Climate Change Justice and Global Resource Commons

Local and Global Postcolonial Political Ecologies

Shangrila Joshi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367364557
• eBook ISBN: 9781000369502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book examines the multiple scales at which the inequities of climate change are borne out.

Shangrila Joshi engages in a multi-scalar analysis of the myriad ways in which various resource commons – predominantly atmosphere and forests – are implicated in climate governance, with a consistent emphasis throughout on the justice implications for disenfranchised communities. The book starts with an analysis of North-South inequities in responsibility, vulnerability, and capability, as evidenced in global climate treaty negotiations from Rio to Paris. It then moves on to examine the ways in which structural inequalities are built into the conceptualization and operationalization of various neoliberal climate solutions such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Delhi, Kathmandu, and the Terai region of Nepal, participant observation at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15), and textual analysis of official documents, the book articulates a geography of climate justice, considering how ideas of injustice pertaining to colonialism, race, Indigeneity, caste, gender, and global inequality intersect with the politics of scale.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental justice, climate justice, climate policy, political ecology, and South Asian studies.

1 Introducing climate change as a global commons problem

The year 2020 was destined to be a year of reckoning, even before the pandemic hit, even before the wrongful deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor precipitated a reinvigorated Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States, with reverberations all over the globe, bringing to public discourse the notion that White supremacy is an unacceptable way of being. The year also marks the end of the Kyoto Protocol, and the official transition from this global treaty to the Paris Agreement, during a year that gave us blazing forest fires from Australia to the Arctic Circle, locust outbreaks in Africa and South Asia, Cyclone Amphan in the Bay of Bengal, Typhoon Goni in the Philippines, and Hurricane Eta in Central America among other calamities, creating a climate in which it has become evermore incredulous for a reasonable person to turn their backs on the seriousness of the climate crisis. As such, this is an opportune moment to reflect on this change – this moment of transition from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris agreement – and what it signifies for global climate justice, for US exceptionalism in climate negotiations, and beyond. The confluence of multiple crises in 2020 enables us to see connections, recognize patterns, and to potentially identify ways to bounce forward from these and other global crises.

Unlike the problem of ozone thinning, the problem of global climate change has not been adequately addressed at the international level. A big deterrent has been the foot-dragging of the highest cumulative emitting country in the world – the United States – that infamously remained the only Western country to never have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the reigning global treaty on climate change that is set to expire at the end of 2020. It will be replaced by the Paris Agreement, as was decided during the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. The Trump administration’s move to withdraw from even the Paris Agreement – which is a weaker treaty than the Kyoto Protocol – was widely condemned. But it is important to understand that even in the pre-Trump era, there was much that was wanting in the United States’ demeanor towards the international process of tackling an environmental problem that is truly global in scope. The US role in international treaty negotiations has been marked by unilateralism, exceptionalism, marketization, obstructionism, abandonment, and most recently by a shameless disregard for treating the universe as a global commons.

Following the rise of the environmental movement in the United States in the 1960s, the first major international environmental meeting in Stockholm, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), started the process where powerful industrialized countries could pressurize newly independent nation-states that were emerging from a centuries-long history of colonial rule to accept direction in how they should pursue development, due to the consequences this pursuit may have on the natural environment – thanks to the newly developed environmental awareness in the West. The United States exercised unilateralism with its trade partners in South America, such as in the case of dolphin-safe tuna, imposing these newly acquired sensibilities to place constraints on resource use elsewhere. Not surprisingly, Global South countries balked at the perceived green neocolonialism on part of Global North countries (Castro 1972). By the time the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, two decades after Stockholm, the environmental agenda – often pushed by the Global North – was inextricably linked with the development agenda – seemingly a priority of the Global South. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) emerged from the Rio Earth Summit, and the notion of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDRRC) was institutionalized as a principle deemed fair given the differential positioning of recognized nation-states in global political and economic power, privilege, and responsibility. The CBDRRC principle was in essence an international norm negotiated by the representatives of the international community in an effort to help create a fair global climate treaty (Miller 1995; Williams 2005). The United States famously disagreed to abide by the obligations that adherence to this principle would place on its industry and economy, vis-à-vis those of China and India that were deemed as ‘emerging economies’. George H. W. Bush is known to have made the outrageous claim in 1992 that “the American lifestyle is not open to negotiation” during the Rio Summit (Roberts and Parks 2007, 3). While Bush eventually agreed to differential obligations for the United States vis-à-vis India and China during negotiations in the lead up to the Montreal Protocol to address ozone thinning – and this treaty has gone on to effectively curtail the severity of ozone thinning – the same has not transpired for the problem of anthropogenic climate change that has fossil fuel-based industrialization as a key driver, which also happens to be central to the way of life Bush was unwilling to negotiate.

Ironically, the United States’ refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol follows a prolonged and deliberate period of negotiations where the United States successfully lobbied to include a cap-and-trade market-based mechanism as a key element of the treaty, weakening it considerably by creating the conditions for the commodification of the atmosphere, even as the inclusion of market-based principles for flexibility was meant to be a precondition for the United States to sign (Ervine 2018; Narain 2019). As annual negotiations for the post-Kyoto period continued, the United States engaged in a deliberate process of breaking up Global South unity in climate negotiations, promoting the strategy of challenging the validity of the non-Annex I category of countries (Vidal 2010). Paradoxically, on this point, the United States’ position appears uncomfortably aligned with those of critical scholars who challenge the validity of the Global South due to its perceived departure from an earlier, more radical agenda of non-alignment, which led to the creation of the Third World coalition (Barnett 2007; Berger 2004). In the United States, the country of my residence since 2002, there are vibrant and robust grassroots movements that are pushing back against the foundations of the fossil fuel empire within the country. But despite the zeal to push back against the atrocities of the state and to push for action at many local sites, there appears a reluctance to acknowledge the importance also of the international site of action, where representatives of nation-states gather to prepare the rules and norms that would be agreed for the common good. Inaction at this scale is keenly felt by those in the Global South who have been at the frontlines of climate impacts, as this statement from a young Bangladeshi man affected by Cyclone Amphan indicates:

Sometimes I feel that the international community has also abandoned us. They have left us to die slowly. The West is largely responsible for global warming, which has resulted in higher sea levels. We are the ones who have to suffer because of it. Still, we don’t see any international initiative for our protection.

