Political Theory and Global Climate Action

Recasting the Public Sphere

Idil Boran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351398725
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From around the world, cities and regions, civil society networks and businesses, nongovernmental organizations and institutions for research and learning, and many others, are taking action on climate change. The role of these nonstate and substate actors is increasingly being recognized in the new facilitative climate regime. Political theory to date has been surprisingly silent about the scale and prospects of these actions for low-carbon, climate-resilient, and sustainable transformations. Idil Boran argues provocatively for the need for a widened scope of vision, one that has a broader public life of climate action at its centre. While acknowledging the role of the state and the multilateral process, Boran maintains that social transformation is as deeply and more continuously influenced by the engagement of a wide range of actors below and above the state, whose actions are often locally anchored and inescapably interwoven across borders.

Bringing concepts of the public sphere from political theory into contact with leading scholarship on transnational climate governance, Political Theory and Global Climate Action launches an exploration sensitive to changing patterns of practice, focused on diversity of actors, driven to explore historically contingent conditions of possibility, and responsive to questions of equity and justice in the context of transformations. The result is a repositioning of political thought on climate change, engaging political philosophers, scholars of politics and governance, and drivers of climate action worldwide at nonstate and substate levels interested in the social and political meaning of their engagement.

1
Political theory and the discontents of climate change justice

When negotiations for a climate agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol reached an impasse in Copenhagen in 2009, it was a wakeup call for the multilateral process on climate change.¹ From that point onward, work towards a new agreement continued with resolve and dedication in order to put the world on track. This intense period of rebuilding the climate regime would lead to the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. This period has seen the engagement of a constellation of actors below and above the state, prompting a groundswell of climate actions beyond interstate negotiations.² This phenomenon is a substantial part of global climate politics. I suggest that the intriguing and dynamic texture of a public life of climate action must have a central place in political theory’s field of vision.

But this is not how contemporary political theorists look at global climate politics. Instead, they maintain their focus on the interactions between states and the moral responsibilities of governments. This is not surprising because the climate regime is intergovernmental. While earlier work goes back to the 1990s,³ it is mainly when intergovernmental treaty negotiations reached an impasse that the moral and political theorists’ interest intensified. Their preoccupations were with fair distribution of duties within a global treaty.⁴ Even a cursory glance at the literature reveals patterns so stark that the similarities among theoretical perspectives outweigh the differences. Most theorists appeal to moral axioms to guide sustained reflection of what would count as a fair international agreement. To be sure, the focus on states has its critics urging instead to turn the spotlight on the responsibilities of individuals, giving rise to two major camps in the debates. The political realm is either that of interstate interactions or the realm of individual action within an institutional structure.

What is conspicuous in this picture is the sheer absence of a public life. Undoubtedly, a public life of climate action is complex and textured. It includes associations and collaborative partnerships, regional and subnational governments and cities; businesses, labour unions, and nongovernmental organizations. A complex web of climate action cuts across state boundaries and levels of governance. In its texture are woven channels of interrelations with states and the intergovernmental process. It is marked by tensions and diversity, and is in constant motion. More features could be listed, but the point is this: although a textured web of climate actors spanning across the world— actors that are wildly diverse, situated, and disparate, yet interconnected—is hard to ignore, it is nevertheless left out of the picture in political theories of climate change today. This chapter examines this predilection in close up. What follows is not intended to be a comprehensive review. Rather, my aim is to display at a glance the theoretical landscape in the debates over climate change justice, and trace its historical origins. The historical contingencies specific to the political milieu within which the seeds of political theory on climate change were sown have had a profound effect on its trajectory. Once these factors are recognized, it should become easier to see why a public life has been left out of the picture.

1. The centrality of axiomatic moral justification in political theory today

A central concern among political theorists has been with establishing fair terms of cooperation in the global effort on climate change by appeal to norms and principles of justice. Few statements capture this concern as clearly as Henry Shue’s words in an earlier article from 1992 titled “The unavoidability of justice.” He writes: the concern is with “the justice of international allocation of the costs of dealing with global warming.”⁵ In a subsequent article, he puts it more broadly as “allocation of the costs of protecting the environment.”⁶ This view is so common that Simon Caney simply states that “any normative account of climate change would need to allocate duties or responsibilities.”⁷ Most of the literature, writes Darrel Moellendorf, is mainly concerned with how a treaty should assign responsibilities.⁸ Climate change results from human practices and its effects are harmful. Preventing its ravaging impacts by altering practices is a moral duty. Mitigating the impacts of climate change will be costly. Whose duty is it to shoulder the burden in dealing with global warming?

