenda, an ethical and legal framework and most uniquely as the basis for an engaged grassroots response to the unfolding global climate crisis. Climate justice highlights the disproportionate impacts of climate changes on the most vulnerable and marginalised human populations, as well as the limitations of conventional political responses to rising climate instability. As a distinct thread in the evolving global civil society responses to climate change, climate justice networks have brought together representatives of indigenous and other land-based people’s movements, environmental justice advocates who have confronted inequities in exposure to toxic pollution, and elements of the global justice/alter-globalisation movements that have long challenged international financial institutions and other elite networks. This constellation of social movement actors has articulated a distinct countercurrent to traditional climate diplomacy, challenged both technological and market-oriented “false solutions” to the climate crisis and organised public expressions of opposition to the incomplete and largely inadequate policy measures developed under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This chapter will outline many of the distinct contributions climate justice activists have brought to the wider global movement for climate action, especially through their organising methods, overarching ethical framework, intersectional politics and egalitarian, community-centred visions of a carbon-free future. It will also address some of the persistent challenges to this perspective, especially in an era of increasingly visible global climate impacts, coupled with rising political uncertainties and declining restraints on corporate political influence in several key countries.
Minority and Indigenous Trends, 2019
Climate change poses a profound environmental challenge that will leave no country or community untouched. Its social impact, if unaddressed, will reinforce inequalities, deepen poverty and leave the world’s most marginalized populations in greater insecurity. Minorities and indigenous peoples are already living with its consequences, from rising sea levels and higher temperatures to increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as severe storms. Their isolation and exclusion in many countries leave them disproportionately exposed to these negative effects.
Indigenous peoples and global climate change: Intercultural models of climate equity
2010
Indigenous Peoples and Global Climate Change: Intercultural Models of Climate Equity I am very pleased to be here and honored that you entrusted me with the opening remarks for this wonderful symposium. I want to start with this thought: I see the climate change issues confronting us today as an opportunity. These are serious issues, to be sure, and they seem quite overwhelming, which inspires many people to choose not to think about them at all, preferring instead to turn on the TV and focus on the crazy antics of our celebrities. However defeated one might feel, this is our opportunity to see where old ways of thinking are not serving us well and where we need to create new ways of thinking. The central challenge for all of us is to be able to conceive of some other way of thinking that is better suited to carry us through this crisis. When one looks at the politics of climate change at the international, domestic, and tribal levels, there is an overwhelming * Professor of Law, Willard H.