(S. M. Shahin Alam, cited in Islam 2020)

In Chapters Two and Three I explain in more detail the politics of treaty-making at the site of the international, but here I want to argue why the treaty-making process is an important space to work towards the safeguarding of the global commons. The United States unceremoniously withdrew from the Paris Agreement, which adopted the apolitical strategy of encouraging all signatory countries to declare voluntary mitigation targets which would be gradually strengthened, even as it had already been weakened to accommodate the United States’ preferences (Narain 2019). The abandonment of the Paris Agreement by the United States is not so much the problem as the movement from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement, which I suggest is the movement from treating the atmosphere as a commons – where members agree to abide by rules created for members by members based on a process of deliberation – to treating the atmosphere as an open-access resource, protected only to the extent that individual members’ conscience allows. The Kyoto Protocol attempted to constrain global emissions with binding commitments for the international community based on principles of equity; the Paris Agreement embodies a clear departure from North-South equity. Commons scholar Elinor Ostrom (1990, 1999) has documented the existence of common pool resource governance structures in various locations around the world, but scaling up commons governance for global issues such as climate change has proved to be challenging. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is a global resource, whether we treat it as a commons or as an open-access resource, and whether we call it a resource or not – some are put off by the utilitarian feel of the term – even as by nature humans use various elements of non-human nature to survive. The significance of treating it as a commons has in my view become more pronounced, given the recent move made by the Trump administration to lay claim to the resources on the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies, in what would be the ultimate ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey 2018, 133).

Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law. Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.

(Executive Order 13914 of April 6, 2020, 20381)

The tragedy of the atmospheric commons

The complexities of the global climate crisis are immense. One key source of complexity comes from the transboundary nature of the global greenhouse effect, owing to the diffuse nature of the atmosphere that serves as a sink for greenhouse gases (GHGs). The resultant warming of the planet in turn has unpredictable consequences for the water cycle and its effects on human and non-human assemblages worldwide. The fallout from the impacts are many, widespread, and unpredictable – although the frequency and intensity of climatic events such as cyclones and droughts are known to rise with passing years. The sources of GHGs – carbon dioxide, methane, and others – are many and widespread as well. The combination of the irreducibility of the sources, sink, and consequences of the global greenhouse effect to a particular nation-state or region of the world renders this a classic global scale problem that could not be successfully resolved by mitigation with stringent action being taken within one country’s borders.

Since at least 1992, the international community has mobilized to address the emerging global warming issue by formulating a binding treaty as had been the norm for other transboundary and global atmospheric crises such as acid rain and ozone thinning, respectively (Skjaerseth 2012; Wettestad 2012). For each issue, representatives of nation-states gathered at UN-facilitated conferences of parties to negotiate a treaty that would be agreeable to relevant parties. Over two decades of negotiations, a consensus-based binding global treaty was barely mustered in the form of the Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect officially in 2005 after the Russian Duma ratified the treaty in 2004, thus reaching the minimum number of countries accounting for more than a half of global emissions (Roberts and Parks 2007). This was the closest the international community came to devising a set of rules and norms for the atmosphere as if it were a traditional resource commons; the action and behavior of the United States was like that of the classic free-rider.

Conjuring up the idea of the atmospheric commons necessitates me to address here two key works on the commons. The phrase ‘the tragedy of the commons’ was popularized by Garrett Hardin, who published an article by that name in Science in 1968. Based on his unfounded assertion that the commons was an open-access resource – which he later amended (Hardin 1994) – his original argument was that a resource commons necessarily meets a tragic demise due to the inherently selfish nature of humans, who seek to maximize personal gain at the cost of eventual communal loss. Further, he postulated that top-down enclosures of the commons, reducing the global population, and the privatization of the commons were the most effective ways to prevent a tragedy of the commons. Fewer people would mean fewer claims on the commons. Privatization would give each individual property owner an incentive to protect the piece of the commons they now owned. If the question of justice should arise in operationalizing his preferred solution of privatization, he reasoned,

[a]n alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable… . We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust – but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system… . Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

(Hardin 1968, 1247)

Ostrom’s rigorous counterarguments to Hardin’s (1968) thesis eventually compelled him to publish his revisionist take in 1994. Ostrom pointed out that in the real world – as opposed to in the hypothetical scenario of the pasture conjured up by Hardin – the traditional resource commons were not always treated as an open-access resource where a person’s individual conscience was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introducing climate change as a global commons problem
• 2 North/South climate politics and the role of India
• 3 Postcolonialism and the struggle over the atmospheric commons
• 4 Environmental justice and the right to development: the politics of scale in climate mitigation
• 5 From forest commons to carbon commodities – REDD+ and community forestry in Nepal
• 6 Learning from the Nepalese experience of taking back the forest commons
• 7 A multi-scalar postcolonial political ecology of the commons in an era of climate crisis
• Index