This question led to a sizeable literature, which will be explored in the next pages. But here, I want to call attention to what is distinctive about this way of setting the agenda for political theory on climate change. Most students of moral and political theory take it as given that their focus must be centred on fair allocation of rights and responsibilities arising from climate change.⁹ This tendency delineates the subject-matter, and its methods, as consisting of justificatory procedures about rights and duties in light of moral axioms. I call this axiomatic moral justification. This is a formal procedure of justification, whose starting premise is a basic moral principle.¹⁰ The first step consists of pinning down a first principle that is so basic, so resonant with the most fundamental sense of what is right and wrong, that no reasonable person could deny. Henry Shue gives expression to a paradigmatic example. The concept of fairness, he declares, is universal: “people everywhere understand what it means to ask whether an arrangement is fair.”¹¹ If someone imposes costs on others, it is morally justified to reverse the resultant inequality, usually by imposing extra burdens on the one who imposed the cost in the first place.¹² The next steps consist of deducing an account of normative rightness in governing human interaction in a given setting, and for political theorists the setting is the institutional structure. The argument lands on prescriptions for restructuring institutions or policy. On climate change, a recurrent conclusion has been that developed countries have a duty to assume a heavier burden in the efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through a climate treaty.

Most arguments in political theory on global climate change derive from two central axioms. The first is that global climate change above all presents a moral problem. The second is that the moral challenge of climate change is inseparably tied to, and aggravated by, global inequalities. The first axiom finds expression most clearly in a survey article by Stephen Gardiner dating back to 2004. In it, Gardiner states in no unclear terms that climate change is a moral question.¹³ The message the article drives home is that political theorists must pay attention to the issue of climate change (there was a relative neglect at the time). The normative branches of philosophy have specialized tools and vocabulary, it is implied, that are indispensable for global climate policy. Theorists can submit the issues to scrutiny, bring the moral questions to light, and counsel on what fairness requires. The second axiom makes global inequalities a constitutive element of the moral problem. It states that existing international distributions of wealth “are morally arbitrary at best and the result of systematic exploitation at worst.”¹⁴ The demands of fairness would not be met without taking into account these inequalities. An allocation of responsibilities would be fair only if it does not impose undue burden, and an allocation would be just if it remedies unduly imposed burdens. Theorists are not unified over which inequalities should matter and how they should be addressed. Rather, most of the literature is a reckoning over these questions. In short, sensitivity to global inequalities forms an axis around which pretty much all arguments on climate change justice revolve.

For most political theorists working on climate change, what delineates the subject-matter, and draws its boundaries, is an appeal to moral principles in an unequal world. The principles are deemed to be universally binding, as exemplified in Shue’s assertion mentioned previously that everyone knows when an arrangement is unfair. But it is worth investigating in historical context the factors that led political theorists to perceive their subject-matter in this way when they entered the arena of global climate politics. For, in spite of the claims of universality of moral axioms, the justifications of duties and rights are coloured by historical contingencies. These factors are rarely acknowledged by political theorists. And yet, they have had a profound effect on the structure of thinking about climate change ethics and justice.

2. Historical origins

I mentioned that political theorists became increasingly interested in climate change in a distinctive period, roughly when the international treaty negotiations were stalling as the atmospheric concentration of Carbon Dioxide (and other greenhouse gas emissions) were rising. But students of moral and political philosophy entered a political arena that has a past. As historian Joshua Howe explains, the politics of global warming bear the marks of their origins in the geopolitical milieu of the post-war era from which they emanate. Climate science was born of the Cold War, writes Howe, moulding climate politics in an unmistakably “science first” spirit. In this period, scientists could not avoid but gave direction to politics as environmental spokespersons. They neither assumed this role easily nor took it lightly. In Howe’s words, they advocated that “more and better science, in the hands of the right political actors, would… lead to responsible political action on climate change.” This then solidified a “science first” approach to advocacy and policy counselling.¹⁵ When interest was kindled among moral and political theorists, roughly around the adoption of the Framework Convention in the early 1990s, world politics was undergoing major shifts. The sudden end of the Cold War had changed the nature of the international system within which the debate about global warming was unfolding.¹⁶ At that time, not just climate scientists but a range of experts in social sciences, and most notably economics, had become centre-stage, shaping the topography of public discourse and policy on climate.¹⁷ This is one of the key factors behind the shaping of political theory on climate change. For political theorists, to assert, in no uncertain terms, that climate change is a moral problem continues to be more than asserting that moral arguments matter, but rather to proclaim a place in direct competition against existing voices in the political arena.

Through journal publications and books, moral and political theorists vociferously argued that the moral problems are not grasped in policy negotiations. Influenced by the methods of social scientists and economists,policymakers see the problem through a technocratic lens. For example, Gardiner makes the case that the temptation to defer to experts in other fields should be resisted.¹⁸ Gardiner is not alone. Nor is the sentiment short-lived. It continues to colour the field of political theory on climate change. In his book from 2013, Don Brown writes about a “stunning absence of ethical considerations” in international climate change debates.¹⁹ Climate change is approached either as a problem of public administration, to be addressed by policymakers or technocrats, or as a matter of designing economic policy, to be guided by economists. For Brown, the predomi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing political theory and global climate action
• 1 Political theory and the discontents of climate change justice
• 2 Bringing public life back in
• 3 Three visions of public philosophy
• 4 Justice and equity in the global public sphere
• 5 Partners in transformations
• Bibliography
• Index